NZVN June2016

JUNE 2016

W

Vol 225

NAB 2016 Part Two e continue to cover the major innovations from NAB for the advertisers who support us in bringing you the pages of NZVN. There would be nothing without them, so please join me in thanking them by giving them first option when you are looking for new gear or services, so see “what’s hot” and “dive in!”

Ed

Clear-Com for Gencom For Gencom, we are at ClearCom with Peter Stallard.

Ed: So Peter, you’ve obviously been working hard and have developed some snazzy, new, bright and cheerful products for our taste buds this NAB? Peter: Absolutely and many refinements and improve -ments on existing ranges. We have the brand new DX410 wireless product for smaller systems – so we have a set of complementary products now in wireless. We also have a new FreeSpeak II base station and then, at the top range, we can integrate FreeSpeak into a Matrix to build much larger systems.

So we cover top, Peter from Clear-Com and David from Gencom. middle and bottom segments of the market with these 3 products. been at that top end of the market where, if you really Ed: I’m going to bring David Barnard from Gencom in want the best, that’s where you go, but sometimes some here … is that good, is that something you’ve been people’s budgets don’t quite get there, so is this a really looking forward to for years. Clear-Com has obviously good addition to the portfolio?

robust beltpack; and a new better form factor beltpack as well, so there’s improvements to multiple product features.

Ed: So why is it important to have a high quality audio when you’re just dealing with communications?

Peter: Well it’s fatigue.

If you’re continually listening at low quality, that eventually leads to operator fatigue.

Technology improvements have given us the means to now offer higher audio quality; that’s always our goal for us, to continually provide the best performance that technology can offer.

David: Yes, they’ve always had a couple of different products over a range. The DX series has been around for a while but the 410 does give us a better spread across a range of needs. So if you need a simple 2 channel or a 4 channel we can do that; if you need a basic wireless system that you can just take and set up on a site and walk away a few hours later, we can do that. We can also do full facility systems and the Matrix systems are very exciting for larger organisations that need a bit more flexibility, a bit more sophistication. And of course you’ve also got Agent-IC which we did talk about last year. This is their software based interface for people to be able to tap in and monitor over an iPad or an iPhone, something like that. So there’s a range of technology to meet a variety of needs and of course we’ve established ClearCom very well in the market.

Ed: Now again another spectrum question, and this is not just New Zealand, this is worldwide – governments are selling off spectrum to telcos for huge amounts of money, is this going to be an issue for your customers?

Peter: No, not really, because our products operate in 2 designated licence-free areas of the spectrum in the 2.4 Gigahertz and the 1.9 Gigahertz bands, so in general, these products don’t need licences.

We’ve got FreeSpeak II which now has transceivers to work either on the 2.4 or 1.9, depending on preference. In the 2.4 range, you can find some congestion, so although the system works well with congestion, there’s an option to work on the 1.9. And on the DX-410, it’s a 2.4 Gigahertz product so again it’s operation in licence-free spectrum.

Ed: And speaking of spectrum, is range continuing to improve?

Peter: Yes, indeed. Coverage is one of the big improvements for both the FreeSpeak II and the DX410.

Much improved for range, much better quality and without compromise : the DX410 supports 7½ Kilohertz audio.

We’ve improved the specifications even on our low end product, now we’re providing much higher quality audio to the beltpack; a new more

Go to https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews/ for more news.

Lots of surprises inside.

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David: Well sure, if you have a large studio operation, if you have a large television production operation, then in many cases, you’ve got a number of different sub-groups at the same time that all need to communicate with each other, so it’s a lot of flexibility and a lot of options.

Ed: Now Peter, David tells me that everybody’s talking about IP – what does this mean in the Clear-Com system?

Ed: Right, that’s the hardware and the improvements there, but you’ve also got a lot of software behind this to share the audio?

Peter: Some years ago we introduced the HelixNet product which supports multichannel digital audio to the beltpack.

This year we’ve introduced the capability in version 3 software, to link multiple base stations together and also to provide many more channels on the Partyline itself. So as standard, the units ship with 12 channels, but for a licence, we can increase that to 24 channels.

So our digital Partyline system now has the capabilities similar to low end Matrix solution, so we are in effect bridging that gap between the 2 product types.

Ed:

Is this good for you David?

David: Well it certainly means more options, more features for our customers.

Ed: Do you have customers who would need more than 4 channels?

Peter: IP opens up the opportunity to extend the reach of intercom systems and we do that with AgentIC, which is our IP based client that operates on smart devices like iPhones and iPads, and using IP and connecting over IP infrastructure of any sort – microwave or intranet. This means that we can extend the range of the intercom system to practically anywhere in the world. Also in addition to Agent-IC, we have LQ which is a product designed just to provide interconnect between any 2 points or multi-points over any available IP infrastructure.

Ed: So you could have a studio in Rotorua and another one in Reykjavik and they could be talking to each other?

Peter: Indeed, and they could add a third location and all 3 locations could be linked together in one seamless communications environment.

Ed:

That’s got to be good.

Peter: Absolutely. You’ve got people on set and there’s monitoring back at base – all kinds of applications for it.

Ed:

Well you could have sets on different continents?

Peter:

Exactly.

Ross Video for Gencom For Gencom, we are at Ross Video and starting us off we have Travis Wigley with David Barnard in attendance.

Ed: So Travis, tell me, Ross is really well known for its Carbonite range of mixers. You’ve got a new low cost version I understand?

Travis: Yes we do. It’s the Carbonite Black Solo, our smallest switcher. It’s to replace the CrossOver range but it has all the features of the Carbonite series.

We have access to MiniMEs, we have inbuilt multiviewer, we have the 4 keys that we have in media transitions, plus we have control of the switcher from DashBoard, so we’ve got all the advanced feature controls, and we can make our own customer control panels with that. So the new Carbonite Black Solo in either an all in one unit, or in a one rack unit frame with a soft panel, or the one rack unit frame with a small control panel.

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Travis with the Black Solo.

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and outputs; it also has upconverters frame sync’d, all the technology in the original Carbonite.

Ed: It’s got all the good bits and pieces, just fewer of them?

Travis:

Yes, that correct.

Ed: So this is going to be a big one for you David?

David: Yes absolutely. We’re very excited about it. We think it really fills a gap that we’ve had for some time for people who are looking for a very powerful but low cost, compact, simple vision switcher.

Ed: is?

Ed:

David: The biggest thing that that gets you is that you actually have XPression graphics built-in because XPression Live CG comes with all the Carbonites at no additional cost.

So where’s the cost been taken out?

Travis: We aimed to build this switcher to a specific price point, so we’ve just had to reduce the IO count, remove a couple of the MiniMEs, just to make it a bit more cost effective.

Ed:

And Ross being the brand that it

You haven’t just put more plastic in there?

Travis: No, it’s all the same technology as the Carbonite, just less of it, but it’s equally shiny. It just has some more of the user features like HDMI inputs

Ed: That’s a good thing – and now we’ve got Amanda Leighton – sorry Travis, you’ve been made redundant.

Travis:

I didn’t get that memo.

Ed: It’s being typed now.

Amanda – gosh Ross making a camera. Red and black are the Ross colours so why have you made it green?

Amanda: Because of the name – ACID – it’s called an ACID camera. We call it ACID for a couple of reasons,

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David: With the ability to do 444 compositing, you are going to get a much cleaner key.

It makes virtual sets look that much more real and allows you to do many more exciting dynamic things with the robotics.

Ed: But we have to say that this is new camera technology from a company that hasn’t in the past made any cameras?

Amanda on set with ACID.

first because acid’s used in etching and we talk about how we have higher detail in the edging around the camera – we’re using 444; and also because we provide a heightened visual experience.

Ed: Okay. It must be a San Francisco company – oh no it’s Canadian isn’t it?

Amanda: Yes it’s Canadian. It’s great to add the camera to our suite so we can really complete the virtual solutions and provide the most superior system possible for studios.

Ed: So it is a studio camera, but more specifically it’s a chroma key studio camera?

Amanda: Yes, with being able to provide 444 we give a separate output on the camera so we can get all of that extra detail into it providing a much superior chroma key output.

We combine it with our new Ultrachrome HR which again allows you to get the benefit of that. So we have a standalone UItrachrome HR unit now as well, to accompany the cameras.

Ed: But if you weren’t using the chroma key that day, it’s still a top notch studio camera?

Amanda:

Absolutely.

you can get a lot spill.

Amanda: We have a partnership on the cameras, but David Ross’ philosophy on the cameras was he wondered why film gets a fabulous chroma keyer you see in all the movies, but then in television you see all the aliasing around the edges, the edges are soft, there’s not a lot of detail,

So he asked “why – why haven’t we changed that?” He went into that and we had a partnership with cameras that we announced by our press release a couple of weeks ago I think it was, and what we’ve now done is we’ve actually added our software – some software smarts that we have done on top of that, to allow it to get that extra 444 data to complete all of that extra information to give you that super high quality chroma keying image.

Ed: So the camera is not actually made by Ross, let’s get that clear. It is a partnership that you’ve made and you’ve made it with a very reputable camera manufacturer?

Amanda: Absolutely. We have a partnership with Hitachi and we have our own special software on top of that, so it’s not identical to those cameras.

We’ve done extra development to make sure we can get our 444 information out of the camera.

Ed:

And you can certainly trust Hitachi cameras?

David: Absolutely and Ross is doing what they do best, which is putting the software smarts in it to provide the best graphics possible.

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Ed: And it takes industry standard studio lenses?

Amanda: Yes it does. We haven’t got into lenses yet, but we do have great partnerships. But yes, it’s a standard box camera, so all of the lenses you can attach to those.

Ed: And this goes really well with your dolly tracking system that we’ve seen in previous years?

Amanda: Yes, with both our Furios and our CamBots, absolutely. We now have a converge control system so you can get the best of worlds. You can combine tracks with robotic heads all through the same control surface. We’re the only vendor that can provide you all those solutions.

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Blackmagic for DVT Now I actually started my NAB visit this year with the press conference for Blackmagic.

Once again, Grant Petty excited the crowd and got rounds of applause that were reminiscent of Apple launches many, many years ago. You could almost say Grant Petty is the new Steve Jobs of the television world, because he has such a very strong following.

Again, there were some products there that I thought “wow, this is really a big improvement”, although I know that every year, Blackmagic products do continue to improve. One of the follow-ups from last year that I was interested in was when I asked my interviewee about the heat problems in Blackmagic product.

He assured me they were employing a heat specialist to help solve this problem and I guess the person to ask “have they actually achieved this?” is Stuart Barnaby.

Ed: Stuart, are they true to their word, heat’s gone?

Grant Petty in full song.

Stuart: Yes, it has. Obviously, when Grant Petty first came out with the Blackmagic initial range of products, certainly things like mini converters, he was driven by being the lowest cost on the planet for all the products he had. In order to do that, there possibly were some compromises made in the design process and that made the first initial crops of Blackmagic mini converters particularly, and some of the other products, a little less robust than we would have liked to have seen. But they’ve been around now for quite some time and all of those issues as far as we’re concerned have now been resolved to the point where the number of returns that we do on Blackmagic products now is extraordinarily low. It is now a quality product that you can buy with the confidence that it’s going to give you the reliability that you need, whether you’re shooting in the field or using it in a live switching environment, or using it for postproduction – it’s really a quality reliable product now for sure.

Ed: And you were saying earlier that there are competing products that are actually now underselling Blackmagic but that Blackmagic has gained a place in the pecking order?

these products better and improved them, and in conjunction with that of course, they’ve lowered the price drastically as well. Now there are a range of low cost converters available from Blackmagic that are price competitive, are a quality product, and are very easy to integrate.

Ed: So you say the Blackmagic range has now become perhaps not premium, but certainly right up there?

Stuart: Oh absolutely, and in comparison to a lot of Chinese knock-off type stuff, they are definitely a premium brand and part of that is of course you can buy them from a company like DVT and get us to stand behind it and support you with the products as well. So it’s very important if you’re deriving your income out of using these tools, that you have that backup and support.

Ed:

So you’re not selling the Chinese knock-offs?

Stuart: Absolutely not. We only deal in premium brands because our customers, like I say, derive their income out of using the products and services we sell.

Stuart: Yes they definitely have.

Blackmagic products have been 2 things over the years – one is revolutionary where they’ve come out with new products that we’d never thought about; and others are evolutionary where they’re just improving upon what they’ve had before. A good example of the evolutionary products is the new range of micro converters that they’ve come out with. You know, they’ve been doing HDMI to SDI converters and SDI to HDMI converters for some time and they sell for hundreds of dollars.

Now of course the market’s moved on and there are Chinese companies that are producing these types of converters very, very cheaply but at very poor quality, very low reliability and at a much lower price point, so Blackmagic have responded and come out with the micro converters. They’ve given it a pretty good level of thought. They ship with a power supply so you can plug them into the wall, just like you could with the old mini converters, but the micro converters are actually USB powered, which is wonderful. For example, if you’re running an SDI cable to a TV and you need to convert it into HDMI to go into the tele, if the tele’s got a USB port on it, you can use that USB port to power the converter. So they’ve thought about how to make Page 8

24x6 SD card dubs at once.

Ed: Do you know anybody who’s selling the Chinese knock-offs?

Stuart: No I wouldn’t know anyone.

Ed: Other products … I know one that really got everyone excited at the press conference was the Blackmagic 4K duplicator?

Stuart: Yes, Blackmagic have obviously forged a path with 4K workflows whether it’s in the vision mixers that they released a few years ago, all the way through to duplicators and 4K video assist recorders and monitors all in 4K. So they’ve released a new duplicator which allows you to put up to 24 SD cards and record in UltraHD from an UltraHD-SDI source. It’s got a video monitor on the front of it and a big fat red record button; you just line up the cards, if you’re doing a live event you can just hit “record”. The really cool thing with the duplicator is that, if you were filming an event that has an intermission, you can actually pause the recording during the intermission and carry on recording afterwards and at the end of the recording, it will stitch the 2 files together into a single file. So it’s a great way for people doing live events, or if you want to mass duplicate UltraHD content or 4K content to be able to get it to your customers, because with the lack of 4K DVD standards or players available, most of the large screen TVs around are currently 4K capable, and a lot of them will actually play these SD cards. If you take them straight out, put it in a 4K tele, they’ll play it in 4K. So it’s a really clever way of being able to get 4K content out to your customers from events.

Ed: Could you actually use it as a post-event recorder – so you’ve recorded something or you’ve made a programme, can us use this as a pure duplicator?

quality screen. In their original video assist, the quality wasn’t necessarily all that flash, but the new 7 inch screen – we haven’t had a close look at it yet, but it looks very, very good in comparison. Plus, of course, 4K recording in and out, it’s great; a very low cost way of being able to record 4K on set or for any other application that you might have.

Ed: And I understand that the URSA Mini is really taking off?

Stuart: Yes. Just prior to NAB, Blackmagic shipped both the URSA Mini 4K and the 4.6K. They were grappling last year with trying to put global shutter in both of those cameras, but just prior to NAB they decided that putting global shutter into the 4.6K camera was proving to be too difficult.

Stuart: You could.

You could use a nonlinear editing system to capture the file then master the file; you could then edit it up and get it exactly the way you want it and then you can play it back out of your nonlinear editing system and record 24 cards at a time.

It’s pretty cool.

Ed: And, what else have they done?

Stuart: The Blackmagic video assist, which was their low cost, very compact, LCD screen and recorder – they’ve come out with a 4K version off that, with a slightly larger 7 inch screen. It’s actually a very good

They did like the fact that the 4.6K camera has extraordinarily high dynamic range in the rolling shutter mode so they’ve released the 4K camera with global shutter, for those who are shooting high speed sports photography or anything with fast moving images where you want a global shutter; and the 4.6K with the rolling shutter is an ideal tool for using for higher end drama, short form documentary type work. They’ve basically decided it’s too hard to put global shutter into the 4.6K, but they’ve released it anyway and with up to 15 stops of dynamic range, it’s an interesting camera.

Ed: Now there are quite a few people selling Blackmagic in New Zealand and you’re just one of the dealers, but what would be the reasons why people would come to you? Would it be because you’ve got lots of stock or because you’ve got lots of comparisons that people can make with other brands that you’ve got here in your new showroom?

Stuart: We’re not “just one” of the dealers of course, but we sell a lot of Blackmagic product, we’re very familiar with the functions across the range of product, but not just Blackmagic – we also do Matrox, AJA, TriCaster vision mixers – there’s a whole range of Page 9

products that we do. Blackmagic fits a lot of our market extremely well, but there are parts of our market where Blackmagic doesn’t fit and other products might be a better choice for what you may want to do.

So it’s really important to have a reseller like us that’s knowledgeable and experienced with the products and, in this marketplace, to be able to guide you on your choices, even if it’s just to confirm that what you think you need is really the right product for the job.

But of course we’re also here to stand behind you. If you’re using these tools to derive your income, we’re here to help and support you, and now that we’re right here in the heart of the production village in Grey Lynn, it’s never been easier.

Ed: And you can always discuss this over a coffee or possibly a beer?

Stuart: Absolutely, depending on the time of day.

We’re always here to help.

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Bright Tangerine for DVT For DVT we are at Bright Tangerine, a matte box company, and the person talking to us is Robert Eagle.

Ed: Robert – Bright Tangerine, why would you choose the colour tangerine when you’ve got black matte boxes?

Robert: The colour “tangerine” because you can see from miles off and an orange presumes strong longevity in some cultures – and it’s a great colour, it’s my favourite colour. But what’s good about the brand, what have we got coming out this year … we’ve got a new monitor arm which I think is going to change the way people buy monitor arms. Rather than buy 5 a year in a rental house, buy one and it will last all year.

It’s the perfect new addition to our range.

Ed:

So you’re not just matte boxes?

Robert: No we’re not just matte boxes now, we’ve got follow focus, we do the old Rabone tape measures and there’s a lot more coming out in the future. We started off making matte boxes, but we’re not going into the full accessories market like some of the

companies are, but what we do make we’re going to make well and make with a lot of support and suggestions from the people who are using them. We don’t just sit ourselves down and make something, we go out to the masses and find out what they want; and the masses were saying “we need a monitor arm that actually does what a monitor arm’s supposed to do.”

And that’s what we’ve gone out and done. It’s got one pivot point and 2 lock-in joints.

You can actually adjust the monitor once it’s locked up tight.

Ed:

It looks very solid?

Robert: It is very solid.

It’s not as heavy or as light as some on the market, but what we have done is machined the ball joints.

Once you have machined them, you can move them back and forth.

A lot of the companies use slightly roughened joints and roughened balls so, if you use it under tension, you can actually take some of the edges off the balls.

Ed: Now this is a UK company by your accent?

Robert at Bright Tangerine.

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Robert: We are UK based, yes.

We source some of our products from all over the world, but the final assembly is in the UK.

Ed:

But your trays take the standard 4mm glass?

Robert: take it.

Ed:

Yes, every tray uses a 4mm glass that will

And your rails – those are all yours as well?

Robert: No, we don’t make the bars we just make the attachment. We do actually make the forks … you know, some 50mm lightweight matte boxes have to back up against the forks.

All we did was to provide a simple solution; we cut the forks in half so you can allow the matte box to go over the top of the forks.

Some of them – not mentioning names – we also have an issue because they cut the field of view. So on 50mm lightweight, cut the fork in half, you’ve got about 3½ inches of adjustment back and forth.

Ed: Now Chris, I would think that to me, one of the great benefits of the Tangerine line is this extendibility – that you can buy the basic matte box to start with and then add to it, rather than having to buy a totally new one?

Nice glass gripper.

Our head office is in Aldershot, but we are looking to expand. We are shortly going to open a US based office and possibly an Oceania based office – not to sell, just to give support to our customers, because we’ve got a growing customer base across the world now.

Ed: Obviously there are a lot of matte boxes here, your major business is matte boxes. What makes yours special? I’ve never come across these before.

Robert: Strength is one of them. Each is made of carbon fibre and hard anodised aluminium. But it’s not just the strength – what do you want a matte box to do? You want it to protect the light from the lens and cover the field of view.

Ed:

And you want it to survive a knock or two.

Robert: Yes, you want to be able to chuck it on the floor, drop it and then be able to use it in rugged conditions. You’ll see the hard flags and the sunshade are all carbon fibre and the back end of the unit is hard anodised aluminium. The reason we’ve kept this so light is because our mounting point is the sunshade. A lot of companies put a polymer or a plastic sunshade on the front; they do all the mounting behind the back.

Our rigidity and our strength comes from our shade, that’s how it’s kept so light. We’ve done it functional; we’ve done it modular as well, so you can add and take stuff away. You can start with a very basic unit and build up slowly. You can actually buy just a simple clipon matte box and then later down the line turn it into a swing away by adding a simple bracket. And also new to us last year, was the tilt – you get a lot of people with internal reflections, you can actually tilt the matte box away rather than just keeping the tilt reflect on the lens.

Chris: Does it work with any accessories from other vendors?

Robert: What you’ll find is that we use some of the ARRI standard 143mm, so a lot of rings and accessories on the donor side will work in with our matte boxes, but the rest of them … these are our products, we use slightly thinner trays than most people and we also use different brackets, so a lot of them won’t work with it.

Chris: Yes absolutely and at the end of the day, when you’re choosing a matte box, I guess you start with what kind of lenses you want to work with and then that will allow you to figure out what kind of matte box you want to use. Then you’ve got a bunch of donuts and filters to work with DSLR lenses … that just came out last year, all the way through to your big cine lenses, and the choice is quite large.

Robert: I think a good way of saying it, is you’re futureproofing yourself. When you start out in the business, you’re not sure how you’re going to go, where your business is going to go. I know it’s just a matte box, but you can start off with a simple clip-on and when you find your work is progressing, you can add a swing array bracket if you want to do more studio work.

And with the field of view as wide as it is, with lenses and sensors all getting wider – you know we’re talking about 8K over there, you’re already there, because we’ll cover a really wide angle view.

So you’ve got something that’s going to last not just from the physical, but from all the technical side moving forward. I know people say “it’s just a matte box” but people spend a lot of money on lenses, they spend a lot of money on cameras to get the look they want, but you can’t do it. Some of these lenses you’ve got to put some effects in and if haven’t got a way of holding that effect filter in the front of your glass, you’ve spent all that money on your camera and your lens, but you’re going to let light in, you can’t use the lens in full view, so the matte box is an extremely important part of that kit that you’re going to use during your shoot.

Ed: Are there any special little bits on your matte boxes that are different to anybody else – I notice there’s a whole lot of little threaded holes here that you can put things on?

Robert: Yes, we’ve just got the mounting point on top so you can put a cinetape bracket on there or you can put a little LED light on. The tilt function that we’ve offered last year, I think there’s one other company that’s doing it, but I think that’s a great option. The other company have only done it for I think 2 of their matte boxes. You could add this tilt to the simple little clip-on and across the whole range. It’s a small bracket you’re not going to use very often, you can quite easily shift it from one matte box to the other. A lot of these matte boxes are modular, you can use a lot of the

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products on one that you can use on the other. If you are a rental house and you’ve got a range of gear, as with everybody else, you can use a lot of the products on all of our matte boxes.

Ed:

And?

Robert: We’ve been innovating again. We realise that people work in cold parts of the world or dirty parts of the world where they’ve got to wear gloves and one of the biggest issues people have taking a piece of glass out of a tray is the little clip on the top. So what we did is come up with this – and why hasn’t anybody done this before? So you take the tray out of the matte box, push the gripper in and you take the glass out. So you haven’t got to take your glove off, you can continue working with your gloves on which is okay. It doesn’t really matter if you’re in a nice little warm place like London where it never gets cold, but if you’re in extremes of the world where it’s down to minus 30, minus 25, you don’t want to be taking your gloves off to put a bit of glass in your matte box. With us, we try to do it so you can keep your gloves on, keep warm and can continue shooting.

Ed: So not just matte boxes but of course what every railed camera needs, is a follow focus?

Robert: Well I know a lot of people have been waiting a bit of time for this evolver to come out. It’s been 2 years in development and we’ve just finished the final round of testing. I’m pleased to let Chris know that shipping will start in mid-summer this year. It’s taken a long time to get to where we are because we’re doing stuff with this follow focus that nobody else has done, and we are working with a micron of measurement, that’s why it’s not an issue to resolve, but it’s been difficult to get the product we’re using to that quality. It’s got to be of that quality to hit the benchmark for most people’s follow focus, which is an FF-4 from ARRI. It’s a great follow focus and I think everybody’s follow focuses get benchmarked against that and I think, once people get their hands on this, they’re going to be extremely surprised at the quality and the actual usability and the options that you’ve got.

Lenses, cameras and everything are all compressing and people are finding it very hard to put the follow focus on the bars and fit the matte box on the front. What we’re

offering is a way of adjusting the actual gear arm around on the follow focus, or even take the ball arm off and take the handle off just go direct with – I call it a walnut cracker – the crank handle and I think once people get their hands on it they’re going to be extremely surprised.

Ed:

Is this particularly important with 4K?

Robert: …

I don’t think so much with 4K, but it’s more

Ed: Well you need a higher level of precision don’t you?

Robert: You do. I actually understand with the focal length of the lens, yes, it will make a difference, but I think what you’ll find is that people are compressing everything into a smaller space and the options we’re giving are going to help out that a lot. I think the high end world you’re talking of, 4K and the 8K world, you do need that level of precision where if you focus the lens into a point, you want to know that that’s going to go there, it’s not going to slip, so yes, it is important.

Ed: And just like all other follow focuses, you’ve got set points that you can pre-programme?

Robert: We’ve given you 3 options in pulling focus – you’ve got your traditional way where you mark your disc; we’ve also got 2 hard stops; and we’ve got what’s called a soft stop where you can actually use the hard stop and use your finger as a soft stop.

That’s important when you’re a single operator – you can operate the follow focus with your hand and not actually look at your marker points, you can use your finger.

It’s more of a soft stop, it’s not as accurate as a hard stop or a mark stop, but it gives you the ability to use it on your own.

Ed: I guess what’s important for the customer is that you’ve actually got stock of these Chris – you keep them there so people can come in, put them on their camera and see how they work?

Chris: Yes that’s correct. What we’ve got at the moment is the Misfit ATOM, a lightweight solution basically for gimbal operators. We go through to what’s called the Misfit which is I guess the big brother, through to the Viv and that’s the range we’ve got at the moment.

There is another model that we haven’t stocked yet – we’re just sort of getting the market to see what the demand might be for it. This is the DNA. The bottom line is we’ve got matte boxes, we’ve got donuts, we’ve got the accessories.

Robert: We met DVT 3 years ago now and we’re finding it a lot easier to work with the extremities of the world – sorry, but New Zealand is a long way away …

Ed:

Well so are you from us.

Robert: Exactly, I’m sorry about that. We are working hard and DVT are a great company, and that’s why we partnered with them 3 years ago. In time I think it’s going to be a great little business down in New Zealand.

We do have a lot of our customers down there already, Ben Ruffell and a couple of other well-known DP’s and I think that’s definitely helping … these guys work NZVN closely with DVT as well.

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Apace for Atomise For Atomise, we are at Apace with Dennis Bress – and Dr Lee is listening in the background to make sure Dennis gets it right.

Ed: Okay, we’re close to the end of day 4 so you must have had plenty of questions. What are the sorts of questions people have been asking you this year Dennis?

Dennis: Well usually, the questions always start with “what’s new?”

My basic response has been that it’s not necessarily what’s new – what we’re really promoting is our relationship with our clients, and I think what’s important in today’s marketplace is that we work very hard to offer not only great products that work – and one of our taglines is “our stuff works” but also support, support, support.

We really pride ourselves not only on the fact that the equipment that we’re providing is solving problems, but also our support staff, so I think they really get a lot of credit for our continued success. But, in addressing what is new, yes we do have some new things that we announced this year and one of the things we’re pretty excited about is that Apace has been able to really gain market share based on providing 54 bit Linux NAS storage systems that are used by our clients to be able to provide an ecosystem by which they can share material.

Ed: I just want to say right at the start, Apace is not a storage hardware company as such, it’s more than that. It’s the software that goes on top of the storage that makes the big difference between you and many of the others out there?

Dennis: Exactly and that’s a great point to be made. At the storage level, we are basically just shared storage, but our shared storage is unique in order to provide real time editing. Now today is significant in history because we just had the passing of Prince who was a very famous musician here in the States and known worldwide. Prince died at 57 today, April 21st 2016 in Minnesota.

What that means is that every News organisation today is desperately and frantically searching through their archives for Prince footage or anything that has to do with Prince. And that’s where Dr Lee and the Apace staff have really shone, because their media asset manager called postMAM is the key that, if our clients have postMAM and they’ve already indexed content that has metadata associated to Prince, any one of those people can open a browser in a postMAM by Apace and type in “Prince” and they can instantly go through hundreds of terabytes, literally hundreds of thousands of clips and the results will reflect some form of Prince.

They can go through and scrub and say …

Ed: Well we don’t want Prince Charles, we want the other one?

Dennis: That’s the point. You can do partial strings, etc but it’s a forensic tool that gives you instant access to your database through the archives, even all the way out to tape, to be able to search and scrub through the proxy representations in order to say “yes, this is the footage. We have an interview that we did in 1981 with Prince.” They can immediately cut that on the raw and

Dennis with Dr Lee.

they can distribute that to the newsroom so that they can go to Breaking News with content they own, in order to be a News organisation that has something very unique to offer. Because there’s CNN, Fox – all the big guys have their stuff, but if you happen to be a smaller station, let’s say in Minnesota where Prince lived, you might have some very unique footage and that makes you different. And especially with social media, to go to Twitter etc with certain videos that you could cut with unique video, that’s key.

Ed: But of course, large broadcasters in their News departments, they’re very often an Avid based newsroom. Are they not able to do exactly the same thing as Apace can do?

Dr Lee: There is very different thinking behind it.

The key is what we do. Firstly is that, on top of your pile of data, how to organise it. Dennis mentioned the postMAM and also how to index, that’s general. But what we add are 2 major pieces. When you do today’s production, it’s rarely an individual work; it’s the work of a group of people. How to tie them together locally, globally, that’s the key.

So what differentiates us from the other people is that we’re not just taking care of a single site or a single storage silo, we can handle data in parallel at multiple sites on a global level.

So through the browser interface, you have access to all the material for different offices, like CNN and BBC have a London office, a New York office, a Tokyo office. When you search you can see whatever else regarding Prince that you have.

There, with a single click you can immediately start proxy editing, then render on 4K, 8K even. So the whole process is virtualised. We put the whole production over the internet – note internet, not online … it’s beyond online.

You have a good connection, you have a bad connection, you can be in Africa, you can be in Europe – all this is a virtual ecosystem. It’s no longer individual editing seats. It is a group of people but they are working geographically, time-zone wise different. But how these things work together include peer editors, include a producer, directors, legal review team, your customer finally reviews your product.

We shorten this whole production process, make here the really timely fashion, you can work from anywhere.

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Dennis:

And that’s the tool called postMAM Global.

Dr Lee: We have a new web based frame actually to cut and we have a highly tuned integrated with Adobe Anywhere hub, Premiere, After Effects, Prelude – all these tools. So all these tools for facilities if you shown process for production without all the people in the single place.

Dennis: If I could just add to that … one of the great workflows thing to postMAM Global is that previously, if you were in New York and your station group in L.A probably has Prince footage, so as a producer or an assistant you are calling from New York to L.A and speaking to someone asking if they could send you some of their Prince footage, what postMAM Global allows you to do is to eliminate that. From New York, you can view everything in L.A yourself. You can do a global search, it will say it’s on the L.A server and you can review all of that footage. So depending on what story you’re trying to tell, you can scrub through that video and if it’s from an awards show and you own the rights to it, you can go to right where Prince gets up and like Lee said, you can do frame accurate cut from an in point to an out, to an in to an out, from New York on L.A’s raw footage. And it could be 2K or 4K footage, those are big files.

Dr Lee: You click all the desires … if we talk about what’s new, that’s the new things. This works with multiple sites anywhere. So now it’s no longer a single site anywhere, it’s multiple sites anywhere. You can also scale up to support concurrently a much greater number of streams, and number of users at the same time.

Ed: I assume it’s very important that, as you mentioned before, you own the rights to this footage, you can also have access to other footage that you don’t necessarily own the rights to, but you know that you’re going to have to pay a certain amount for that and so maybe certain people who are able to make decisions about whether they pay for it or not, can have the right to access that footage, and not anybody in the facility?

Dennis: That’s a good point Grant. Apace has a watermark feature within the postMAM asset manager that you could technically watermark content that you don’t necessarily have free rights to. So just by having it watermarked the question would be raised “oh I like this clip, it’s watermarked, I need to talk to whoever’s in charge of that particular content in order to buy the rights for it.”

Dr Lee: It’s also possible with the metadata, with the watermark combo, you have a streamlined

workflow. By a click you can edit on the watermark proxy, once you finish, you say here is the price you willing to pay, you render on raw, otherwise you can have a preview of what is the final outcome. It’s your choice. It’s about workflow.

Ed: Okay, we’re just about at the end of the show, so you’re in a good spot to tell me what has been the most common but sensible question that you’ve had from people on the show floor this year?

Dennis: People are in this rich media space, media and entertainment and the basic premise is that they need storage. There’s no stopping storage … based on the video formats 2K, 4K, these are big files, so even for the smallish jobs the conversation starts at 100 terabyte. What they want to be assured of is that wherever they’re at, or where they want to go, they want to be able to scale up in their storage. What’s neat about Apace and what they’re offering, is not only the storage attribute, but also the media asset management via postMAM because once you start to get into 100, 200 terabytes it’s a NAS. You can organise your content in folders and sub-folders and that’s fine. As long as you know where to go, to double click and play that file, that’s great.

Ed: I don’t know where my photos are at home, so …

Dennis: So you know it’s a problem even for people that are just photo-graphers and have tons of images.

How do you search unless you went through and renamed those files something that’s searchable, it’s very hard to be able to find. But in regards to the people in media and entertainment like for example, today – if they’ve got 200 terabytes worth of storage, they would like to be able to go to a tool and type in “Prince” and have those results be reflected within seconds.

So it is storage but it is also crucial now, and that’s probably in answering your question – storage is becoming secon=dary, although we can address that in a scalable fashion, but the asset management still continues to be the key. People are looking for a powerful but simplistic tool to be able to leverage on top of their storage and what’s unique about Apace is Apace not only makes the storage, but they also are the manufacturer and designer, because primarily Apace is an engineering company that has deep software engineers, along with hardware engineers. You couple the two of those together and you have a very compelling story, compared to our competitors who might have storage, but then they point you in another direction to the asset management. And as we all know, when you get more people involved into an installation, now people point this way, they point that way, it’s a little more cumbersome.

Apace is a single point for an entire ecosystem that is a range of software tools that can help you, as Lee likes to say, regardless of the fact you’re using Adobe or Avid or Apple, the hammer or chisel you choose to do your particular function is up to you, and whether you’re Mac based or PC based, we intercommunicate with that, the storage is on the back end, the asset management rests on top of the Apace and also any additional Apace storage that you purchase – and you will buy more storage as you continue to be successful, there is no penalty, because the way Apace price their media asset management is there’s no additional charge as long as you continue to buy Apace storage. You buy another 100 terabyte of Apace, there’s no additional charge –

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you’ve already invested in the media asset manager by Apace, postMAM, it sees the 100 terabytes. Now that doesn’t mean if you buy someone else’s storage that we can’t charge you to track that, but if it’s Apace storage, you just keep buying it.

Ed: It keeps the customers loyal. from Dr Lee?

And a final word

Dr Lee: Thank you and also there is another interesting perspective along with the storage. I totally agree with Dennis that the MAM for storage is just a search. Used to be broadcasters have told us “I have a 14 terabyte, enough I need more” but in the last couple of years I have yet to hear somebody tell me “I’ve got enough storage.”

They always say “the more the better.”

When we look at storage, typically people tend to be one-dimensional. How many gig, how many terabyte, this kind of capacity is the only measurement. Actually, I want to remind people in the broadcast space, it’s more than the single dimension of our capacity. It’s also related to how you serve the video data because, when people do their editing, collaborate editing or

JMR Storage for Atomise For Atomise we are at JMR, innovators in storage technologies and we have Mitchell Guzik.

Ed: Well there are a lot of people doing storage here I have to tell you Mitch, so why has Richard Kelly chosen you as one of the people who he is happy to represent in New Zealand for storage?

Mitch: Well I think one of the reasons is that we build everything ourselves, we don’t buy components.

Clearly we buy boards, but we do all our own design work, everything’s built in the United States – our backplanes and our SAS expanders, all our storage technology. We do things with split buses and SAS expanders so we get a little better throughput and we maybe beat the market a little bit with reliability.

Ed: And I would say reliability’s pretty important in storage?

Mitch: It sure is, I think so too. What we’re showing here at this show, for your Mac based workflow, is our Thunderbolt line of products. This is all Thunderbolt-2 – so we have expansion chassis and expansion plus storage chassis. This is a single slot expansion chassis, dual-slot expansion chassis Thunderbolt-2. Then we go to our quad-slot expansion chassis, but what we’ve done that’s different is that we use 2 Thunderbolt devices. There are 2 chips in here, so we split this bus again and so there’s 2 on one chip and 2 on another, so you get twice the throughput. Attached with that is 8 solid state drives with a builtin RAID controller. You can go anything from RAID 0 to RAID 6. It’s in a very nice convenient rack mount chassis. Your Mac Pro mounts next to it and, if you would like to put it on a single unit here, this is all available in a contained unit with a media reader and a built-in fan – very popular with a lot of DITs. Again, 8 SSD drives, and new this year are the products down below which enable you to put a Mac mini in these chassis. So the top one is the Mac Pro, the Mac mini goes in here, same 8 bay drive array. The only difference is that this only has 2 slots, compared to the 4 slots here, but that’s fine on the Mac mini because of the way the bus is. These are also available in desktop versions.

This is obviously

capture, you cannot tolerate a frame drop so you have to be able to serve, not just in capacity terms, but also serve the data in a timely fashion. So that’s very important, we call it specialty storage because we facilitate the collaboration and make sure there is no frame drop during the editing and during the capture process.

That’s one issue. Then also the issue related to this is that really when you look at it, this ecosystem, from a data end up, how to find the data? Really we are talking about managing the data versus RAW data.

RAW data the value is different. If you cannot find it, you don’t own it. By doing this combo, you not just own the data, you also find data timely fashion, which improve efficiency and the quality of your work. If people can’t find the footage they’re looking for, they make up something to get away with it. The quality will suffer. By doing this efficient and improve your quality, this is really also on the further dimension is that reusable of your resource, which is like a software engineering. If you code it once, you do not have 100 NZVN people to do that again and again.

without storage, and this is a new Mac mini product using 3½ inch rotating drives and with 8 drives, you can get 64 terabytes of data. The Mac mini goes in the back of it.

Ed: I was going to ask the question why are you using solid state drives – they’re obviously a lot smaller, but …?

Mitch: They’re smaller, but the capacity is going up. They’re a lot faster and we only have 8 available.

When you’re working on a set you could get 8 terabytes, that’s a lot of capacity, so you’re getting twice the speed out of them with SSD over rotating drive. So they’re faster, the price points are coming down and they run cooler. In a situation like this, the application’s really good.

Ed: Well you don’t have to worry about spin up – this is one of the things with rotating drives?

Mitch: Solid state are just faster – they just run faster, they run cooler.

Ed: You mentioned “on set”. Is this a tool really for specific production purposes?

Mitch: We’re finding that the DIT gentlemen and women are mounting these in their carts and are using them on set, but it’s also fine for small work groups.

Then we attach all this to one of our JMR 3U storage

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server chassis here which is running NAS, so all this can be on a local work group.

Ed: So because of the size of it all, the portability and the reliability, this is an ideal product to have on set as your digital …?

Mitch: In your DIT cart or in a small production work group as well.

Ed: But you could also use it for your storage arrangements if you’re a small production company?

Mitch: Absolutely. You know a videographer has a Mac Pro, they want maybe a DeckLink card, a card by AJA, a KONA card – they need something to put it in to cache the Mac Pro. Ed: Now you keep talking about Mac, Mac, Mac – is there no Windows application?

Mitch: There is – as Windows moves towards Thunderbolt-3, I mean they’re pushing that bus, all this will rotate to Thunderbolt-3. We have Windows clients as well, but mostly this market is controlled by Apple and Macintosh. These are Linux boxes …

Ed: It really is the Thunderbolt-2 that has driven it to the Mac, but with Thunderbolt-3, it becomes a little bit more flexible?

Mitch: Apple hasn’t decided yet if they’re going to make that jump yet. We’re all waiting for them to make the decision and you have to go through a really difficult certification process, which is good because they want to make sure they have a good user experience and everything works.

Ed: But it is limited to Thunderbolt – you don’t offer any other …?

Mitch: Actually we have a whole other – this is like the stuff Richard bought, which is some Windows base and Mac base.

Our other chassis, we have 3U

SilverStor chassis that are server chassis that have all kinds of expansion base in them to put in GPU cards.

Those are like high performance computing products for doing 4K. This will also stream 4K, so we do build big servers as well. But the Thunderbolt-2 market really gravitates towards the Mac workflow.

But there’s definitely Windows based product that connects via SATA, via 10 gig or fibre connections.

Ed: And the solid state drives themselves – do you have a particular brand that you use?

Mitch: No. We kinda like mid-level enterprise, but to me this is still a little bit of the Wild West. You could spend a lot of money for the most high end drive that you need that gives you the longest performance. So far in the 4 or 5 years we’ve been using them, I’ve only had a couple fail, so I’m not sure paying all that money is really necessary yet.

Ed:

And because you’re in a RAID environment?

Mitch: Right, and the cost is coming down – we don’t recommend desktop stuff, but it’ll work, you just may burn it up faster, but it’s kinda like a toner cartridge, you change it. I mean you’re getting such great performance, don’t sweat it.

Clearly in the rotating drives we only recommend Enterprise drives.

To mess with desktop drives is a mistake, the controllers just don’t like them over time. People do it because of the cost effect, but if you have 4 or 5 editors and you’re doing 2K and 4K stuff, you get the kind of intermittent errors that really interrupt your workflow.

So if you’re not using Enterprise drives, we don’t support it.

Ed:

What do you see happening next?

Mitch: Probably some of the Thunderbolt-3 product, but this is also interesting. This is a quarter terabyte SSD brick, 1400 megs a second, so things like this. This is a very fast USB stick, but it’s Thunderbolt2. It has a 20 gig bandwidth, 1400 megs a second.

Ed:

Wow, who’d want to use one of those?

Mitch: Actually people in media and entertainment, a couple of people who have ad agencies – sometimes to load stuff on a USB 3 takes 20-30 minutes, this probably gets done in 2 minutes.

Ed:

So you could put a 4K movie on that?

Mitch: Whatever you can get on a quarter terabyte … soon to be half a terabyte when we get it through certification. And it will go to one terabyte next summer, then yes, it’s fast enough to stream a 4K movie.

Ed: Page 18

Go and see Richard.

NZVN

SightDeck for Techtel For Techtel, we are at SightDeck with Paul Vlahos, CEO Ultimatte Corporation and David Colthorpe.

Ed: We all know Ultimatte has been around a very long time and I guess is regarded as the leader in matte compositing hardware and now you’ve gone in a slightly different direction, but still using the technology and expertise you’ve developed over the years?

Paul: Oddly enough, the expertise actually is more of a … what would you call it … sort of life experience. Green screen, blue screen – what I’ve discovered over the years is just great when you’re dealing with professional actors. You discover that for them to walk onto a green set, bright lights in their faces, a crew and then emote to a camera, actors do that great. But for the rest of the world, professional communicators, salespeople, trainers, CEOs of companies, department heads, professors, teachers, that sort of thing … it a very different situation.

Ed: They’re used to talking to people, they’re used to getting feedback from their audience. But you put them in front of a camera on a green screen, they don’t know what to do?

Paul: They don’t know what to do, they kinda freeze up and that life force that they had, that everybody is so thrilled with, disappears. So it’s based on that experience that led me to believe that there’s got to be a better way. I see so many corporations and schools that are actually bringing in video departments or setting up blue and green screens, and they’re always complaining about that problem of how do I make this work – the number of days that it takes to prepare to get ready for a production, the actual time it takes to do the production, and then there’s the huge cost associated with the postproduction. That’s fine for, again, our professional world, that’s what we do, but outside of that it’s very difficult to muster the time.

Another big issue. The whole world’s going towards video, video documentation of things. It’s not so much going to a web page and reading a bunch of paragraphs; it’s more like watching videos now. So it’s based on that that I realised perhaps green screen and virtual studios and what we’ve been developing all these years, wasn’t the best answer.

Ed: it?

Okay, you’ve set the scene, so how do you solve

Paul: What we’ve created is a screen that can mount on the wall, it’s about 4 inches thick, it’s 6 foot by 11 feet and it’s a specialised kind of a projection screen that works in conjunction with a specialised camera that we make.

It’s actually mounted underneath a projector; the projector’s a front projector and it’s on the ceiling on the opposite wall of the room and it actually then projects the image onto the screen. The room is like any room – it’s still a conference room, it still has a conference room table in it, or seats or whatever you want to have in that room.

In the case of the monitor you see in front of us, I actually have an 8 foot ceiling and there’s just fluorescent lights in the ceiling and there’s a projected image … so one of the first things it does is it masks the projector so it doesn’t project the image on your body and it’s not in your eyes. So it’s a comfortable place to stand when you’re up here.

David from Techtel with Paul.

Ed: Even though the presenter would see the image on their body?

Paul: They would not see it on their body, it’s actually masked, so I’m actually projecting black in the area where you’re standing.

Ed:

And it follows you as you move?

Paul: That’s exactly right. It’s an actual Alpha channel that we’ve created; we’re actually using it then to mask the projector so that it just puts a black light – basically a shade, it’s just black that’s being projected on you, and that makes it a comfortable place to be, so you’re no longer chased out. The problem with a short throw projector is that if I get it large enough so that people at the back of the room can see it and the detail that’s on it, then the projector’s far enough away that if I get close enough to the screen to be able to touch it, I’m being projected on again, and I cast these long shadows as well. When the projector’s straight on, my body covers the shadows that I’m creating, so I’m not really blocking the information in the same way. Now the output though of this system is what we see up here, which is a first generation foreground with a first generation background, so the same as if I was standing in front of a green screen, those same advantages.

But now there’s some additional advantages as well. If you’ll notice on the screen in the room that’s where it’s being projected, you can see that there’s a toolbar projected on that screen and yet that same toolbar’s not on the output, so now that’s like a prompt layer if you will, and I can put anything on that

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prompting layer. So I can do notes that a presenter has to remember, or maybe there’s a diagram that I want to put on there that he wants to draw freehand … all he has to do now is just trace over it. It looks like he’s a genius drawing freehand – it’s perfectly proportioned and totally accurate.

Ed: Now I see on this particular slide there are a whole lot of customers shown there, and my immediate thought is, this is just ideal for weather presentation?

Paul: They don’t really need this solution, they’ve got all these professional guys who know quite well how to do what they’re doing; the system is in place, if you have a green screen and a camera and an Ultimatte it’s cheaper than a setup like this, because here there’s so much more involved. Also the image quality itself – the quality of the composite that I can make with the green screen Ultimatte is better than what I can do here, and yet this is a good enough matte quality that for most corporations, schools and the rest of it, you look at the kind of chroma keyers they’re using, it’s actually quite superior to what they’re doing. So it works.

Ed:

So is the major cost in setting this up …?

because they’re like a green screen thing, but with something much more dynamic than I can do in green screen, and that is the interactivities.

Because of whatever is on my computer, I can decide maybe to go to my webpage, and I can scroll through pages, open up boxes, start videos and so forth and I’m doing this physically.

Or I can demonstrate how to operate software. It’s much better than just listening to a voice or watching a cursor move around the screen.

Ed: Now I would imagine that the cost of setting something like this up for a company, maybe not all of the time they actually want to make a video – maybe they want to do a live presentation to a smaller group, you could still use this technology, but use it in a direct way. So you could actually have an audience there, you could still use the screen as a touch screen and show things, but record it for later use or for sending out?

Paul: Or simultaneous. You’ve hit on the key to this Grant.

Ed: This is the value I bring to this particular production.

David: Do we dare mention that Grant was once a school teacher …

Paul: You now get a great performance at the same time you’re getting all the production values that you’d get if I was launching a major production, with full postproduction.

Now you know, we do a lot of things here in postproduction.

Paul: It’s the cost of the hardware itself. Once it’s in place, you start to have tremendous savings, because I can now create videos at the same expense as doing voiceover PowerPoint.

The screen has electronics that are behind it and it weighs about 160 pounds; you can either put it on a stand or mount it on the wall. The frame that you see around the screen contains an IR system that allows you to turn this thing into a big touch screen also, so that I can get the interaction.

You can see I’m just using the fluorescent lights that are in the building, I’ve got a little microphone that’s up in the ceiling here that’s picking up the sound – and does quite a good job. The background is nothing more than what’s on your computer, so you step in and plug your computer in and it comes up on the background.

The record button is actually right on the screen, you just hit the record button and now you’re recording. So it’s literally the kind of a thing that you can crank out videos, and they’re very good looking videos too,

When you launch the recording on the screen, as we’re recording we put markers every time there’s a pause in your voice, so that if you reach a point – say you’re 10 minutes into it and you make a mistake that you can’t recover from, now I’m presented with a choice.

I’m either going to stop and start over or I’m going to have to book an editing session and the editing part of things can be very expensive, because I have to find somebody who’s got an editing system on their computer, they know how to use it, and then of course I’m now struggling with I’ve got to cut this part out and how am I going to put this together where it makes sense.

So with our Pick-Up Editing system, if I make a mistake and I hit the stop button, over to the edge comes up thumbnails stacked on top of each other, with a number which is how many seconds ago it was that that pause occurred before I stopped.

And if I touch one of them, it plays the 3 seconds of audio leading up to that pause point. I can go back further and further, keep listening to 3 seconds of audio until I find where I say “oh I could pick it up from there, that’s a good place for me to pick this up.” On the screen we’re showing you where you were standing at the time when you had that pause, so now I can go

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ahead and line myself up with that place, hit the record button, it will then play the 3 seconds of audio leading up to it and at that moment I just pick it up and start talking again, completing my sentence if you will, and just keep going again. And I can start and stop as many times as I need to, to get through it.

When I’m done I hit the render button and now it does the complete edits and it hands you a finished piece where it’s all edited and the edits are much more intelligent than I could ever do in a post environment, because the idea flow is flawless.

David: It’s a very fluid way of creating the sort of natural presentation where your high quality presenter is in his element rather than being intimidated by the technology around him. Actually there’s 1 or 2 other applications aren’t there?

Paul: Yes, I’ll show you the screen here. One of the things that’s on this invisible-visible control panel is a button that he pushes that actually then fades him off and on the picture. It’s handy, but in this case the

Ed: Now just one question – if you decided that you wanted to have the higher resolution and you had a bit more budget, you could put a better camera in there than your standard camera?

Paul: No. It’s the specialised camera that makes this possible. These pictures don’t do it justice.

If at some point I could do a live presentation to you, you’d see what it actually looks like.

Ed: Okay. So David, wow – I could see lots of uses for this in New Zealand.

You can really interact with your audience.

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device actually streams 2 separate video streams. One of them is for the standard large format viewing screens; another is more appropriate to a small cellphone, and a lot of people want to watch these things on a cellphone. So what if you’re dealing with spreadsheets that have a bunch of small numbers on them? What you discover is that you set it up so that … and here the presenter fades himself on, he’s making a presentation, maybe he wants to reference something that is a number that’s on here and there’s no way it can be seen on a small screen. The second output though, any time he reaches out and points to anything, it automatically then blows up the background, zooms it up – let’s say a 4:1 zoom, holds it there for a couple of seconds and then brings it back down. So the presenter doesn’t have to know anything, he’s just pointing to things as he ordinarily would, to draw your attention to it and that version now has these zoom things going on, so that the guy watching on a cellphone can read these numbers and actually get something out of the presentation. So that’s another thing that happens with a SightDeck – there’s dual recording, dual stream and it actually gives you examples that it’s really good for cellphone use.

David: Can you imagine the absolutely killer Quarterly Report that the CEO could give to the shareholders with this sort of thing.

Ed: Now we’ve just seen a pretty killer application here where you can extend this to the remote viewer if they have a webcam on their screen … you can actually switch to that remote viewer and have them as part of a conversation. The presenter can present to them, they can ask a question and be shown the answer either with the graphic that’s there or the presenter can bring up a new graphic that exactly explains what they ask.

Paul: And what’s so interesting is that the people at the distant location see themselves behind the graphics, so that, because they’re mirrored, they’re able to reach up with their hands and actually to point to areas specifically of the graphic, that both the presenter at the distant location and all the other people can see exactly where they’re pointing. The people who are watching this or what you’re recording would actually see now the presenter in front of the information, the information itself is transparent, and behind them is the distant crowd that are actually then able to see themselves and the information and actually point and reference things that are up on the screen. It’s difficult to describe, visually it’s quite pleasing.

Ed: But both parties, the presenter and the remote people who ask the question, are seeing the same graphic and can actually show exactly what they want more information about, and everybody sees it at the same time?

Paul: I know this description is tough to understand, anybody who’s reading is going to go “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

Ed:

We’ll show them a picture.

David: We will. I’ll ask Grant to put in a web link to http://www.sightdeck.com/ … it’s a great starting place to understand this technology. I’ll just comment on what I thought was quite a spectacular application for this, and this is onsite inspection. Now you might think “what the hell is he talking about, how does this relate to this?” Well ... there are scenarios in

construction projects where there are highly salaried architects or engineers who sit in their offices and yet they get dragged out and drive 100 miles to go to inspect a site, they’re there for 5 minutes and they’ve just wasted a half a day and thousands of dollars to inspect the quality of the footings on a new bridge pylon or something. With SightDeck there’s an application where you have the site supervisor in the field with an iPad running a SightDeck application. This sends the content – the view of the pylon, the construction work site, to the base where the architects are, they’re looking at the SightDeck screen and they can discuss it, annotate it, talk back to the supervisor …

Paul: Well, I should point out that the image of the iPad that’s looking at the stuff is sent to the SightDeck; the important thing is to be able to send back to the crew on site, so now the architects or whoever is involved with the engineers, are then able to stand in front of the SightDeck and now the image is sent back so that the fellow that’s holding the iPad – what he’s seeing is what is in his back camera with the engineers over the top of it.

Now those engineers can point to specific things, actually draw on specific things, instruct them exactly what plate to remove, what’s behind it, where to put a probe for example, what knobs to turn, and indeed actually run both instruction as well as inspection and everything else in a way which is far better than just images and sound, which is what we deal with now.

Here’s the image, tell me what you want. Here we’re actually showing you what we want and we can direct you to do it, where to put the camera, every piece of it.

So the SightDeck Mobile is what that represents. The ability to put the expert over the image and actually drive the action in a sense is very valuable. If you have 2 cameras, you can have one looking at the site, it’s a fixed camera looking at the site, and now the fellow that’s doing the work is standing in front of that camera looking at the output on his iPad, he sees himself standing there, but standing right next to him is the engineer who can then reach up and say “hey look at this crack right here” and at that point he can then walk right up to what he’s actually pointing to and move all around the set. It’s very effective. Hard to describe again … this is the most experiential product I’ve ever seen and it does not lend itself well to verbal description!

Ed: So this is a product you can start off very simply by the CEO just walks in front of the screen and doesn’t have to use the visual tools that are available to start with, but once they get a little bit comfortable with it, then you just keep adding more and more features and make the presentation more and more interactive and professional, without the pain?

Paul: Right. The most valuable part of it is that I can bring a guy on this thing who has never seen it before, may never see it again, and with no training whatsoever – none – just say “go give your talk, point to the things you want to point to” and that’s all the instruction you have to give him.

Ed:

And you can give him an audience to talk to?

Paul: Right in front of a live audience, that’s the way they work best, and this is where the magic comes – a fantastic performance that you’ll almost never see on video, at the same time you’re creating like a green screen composite of high end graphics in the background.

NZVN

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LiteGear for PLS We are at LiteGear for PLS and we have Paul Royalty, VP of Sales.

Ed: Now the first question I have to ask – every man and his dog seems to be making LED panels these days, however Chris McKenzie is very keen on what you produce, so there must be a reason why he’s chosen you over the other dogs. Why would that be?

Paul: A lot of it has to do with my devilish good looks and my sordid wit – but really, the LiteMat product was born out of the LED Ribbon that our company was founded with.

So for years and years, we A length of ribbon inside a tortilla warmer were building all sorts of provides the near perfect ring light for my photo. custom panels and shapes Ed: You’re just taking up more space? and sizes for gaffers and DPs, and we finally got to a point where we realised maybe we should formalise this Paul: Exactly. and do an actual fixture and make it easier, so it’s not Ed: Right, so you get a much more even light over a such a custom thing – that’s how LiteMat was born. wider area?

The idea with LiteMat is that it’s extremely lightweight, Paul: Correct. It wraps a bit more and you don’t it’s made of 2 layers of corrugated plastic, so the single necessarily have to put any type of diffusion on it. unit, the LiteMat 1 only weighs 1.8 pounds. You can Because it’s so soft initially it works great as a wrap literally use gaffer tape or Velcro to tape it to a wall, around keylight. you can put a drywall screw right through it, so the flexibility and versatility of that I think hadn’t been done Ed: But because of the substrate, this is not before. In addition, the light engine in LiteMat matched something that hire companies would take on. I would all of the ribbon that we’d been selling and working on image it would be something more that you would put productions, so it matched, it became a system of sorts. in place and move irregularly?

Again, nobody else was offering that kind of flexibility.

Paul: Well initially you would be correct. The Ed: Just tell me, LiteMat versus LiteGear – the original product was more intended for the owner / company’s name is LiteGear? operator, for the individual gaffer or cinematographer, Paul: Well yes, we’re not very creative, so every but it turns out there’s another company that makes product we make has to have the word “Lite” in the corrugated or corflute based product with fluorescent beginning. But yes, born from LiteGear is LiteRibbon tubes in it, that has sold a number of those to rental and then LiteMat and now the giant product behind you companies. So we feel that the product actually does which is LiteTile. hold up really well and what we’ve introduced here at Ed: All under the banner “LiteGear”?

Paul: Correct.

Ed: Gotcha.

Now substrate is corflute?

Paul: It is.

I

guess

your

Ed: I know one of the problems with LED arrays is heat and so, by putting it on a metal substrate, you get to disburse that heat. If you’re putting it on corflute or cloth, that doesn’t happen. How do you get away with that?

Paul: Primarily because of the spacing of the emitters. We don’t group our emitters very close together like some of the more ubiquitous 1x1 style panels and the reason for that is what we call soft light through pixilation. By spreading the emitters out, allowing them to be very wide, you get a very nice quality of light, a more cinematic quality of light, so that distance then means we’re not getting such intense heat close together.

Close-up of tortilla ring light.

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this NAB is a better system specifically for rental companies.

Ed: And how do you make it a better system?

Paul: So the light engines themselves are brighter, which doesn’t much matter to rental, but now it’s a full locking connection system, so all the cabling is locking. And then, instead of a power supply and a dimmer being 2 separate pieces, it’s now all in one selfcontained unit. The cable is the same for every single product we make – so it’s one cable the rental company has to stock, and there is a power supply option that powers everything, so they only have to put one of those in rental and one head cable and it will run the entire 5 or 6 LiteMat systems.

Ed: Now what about repairs – is it a case of just replacing a little piece of ribbon? If you say that your standard ribbon makes up these panels, if say, the dog chews an end of it, is it possible to fix it yourself with a bit of extra ribbon?

Paul: I wouldn’t say it’s a “do it yourself” at home project, but I would say that a distributor like PLS would certainly be adept at replacing it. You just simply replace the whole PCB if the dog chewed the area where the connections and the wiring was. If you end up losing some emitters, the unit will still work just fine – it will just look a little odd if you’re staring right at it.

Ed: Okay, so those are the panels. Obviously you must make a very good ribbon, otherwise you wouldn’t have progressed into the panels, so what is it about the ribbon that makes your one particularly good. Is everybody using your ribbon, or is this a proprietary ribbon?

Paul: I would say that the ribbon itself is proprietary. We design it, specify it, and have the emitters built for our company.

We do things specifically for the cinematic and motion picture industry, so the colour quality is way better than really anything that’s available from the websites TradeMe, Amazon, eBay, things like that. We also have more variety than anybody else as far as different thicknesses, different widths, different densities of emitters, all specifically in the tungsten-daylight or a hybrid which is two colour chip. And then from that we also get into the RGB, RGB ambers – this year we’ve introduced a 4 in 1 emitter. It is RGB and then cinema quality daylight, or cinema quality tungsten and in fact that’s what being used a lot in the production in Wellington right now, because it gives wonderfully desaturated colour – you know saturated colours, but then if they need to go to a cinema quality white, it’s already on the emitter.

Ed: Now I look around on the bench here and I see what looks like a homemade rectangle here with a bit of home soldering on it. Is this something that you have made up just for the show?

Paul: No, that is LiteRibbon. That is our 60-X6.

We also kinda tongue in cheek call it “LiteCard” but that is what the ribbon product is based on, so it’s an adhesive backed unit, every line that you see here is actually a cut point, so you can cut it to fit any need that you might have.

Ed: But then the bits you cut off you can’t use for anything else, or what?

Paul: You absolutely can, because you can solder them right back together.

Ed: Aaaah … so you can make up your own arrangement?

Paul: Correct. So you can create anything you want. You can create your own little cards, you can create your own little gags … that for instance is a bit of

cut ribbon inside of an old camp lantern, with one of our flicker dimmers.

Ed: I see. So for the home hobbyist this is …

Paul: Very entertaining. This little unit right here … you might not have these in New Zealand, but this is a tortilla warmer. I think this was exactly 99¢ at the local Mexican market, and we’ve filled it with a bit of hybrid ribbon and cut a hole in the back for a ring light.

You can change colour temperatures and change intensity.

Ed: Okay and lighting us up in this interview is a very large panel called “LiteTile”?

Paul: Correct. So that is an 8x8 grip frame, something you’d find at any rental company and then inside that are 4 strips or tiles that are 400 Watt each, which gives us 1600 Watt of beautiful cinema daylight or tungsten.

Ed: So you can make one of these yourself or what – you buy it as a complete panel?

Paul: You can buy individual strips or you can buy the entire panel system, but it puts a whole bunch of light in a very, very small area.

Ed:

Right. What would be the alternative?

Paul: So this unit right here, which is maybe 2 inches in depth for 1600 Watt, puts out the equivalent of what maybe a 5K tungsten Fresnel pushing through a grid cloth of some sort, or maybe a 2500 to 4K HMI pushing through cloth. So clearly the depth of doing

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that is a lot of stands and grip hardware and stuff, whereas this is literally a wall of light.

Ed: And I can actually feel for the first time a little bit of heat coming from an LED panel, because it’s a very large panel?

Paul: It’s a very large panel, that is absolutely right and we are actually working with a couple of the grip manufacturers now and you’ll be able to attach a second panel in front of this, for your diffusion, so the entire system could roll on 2 stands or you could literally set it down as a box on the ground.

Ed: Wow. And then if you have to move it, can you roll them up?

Paul: They actually fold like an old-school map. I know most people don’t know what a map is anymore, but yes it’s a “zed” fold, just like an old map.

Ed: That’s on paper?

Paul: Yep. Ed: Now you were just saying to me that, in fact, you manufacture 2 different qualities of ribbon – one the cine quality and another you call the Eco quality.

What’s the difference?

Paul: The main difference is that the cinema quality is a 2 bin process. We take the top 2 bins of the emitters once they’re produced and those are what go into our VHO Pro LiteRibbon. The remaining emitters that don’t qualify for those bins we just get the closest to cool white or warm white and that’s our Eco series.

So it’s a much lower price point, not great for lighting skin and faces, but great for things where colour isn’t an issue, so maybe there’s some odd set pieces or there’s under cabinet lighting, or places where the colour quality is not so imperative, and that’s what the Eco’s designed for.

Ed: So that’s still for the cinema world, but only as “in shot” lighting that may be lighting up part of a set somewhere, or is this purely for domestic use if you’re building yourself a campervan?

Paul: I would say it’s more a domestic, home improvement … we’re not a fan of recommending it for camera, but in today’s cinema world sometimes off-

colour is what they’re looking for. Maybe they’re in an industrial building where there are bad fluorescents and stuff, Eco works great in those situations. But we definitely don’t recommend lighting any type of talent NZVN or skin with it.

Matthews for PLS We’re at Matthews for PLS and we have James Saldutti.

We’re doing something a bit different this year – Linda is acting as my chaperone and taking me around and introducing me to various people.

They’re the ones who really know what they’re on about, because they designed them – starting with the Dutti Dolly.

Ed: James, I’ve just had a little play with your dolly – it is very smooth?

James: Yes, it’s designed to get low and smooth.

You put your foot on there and just give it a little test drive, you’re not going to get much lower and you’re definitely not going to get

James being held in place by our Matthews rep, Linda.

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any smoother and that’s pretty much how I decided to do it. It rides on three-sixteenths aluminium angle to keep it low and if you want to come up and then get lower, you can under sling it right here, so you can drag it right on the deck. You’ve got 2 stands and it’ll cut the corner of a pool or something, and drag your camera right along the waterline – you know, any cool shot you can dream of.

When we come up on stands here, we have these brackets that go on the stands and then we go to square tube here for the rigidity. If you’re outside and it’s not level, we can take these pins off and just lay these flat like they are down there, and then you have some way of levelling it.

And on flat floors it works great; it works without the track, so if just want to do a push-in and you’re in danger of seeing your track, you could just go without it.

Ed:

So you don’t even have to use the track?

James: You don’t have to … it rides nicer, but sometimes, if I’m doing a straight push-in and I see my track, then I’ll just go without it.

Ed: So if you’re on like a hard smooth concrete floor, or lino or a wooden floor, you could use this, at a pinch, as it is?

James: Yes, depending on your legs, if you’re a little wider.

Ed:

So you put what?

James: This is a Bazooka. You can ride it, you can go on the round tubing, the inch and a quarter tube.

We have a tripod on this, we put these plates called Dutti Wings on there.

Ed: So it’s the same dolly, but on one you’ve got a round track, and on the other you’ve got an angled track?

James: Yes it works on different kinds of track and these are just a couple of accessories to accommodate what other people do. If you’re doing a documentary or something and you want to add a little life to your shot.

Ed:

Ed: We’ve just had a look underneath and we’ve seen the wheel arrangement, which we’ll take a photo of.

James says it’s heavy, but it needs to be heavy James?

Ed:

James: Oh yes. It’s part of it, so when you get the Bazooka on there and you get it top heavy, you don’t have to worry about anything tipping.

In my experience, just a little more weight makes it more stable.

And you can have any colour you like?

James: Right now they’ve made a couple of different runs, but we’re not sure what the public likes yet.

And has anybody tried to skateboard with it?

James: Oh yeah – Tyler has been skateboarding all over the shop and I do it – everybody does.

Ed:

But only in a straight line?

James: Actually I can turn it. It’s great going upstairs, you know we don’t want to carry the dolly. I know if you have a big scene, you’ve got to bite the bullet and you’ve got to carry the dolly up, but if it’s 1 or 2 shots, just carry the light thing up there. We worked on a TV show Glee – we filmed in a lot of theatres where you can’t get dollies in between the seats, so this worked great for that.

Ed: And I do like it that you can actually quite easily put it up on just 2 Matthews stands.

James:

Yes, just put some planks.

Now we continue with another Matthews item and we have Sage Seb, Product Specialist, Matthews.

Ed: Sage:

Sage, you are the designer of?

The Infinity Arm.

Ed: Now this has been around a little bit hasn’t it … well it’s been the Micro Arm, but you’ve made something a bit better?

Solid is a good description.

Sage: Well actually, this is the debut of the Infinity Arm. It’s a completely different system and not attached to the Micro system. This is my design and invention.

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twenty female instead of male, you can go threeeighths, you can go threeeighths male / female, you can do a baby pin, you can do a receiver, you can do a Go Pro mount, you can do a hot shoe mount, you can do a Cardellini Clamp – you can do anything.

Ed: So you can’t release the tip there until you’ve loosened the central?

Sage with his Infinity Arm.

Ed: It looks just as though it’s a little bit bigger, but it’s a lot different?

Sage: Yes it is actually a lot different, but it’s still a Matthews product, so it’s going to definitely match and work with a lot of the other components that Matthews makes.

Ed:

Oh can you “mix and match” Micro and Infinity?

Sage: Eventually, yes; currently we’re working on it. But the beautiful part about this Infinity Arm is that it’s modular, so you can mix and match just about anything with it.

Ed:

Do they have standard threads?

Sage: No it’s not just standard threads, not at all.

I’ll show you and I’ll explain. First of all, the Infinity Arm was born out of frustration. I’m actually a director and a DP and I own a boutique camera rental shop.

The biggest issue that I was having was articulating arms were going down on me all the time. I was in Vietnam doing a documentary and I had 4 arms go down on me while I was shooting on the river. I came back and decided “I’m going to fix that problem” and started by designing this and it evolved into what it is now. So what we have here is the Infinity Arm. What you’ve got is an articulating arm that looks like many other articulating arms to an extent, but it’s very much so different.

There is a centre rosette that locks it in and you’ve got this tie down knob that once you release it, first of all it’s locked in so you can’t undo it. If you’re strong and you really want to, you could, but all the components are internal so you don’t have any springs or anything popping out; everything is pretty much built into it. The good news is that once you’ve loosened the centre rosette, you now enable the quick release capability.

What we’re calling our “tips” – our tips are quick releasable and interchangeable. So now this becomes modular. This right here is a quartertwenty tip, but you can go quarter-

Sage: There are 3 safety redundancies built into this arm. The first is you’ve got to loosen this knob; the second is you’ve got to press the red button; the third is the ball needs to be flat right here, and you go down and out.

The reason for that is, as a cameraman, I know what it’s like to be able to accidentally take something off and kinda break it. I wanted to make sure nobody ever had that experience with the Infinity Arm. So the quick release capability has 3 safety redundancies, so that you can quick release it, you know for a fact it’s going to be solid, it’s going to be secure, you’re not going to accidentally drop it or accidentally release something.

Ed: Okay – now you say 4 of your previous arms on this shoot went down. In what way did they go down?

Sage: Actually the biggest way it went down was that the other arms I was using had a centre locking mechanism that is not very safe, it’s not very solid, it’s not user friendly and it breaks very easily.

Ed:

What do you mean “breaks”?

Sage: If you tie it down and over-crank it, it doesn’t have a safety feature that stops it. You can potentially strip it. Once you strip it, you can no longer release or open it or close it, it stays locked in that position.

The second problem is that sometimes you accidentally unscrew it too much and the knob comes off and then

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you have a bunch of components – springs, washers, they fly everywhere. It’s almost impossible to find them all, and if you do it’s even harder to put back together. So this solves that problem. That was where my arms would always go down on me, is really that portion, so again this has the centre rosette that solves that issue; it also does the quick release capability – makes it more modular, makes it a piece of gear that will last a long time, not something that you have to keep buying over and over again. You buy it once, then you just have to buy the tips. Your tip goes down or breaks or something happens to it, you buy another tip.

Ed: How did you get to talk to Matthews … you looked around for a manufacturer who would take on this project and you believed Matthews could do it?

Sage: Initially I wanted to do it myself. I vetted 6 manufacturers from China and I went to China and, of the 6 manufacturers I vetted, not a single one of them delivered the quality that was up to par with what I wanted to have out there, because again, I’m a DP and a director and I know what it’s like to have gear and use it.

Quality is of the highest importance and relevance for me. So after that experience in China I came back to the States very frustrated and I wasn’t sure what to do. A good friend of mine, Casey Good, introduced me to Tyler and then Ed and from that moment on, it was “love at first sight.” Matthews is a great company and they treat me like family and they’ve been heavily involved in the Infinity Arm projects and they make me feel like I’ve got a real partner and not just somebody looking for the bottom dollar. They really care about the people they sell stuff to – and so do I, because I am those people.

into the van if you had some ramps, because I imagine it would be quite heavy?

Bill: No, no ramps – when I take this off, it’s a oneman lift. I’m 71 and it’s a piece of cake to lift this.

Ed:

Yes, in bits, but not as one complete unit?

Bill: That’s why I built it. On this one here there are 2 shelves and you can see how much gear … this is actually only about half the amount of gear that I normally put on it. The other great thing about it is, if you notice all the holes, it’s very customisable. See all these holes that you can just fit on there, you can stick all kinds of parts on there. That’s my prototype, the wheels are really great, I can go through the snow, through mud. It’s really a tough cart for carrying gear.

Ed:

So where’s the motor?

Bill: That’s next year! Here’s a configuration that you can add onto there and now you can do 8 foot slides.

Ed: So you can extend the rails past the length of the cart?

Bill: That’s right, and if you wanted to you could even have 10 foot. You just simply take one of these and put a stand out here, use that as a base, and now you’ve got a really long slide. You could be 10 feet, you could be 15 feet, just by adding more stands.

Ed: And you could actually adjust it so that if you’re not on level ground, you could level the rails …?

Bill: It literally takes 30 seconds; I just have to undo this here, put a level down, it’s levelled … 30 seconds.

During the winter I was shooting in the forest, pushed it into a snowbank, found the shot I wanted, but the cart

Lastly, Linda brings me to Bill Kerrigan, the inventor of this wonderful cart, called a KerriKart.

Ed: Right, that’s it there in the catalogue on page 14/15. It looks as though it’s made out of good standard Matthews bits and pieces, but you’ve obviously designed many of these yourself?

Bill: Well actually, I’m not a designer. I have done a few things in the past, but what I did was build out of need. I used to have something called a Magliner and it really didn’t do what I wanted. It didn’t hold the amount of gear that I needed. This can hold 800 pounds. I used to work with 2 carts, I would push one and my assistant would push one, and now I’m able to put all my gear onto one cart. I’m a big fan of sliding, I often slide on shoots, and I used to carry – believe it or not – 8 C-Stands, 4 of them for high shots like this and the others were babies for doing people sitting in interviews.

So I’ve eliminated carrying 8 stands, because if you notice here, this can be moved. This height here gets the camera about 7 feet high and I can clamp it all the way down, right down to the bottom. I can even take the rails off and the rails will actually sit right on the ground.

Ed:

And the other great thing?

Bill: The other great thing is the small footprint – it fits into a van. Typically, like most people, I work out of a small minivan, I’ve got all my gear in there, so really I’ve actually created more space because instead of 2 carts, I now carry only one.

Ed: So the C-Stands are the key to this, that you can lower …?

Bill: And everything fits underneath.

Ed: Oh, you disassembled this, so I can see that, in a van, you could actually just lower the C-Stands so the whole platform drops and the whole thing would just go Page 29

Bill with his very clever cart.

was on this angle. I just lifted up the parts and in 30 seconds I had it levelled.

Ed: And of course, again, with the 4 C-Stands that are the skeleton of this, you can add lights onto the end of the stand, you could put a monitor on, and there’s your laptop on there and a boom?

Bill: The other great thing about it is just this configuration. This is the same cart, but this one here has been rigged out more for just working with cameras. You can see there’s a nice platform to put your camera on there, to work on it. You can do all kinds of adapters to hold … you can see a ball plate over here to put a head on it. These metal poles are to hold the handheld MōVI. At one point, we had 3 MōVIs hanging off the one cart. We had all the carts from the whole show just on here with the lens package on the shelves below.

I’ve got some buddies who are soundmen … soundmen love their carts and this is also great, because all of a sudden they may be in a situation where, you know, each production is different, so it’s really adaptable. So you’re going to see sound guys with it, you’re going to see Video Village – if you’re in a feature film, it’s perfect for Video Village, you know setting up monitors for the director, there’s all kinds of points to different monitors.

They could have maybe 3 or 4 monitors set up each on a different camera and you can put the level at any level you want, if the director is standing or sitting down.

Ed: And you just move it between where the shots are being made.

Bill: I’ll show you something else that I often do. I was working for an ad agency about 2 weeks ago and when the director saw this he went crazy. We did 4 days’ shooting and about 90% of the shooting I left the camera right on the dolly, and even during interviews, he wanted me to do slight, slight moves as we’re talking. The other thing I can do with it, is I can do an A/B camera – you know you have somebody answering and then all of a sudden when the interviewer asks another question, I whip over here and I’ve got another angle, so I’m doing A/B right at the same time. When that interview’s finished and I’ve blown that background, can’t use that background anymore, I just haul it around and now I’ve got a new background, key lights in the same place ready to go. So within 5 minutes I’m ready to go, with another dolly if you want, another slider if you want. I get tired – production’s changing, I’ve been around for many years, and you’ve got less and less time to work. So often I’ll want to do a slide and they’ll say “well we’ve got to go in 5 minutes, can you do it?” I can’t, give me half an hour and I’m ready to go. I got tired of that. Now if they want it in 5 minutes, yeah, I’m ready to go and then in 5 minutes I’m ready to do another one, and in 5 more minutes I’m ready to do another one. There is one downside …

Ed:

You work too many hours?

Bill: No, quite the opposite. overtime!

I’m actually doing less

Ed: But then you could put your price up because you’re so efficient?

Bill: That’s true. The clients are very happy, a lot of people keep coming back.

Ed: The other thing is, of course, everybody looks at this and thinks up some new idea that they could add to it to suit their particular workflow?

Bill: Exactly. For example, one person wanted a lip on the bottom and I told him I didn’t want a lip on the

You can put anything on it.

bottom because I never know how long my cases are.

But he, for some reason, wants a lip. So it’s very easy – either Matthews will drill the holes for them or he can drill the holes, the metal’s already there for him.

You notice that the bottom shelf also has many holes in it. I’m going to be rigging about 8 different power outlets underneath … you can see we’re charging batteries right there, so we’ll roll our whole unit, pull the main out and everything else, whether it be the camera, the monitor, or the light, it’s all working off one main. I’ll just run a cable like this up through the whole thing.

Ed:

And it looks professional?

Bill: It looks professional, exactly.

Ed:

Flexibility I guess is the key to this?

Bill: One day I wanted to hang a light, I’d run out of Mafer clamps. I just took it off the cart, hung it up, so I’m stealing parts of the cart sometimes. What’s great about it is you see all those parts that Matthews makes – everything they make, all that stuff over there, it all just fits, so grips love it, they see it as a grip cart, they see it as grip pieces, they recognise everything, they know how to do it. I’ve got a little manual which shows how to build it, but a grip just looks at it and says “I know what to do with this.”

Ed:

Where’s your name on it?

Bill: Aaah well … this part here, it’s on there.

Ed: I think you need a bigger name to go on there. I reckon it should be emblazoned on something?

Bill: Yeah, you’re right.

Page 30

NZVN

The new Slider Stand from Matthews.

A strong, wide-based stand with a low working height for those using camera Sliders, Monitors, Speed Rail/Pipe Dolly etc.

• • • • • •

Working Height 61cm to 117cm Operating Capacity 36.3 kg Incredibly stable with dual adjustable legs Stylish Aerospace Inspired design Welded Junior (1-1/8") Receiver Stand Adapters can convert to; (sold separately) o 5/8" baby pin (16mm) o 3/8" Tripod Mount o 5/8" Magic Finger

Works great with the big lights and pairs well with the new DIT Laptop tray Noga Arm • MICROgrip • GoPro Mount …now @ PLS The Matthews innovative 3/8” - 1/4" 20 camera mount system.

Attach lights, monitors, iPads. Rig your DSLR / GoPro at any angle.

“Try this, you’ll like it, I guarantee it” Ed Philips, CEO Matthews.

Phone: Phone: 09 302 4100

Email: info@kelpls.co.nz info@kelpls.co.nz

Website: www.kelpls.co.nz www.kelpls.co.nz

Flying the Flag at NAB We’ve found a pavilion with “New Zealand” on it and talking to us we have Colm Kearney, Policy and Planning for the New Zealand Government.

Colm: Going back towards last year, Callaghan Innovation ran the C-Prize.

It was a competition focused on unmanned aerial vehicles, particularly the drone sector for the screen industry.

There were a number of categories and we had 80 plus entries.

From that, we came down to six finalists, and those finalists were provided with $10,000 to go away and work on their drones and then competed at the end of the process in something called the “Den of Drones.”

All the drones were judged and the winner, VorTec UAV, who are exhibiting right behind us, was picked. Part of their prize package was $50,000 and to come here to NAB 2016 to exhibit. There’s also a number of other UAV operators in New Zealand so the idea was to create a kind of a centre, a place where they could be together at NAB. We have Dotterel, Britten Aero and Aeronavics based out of Raglan.

And finally we have Wipster. Wipster are a company based in Wellington and they do sharing, reviewing and publishing of video content on the Cloud. So that’s how we all came to be here. We put the booth together.

We also have a drone hanging from the roof now – as you can see it’s an absolute beauty. It is from Shotover who are also at NAB on their own booth. Shotover and Aeronavics have been operating for quite a while. Linda from Aeronavics was here five years ago when drones weren’t the thing at NAB, but now it seems that America has woken up to the drone industry and, as you can see round the place, it is chocka-block with drones.

$50,000 prize money, and exhibiting here is part of their package of winning. Wipster, while they’re on the stand, they’re paying to be there, they’re paying for that stand.

Ed: So I understand that Callaghan Innovation is there to support New Zealand industry, but you’re not getting a return from the products that you …?

Colm: If these companies grow and do more re R&D, it benefits New Zealand because, as these companies grow more, they contribute more revenue, they employ more staff … that’s good for New Zealand.

It helps the economy grow, it helps us all to do better, so of course we’re here to support them in lots of different ways and services.

Ed: There are other organisations who provide seed capital, but that’s something that is separate from Callaghan Innovation?

But yes, New Zealand is here, we’ve got this space and we’ve got a growing industry, smart people and it’s wonderful to be here with them and helping them along.

Ed: So is your support going to continue or is this a one-off?

Colm: Callaghan Innovation will work with these companies as they grow. We’re here to promote R&D in New Zealand and so yes, absolutely.

We’ve been working with Aeronavics for a while and we will continue to do so; VorTec, as I say, now are started up and they’re here and we will see where their journey goes to. Dotterel is exactly the same thing.

Ed: Does Callaghan Innovation take a shareholding in these companies?

Colm: No sir.

Ed: So they don’t have to pay you anything back?

Colm: No sir.

Ed: So the taxpayer’s paying for it all?

Colm: Callaghan Innovation is a government agency. The prize winners were VorTec, who received Page 32

Colm Kearney, NZG.

Colm: Absolutely. We work with all our partners, including New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, who help companies if they go overseas, and then there are other services and other partners who these companies can be connected up to.

Ed: What other areas generally does Callaghan look after … I guess in the dairy industry?

Colm: We have national technology managers who can tell you about all the different areas we’re focused on.

Ed: What is the rough percentage of Callaghan Innovation that is involved with UAV drones in New Zealand ... Would it be less than 5%?

Colm: Oh I couldn’t put a number on it. As you see, we’re here now, we’re driving interest in New Zealand, it’s definitely a focus. We’ve got two of us over here and we’re supporting these awesome companies and we want to support more awesome companies as well. That’s what we’re here to do and we do that well in New Zealand, and sometimes they come over here and there’s a number of companies in San Francisco at the moment.

I’m visiting Silicon Valley. So those are two aspects – we continue food and beverage, obviously manufacturing is a huge interest as well. It’s technology, supporting companies to use the technology when they want to accelerate the commercialisation of their innovations. We’re here to help businesses be successful to use the technology.

Those are the companies we support.

Ed: You’re not giving away kiwi soft toys or making lamb burgers on the stand?

specialise in doing cinematic 4K stuff and also just generally difficult things with drones.

Ed: Now the main topic I want to talk to you about is the safety aspect because I understand that you’ve had some input into the regulations that have been setup in New Zealand?

Sam: Well I don’t know about having a direct input, but I’ve definitely spoken with a lot of different people and I’m continuously monitoring the laws and the changes and working with them, to operate safely and do our job.

Being a commercial operator, I find the law about having the rights to fly over the property is really, really good in some ways and very difficult in others. A lot of the time, if you’re being paid to go and film real estate for example, the person is paying you to film that property, so that’s fine, they’re going to give you permission in a heartbeat. But unfortunately, to get a good angle of their property, you might have to fly over their neighbour’s house.

So therefore you need a secondary permission – and the same with a lot of other aspects to do the job for the person that you do have permission for to land, you may need others.

Ed: But for a professional operator, that shouldn’t be a problem?

Sam: Well they should be paying you enough so you have the time to make a flight plan, to go and assess the risk factor and make sure you’ve got a simple failure plan. It doesn’t have to be complicated, you just have to make sure that you’re aware of the risks and actually managing them and thinking and

Colm: Not yet sir. When we take companies over here, it’s about exposure to international markets, it’s about seeing the other people in their areas doing the technology and what they can learn from them. It’s learning what the trends are that are coming up, what they need to be aware of … it’s also meeting people so they can connect with them and discuss partnerships and so on. So much is about learning, but also getting themselves out there on that stage – facing the fear and then actually going out there and embracing the technology and taking it to the world. That’s what we want, right?

We want to grow New Zealand’s technology base so we can be at a place like this and they know the New Zealand brand and name. That’s what we’re here to do, and we’re here to help these companies.

One of these companies is Britten Aero and, to continue our conversation regarding New Zealand developed drones, we have Sam Britten.

Ed: Sam, that’s a very famous name and I’m a great fan of your father’s work. I actually tracked down one of his motorcycles in Solvang in California in a little museum tucked away in this faux Danish village, and there was a Britten.

Sam: It’s amazing where they get to isn’t it. Last year, we actually managed to get 9 of the Brittens to this one museum event in Alabama – the Barber Motorsports Park and Museum there, and it was truly incredible. We hadn’t had them all together ever in that number and they actually got 5 of them running on the track together at once, which once again has never happened. That was a beautiful tribute to dad.

Ed: Okay. But we’re here to talk more about other technology and you’re a drone builder yourself?

Sam: I’ve operated a production company for 15 years and been custom building drones for the last 5. I Page 33

Sam Britten.

develop better products ahead of time, and if it wasn’t for Callaghan, I wouldn’t be here doing it.

I feel very grateful to them and further down the line I’ll be applying for project grants and things like that, to try and assist my project to be able to grow it fast enough, because it’s very difficult doing an extremely technological project that requires a lot of people, and starting it up with no funding for the first few years, you know.

Ed: That sounds like what your dad did?

Sam: Totally. a lot of that.

talking about them with your co-pilot or gimbal operator if you have one, or anybody else who’s within the danger zone of the drone.

Ed:

So the regulations in your view are very good?

Sam: I think they’re absolute common sense. It could be a little bit lighter with the property thing, that would make it easier for everyone, but stopping everyone from flying randomly over other people’s properties is really good for privacy and it’s really good for safety, which I think are 2 key things. If New Zealand can go forward as one of the world leaders in drone technology, we’ve got to also be a world leader in the way we safely use them.

The number 8 wire is something we’re not short of in New Zealand – and we’re good at slapping carbon fibre round now too.

Another beneficiary of the fund at the New Zealand Pavilion is the company of Seamus Rowe from Dotterel.

Ed: Now Dotterel is a New Zealand company and Seamus you’re a New Zealander who’s the designer and

Ed: Now you don’t actually have one of yours here, because you don’t want someone to copy your design, but I understand that your main thrust is in the robotic control of your drone?

Sam: Yes the area that we’re focusing on is aerial automation for bigger industries, building, construction, maintenance. Our drones will still work wonderfully, and probably better than others, for higher end film, as well as anything that requires a camera, scanning, all that traditional drone stuff. Our design really lends itself to being able to achieve much more than just taking a photo in the sky.

Ed: So there’s some GPS technology in there that enables you to plan where the flight’s going to go?

Sam: What we can do is accurately position an accessory that’s stabilised outside of the rotor area, which no one else is able to do currently.

Ed:

We do

And no more to be said?

Sam: Exactly. And now you understand why I don’t have a prototype for everyone to look at!

Ed: So without Callaghan Innovation and the New Zealand taxpayer, you wouldn’t be here?

Sam: Without Callaghan Innovation supporting the New Zealand drone industry, I don’t think I would have been able to make it here. It’s always been a dream to come to NAB and see all the different technology ahead of time, make those lasting connections with CEOs, managers, parts suppliers – all these different people from different companies, that allows you to have a better business relationship, and Page 34

Seamus Rowe.

inventor of something that’s quite unique in drone technology – a quiet drone.

Seamus: We do shrouded propeller designs with acoustic properties which reduce the noise from a UAV or drone. At the moment, we can get it so that the drone sounds as if it’s about twice as far away from where it actually is.

Ed: Could anybody put a shroud on their drone and make it quieter?

Seamus: You’ve got to have a lot of design behind it.

There are a few drones with shrouds, but they’re mostly for protection. Our shroud protects and reduces noise and with it, we can also make sure the efficiency goes up enough that it counteracts the weight of the shroud, so you don’t lose your flight time.

Ed:

So it’s a bit like a turbine rather than a propeller?

Seamus: Yes, it’s similar to a turbine, so a shrouded propeller. There are a few designs out there, but they haven’t really been applied to drones as there’s a lot of tolerances and design involved.

Ed:

You’re using carbon fibre?

Seamus: Yes. We use carbon fibre as it’s super lightweight. There are not a lot of lightweight materials you can use for drones, which you can just slap on them. If you use a different material, you put too much weight on it and lose flight time … and flight time’s very important.

Ed: Now in your signage here, you talk about “active noise filtering” as well as “passive noise reduction.” I guess the passive noise reduction is the shroud itself, and the tight tolerances you have between the blades and the shroud. Active noise filtering – this is not noise cancelling, but?

Seamus: It’s filtering. So active noise cancellation firstly, is just that you generate a signal which is the inverse of the sound and it cancels out the sound. Now it’s been done in theory and in sound rooms.

In practice and in uncontrolled environments, it’s very difficult, especially with moving objects and when the sound source is in different areas. With active filtering, we’re taking the sound from the drone and the sound from the source we want to record and we’re using algorithms to remove the drone sound from it. We’re attempting to do that in real time, and feed it back to an operator. So you could fly over a source, listen to it and tell “is that good, is that not” … you don’t have to go back and land and take the audio off, post-process it, so we save time and money on that.

Seamus: Yes, so they’re trying to generate destructive interference, but the issue with active cancellation is it’s very easy to stuff up and generate constructive interference, and make the sound worse.

Ed: So where do you see the future of your particular design?

Seamus: Well we’re planning to put this on drones for other companies at the moment, and build it into their frames. We want to have a silent drone … well, quieter drones … silent is very difficult, but we want to try and get there, because it would be great to be able to fly over New Zealand forests, which we really don’t want to do at the moment, because there’s so much wildlife and birdlife and it’s not good for them.

Ed:

Seamus: Yeah, you’re not even allowed to fly near dotterel nests, it’s specifically against New Zealand law.

You’re not allowed to fly near bird nests and by cliffs and everything, because you’ll disturb them. Also it’s not very safe having a spinning propeller blade near birds – it’s dangerous.

Ed:

So where’s your workshop?

Seamus: We’re in Parnell in Auckland and this shroud was actually fabricated in Wellington by another company called Make Good and they worked with another company called Carbon Made, so all good New Zealand talent there. Also, the acoustic fibre was done

by Revolution Fibres. They actually put their fibre on some furniture in offices to reduce sound, so you may have it and you may not even know it.

Ed: And all of this is made possible by the Callaghan Innovation fund?

Seamus: Yes. We won the first round of the C-Prize which gave us $10,000 and Callaghan’s partly sponsored us up here and paid for this entire booth.

We wouldn’t even really be here without them.

There’s a whole bunch of new companies – Britten, VorTech, us – a whole bunch of new start-up companies out of New Zealand that wouldn’t even be here without their investment.

Ed:

And this is your personal first time in Vegas?

Seamus: Yes, my personal first time. It’s big. The city blocks are huge … they’re like “it’s just one block down the road” and 20 minutes later. I’m not used to it!

NZVN

Ed: So it’s not a case of putting your propeller blades 180 degrees out of sync so that the noise cancels, because the noise is actually coming from the tips of the blades?

Seamus: Yes, there’s a bunch of issues.

Amazon actually released a patent on that about 3 weeks ago from now. But the issue is that they have a dual propeller system so that, when the propellers are spaced far enough apart, they generate an inverse sound. The problem with that is when the propellers flex and bend slightly, they’d have to bend in exactly the same way, or else they go out of sync. If you go out of sync, you could then go …

Ed:

You don’t want to frighten the dotterels?

Double the volume?

Page 35

IDX Batteries for Panavision For Panavision we’re here at IDX having a look at batteries, chargers and power supplies and we have Robert Holland, Sales Manager UK and ROI? Ed: That’s a new country ROI – what’s the flag?

Robert:

Republic of Ireland.

Ed: Oh, sorry. flags at present.

Robert: people.

We’re getting over

I do apologise to all the Irish

Ed: Right now, what has impressed me is that the IDX range of batteries is now in the 7.2 Volt area. Where it used to be only for JVC, under licence to JVC, now JVC, Panasonic and Sony are all covered?

Robert: Historically, we’ve done JVC batteries, which have been distributed by JVC across the world and specific chargers for the JVC. What we’ve done for the last few years now, is we’ve actually been doing Panasonic …

Ed: You mean selling those as through Panasonic or as IDX? Robert: As IDX, so they were all branded IDX, even the JVC batteries are branded IDX, so they’re all clearly IDX products. So historically, we’ve done JVC for a long time, as well as Panasonic, but what we’ve now got is a new range of Panasonic – the SL-VBD96 and the SLVBD64.

Ed: These are really for the 4K cameras – a bit more grunt?

Robert: Correct – basically for the DVX200s, PX270s and X1000 type cameras. Most importantly, we’re giving you more capacity than the current Panasonic range of batteries.

We’ve had a lot of customers say “we need longer run times” and that’s really what we’ve produced.

Robert at IDX.

Robert: You can charge up your iPhone as well on one of those, definitely.

Ed: And there’s a nice little cover that just flips off and the connection is underneath that?

Robert: Yes. Now these for the UK market have been released and are on the market, but looking at the Sony product now – this is the SL-F70 and SL-F50.

These are all tentative specifications. We are showing these to get some feedback from the market but we expect to see actual products by the last quarter of the year.

So although they’re saying “new” they are tentative specs, following on similar specifications from our Panasonic range, the 90600s, but these are tentative products.

Ed: They’re not “smoke and mirrors” products, you are actually going to build them?

So for example, the SL-VBD96, you’ve got 960 milliamp hour.

Interestingly though, we’ve now got a built-in X-Tap and a USB output, so this is to power peripheral products. With a lot of these cameras, people are wanting to do additional things, so we’re giving them that benefit.

Ed: Which in the past, I know from experience that the camera manufacturers haven’t provided with their own batteries?

Robert: Correct.

Most of the standard camera manufacturers have actually just produced a cell to power their camera. Obviously we need to give an extra benefit and what we’re doing now, as I say, is USB plus X-Tap as an output for you.

Ed: So you can actually charge up your iPhone off one of these too, I guess?

DUO-C95 below is slimmer than the DUO-95 above.

Page 36

Robert: They’re definitely going to be built, they will definitely be there but what I can’t say at the moment is that the specification is definite, or the functionality is definite. My hope is that we just mirror what we’ve done with the Panasonics. That’s what I believe will probably happen.

batteries via the X-Tap input. So we’ve got an X-Tap output which will give you the voltage from the battery.

This will actually go in as a low-cost, lightweight charger. So if you’re running with X-Tap type batteries, we can actually charge those for you from there.

Ed: And of course, these have become standard batteries for external devices such as the PIX monitor, Atomos Shogun and a variety of other external devices … not only will these recorders run off the tap, but you can actually connect these batteries directly to those products too?

Robert: No you can’t charge it while it’s on the camera. Things don’t like going in and out at the same time.

Robert: Yes, you’re spot on with that one. There are so many products now that go with these common type batteries that these will plug onto it.

Ed: So again, you don’t need a huge number in your range, you basically need a big one and a medium one and away you go?

Robert: That’s it basically. Someone using a Sony camera and, say, using the Atomos Shogun or something like that, they can use the same batteries, but these will have additional functionality on them as well. One important thing is down this end of the range. We’ve got a new charger, the LC-2A. Now you’ll notice on the literature here, the LC-2A charges 2 types of Canon, 2 types of Panasonic and the L-series Sony.

So anybody that does have a mixture, I know we just said people using Sony batteries can use it on the Shogun and on the Sony camera, but if you’ve got somebody with a mixture of batteries, this charger’s sweet. You put the right adapter on it and it will just charge, so you don’t have to go out with a bundle of chargers.

Ed:

And it will charge all of the 7.2 IDX versions?

Robert: All of them except – there is one exception – the JVC. That’s the only one it won’t charge.

Ed:

But you do have a charger for the JVCs?

Robert: JVCs, yes.

Ed:

We do definitely have a charger for the

And an X-Tap charger?

Robert: An X-Tap charger, yes. As a concept, this will be coming out to charge some of the smaller

Ed:

Can you charge it while it’s on the camera?

Ed: Okay, now here’s a question … I’ve always wondered why you can’t have a battery that’s connected to your camera being charged or kept at charge, while the camera’s being used. I mean, you can do it with your mobile phone – you can have that plugged in and charging while the mobile phone’s still on, why can’t you do that with a camera?

Robert: Most camera manufacturers, once they have a battery on, will run obviously off the battery if that’s the only source. As soon as you take an external connector power to it, most – and I have to say “most” because I’m not an expert at every product – but most manufacturers then isolate the battery, so it gives priority to the power supply to go to the camera. Then the battery’s essentially disconnected from the actual camera itself.

Ed: But if you were charging the battery, which is what you’re doing with the X-Tap connector, it’s going through the battery and then into the camera?

Robert: Potentially yes, but as far as I know, that won’t be the case. It’ll be one or the other, not both the functions at the same time.

Tech alert - we’ve got Zac here who’s going to give us the lowdown on charging while connected.

Ed: So in fact the whole thing is a battery safety feature Zac? Zac: Correct. It’s not safe to charge the battery while it’s discharging, so what we’ve done is implemented a safeguard, or protection circuitry, to prevent the charging occurring while the battery is being discharged.

Ed: Well you can do that with a mobile phone, why can’t you do it with a camera?

Zac: Yes, you can do it on a mobile phone, but in a mobile phone, it’s an integral battery.

Unfortunately the camera has all types of batteries attached to it, therefore, you don’t know what you’re attaching. So by trying to charge a battery that won’t accept that charge, at the same time as powering out, you can damage it.

Ed: And we don’t want that to happen. And now we’re back to Robert, and my next question is, if you’ve had a camera for a while and of course the manufacturer has sold you the charger to go with it, you can still use the original manufacturer’s charger to charge your IDX replacement battery?

Page 37

Robert: I would expect the IDX battery to be able to be charged on the manufacturer’s charger.

Ed:

One would hope it would Robert.

Robert: I certainly would expect it to be. Again, I can’t qualify every manufacturer’s product.

Ed: But if it didn’t, then I’m sure the customer would be right in bringing the battery back and saying “well I’m sorry, it can’t be charged”?

Robert: Sure thing, yes. I always have to err on the side of safety and correctness, so I don’t want to quote on behalf of somebody else.

customers aren’t disappointed. We’ve got a new VL-2X; this is primarily a low-cost charger, a nice light weight 2 channel charger, sequential.

People are asking for lighter and lighter products and easier products to slip in their bags, so external power supply, just plug in, charge up, stand and away you go at a very costeffective point.

Ed: Now the beauty of the VL-2X that I’ve just spotted is that the DC input is just a – what do you call that type?

Ed: But your chargers are designed for your batteries and obviously provide the best charging conditions?

Robert: Correct. Our batteries and chargers are matched together to give the best operation for them.

Ed:

And I guess there’s a range of chargers?

Robert: Let’s go back down to this end of the stand again … sorry, booth – we’re in America, got to use the word “booth” not stand. We’ve also got a new range of batteries coming out which are the BPU type. Again, these are tentative specifications, but these are designed to work with the FS7 and the FS5, so these are 12 Volt outputs. And again, we’re running with DTap on these, so multifunction output, high capacity.

We’ve got the SBU-95 which is going to give something like 93 Watt hour output.

Ed:

You don’t want to go 101 do you?

Robert: Ummm no. Certainly under 100 that’s for sure. And then there’s its smaller brother which is the SBU-50 which is 47 Watt hour. To go with this product, we have the SBC-400S. Now this is a four-way charger, but it’s classed as a “2 plus 2” so what it actually does is it will charge the first 2 batteries first and then charge the second 2. So it’s a good way of getting batteries charged as quickly as possible. So overnight you’d end up with all 4 batteries charged by the morning.

Ed:

Fantastic.

Robert: These aren’t available currently, these are products to come hopefully after IBC, end of the year.

Ed: Now, on the other side of the stand, we have the V-Mount batteries which IDX are famous for, and you see them on the back of many News production cameras.

There have been some improvements – slightly lighter weight?

Robert: Yes. We’ve substantially reduced the weight on our 95 Watt hour type battery. Currently we’ve got DUO-95 which is 1.76 pounds in weight; now we have a DUO-C95 which is reduced down to 1.36 pounds in weight. So a considerable weight saving, and I know we can’t show you this on your recording, but bear with me one second while I show you personally – hopefully you’ll remember the photograph. Now if you look at these 2, same capacity but we have a slim model and we have a normal model – so a considerable saving in weight and size for giving you a similar power output. These are going to be available in May. We’ve obviously got D-Taps on these and a USB on the compact. We’ve also got the larger compact which is the 190. Now that is 185 Watt hour and it’s comparable in size to the DUO-90. So 185 Watt hour, 11 amp discharge, you’ve got D-Tap and USB outputs on that product, so a significant increase in capacity without any compromise on size.

Ed:

And the chargers are looking new too?

Robert: Yes we’ve got a few new chargers – again just qualifying the arrival time on these, so your

Robert:

I honestly don’t know the name of it …

Ed: It’s a very standard one like you have on a shaver or something and the power supply is proprietary, but it’s the separate one that just is the prongs on the end of a box, it plugs in … it just means that there’s a lot less size, weight, and it just makes the whole thing a lot easier and as well as being able to charge 2 batteries, it’s got a 4-pin DC out and … ooops sorry – and it bounces! Yes, I just dropped it on the floor.

So these that we’ve talked about, they’re all V-Mount, so you change the backing plate on your camera to suit these batteries. Now of course, IDX are well known for their Cam-Wave or WEVI product that’s been around a long time, and it continues to improve Robert – I see a rather large one here with 4 antennae?

Robert: Correct. It’s called the CW-F25. This is a slightly different product area from the previous ranges of the CW-7, CW-3 and CW-1.

This is more a production type tool, so there is a maximum range of 1.2 kilometres, which is significant to say the least of it.

Normally with a WEVI, it’s just transmitting video from the camera back to the receiver.

On this one though, you can have return video to the camera, so if you’re doing an interview with somebody like we’re doing now, I could see the studio at the camera end.

We can use a tally light – you can transmit a tally light. This is as well as sending video back to the receiver. You’ve got two-way intercom functionality and you can actually use it as an Ethernet bridge and an RS 422 controller. You can take control of a camera at the end of the WEVI system. That’s using the standard manufacturer’s product and then connecting to the RS 422 on the WEVI, so a considerably different product.

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4x 4f i l t er s

achancet o pur chase Ti f f enf i l t er s atbar gai npr i ces Li mi t edst ock.Onl yf ort hef i l t er si nst ock

Ed:

So you don’t need a camera operator?

Robert: You’re still going to need somebody to point it in the right direction, get the focus done and make sure they follow the talent.

Ed: Aaah that’s alright guys, you can rest easy, but certainly a step up in the Cam-Wave area?

Robert: It certainly is and, like the other products, the key thing to this product is it is licence-free. So it’s on the 5 Gig band and it is licence-free.

It’s a phenomenal product and as you can see the build quality of it is robust, it’s built for the job basically.

Ed: And again, the one IDX battery powers the CamWave and the camera?

Robert: Yes, in the standard CW-5, CW-7 type scenario, you just put the Cam-Wave on the back of the camera and then put the battery to the Cam-Wave … both products then are powered from the one battery.

Ed: And of course, always on the stand, the CW-1 and the CW-3, the smaller versions for the HDMI or HDSDI transmission for a shorter distance, but again in the 5 Gigahertz licence-free range and a much more costeffective price with zero delay transmission. I think that’s one of the key things that you guys have always been proud of – your zero delay?

Robert: Yes, zero delay on the CW-1 and CW-3.

You will get a delay on the CW-F25 – this one is obviously doing a helluva lot more functionality.

But when you compare it to other transmission systems in this sort of area, that is an acceptable compromise – it’s not like when you’re using a pull focus, it’s not as critical on this type of operation. As I said in the first instance, it’s more of a production tool rather than a studio type set.

Ed: And the delay is nothing to do with the distance – I mean, you could be one metre away from the receiver, but you’re still going to have a delay that’s due to the electronic interface?

Robert: Correct. It’s purely to do with what it’s actually mixing, and getting all the information backwards and forwards from the receiver to the transmitter and vice versa.

So it’s not going to improve down to a zero delay like the other products. We offer H.264 transmission as well, so there is a very high quality signal being transmitted.

Ed: Fantastic. I’d like to finish with a good word for the IDX brand – for some of you who have not come across it, it has been in business for an awfully long time, it is a Japanese company and they stand by their product.

Robert: Yes, we’ve built a very high reputation over the last few years which is why most broadcasters tend to go with us. They know they’ve got a product they can rely on and they’re not going to have any issues with.

Obviously, if any of your people do have issues, please do talk to us – we will resolve them.

Ed: Well Tim from Panavision will be their first port of NZVN call in New Zealand.

LEE Filters for Panavision We are here at LEE Filters for Panavision and we are talking to the Managing Director, Eddie Ruffell.

Ed: Now in terms of filters, I see a big sign here that says “Zircon a New Concept in LED Filter Design.” Can you please explain why LED needs a special filter?

Eddie: Yes. LED has a very bright output and so we found that the existing filters would suffer with that; whereas the filters were fine on tungsten light and other arc lights, they didn’t like the close proximity of the LED source.

Ed: Okay, now here we’re talking light filters rather than camera filters aren’t we … we’re not talking about glass that goes in front of a camera; we’re talking gels that go in front of a light source?

Eddie: That’s correct; these are gels in front of a light source. We made a fade-proof LED filter, as “fadeproof” as you can get … obviously after a long period of time you can see an effect on it. That’s what we made into this range. Because the LEDs that come in are all supposed to be the same colour, but they’re all slightly different, using one of our filters you can match them all together; it sort of works like that.

Ed: A lot of the LED manufacturers these days are making multicolour LEDs, so you can go from daylight to tungsten and a whole range in between, so why do you need an extra filter?

Eddie: We’ve found that, if you stay with the same manufacturer of LED, then “yes”, you can do that. But if you start to mix LED manufacturers, it doesn’t work that well.

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Ed: Of course with a lot of the panels these days, you do have the slots that you can slide filters in and out and because your filter material is thick enough, you can slide it in, you don’t need the wooden clothes pegs to hold it on?

Eddie: Yes that’s right.

It’s not designed to be held on with wooden clothes pegs or crocodile clips or anything like that. It is designed to go more into a fixture. Often where the LEDs are, they’ll be in a housing where you can slide something in with it, and that’s really where the filter comes into its own – you would slide it in there as well.

Ed: Does the name “Zircon” indicate the material it’s made from in any way, or is it just a name?

Eddie: Zircon is a hard crystal but for us it’s just a name.

Ed: Now there’s one specialty feature here that is obviously not a filter and it comes in a box?

Eddie from Lee Filters.

Ed:

Or I guess LEDs with tungstens?

Eddie: Or LEDs with tungstens, yes obviously. For me, I prefer tungsten; you won’t find any LED in my house at all. I know that’s very Neanderthal but there we are.

Ed: Oh you mean you like a full spectral range in your house do you?

Eddie: yes.

I do like a full spectral range in my house,

Eddie: The looking at?

Ed:

black

wrap

aluminium

foil

you’re

Yeah.

Eddie: Okay, if you’re using a light source and you’ve got light that’s spilling out into areas where you don’t want it to spill out, that is a black aluminium foil that obviously you put round the light to stop those back reflections or whatever going on. It’s used quite a lot, it’s a disposable product.

Ed: But I guess that’s not all, because you do filters that are colour effect filters?

Ed: Well I guess you could put it over your basement windows if you wanted to?

Eddie: Yes we do do colour effect filters; they’re in TV, film, things like that. LED obviously has its own position there now and does give you different coloured lights, but it doesn’t give you all the subtlety that you can get using filters. However, it’s up to the customer to decide what they want to do.

Eddie: You could put it over your basement windows; I’ve actually used it in my house as a screen over my fire to provide draught – it’s very resilient. It’s a nice aluminium foil, but matte black.

Ed: So I guess there’s competition out there from other manufacturers … apart from low fade durability, is there anything else that makes a LEE filter better than someone else’s?

It’s really good and it does have a multitude of uses, especially if you’re a gaffer or a cameraman – or a Goth!

Not really if you’re a Goth …

Eddie: We actually put it on a stronger base as well, because we feel that there’s an advantage to having the filter slightly bigger so it will support itself in some of the fixtures. We’re also making different diffusions to go with it too, because that’s something else the LED user is after – he’s after different types of diffusion to help his LEDs all meld together.

Ed: So it’s not just pure clear … what is it, not a clear base, is it frosted or is it …?

Eddie: We actually put a coating on it. That’s what we do, we are a coater of polyester.

Ed: Okay. And I see gold there … what would you use a gold filter for?

Eddie: It’s actually yellow.

It’s transparent yellow – if I opened it out you’d be able to see through it.

Expensive tin foil held by a stunt man.

Page 41

NZVN

Lectrosonics for Sound Techniques For Sound Techniques we’re at Lectrosonics with Karl Winkler.

Ed: Now Karl, I guess the big buzz from Lectrosonics this year is your receiver that seems to be the one receiver that works for all. Is that about right?

Karl: That’s about right.

The SRc is the latest generation of our SR dual channel receiver line. It’s fourth generation and so we’re packing more and more into this product. The latest version has wider tuning bandwidth to match transmitters we’ve introduced recently; it’s 3 block wide or about 75 megahertz of tuning range. We offer 3 different ranges for worldwide use. It’s also got what we call “tracking filters” in the front end of the radio, so it’s very good at rejecting out of band information and gives you high performance – even in congested RF environments.

It’s also got infrared sync to go with the recently introduced transmitters as well, so it’s very quick for set up. The SRc does what’s called “smart tune” – it will do a step by step tuning process using scan data to get your transmitters set up on location, to give you a good clean frequency.

And finally, these units are also SuperSlot compatible, which means that, for the Sound Devices SuperSlot spec, you can dock the receiver into one of their devices and you have a data connection so you can do the programming and the monitoring of your receiver right through the menu on your recorder or mixer. So it’s a very powerful feature that allows these receivers to be part of an integrated system with a field recorder and mixer system.

We offer 2 different versions of the SRc – there’s the SRc standard and then the 5p version is where you

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Karl from Lectrosonics.

of the A1 band is usable, but particularly in Auckland and for the foreseeable future, C1 band is the one that we commonly stock and sell.

Ed: Because that looks to be the most likely to remain?

Stephen: No, not so much the most likely to remain, it’s the one which is currently the most usable, free of interference.

Ed:

have an external 5 pin connector to get 2 channels out of the receiver to external inputs on a camera. Some cameras don’t have connections in the camera slot, so this is one way that you can do that. So these are very flexible units and all the accessories we’ve introduced over many years for the SR line, still apply to the SRc – so that’s powering options, connecting options, your audio outputs, battery sleds – you name it and all those accessories still work. So that’s the latest in the line.

Ed: Now you’re saying there are 3 different bandwidth ranges that you can choose from. Are they changeable once you’ve bought a particular receiver?

Karl: They’re not changeable, that’s hardware determined, that’s your filter set that’s in the unit itself.

We can do what we call “reblocking” which is a replacement of the radio board at some cost – maybe about one-third to one-half the cost of a new unit if you need to change it.

Ed: Because I understand, in the States, you’re still undergoing negotiations over spectrum?

Karl: Yes they are. It’s looks like the C1 band which covers most of the 600 megahertz range is probably the one that’s at risk, so in the United States, we don’t recommend that people buy C1 band equipment and we’re not selling very many domestically. Those are mostly for export markets. In the US, the A1 and B1 bands are the ones that are safe because they’re below 600 megahertz.

Ed: Any comments on that Stephen?

Stephen: Yes, unfortunately the C1 band is the most viable in New Zealand for the foreseeable future. Some

Timecode Systems For Sound Techniques, we are at Timecode Systems with Adam Parr who has something dangling round his neck.

Ed:

What’s that Adam?

Adam: This is a GoPro HERO4 attached to our new SyncBackPro. Now a SyncBackPro is a full timecode solution for GoPro. So for the first time ever, we can have frame accurate timecode directly embedded on the MP4 file in the camera. The SyncBackPro is a full timecode generator, it’s the exact same size as the standard GoPro BacPac system, so their screens and their battery pack for example, which means it fits on the back of the camera and utilises all the existing cases and surrounds.

Ed: So what happens to the battery while you’re doing that?

Anything you’d like to add to this?

Stephen: I don’t know whether you said that all the Lectrosonics range is moving to cover the 3 blocks 72 megahertz of spectrum. There’s also a new plug-on transmitter which does the same thing, and presumably the rest of the range will follow, but I don’t know – would that be right?

Karl: Yes, since the last NAB show a year ago, we’ve actually introduced 5 new products. The SRc is the latest of those.

But since NAB last year, we’ve introduced an IFV system using VHF frequencies to help with the spectrum crowding; we’ve introduced the Venue 2 which also does the 3 block tuning, the 75 meg tuning per module. We’ve also introduced the HMa plug -on transmitter with 3 block tuning and infrared sync, and the HHa is a handheld mic. All of those units do the 3 block tuning like Stephen mentioned. So a lot of new products out there.

Ed:

Have you got some stock yet Stephen?

Stephen: We have stock of the products that are available, but I think there’s just a slight delay with the SRc and the C1 band, which Karl and I are both working on getting sorted.

Karl: Very high demand, and supply is coming slowly.

Stephen: But one of the things Lectrosonics has done in the last 12 months is insist that they don’t allow a new product to be ordered until there’s at least 100 units on the shelf, so that means frustration with delivery times has decreased substantially.

Ed: Right, but in any case if you’re interested, come in and talk to Stephen and he’ll put you on the “to do” list?

Stephen: Put you on the to do list – actually we get regular stock lists as well, so we can tell you at any one time what’s available. Even if it isn’t in stock, it’s usually only 1 or 2 weeks away.

NZVN

Adam: It has an internal battery in the camera itself.

Ed: So it means you can’t use their external …?

Adam: Yes, they have an add-on battery to get extra life out of it. So it’s a small compromise but we have one other feature which I’ll tell you about shortly, which actually helps prolong the battery life of the camera anyway.

Ed: And this is done in cooperation with GoPro, you haven’t just sort of done it and then told them?

Adam: No, absolutely. We’ve been working with GoPro for quite some time. We launched this officially last week in San Francisco at GoPro’s press launch of their GoPro Development Programme and their Works with GoPro Programme.

Ed: So why is it so important to do this with GoPro – it’s not a highly technical camera and yet your product is obviously highly technical. Why have you done it?

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your GoPro with, it’s also audio, because there’s limited capabilities of recording audio ( if any ) on a GoPro, so if there’s a shoot, and they’re often happening where GoPros are involved, you can record the audio timecode sync on your mixer or your recorder and sync it up with the GoPros later on.

Ed: So as an adjunct to a production, this is something that you can now offer?

Stephen:

That’s right.

Adam: We have a product called the Pulse, which is our flagship product.

It’s a full timecode generator, it also generates Genlock and word clock as well, at the same time.

But the Pulse offers as well our long range RF sync B:LINK ( “Blink” ) protocol that we use to jam all our devices at 915 megahertz. It also has Ethernet and WiFi built-in at the same time and this means that we can start to use applications to monitor and control all our devices.

So remember we talked about battery life and how if you use the SyncBack you couldn’t have the extra battery pack on the back? Well, using the Pulse system as a base station, we can use our B:LINK application as a control surface for all those cameras. So we can actually view all our SyncBacks in a Dashboard; we can monitor the status of them from the screen and then we can actually turn the camera body on and off independently. So we could actually shut down the GoPro itself, leaving the SyncBack running, conserving

the battery life. And then we’re ready to roll, we can turn those cameras on, and actually roll record from here, from a central point. And that’s all done over our long range B:LINK protocol, so we’re talking 3-400 metres. That’s a huge, huge feature, particularly in broadcast when you’ve got cameras in awkward places, time’s an issue, you rig some stuff in the morning, you want to leave it alone till you shoot, you’ve got full control from a central point over a long range RF link.

Ed: Stephen, have you ever had a camera in an awkward place?

Stephen:

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Not that I’m telling you about Grant!

NZVN

VR and AR Show in Auckland

By Peter Cummuskey The title was "Magnify" and it was part of Auckland's Tech Week in May this year.

The topics were 360 degree spherical vision, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and a mixture of all three.

Topics were covered by learned presentations, qualified panel discussions and a showcase of products. Free tickets “sold out” fast which meant that the hall was full but, utilising the latest technology, the event was live streamed.

First to speak was Brett O'Riley, CEO of Auckland Tourism. He stated that it is easy to think of VR / AR adding excitement in entertainment but it can also change the way you educate or upskill people.

Auckland will be the first city in the world to have a dedicated VR / AR precinct which will eventually be combined with the Screen Production area in West Auckland. Auckland Tourism will be providing potential visitors their first experience of Auckland and New Zealand through VR / AR presentations.

Next up was Catherine Patterson, director of Interaction advertising agency in the USA. Some key points raised were that delivering brand awareness to consumers is now a communication – not just a presentation in one direction. We look at an idea and plan how it fits into all channels so that customers get real value out of the experience and not just "an experience." A case study involved a muesli bar company who wished their brand to connect with consumers by being seen as supporting nature. The result was collaboration with the National Parks Service with sponsorship and park experiences by roving 360 degree cameras and augmented reality.

Sound design was seen as an important part of the 360 presentations. The productions were designed, not to be in lieu of real park experiences, but in addition.

Catherine does not see VR as a workable option for story telling in the corporate area due to the high cost

The Samsung tech area.

of creating a high quality environment. If chosen, cost needs to be covered by a wide range of media offers.

Selling the concept to a brand starts by finding out how the technology can enhance the brand experience and not by forcing the technology on the brand. Some fit better than others. If a trial fails, the brand will never use that technology again. VR / AR gives a much deeper experience for consumers than any other communication. Catherine concluded by saying that their company is interested in staff who can work hard over many time zones and are creative in problem solving in a technology sense. They also need to be flexible and collaborative in all areas.

After a short break when we could inspect the technology on display, there came a panel discussion with questions posed by the moderator, Mark Frieser, Founder and CEO of the SyncSummit event series, and the audience. There were Todd Selwyn from Samsung; Aliesha Staples from Staples Rentals; Roy Davies from Imersia and Richard Broo from Wemersive in the USA. Aliesha: We are a rental company for the film and TV industry. The last 12 months is when we've got into virtual reality. Ideas started flowing after we saw VR at NAB 2015 and now we've brought back some systems including the Nokia OZO. Our biggest problem when shooting 360 degrees was that we couldn't show a reference image to the directors which is a big "no-no" in cinematography.

Now, the Nokia OZO allows you to see each camera

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individually in real time as well as a stitched image through a VR headset. Without that, and only looking at the recorded material, any errors in shot are not picked up until it's too late, so requiring a re-shoot.

In shooting, the gaffers and crew hate 360 because you can't have any stands, lights, microphones or booms seen because they are all "in-shot." 180 degree vision solves that. 360 takes a lot more planning.

Initially, we were shooting stuff for ourselves to learn what was possible and how to do things creatively.

Now we are getting clients coming to us with requests.

Some simple stitching software is available so you can teach yourself how to use it or Staples Rentals can teach you.

Live streaming of VR is an area we are working on and it should be available here very soon. The OZO will solve a lot of problems as the stream is coming out of one cable – you are not dealing with a lot of different sources.

You should make sure that you’re not streaming 360 just because you can. There needs to be something interesting happening at different viewing angles or you may as well stream in 2D. No point showing a car park for half the stream.

Todd: Samsung have been in VR in NZ for 18 months and we've seen exponential growth. Our angle on the market is that we see the mobile phone as the engine to drive self-creation of content by users. The computing power and battery life of our phones will increase, which will enhance the VR possibilities for our users. We have our own 360 camera for self-content creation which, combined with our phones, provides an ecosystem around VR and AR. At $199 for the camera, content creation is very accessible.

We started providing our own content but now, production companies in NZ are producing on our platform. We are not making software – that is a choice which will be made by the consumer. Right now it is Occulus which we are partnering with and we see that as a robust tool. The market will decide the technology. You've got social networking through social media driving free platforms and that looks to us like becoming the main consumer.

Aliesha Staples with her OZO.

Roy: The Wall St Journal already has a 360 channel and we should see something here soon. NewsHub has tested it. AUT Media Department are teaching students that VR is about creating something that people can interact with: it's about creating non-linear narratives and not making a film that goes from beginning to end, but one where people can choose their pathway. It's a very complex workflow to plan.

I see a proliferation of standards where technology companies will make their own so consumers will find one software won't necessarily do everything they want.

Imersia is trying to come above all that by providing one platform.

Left to right - Todd Selwyn, Aliesha Staples, Roy Davies, Richard Broo, and Mark Frieser.

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Richard: I'm not a VR purist. I see a crossover between traditional CGI VR and interactivity. A lot of VR came out of panoramic photographers wanting to go a little further

Richard: To get a great VR experience, you are currently looking at an outlay of around $6K – very limiting.

Right now there are 2.4 billion smart phones in the world and by 2020, 6.4 billion which I believe is the future platform for youth.

Experiences are going to be delivered to people by such technology as Google Cardboard. We are expecting 5G to be rolled out later this year which will give 1GB per second speeds further cementing smart phones as the platform. There will also be VR ready chips built into the handsets.

Roy: Content is king no matter what the technology.

3D audio is also part of the experience.

Lots of images to stitch from the OZO.

with the stitching technology that they were using.

There is a large VR presence at the Cannes Film Festival this year.

A lot of people forget the cost in band width of live streaming VR. If you have lots of viewers you are paying for each one.

This allows brands to get involved, such as Telcos sponsoring. There is a place for 180 degree streaming especially for sports.

Concerts should always be 360 because of crowd interaction.

Moderator: NZ has over 90% penetration of smart phones but what kind of software are consumers going to download?

Roy: We see consumers downloading a browser that takes care of VR, AR and mixed reality eg. where an item will have an augmented code on it and so moving it will create a change in the viewing experience.

We are hoping that will be the Imersia browser.

Aliesha: That's our biggest problem. We can create the content but the ability of consumers to view at present is very limited. That will change within 6 months.

GoPro VR has bought Kolor Eyes which is one of the softwares we use. We are always looking at more immersive ways for viewers to experience what we make.

A final panel comment that got a big "thumbs up" from the audience came from Richard Broo – "Let's face it, we are all just trying to build the Holo Deck!"

The afternoon presentation was by Barry Sandrew, the founder of Augmented Vision Works and Legend 3D. Analysing feedback from the technologies he developed for stereo film ( 3D ) and colourisation, Barry has deduced that some people don’t want to be that immersed in a story.

Could fully immersive VR storytelling be over before it begins? Ang Lee is quoted as saying “let me move the camera because my VR is better than yours.” There are so many valuable uses for VR, why waste time with storytelling? It’s value lies in providing an experience.

For me, the event was a real experience and I came away believing that this general direction in visual technology has legs. It shows wider potential than 3D stereoscopic vision ever did and will undoubtedly influence the search for the ultimate visual experience.

That any combination of VR, AR or 360 degree will replace high resolution flat screens in TV or in cinemas is not my prediction, but it will develop and will be a major force in visual communication. Just make sure you go outside sometimes where the experience is free NZVN and in very high resolution.

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VR with Nokia Nokia showcased a 360 degree camera offer, along with a brace of enticing dolly birds, at the Virtual Reality display section of NAB. To tell us about Project OZO, we have Stuart English at Nokia Technologies.

Ed: Now Stuart, I saw the name Nokia and I thought wow, Nokia’s got into television?

Stuart: Yes it’s a new project for Nokia that started about 2 years ago.

A lot of people have asked “what is Nokia doing building a VR camera?” Well Nokia is a personal communications company, and has been right from the beginning. You have a paper mill, so you make paper, which lets people write letters and communicate with each other.

Clearly cellphones let you do similar things and we now look at VR as being part of the next wave of communications.

Obviously, in this sense, it’s more like one person communicating to many, many people, which is the definition of broadcasting.

Ed: But is it a case that Nokia had the technology or developed it itself, or did you buy a start-up company and then expand from there?

Stuart: The Nokia OZO is an internal development.

Nokia is always changing, always evolving.

Ed:

It has to doesn’t it?

Stuart: Well every company does, and at 150 years old it’s been through a lot of evolutions. The guiding vision on this project was that VR is going to be very important.

We had some core technology and understanding from the cellphone business about cameras and networking and audio, and I think that’s why our offering is very different to what anybody else has out there.

Ed: So how far do you go with the offer – is it just a camera or do you go to the next step and provide the software to manipulate those images?

Stuart: Yes, it is more than a camera. No camera can exist on its own – there has to be a workflow that follows on from it. We’re not positioning ourselves as being a turnkey solution where we say “look you shoot with our camera and use our software exclusively; you must deliver on our network, you must use our platform.” We’re an open system where we provide software to take the camera data and export it to industry standard file formats, and we’re okay with using existing industry tools if that’s what the customer wants; although we have our own tools if customers want to use those instead.

So we’re all about enabling a lot of different choices, and that includes what you distribute the content on.

The most common platforms right now are things like YouTube and Facebook, but they don’t yet have the full richness of 3D natively stereoscopic and surround sound

Stuart English at Nokia.

that we can provide in our own VR player. So at this show, we’ve announced we’re going to be releasing our player as a software development kit, which means you can “white label” ie, you can reskin it and say “hey, it’s not a Nokia player, it’s a TV New Zealand News player”, and viewers could download it and play your content on it if you wanted to offer that kind of service. So although we do have software solutions right through the chain of postproduction, they are not exclusive, you can use any of the other available tools if you wish to.

Ed: Is the resolution of this something that is really going to be limited to the mobile market or YouTube or is this something that you could see as a projection format, so you’ve got a 360 theatre?

Stuart: That’s a really great question. VR systems are inherently limited in resolution compared to other technologies like cinema …

Ed:

Well, we’re not looking at 8K here.

Stuart: You’re not looking at 8K, but I’ll tell you, there’s a very different promise that VR delivers. I could be sitting in a cinema and looking at a 4K image on a 40 foot screen. The pictures are beautiful but, at the end of the day, I know it’s not real, because there’s a great big black frame right around the picture that screams at me “it’s not real.” When I put on these VR headsets, particularly with the data that we generate, the dataset is perfectly consistent with what I see when I look around me with my own eyes and listen with my own ears, and I can’t look away from it. I don’t have the option of finding a place where it’s no longer real, so my brain goes into this mode of acceptance. And once you believe you are there, you’re much more receptive to the storyline. So it is, I think, a much more immersive and powerful communication medium and it’s also necessarily a different point of view communication – it’s not a third person looking from the outside in, it’s a first person looking from the inside out, or a second person like you and I are having a conversation right now.

For example, in a News environment, a recommended practice would be have a conversation with me, I’m the camera, you’re the reporter, let’s stand side by side and you tell me what you’re seeing and you let me observe the world, and if I

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choose to look back at you and see you, that’s great. If I choose to look somewhere else, that’s great. So we can be friends together and it’s a very different communication style.

Ed:

One could say that it’s voyeuristic?

Stuart: Voyeuristic … actually no, I would not say that. I would say it’s almost the opposite.

Ed:

It’s very first person?

Stuart: Yes, if we could just take our head off and put an OZO on our body, it’ll see just what we’re seeing. And second person viewpoints I think are also really powerful, whether there’s just two of us or a larger group of us talking together.

Ed: But isn’t there a difference when putting on a headset that you immediately retreat into yourself and it really is a single person experience? Whereas in a cinema, you have people around you and you’re sharing an experience, so that’s where I’m heading. Isn’t there a slightly frightening side of this technology that it takes people ( especially young people ) back into themselves and they only see one view; whereas if you can share it, they can share their experiences with their friends …?

Stuart: Ed:

Yes, well, that’s a very good point …

Oh I’m well known for making good points!

Stuart: Yes, you are, and honestly when I joined the company that was one of my thoughts too – wow, this is antisocial, I’m putting this headset on and I’m blocking myself away from the world. But a counter point is that the way this data gets displayed is itself changing – maybe in 5 years’ time we’re talking about eyewear that projects data so you’re still aware of your surroundings. But leaving that aside, let’s flip this around and consider how the camera is interacting with the world … I was just talking to a gentleman who is in Natural History. He described this cage they put up in the canopy in the rainforest which holds a scientist and a camera operator. For VR, you might just put the OZO up there with the scientist and the social interaction you’re getting is that you’re actually having this scientist describing to you “what is it that I’m observing?” Unlike traditional video, you are free to look around you and make independent observations, but you’re still listening to him, and in that sense that’s a much more socially interactive communication, even though I’m only remotely joining him in that conversation. Or in another example I might be joining in a debate of directors describing how they shoot movies …

Ed: I can see that, like our interview now – I can look away if a beautiful girl’s on the stand here or I can make eye contact with you. I know which I prefer, but hey …

Stuart: Absolutely, but that’s exactly the point. If we understand that this is the medium, then we construct storylines to exploit this environment. So it’s an excellent camera for close-up intimate conversations. It’s almost like sometimes I just want to join a conversation of famous people … you do it at dinner tables all the time right, you sit down and sometimes it’s just best to let the conversation flow and you pick and choose who to watch. And another thing is when you get VR distribution on a medium like Facebook, there is a built-in social communication which may not be the sort where we are sitting together round the couch and chatting while we’re watching a

If you’ve got it, flaunt it!

picture … rather it may be more of “I observed this” and “did you see that at this moment in time” and “I didn’t, let me go back and watch that all over again.” So it’s different.

Ed:

Yes, or you could go outside?

Stuart:

Of course, of course.

Ed: But that’s another conversation. Now going back to the technology, around the stands here in the Virtual Reality area, there are a number of people who are using GoPro’s and other aftermarket product and creating a cage that holds them, whereas you’ve gone for a standalone ball and that’s it, you have one product?

Stuart: Yes – and why did we do it that way?

What’s very fundamental to VR is that, when I put my headset on and I turn, what I’m describing here, the geometry of this is a smooth circle or an arc. A circle is not a hexagon, so if you build a VR system out of cameras that are basically shooting rectangles, and you put them on a rig, what you’ve effectively built yourself is a hexagon, and where those edges meet you have a major problem of resolving objects that are near or in the distance far away – technically solving parallax.

Ed: So that’s why they have different numbers of cameras on different rigs, depending on how far away you are?

Stuart: The more cameras that you build into the rig, the less that problem gets, but the right architecture is that you build it as a sphere, and so

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that’s the way we built it, and we built it out of metal because you need to have a rugged camera if we’re going to survive in a professional environment. You can’t constantly be readjusting your cameras on the rig.

You also need to have the certainty that the cameras are all going to be synchronised together, they’re all going to start and stop at the same time, they’re all going to record to the same file. So there’s a whole bunch of on-set workflow issues that are resolved by having a dedicated camera including the final image quality you get is better when you do it this way; all the images align with each other geometrically, and it just solves so many production problems.

Ed: But it must create some, because if you take the rigs that take the GoPro’s, something that any man and his dog can fix – if one of the GoPro’s goes down well you chuck it away, you stick another one in there and you carry on. However, with a rig like this you would need to set up some sort of worldwide servicing system otherwise it’s a bit frightening if one of them goes down. Have you thought that far ahead?

Stuart: Yes, for sure.

When you’re in the professional business, you need a professional service organisation.

So we’re building up our commercial capabilities … I believe there are some OZO cameras in New Zealand because people have rented them in the US and taken them there … but we’re not officially selling yet in New Zealand; when we do we want to make sure that all the servicing is done right.

The reality is, when you do things like News gathering, there’s a fundamental requirement. News happens in real time, your camera has to work now, not tomorrow, it has to work now. When we’re shooting commercials, we’re paying a lot of money for the actors to be on set, lights, costumes, you have to have reliability. If you have more and more independent cameras brought into a VR system, the probability that one of them fails increases.

If you’re recording each camera to an individual SD memory card, you now might give 16 SD cards to a runner to take back to headquarters … what happens if they lose one? So the risk is you complicate your production workflows and just create a cascade of problems.

My personal opinion is that VR has needed to move towards a truly professional workflow which people who are in the business of creating content can rely on.

That’s what our camera represents … and that’s why it’s built the way it is. It’s a professional level of camera.

Just like in Electronic News Gathering – the major organizations use full size Panasonic and Sony cameras; while the runners often use less expensive semiprofessional cameras, even down to cellphones.

Ed: Okay, for the current situation, if managed to capture something that interesting that a broadcaster might want air, is it easy to take a high definition 2D the material, or is that impossible?

the camera was really to put onto image from

Stuart: Can you get one camera view out of the 8 viewpoints? It’s not what we recommend doing, but the answer is yes, you could do that.

What we do recommend doing is over the top delivery, like streaming live. We’re showing that on the booth right now and obviously there’s also the option of packaging it and then downloading the content from a website.

Ed: If you’re streaming live to a TV set, obviously you could take that stream and record it and there it is?

I see you!

Stuart: The answer is “yes you can do that.” But what we’d really like to do as quickly as possible is to bypass that 2D intermediary and get to the real value, which is to let me stream the whole camera view so you have a fully immersive VR experience, and not a 2D extraction of the VR experience.

Ed:

Or something on a mobile phone?

Stuart: You know what, streaming to mobile phones lets you offer a range of VR experiences – do you want to see it flat, do you want to swipe through it, or do you want to be fully immersed if you wear it on your head?

So there are multiple levels of VR experience, but the reality is cellphones can work hand-in-hand with a broadcaster, because there are hundreds of millions of them, so if we can leverage communication from the broadcaster to cellphones, that’s a fantastic way to get a very large audience.

Ed: As a mobile phone company it would make sense?

Stuart: As an ex-mobile phone company we know the value of that, yeah … with a 4G wireless service, there’s plenty of bandwidth to stream Virtual Reality content to cellphones.

It’s a new form of broadcasting, whether existing broadcasters choose to do it directly themselves, or other people start new businesses to do it instead.

Ed:

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So watch out.

NZVN

Sony for Protel We are at the Sony stand for Protel with Scott Webster and Ken Brooke from Protel.

Ed: Scott, we’ve just been amazed by this huge screen as we walk into the Sony pavilion. Everybody should spend at least 20 minutes sitting there and just gazing at this beautiful, very large scene, and I’m just stunned that it’s not 8K, it’s in fact 4K, but it’s some special 4K. Can you just tell us a bit about that?

Scott: As you come into the Sony booth, there’s a massive monitor wall and it’s quite funny because, if you spend any time around that area, you have people looking for where the projector is mounted! You have to see it and get out of your mind what your normal sort of big screen display is like – this is virtually seamless and what they are showcasing on that screen is 4K HDR content.

It looks absolutely stunning and the first comment that we get from anyone we bring to the booth is how amazing those pictures look. It really is a testament to the technology and of HDR. Ed: Now first of all, the blocks – you say this is a monitor wall so in fact you’ve got little foot square panels?

Scott: The specs and tech will be revealed at Infocom but, yes, LED blocks make up the screen and it’s the very small gap between the arrays that gives you the seamless display.

Ed: But you can make up pretty well any shape you like, as you like?

Scott: Ed: for?

Yes pretty much that’s it.

And then on the 4K HDR, what does the “R” stand

Print does not do the image justice.

Scott: With High Dynamic Range acquisition, if you’ve been shooting RAW or in a log mode found in many cameras or recorders, you’re already good to go.

Traditional broadcast at this stage can’t transmit HDR but online services such as Netflix and Amazon are already providing HDR content.

Ken: Is HDR actually encoded in the stream – your TV actually picks it up?

Scott: Yes it does a handshake and says “here comes some HDR content, go into HDR mode” and away you go.

Ed: So how community?

does

this

Ed: I’ve never seen Katy looking quite like that?

Yes, HDR suits

Ken: HDR, exclusive to Sony, or is this a standard that all of the manufacturers have embraced?

the

production

Scott: If you’ve been shooting RAW or Log on a 14 stop camera, you’ve been acquiring for HDR. You

Scott: HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. When you come around the booth, there are various displays and panels showing HDR content.

You can see content from the Katy Perry concert recently performed in Sydney. That was shot with our HDC-4300 and, because it was shot with the 4300 in S-Log, it’s been graded for HDR. You’re seeing 4K shot from a live concert, graded and finished for HDR and it’s on display round the booth. You can see from that material what a difference an HDR finish can make.

Scott: her!

impact

Ken and Scott with Sony media.

Page 54

can now go back to that material, grade it for HDR and rerelease it as HDR content.

Ed:

So that really is a case of futureproofing?

Scott:

Yes, you can.

Ed: And of course, you can decide which one goes in which quadrant?

Scott: Yes, it’s great if you’ve been acquiring in RAW. The other thing to remember with HDR ( and some people forget ), is it’s not tied to 4K. You can shoot 1080 RAW/Log, it doesn’t have to be a 4K project.

Scott: Yes that’s just a matter of feeding it in.

And correspondingly we’ve got 3 individual monitors with the same image, so we’ve an SDR 709, SMPT 2084 (HDR) and HLG, but replicated within the one display here, instead of 3 individual monitors.

Ken: So when you’re colour grading, you’re actually using HDR Grading Tools and settings in your colour grading software?

Ed: Have you had interest from colourists already about this wonderful monitor?

Scott: You’re grading to the SMPTE 2084 or HLG spec and you need a monitor capable of displaying that, like the Sony BVM-X300 or PVM-X550.

Ken: We’re looking at a large Sony Professional Video panel with a quad split and I think some of the images are showing HDR. Even I can see the quality difference, HDR is fantastic, but I’ll let Scotty tell us the difference.

Scott: Yes the issue we’ve had in the past is not having a screen that is to a colourist’s standard for client preview. They would work on an OLED monitor themselves doing the grade and they want to give the client the closest replication of what they’re doing on their own monitor, on a bigger display.

Now sometimes they’ve done that just using a consumer TV or a projector, but for the first time we’ve got a large 55 inch client preview monitor that will very closely match what they are doing on their personal monitor.

Ed: Now we’re into the camera area and gosh, this looks like my Z5 Scott?

Scott: It does look like the Z5, but this is a 4K PXWZ150 Camcorder.

Ed:

Oh. Where does the tape go?

Scott: I knew that would confuse you Grant. Yes, not only have we moved past SD, we’ve gone straight to 4K and no tape. I don’t know what you’re going to do.

Anyway, this is our 4K Handycam. It’s got a one inch sensor, 12x optical zoom and it’s also got Sony’s very, very clever Clear Image Zoom which is fantastic and extends the lens out to 18x for 4K and 24x in HD. Just forget everything you know about digital image zoom, because Again, you have to see it to understand the difference.

Clear Image Zoom is just seamless to the point you won’t know when it kicks in and extends Scott: What we have displayed here is our new X550 55 inch OLED display and it has the capability of the focal range of your lens. It’s very nice. taking four 1080 inputs or one 4K image and giving you Ed: Well how can it do that, because you’re cropping a completely separate workable 1080 window for each pixels aren’t you? of those inputs. So on display in the top left we have SScott: It’s a lot smarter than that. The processor LOG, then we have SMPTE 2084 (HDR); underneath we compares patterns found in adjacent pixels and creates have HLG and then we have SDR (Standard Dynamic new pixels to match selected patterns, resulting in more Range) 709. So if you’re a colourist and you’ve got a realistic, higher quality images. customer, you start out with your camera original, Ed: Do you mean the transition’s seamless? being S-LOG 3, then you can apply your looks or grades to each of those images and you’re not worrying about Scott: You won’t be able to pick when it goes from 2 different monitors matching, you can see it within the optical to Clear Image Zoom. one display panel.

Ed: Until you get down to 100 times?

Ed: Wow that is really clever.

Scott: Yes – until you go crazy! Also the other Scott: Each of those segments can be graded interesting feature of this camera is the ability to shoot individually without affecting the rest of the other 3.

120fps for HD. Ed: Is it really just for viewing or would you look at Ed: Wow in a simple little handheld? that and say “oh we need to do a little bit more with the Scott: Yes, it’s great. green”?

Scott: Yes quite possibly. I guess it’s up to the colourist and how they want to utilise the capability of doing that. You’ve got to remember that usually a multi -viewer is just literally a multi-viewer, just giving you those 4 scenes. You can’t do anything to those images you’re seeing, but here you can actually individually change these windows.

Ken: And you can bring any one of those windows to full screen?

Ed: One of the barrows that I push about these cameras is that you don’t want to have short depth of field all the time with your handheld camera. This is a single large sensor, but because of the lens and the way it’s put together, you still can have that situation where everything can be in focus all at the same time?

Scott: Yes. It’s the best of both worlds really with that one inch sensor. You can do your run and gun, but when the situation calls for it, you’ve still got a bit of

Page 55

be no announcements about the F-series family at NAB. What we have done is released firmware updates for the FS7, FS5, F5 and F55, so we continue to support those cameras with firmware updates and improve them whenever we can.

If you were an early adopter of the PMW-F5, you’ve done very well, because that camera’s had a very long and productive life.

Ed: And that’s it – you don’t fix what’s not broken and these cameras continue to give extremely good service?

The PXW-Z150 camera.

play there with depth of field because of the size of the sensor; it offers a lot of flexibility.

Ed: Any other benefits of that single sensor – low light capability?

Scott: Low light’s very good due to our latest back illuminated Exmor sensor. The sensor allows full pixel read-out which means no need for pixel binning or line skipping which can affect image quality.

Ed:

So what is the PXW-Z150 replacing Scott?

Scott: up.

It doesn’t replace any camera in our line-

Ken: The Z150 is in a new category of Sony camera on its own. I t is compact with three independent rings on the lens and a 1” Exmor RC sensor. The camera can record UHD footage up to 30P and HD up to 120P. The camera supports XAVC-L recording along with traditional XDCAM HD422 recording formats. It also has dual SDXC memory slots for continuous recording and an impressive runtime of over 6.5 hours from a single NPF970 battery. We supply a free Sony 64GB UHD SD card with each Z150 sold. Protel currently have limited stock of the Z150.

Ed: And there seem to be a lot of accessories down here for it Scott. Are those wide angle lenses that screw on the front?

Scott: Yes it’s been a great product, it’s still continuing to sell. We’re just seeing now in Australia freelancers making the move to large sensor cameras which we’ve already done in New Zealand 1-2 years ago, but that’s just happening now in Aussie.

Ed: Now one of the points when the FS7 was launched was that a Sony zoom lens was promised for it. That has appeared, has that been a good success Scott?

Scott: When it comes to kit lenses and cameras, typically what most people do is take the kit lens with the camera because in the price comparison they are good value for money within the bundle price. If they don’t use it, they always keep it as a spare. Because the E-mount is so versatile you can adapt it to anything you want and it’s always good to have a run and gun lens available which the SELP28135G works well as.

Ed: I would think that somebody who bought an FS7 could see that it was a cine camera, if you put cine lenses on it, but if you wanted a run and gun camera, if you wanted something to do freelance work or stringer work, then you would use that Sony zoom lens and you’ve got a very versatile camera?

Scott: Yes, that’s right.

And that’s why it’s bundled with the camera. You can buy it with or without it, it’s totally up to you.

Scott: As with all our cameras, we a supply a large range of accessories.

There isn’t a Sony wide angle adapter for the Z150 but there are third party ones available.

Ed: Now of course, a couple of really successful cameras over the last few years for Sony have been the F5 and the FS7. These models continue Scott?

Scott: Yes, there have been no new announcements for large sensor cameras at NAB. They actually had a press conference before NAB announcing that there would

Sony Z450 camera.

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Ed:

Now speaking of stringers?

Scott: Yes we have a world first which is our first two third inch, single sensor 4K ENG style camera. You can shoot 4K on this and of course you can shoot your other 1080 options as well. The other interesting thing with the Z450 – if you buy its sibling, the X400, which is a 1080 camera, there is an upgrade path from that X400 to the Z450. So even if you’re starting out now and you don’t see 4K in your foreseeable future, you can buy an X400, do your work, but should the opportunity come up that you need to cover 4K, you can pay for that upgrade and your X400 will become a Z450.

Ed:

Do you get a free sticker with it?

Scott:

I hope so.

Ken: What is the actual upgrade path from the X400 to Z450 – is it just a software only upgrade or is it a sensor change as well as software?

Scott: Oh that’s the HDC-4300 which was actually announced last NAB. It’s been a huge success and has basically become the default new camera purchase for the OB companies around the world.

They’ve had massive global sales since the announcement last NAB. Ed: Now in the professional audio section, we’ve come across the Sony FS5, but what we’re looking at is what is attached to it?

Scott: What we’ve announced at NAB is our little 2 channel receiver from the UWP-D series. Pair the URXP03D Dual Receiver with the SMAD-P3D Dual Shoe and it allows you to power and sync your audio signal direct to the camera with no cables through the MI shoe connection.

You can also plug in an external mic directly into the receiver, which is another option, so you can effectively have 3 channels going into the receiver.

Yes, software and hardware, sensor and

Ed: So this really is a hot shoe on the camera. Not only can you put a radio mic receiver in there, you can also put a light I understand?

Ed: Now you say the Z450 has got a two thirds inch lens – we just looked at the Z150, the little handheld one, and it had a one inch lens. Why would you have an ENG camera with a two thirds inch sensor?

Scott: Yes I believe there is an accessory for that.

The great thing for existing UWP-D 11, 12 or 16 owners is they can just buy the URX-P03D and the SMAD-P3D and those existing transmitters that they have will be fully compatible.

Scott: boards.

Scott: Because the two third inch lens has been the standard sensor size for ENG cameras for a very long time and, if you own a B4 mount, there’s nothing stopping you putting your HD lens onto the Z450 and off you go and shoot.

You’ve got to remember with ENG cameras that it’s not just about the sensor size, it’s about muscle memory and shoulder ergonomics and a style and body of a camera that somebody who has been shooting for years and years just picks up and knows where everything is and can be up and shooting very quickly. There’s a lot of history behind that style of camera and that size of sensor and the lenses available for it.

Ed:

Ed: And which cameras have actually got that hot shoe on them?

And it obviously does the job?

Scott:

Absolutely.

Ed: So Ken, who are the customers you can see coming in that you would recommend this particular camera to?

Ken: Well many NZ cameramen already own a two third inch camera and some have HD kit already, or even if they own an XDCAM they could certainly upgrade and purchase a new Sony X400 camera body and use existing lenses and probably in some cases existing battery and radio mic kits and save a lot of money, and still shoot the same way they are used to shooting, but have the 4K upgrade Z450 available as an option for the future. So that’s basically it. I think the market will quite like it.

Ed:

And the recording means?

Scott: Ed:

SxS media.

There is a higher level now than SxS isn’t there?

Scott: Yes that’s the AXS media which is used for our R5/R7 RAW recorder for the F5 and F55. Now up to 1TB capacity and designed for 2K and 4K recording of 16bit RAW including 4K at 120fps.

Ed: Now talking about Sony cameras and the top of the range, there is a new super-duper camera and I understand they’ve sold about 80 in Great Britain to a rental house … or was it France? Anyway, a very top end camera that …?

Hot shoe for microphone or light.

Scott: Quite a number in our Handycam range have the capability of taking the SMADP3 adapter.

Ed: Alright, so if you didn’t have the SMAD capability on your camera, you could still use this with a battery tap?

Scott: The URX-P03D doesn’t have an external power port, however it takes batteries internally and then if you don’t have a camera that’s capable or compatible with a SMAD-P3D, you just run cables out to your XLR connections.

Ed: And now we move onto the media section, and well, I’m very pleased about this, because there seems to be a resurgence in the availability of Sony media?

Scott: Yes, certainly for our solid state cameras, there are plenty of choices and options in terms of how you record on those cameras. We’ve got our full line-up here – SxS PRO cards, original SBS-G series which was first released with our original EX1 camera. They’re still

Page 57

other manufacturers in and other manufacturers were able to provide cards and media certainly at a cheaper price than Sony had, but now you’ve recovered?

Scott: options market. moves keeping you can

Yes I think you’ll find our are competitively priced in the Certainly the media market very fast, but we’re always up with the size and options that buy.

Ed: But I do understand that, as of March this year, you’ve stopped selling tape decks?

Scott: Yes, that’s come to a close, you can’t order a tape VTR now. You’ve still got your camera Grant, you’re okay!

Lots of new media.

available for HD only cameras that don’t need the faster write rate that the PRO cards require for 4K, 2K and HFR. Something that’s new and has taken off quite well is our professional SD cards. They’re just new to the market, but have proven very successful. They’re 10x the toughness of a regular SD card and come with file rescue software. They support our latest Sony video formats XAVC-S and XAVC-L. Ed: I think I’m justified in saying that there was a bit of a gap in the traffic there for a while where Sony let

Ed: Now Ken, I want to bring you in at this point to tell us about the media. You used to sell lots and lots of other brands of media, but nowadays, you’re stocking and selling more of the Sony cards?

Ken: Yes we’re stocking in both our offices and selling the Sony SD cards – all of their media in fact, but the SD cards are actually specified as more rugged than other brands, and have read and write times suitable for the PXWX70 and FS5 cameras and other camera products. We not only sell them with Sony cameras but with other products as well.

Ed: And the pricing’s competitive?

Ken: The pricing’s actually very competitive.

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Scott: Yes that’s right and it’s absolutely safer than backing up to a hard drive where countless production companies all have dozens and dozens of hard drives sitting on the shelf, but if you’re not spinning those up on a regular cycle, the one day that you need that content and you pull that drive off the shelf, it’s not going to spin up.

With ODA you don’t have to worry about that. It doesn’t have the complexity of LTO in terms of access, trying to find the material and spooling up, and all those issues you face with a tape based archive system such as climate controlled storage and generational upgrades.

Ed: So Ken this is an exciting product for you and your customers do you reckon?

Ken: Yes for our customers it’s obviously a very useful product, particularly if they want to archive their RAW footage and ensure that it’s actually intact in 10 or 20 years’ time.

So I think it would be quite a useful device to have, particularly because I have experienced with customers their pain when their drives have failed and they‘ve lost all their footage, and sometimes not being able to recover it from the drive array, whereas these ODA’s are supposed to last for 100 years.

Ed: But this raises the area of accessories – somebody who comes in, perhaps to buy a camera from you, they can also look at other things that you can provide along with that camera, such as the radio microphone we looked at before, or this deep archival system or media to go with that camera. That’s the sort of material that you offer?

Ed: Now also in the media section, a little product that is dear to my heart and I’d desperately love one, but I can’t really justify it, and that’s an Optical Disc Archive. This is a small one, but the value in this Scott?

Scott: The value in this is very much as a plug and play deep archive system for anyone doing content creation. It’s a single drive unit, takes a 3.3 terabyte cartridge ODA ( Optical Disc Archive ). It’s quite clever, it’s made up of 10 Blu-ray discs within the housing itself and if you remember the old CD stackers you used to have in the back of your car, it’s a similar concept.

Ken: Yes basically you don’t just buy a camera, you’ve got to have all these other accessories to make it work and we can talk you through what you may or may not need. In some cases customers already own some of the accessories and other bits and pieces and can save money, but we definitely usually talk through options.

Ed: And that’s the value of being a Sony professional dealer?

Ken: Absolutely and that is why we are a Sony NZVN Authorised Specialist Dealer.

Ed: Oh you mean like 8track. You had an 8-track did you?

Scott: I’m actually a bit younger than you Grant, so I can’t remember back that far! It pulls each disc out, does the write, then slots it back in.

Ed: So really for an independent producer who is recording stuff on their SxS cards or their SD cards or whatever card media, this is a really safe way of preserving either that wild footage, or edited footage?

Scott will meet yours too, with help from Protel of course.

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AJA stand for Protel AJA Video Systems was honoured with multiple Awards at this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Convention in Las Vegas, NV. AJA’s newly introduced KONA IP, a desktop multichannel I/O card for IP-based workflows, was honoured with both a Post Magazine “Post Pick” and Production Hub’s ProHub Award of Excellence.

AJA’s HDBaseT compact block camera, RovoCam, won Broadcast Beat’s Content Creation Product of the Year Award. Video maker Magazine awarded its “Best of NAB” Award to U-TAP HDMI, AJA’s new USB 3.0 powered capture devices, and Studio Daily awarded AJA’s Ki Pro Ultra file-based recorder/ player with a Studio Daily Prime Award.

KONA IP is AJA’s first desktop video and audio I/O product for professional IP-based workflows. It is the next generation of AJA’s industry-leading KONA line of PCIe capture cards with multi-channel 3G-SDI HD with SMTPE 2022-6 support over 10GigE for editing, playout and capture.

RovoCam is AJA’s compact block camera for industrial, corporate, security, ProAV and broadcast applications. The UltraHD/HD capable RovoCam includes an integrated HDBaseT interface supporting uncompressed video, power, stereo audio and RS-232 control over a single CAT 5e/6 cable at lengths of up to 100 meters.

U-TAP HDMI and U-TAP SDI offer high quality HD/SD capture through a bus powered USB 3.0 port. The U-TAP products offer a simple, cost-effective and portable solution for plugand-play capture that is compatible with OS X, Windows and Linux, and a range of software applications.

Ki Pro Ultra is AJA’s file-based 4K/UltraHD and 2K/HD video recorder and player with a built-in HD LCD monitor. It is capable of capturing edit-ready 4K (4096 x 2160), UltraHD (3840 x 2160), 2K (2048 x 1080) and HD (1920 x 1080) Apple ProRes files. Ki Pro Ultra also supports a range of video formats and frame rates up to 4K 60p, and offers flexible input and output connectivity – including 3G-SDI, Fibre and HDMI – for powerful and efficient large-raster and high-frame rate workflows.

AJA Video Systems announced HELO, a new H.264 streaming and recording device, offering a range of professional workflow options with both 3G-SDI and HDMI inputs and outputs and the power to handle up to 1080p recording formats and a simple web-based UI for easy configuration. It allows users to simultaneously stream video signals directly to Web Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) while recording either to an SD card, USB drives or network-based storage, with dedicated record and stream buttons for easy operation.

Buy AJA products in New Zealand at Protel International PROTEL Technologies – Auckland and Wellington Offices.

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ARRI Cameras We are now with Stefan Sedlmeier in the ARRI camera section and we’re surrounded by lots of ALEXAs, AMIRAs, and ALEXA Minis.

Ed: Now Stefan, I want to start off by sharing an observation that I’ve made that there’s a lot of brouhaha around this show about 8K and still about 4K – how you’ve got to have this level of resolution, but when you look at most of the motion pictures that are made around the world, it seems to me the ARRI ALEXA is the number one choice. Would that be true?

Stefan: Yes this is Stefan with a big gun from ARRI. definitely true. We stay with our feet on the ground but Ed: I’m actually looking at the viewfinder of a camera we are the market leader in motion picture imaging. that’s got a Master Anamorphic 28mm lens on it, and Resolution is one of many factors making a good this looks very, very wide Stefan. Is that the image camera imaging sensor but, as important as resolution, that you get out of it? are dynamic range, colour representation, good signal to noise ratio, excellent representation of skin tones, Stefan: This is the image which you will later on variable frame rates – what’s the maximum frame rate see on the screen in the cinema, 1x2.4 aspect ratio. without changing the aspect ratio, without changing the The camera will record the native image, but you can magnification factor of the lens. All of that makes a pre-process say, for monitoring purposes, the unsqueezed image which has the right aspect ratio, but good motion picture camera. usually you do that in post. But you can look through For us it is about the final image, the output which the the camera viewfinder and you see a geometrically colourist sees and grades in post, which the broadcaster correct image. passes to distribution and sometimes I compare it with Porsche – they only build 6 or sometimes 8 cylinder engines, but they’re still one of the fastest sports cars in the world. So you don’t have to overdo it on one end, it’s about the composition of the entire camera system.

Ed: And it’s also about how easy it is or how intuitive it is for the camera operator to operate the camera?

Stefan: It is as well for the operator on set, as well for the postproduction path which means the colourist in post or in terms of editing any data wrangling you have to do for debayering or image processing to keep it fast, to keep it simple and to keep it reliable.

Ed: Okay, so what’s been happening technology development of the ARRI range?

in

the

Stefan: The ARRI range is complete as you said, with the 3 camera systems – ALEXA which is a complete camera family, the AMIRA with 3 different models and the ALEXA Mini where we have delivered quite a substantial number now. We are releasing software version 4 also for the AMIRA camera and we have the ALEXA 65 as a rental camera on the booth. This camera is currently shooting Ghost in the Shell in Wellington, New Zealand. This NAB 2016 is also about lenses. We have some new lenses to show – to start with, the Master Anamorphic range of lenses manufactured by Zeiss, designed by ARRI. We have 2 new lenses – the 28mm Master Anamorphic, so on the wide end; and a 180mm on the long end.

This completes the entire range of Master Anamorphic Primes to a complete set of 9 focal lengths.

Ed: So that’s the value of using an Anamorphic lens – you’ve got that flexibility?

Stefan: The value of an Anamorphic lens is that it’s really an art in film shooting, because the images look different when you defocus on that background, you have the lens flare, how highlights defocus. It’s a matter of composition of the image and it’s really an art and the choice of the DoP or the director to shoot Anamorphic. Even for a TV commercial sometimes they’re shooting Anamorphic; also if the deliverable is a 1x1.78 full screen, but they might use an Anamorphic lens to shoot that.

Ed:

Because …?

Stefan: Because it’s a different look when you’re panning the cameras, when actors are running in front of the lens closer or more far away from the lens. It’s a different way how the image is represented by the Anamorphic process.

It’s basically a factor 2 compression horizontally and then, in projection or on the delivery, it will be stretched perfectly by factor 2.

But this does a certain composition, a certain contribution to the image, an impression of quality.

Some people say it looks more natural, it looks very sympathetic, very pleasant to the eye in terms of focus and motion.

Ed: But that’s not something that you should try if you’re just starting out in camerawork.

It’s really something that’s learnt by experience?

Stefan: Learnt by experience and usually Anamorphic lenses are used by high end DoP’s and cinematographers.

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Ed: Okay. But for the mere mortal camerapeople who are not into the Anamorphic area, what have you got there?

Stefan: A lot of accessories for any kind of camera and this also ties in with the lighting story too. We accessorise any camera, be it Blackmagic, Sony, Canon, Panasonic with wireless remote control systems, any kind of matte box and wireless remote follow focus and control systems, support systems, shoulder sets, and we do quite a lot of variety of good quality accessories for any camera manufacturer. This is part of our core competence as a German manufacturer in aluminium, well made, spare parts available if you lose something, but they’re also built to last.

Ed: Now I did hear a report, probably 6 months ago, about an issue with the ALEXA Mini, that people weren’t happy with something. I didn’t find out what it was, but you think you know what it is Stefan – and you’ve fixed it?

what it was, somebody damaged your connector.

Sometimes this was negligence on set, when somebody just forced the wrong connector into the wrong port and the damage happened and with these cables you can’t fix the connector, it has to be replaced.

Ed: Now I’m pretty confident that, similar to lighting, we know that the ARRI lights just go on and on forever – well nearly forever – it’s pretty much the same with cameras, and I believe that the very first ALEXA that arrived in Australia quite some years ago is still working?

Stefan: This is correct.

The first cameras we shipped may have been during the year 2010. All these cameras are still in the market, so we don’t make our own product obsolete, we upgrade cameras by software. Most of the time, it is free of charge to the end customer, we look after spare parts, sensor recalibration, any kind of maintenance and we will look after our clients. So for their return on investment – how did you say, longevity – to make the camera worthwhile because we are in the professional market and for our customers it’s a tool to work and make money; it’s not a toy, so we see this as a professional investment which should last.

Ed: But surely, those very first ones, you can’t software upgrade them to the same standard as a new one?

Stefan: We are still selling and manufacturing the ALEXA EV – called now the ALEXA Classic – for film schools with Sony SxS cards as the storage media, and all of these cameras are also upgradable to the current software version 11; features such as 4x3 or if you use the studio camera with the optical viewfinder and mirror shutter, this is different hardware.

This is not upgradable from a 16x9 to a 4x3 camera for example, but feature and software-wise, yes.

Ed: And really, going into the pedigree of ARRI, before video cameras, you were making film cameras and one would have expected a film camera to last at least 20 years?

Stefan: Definitely. What else would you expect, because there was not a major change in film. Film cameras also required maintenance in terms of cleaning and re-lubrication of the movement and readjustment, but of course they last for decades.

The EVF cable connector is yellow.

Stefan: Yes, it’s fixed for a while now, and this may have been the ALEXA Mini viewfinder cable for the electronic viewfinder. Now we have introduced colour coding on the connector and on the camera body. In the beginning, this was not the case – it’s a new style connector and unfortunately, the diameter of the connector itself also fits in the existing Ethernet or timecode connectors and, when this happens on set in a rush, it will bend the very small pins in the viewfinder connector and basically damage the connector and makes the cable unusable.

Now this has been addressed in 2 ways – first by colour coding the connector; secondly, all ALEXA Minis are now shipped with caps to cap off the non-used ports. This is an upgrade; and we were also proactively helping customers to get as many new viewfinder cables as they require.

Ed: Again, ARRI coming to the rescue, looking after the product.

Stefan: For us, it was important to keep all cameras running.

We were proactive – when the customers said they had a problem, we said we knew

Ed: And we hope that the video cameras follow the same pattern?

Stefan: Definitely.

Digital imaging cameras, we don’t make our own products obsolete, we keep them running as long as we can to the benefit of the customer.

Ed: And just to finish us off, we backtrack a wee bit … we talked initially about the brouhaha about 4K, however ARRI do have a high resolution camera, but it’s a very specialised camera at the moment Stefan?

Stefan: We have the ALEXA 65 which was released about a year ago. There are currently 30 units in the market but at the current date, it’s a “rental only” camera. It’s a 6½K sensor – 6.5K. They’re using at least 3 cameras at any stage on Ghost in the Shell shooting and as I said, it’s a 6½K sensor with large lenses, spherical lenses. Most of the time Panavision is the rental partner for that.

Ed:

And it’s only in the rental market because …?

Stefan: Currently, it’s in the rental market to allow excellent support for both the camera side and the postproduction side for image capturing. I can assume

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that it’s a lot of data to be captured on a 6½K sensor. This camera offers all the other features you know from the ALEXA range in terms of exposure index, colour representation, skin tones, excellent signal to noise ratio …

Ed: So in other words, an operator who is used to an ALEXA could easily jump to this with a little bit of extra training?

Stefan: Immediately, yes. No doubt about that. It’s the same. It’s just a little bit heavier, consumes more power, produces a lot more data and to handle this in post, we have a cooperation with Codex – they do the image capturing with the capture drives, there are 1 terabyte and 2 terabyte capture drives available for ALEXA 65 and we have the Codex Vault for on set processing, Must be a director with that hat - plus ALEXA 65. debayering, quality control and archiveing, to manage the deliverables. This is working well, it’s a good workflow, it’s established, it’s comes with the established ALEXA 3½K imaging sensor, fast, it’s a large amount of data but nevertheless the but it has a new processing backbone running the same ALEXA 65 camera system has been established in the software processing power like we already have on market and there will be more units available.

AMIRA and ALEXA Mini.

Ed: And one could speculate that, having developed a 6.5K sensor, this technology will one day filter into the production camera range?

Stefan: Currently, and we discussed this yesterday, this camera is already used for production purposes, even on more features than we expected, even on commercials, because of the image quality. We expect that the camera will be available maybe through a partner programme in the future, with rental partners to have a local presence for this camera.

Ed: Okay, so the ALEXA 65 is pretty much as it is, and that’s going to be the camera, but is there any other possibility for a sensor upgrade in the future Stefan?

Stefan: We always are thinking about futureproofing the hardware, the camera bodies, and the next generation is the ALEXA SXT which currently

This camera is futureproof in terms of hardware – if there might be a different generation of imaging sensors in the future, this camera body can already handle it. This is the ALEXA SXT – Superior Extended Technology.

Ed: So for the wise camera purchaser who is looking for a long-term relationship with their new ALEXA, this would be the model to purchase?

Stefan: This is the model to invest in. We are not shipping this model yet, but we have an upgrade programme in place. Since 1st of January 2015, any customer who purchased an ALEXA XT or an ALEXA XT Plus from January 2015 onwards, qualifies for a free of charge upgrade to ALEXA SXT to get the benefit of the new processing core of the new camera body.

Ed: And having said all of that, I’m sure that even a Classic ALEXA that’s 5 years old would still command a very good price on the second-hand market?

Stefan: We observe this quite often, because we help customers to find new buyers for preowned equipment. We don’t necessarily trade-in cameras, but we help customers find a buyer, find a seller, and connect the buyer and the seller.

We do a test on the camera, we issue a certificate, we check that the camera is in good condition and then the customer is happy to get a new camera body from us after we have helped him to sell his previous ALEXA. Ed: That’s looking the customer Stefan.

after

Stefan: Thank you very much for your positive feedback.

“What else could we put on it do you think?” “Mistletoe?”

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Ed:

You’re welcome.

NZVN