NZVN July 2014

JULY 2014

AMIRA in Auckland On a mild June evening, there’s a big ARRI sign all over the Nutshell building.

This is quite a combo affair because there are people who have made the effort to come and look at the AMIRA camera, the ARRI lighting, or just for the free beer. It’s something that’s been organised by PLS, ARRI, and Nutshell Camera Rentals.

Ed:

Chris McKenzie, what was your part in this?

Chris: We’ve provided all the ARRI lighting here tonight. We had a conversation with Stefan from ARRI Australia a number of months ago when Paul Richards signalled that he was going to get an AMIRA, and we decided that this would be a good opportunity to do a bit of a “dog and pony show” between camera and lighting and get all the fields of interest involved.

Ed:

And you’ve done the catering?

Chris: We’ve done the catering and Paul’s done the wine and beer … we must mention the beer, the very

Vol 204

local ( two doors away ) Governor, brewed by Andrew Peacocke. I gather it’s a good drop. This was the right opportunity to get Stefan across as well; most of the activity he’s had over here has been with the ALEXA cameras and now the AMIRA, I think, is another good offer.

For us at PLS it was an opportunity to get the M family of HMI Par – well we’re calling them a “Par”, we should call them “M”s, they don’t have a lens like conventional Pars, but they give you all the benefits of a Par, but especially they give you a higher output.

Ed: And events like this are where people in the industry can have a look at them, see them and think “Wow, that’s something I hadn’t thought of” and then, either come and buy one or two, or they can rent them?

Chris: That’s true. We can rent them, we can sell them and, as my sales guys said to me “well, who are we pitching to tonight?” I said “well, we’re pitching to the DOPs, because they’re like the architects, they’re the guys who have the vision, they want to understand some

The mainly cinematographer audience listened intently to Stefan’s (left) presentation.

Go www.finnzed.co.nz and follow the link to NZVN for more news.

P8 Avid Audio Roadshow with Protel.

P14 Media Conference in Auckland.

P17 And the Winner is …

P21 Last look at NAB with PLS

DISPLAY & CLASSIFIED ADVERT BOOKINGS BY WED 30 JULY ADVERT COPY BY FRI 1 AUGUST UP ON THE WEB BY FRI 8 AUGUST

of the tools but, at the end of the day, they say to the gaffer – alright give me one of those.” Video guys are more hands on. They have a better understanding, and I think the AMIRA is pitched at those guys as well. So it was a good opportunity to attract a clever bunch of people and give them a taster to say “well, yes, I must go and have a look at that properly” and then we’ll happily spend an hour or two with them and take them through all the details and everything else that they may need and other products that they can value add – you know, “would you like fries with that sir?” As you see, we’ve had a helluva good turnout.

The evening included a camera test by Donald Duncan, an acknowledged “top-shelf” cinematographer on the Auckland scene. Donald told us that he had less than an hour to get to know the brand new AMIRA, then take it out on a variety of dates and cut together a presentation that showed some key elements cinematographers would be interested in.

His comments indicated that Donald was enthusiastic at the start and close to proposing by the end! Hey, no girl ( or camera ) is perfect but a ratio of 20:3 positive to negative has got to be a good bet.

The technical details were that he used the AMIRA’s native recording to C-fast cards at ProRes 4444 2K using ARRI log-C gamma curve. Most was shot at ISO 800 although some night shots were done at ISO 1600 and, although there was grain/video noise evident at ISO 3200, it was even throughout the tonal range and comparable to a film grain look.

Donald is used to an ALEXA, and found the comparable AMIRA images compelling but the layout more suited to use by a solo operator. The points that backed this up were excellent hand-held balancing, a state-of-the-art OLED viewfinder, handy flip-out LCD screen for menu

replied “Hell yes!” and he would like to see many of its features added to the ALEXA on its next update.

Now for the owner of this German beauty, Paul Richards from Nutshell.

Ed: Paul, you must be a very happy man knowing that you have got the first AMIRA in the South Pacific over and above the Australians?

Paul: Rightly so. No, it’s great to have the first one and it’s all down to Stefan really – his choice to deliver here first. He mentioned that there were various people giving him a hard time for not having looked after the New Zealand market so we get the win this time. It’s a great pleasure also to see the reaction of these people who are skilled, mature DOPs and young people who are wanting to work with a good camera, and the reaction listening in to their conversations is very interesting.

Ed: Which must be very heart-warming for you because you’ve invested rather a lot in this camera and its accessories and I know you made this decision quite a long time ago, when the AMIRA was just a brochure … you went ahead and made that decision to buy it then?

Paul: Yes, and not buy other product that was around at the time. The AMIRA seems to fill a spot in my market that, with regards to the current budgets, we had the options of the sweet spot of ProRes 444, 422, 200 frames, a lighter weight body; we’ve got a great viewfinder, all the attributes of this camera …

Ed: Yes, but that was all on paper. You bought this on paper without actually having seen it and handled it?

Paul: And why wouldn’t you buy it on paper, knowing the pedigree of the camera and the manufacturer? Yes there was a delay in delivery, but not that significant.

The delight is, you know, internally I’m just glowing and waiting for people to come and say “buy another one!” because I think probably, within a short period, there will be lots of these cameras around. They will become accepted as being the camera to work with everyday. ALEXAs may be challenged by them on commercials and drama. I think they are underrated at this stage by the ARRI advertising, putting them down as a Doco- style camera.

In fact they are capable of doing 90% of what most people want to do.

Ed: But obviously, it has been a nervous time for you Lots of intense discussion took place. Donny is the third from the left. from that initial order until now, that nobody else has come up with something selection, great user programme buttons allowing a that’s even better? change of frame rate and ISO within seconds and a fully versatile sound interface. That it does not shoot RAW is Paul: Another manufacturer? Inevitably there’ll be a probably not a problem for its intended market of TVCs, Canon that sits on your shoulder like a cat, or something or other else that sings every tune going.

TV drama and low budget features. It might be too The difference with this camera is that they’ve done one expensive for any local docos, other than high-end thing well and they haven’t tried to become everything budgets and it feels too heavy for sustained “run-andto everybody. The 80/20 principle – they have provided gun” operations though it’s extremely rugged with an 80% of what everybody wants. excellent build quality.

In the post process, grader Karl Lear was impressed as to how much detail he could pull out of the LogC material. When asked if he liked the AMIRA Donald

Ed:

With a workflow that DOPs will understand?

Paul: Yes. I mean 200 frames is a huge attribute, the switching on the camera is very simple, the menus are

Page 3

very simple, you don’t have to go to a menu within a menu, within a menu and a sub-menu and then go “Now where was I, hang on it was down a couple … oh hang on …”

Ed: But what I noticed tonight, in just this short time, is that people come along, they pick it up, stick it on their shoulder and it works. They don’t have to add a whole lot of things to it or figure out which bit does what?

Paul: And that’s the great delight of ARRI product; SR 1, 2 and 3, it was just things clipped together and worked really well as a film camera; everything around the camera holds together well, the engineering is superb, it’s a pleasure to hold and work with.

Ed: It looks very rugged which I guess, for a rental camera, must be a good attribute?

Paul: Yes, inevitably people will have a go at cracking it and breaking it and scratching it and doing their worst, but hopefully they have some respect for the fact that it’s a beautiful thing.

I think one of the key things is the pedigree and the heritage of the ALEXA, the reduced size, the reduced weight and the reduction of RAW; you’ve still got that 2.8K sensor producing a fantastic image, and the colourimetry of the ALEXA is right there, proven by what you can see in the viewfinder. It’s superb; it’s a superb image.

Ed: Have you got an answer prepared for the question that will come along – “oh, but it’s not 4K?”

Paul: Someone said along the way, “it’s not how many pixels you’ve got; it’s what you do with them.”

Ed:

Ummm, a good answer to have.

Now, the man from ARRI, Stefan Sedlmeier.

Ed: Stefan, you’ve got a glass of red in your hand, I hope it’s a New Zealand red?

Stefan:

Yes, Pinot Noir. Yummy.

Ed: So we finally got you into New Zealand and we have two AMIRAs as the stars of this show?

Stefan: I brought our demo camera over so we have two cameras for people to handle tonight. I’m very pleased with the turnout and how welcoming everybody is.

Ed: You are in New Zealand Stefan – you’ve got to expect that. You must also be very pleased with the demo that Donald did?

Stefan: Yes, he shot a 3 minute reel, edited it last night and it’s fantastic footage shot around Auckland.

The night shots, high frame rate footage shot in the circus, daylight on a soccer field with kids, it just blew me away – without much preparation, out of the box one week ago; wonderful footage on the screen one week later.

Ed: And to me, one of his telling comments was that, when he was trying to think of things that weren’t quite right, he had great trouble. He came up with three, but he found 20 things that were really superb and in fact, he said that there are some of those things that he would like to see on an ALEXA?

Page 4

Ed: Now of course, our readers see all these in the pages of NZ Video News, but there’s nothing like actually coming and putting your hands on them and seeing them for real, and if somebody’s missed tonight, they can always go along to PLS and put their hands on them there and get a full demonstration of how they work?

Stefan: For lighting yes, for lighting please see PLS – for the AMIRA camera, please see Nutshell. But it’s really true that to put your hands on is much better than reading a brochure, or downloading a PDF. This is why I always travel with the camera.

The ALEXA travelled with me through all Australia and New Zealand in a flight case which we shipped. The AMIRA travelled with me as hand luggage in the aeroplane.

Stefan and Paul with the AMIRA to the fore.

Stefan: Yes, of course, but it’s a hardware design, we always listen to our customers and we really try to incorporate the feedback we get.

This is why the camera is as good as it is, because we really listen to our customers’ preferences, feedback, thoughts, wish list.

A comment some time back was that we should have the audio level meter on the lefthand side of the camera, so look where the audio level meter is on the AMIRA, it’s on the lefthand side of the camera. No doubt about that, because this is how people operate.

Ed: I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more of the AMIRA as people get to use it.

Stefan: well.

Ed: So where do you go from here? There’s obviously a rental camera now available in New Zealand through Nutshell, but what’s the next step? Are you hoping that a lot of owner / operators out there are going to see the value in such a well-designed and rugged camera?

Stefan: It reminds me a little bit of when we started off with the ALEXA about 3½-4 years ago and meanwhile, we have an installed base of 150 ALEXAs in Australia and New Zealand. You always have to start seeding and always use strategic positions like here in Auckland, where you get a camera for testing, for trying. Of course, Nutshell purchased the camera, but it is also good to have a customer there. We have sold quite a few and they will be delivered in the next few months and we’re still taking orders of course. What’s new with the AMIRA is that we also have all the TV studios, broadcasters, News interested because this is the camera which is suitable for them, ENG style lens, two-third inch B4 mount and ready to shoot.

Ed:

And you’ve got a few lights here tonight as well?

Stefan: Yes this is true. I should say that I will try to be in New Zealand more often. Maybe I come more often but for shorter times, but it’s great to be here even if it’s just for one night, I really love it, it’s worth coming over for. The event tonight we did in cooperation with Chris McKenzie, Professional Lighting Services, who is our lighting distributor in New Zealand.

Along with the AMIRA, I brought along the new ARRI L5 -C. This is the little brother of the L7. It’s a 5 inch Fresnel, controllable, tuneable LED light. We show the L7, we show the M90, the M40, the M18 and the M8, so the entire family of HMI and it’s just the place to show both at an ARRI night at Auckland.

Page 6

Thank you very much, yes I hope so as NZVN

Editing Solutions Experts The experts providing end–to–end editorial solutions to New Zealand’s film & television industry Authorised Elite Reseller for the complete Avid Video, Interplay & Storage ranges.

Official New Zealand Distributor for Avid Media Composer, Avid ISIS 5000 & JMR Storage.

We are proud to have been selected as one of Avid’s top 100 partners Worldwide.

Stow and Share Your New Mac Pro®

JMR ProBracket The new Mac Pro® and its revolutionary design have taken the market by storm, but Apple is …the solution your Pro! leaving some usersfor and securing IT pros scratching theirnew heads. Mac How can multiple The new Mac Pro® and its revolutionary design have taken the market by storm, but Apple is leaving some users and IT users share the power of the Mac Pro? How can I get it off my desk or the floor?

pros scratching their heads. How can multiple users share the power of the Mac Pro? How can I get it off my desk or the The floor? new patent pending, JMR ProBracket is an innovative racking system that enables you to

securely install your new Mac Pro under a desk, aside a desk pedestal, to a wall, or into a rack The new patent pending, JMR ProBracket is an innovative racking system that enables you to securely install your new cabinet.

The unique of mounts allows forathe Mac Pro under a desk, aside family a desk pedestal, to a wall, or into rackquick, cabinet.convenient mounting of the computer, with I-O ports readily available or hidden, and includes cable management and The secure unique family of mounts allowsthat for the quick, convenient mounting of thealong computer, I-O ports readily available integrated straps hold the computer in place, withwith rubber gasketed or hidden, and includes cable management and secure integrated straps that hold the computer in place, along with “cradles” that protect them from vibration and scratches. rubber gasketed “cradles” that protect them from vibration and scratches. The ProBracket family includes:  

The ProBracket family includes:

Mounting a single Mac Pro computer under a desk or against a wall: MPRO-DESK • Mounting a single Mac Pro computer under a desk or against a wall: MPRO-DESK Mounting a single computer into a rack cabinet, or against a wall/pedestal: MPRO-HORZ

• Mounting a single Mac Pro into a rack cabinetl: MPRO-HORZ

Dimensions: MPRO-DESK wall or desk side mount: 9.75” (247.7mm) L x 9.75” (247.7mm) W MPRO-HORZ rack mount: 7.00” (177.8mm) H x 15.75” (400mm) D, when installed and nested

www.atomise.co.nz | atomise@atomise.co.nz | 04 380 5010 The ProBrackets are all finished in high gloss black baked-on powder coating over 18 gauge galvanized steel and allow for sliding the computer(s) in and out of a cabinet, or may be used for wall/pedestal mounting. The JMR ProBracket is American made and brought to you by JMR ELECTRONICS INC. JMR was awarded BEST OF SHOW by Digital Video Magazine at NAB 2014 for the “storage” category. For more information or to order contact JMR at 818-993-4801 or www.jmr.com.

Atomise Limited is proud to supply and support the Post Solutions for leading NZ facilities including:

The Hobbit – Avid Media Composer | Avid ISIS 7000 | Apace VSTOR Octopa Natural History NZ – Avid Media Composer | Avid ISIS 5000

Avid Audio Roadshow with Protel I know that I go on about this but it’s really important that we are all educated about the basic technical aspects of our industry. If we only do things the way we’ve always done them, or we only listen to a small number of other users, then we may continue on a misguided path. That’s why I urge everyone to make the effort to go to training sessions – especially free ones! A case in point was a recent show put on by Sennheiser ( sadly, Auckland only ) and this one around New Zealand by Avid in conjunction with Protel.

Stuart, David and René at Protel’s old offices.

I’m not an audio specific person but I gained knowledge that will help me improve the services I can offer to my video clients. After all, silent video is not much fun.

Now, the questions I asked were based on what I found interesting so, if you are a dedicated audio person, in fairness to the products and the organisers, go and see for yourselves at Protel’s showrooms the next time you are in Auckland or Wellington.

Here’s what I picked up at the Auckland venue. To tell us about the S3L console, we have David Sullivan, ANZ Audio sales manager from Avid Australia.

Ed: Now David, what impressed me about this is that it’s a little console, but it’s a console with powerful features?

David: Absolutely. When we released it, it was version 1 software. The great thing with having a EUCON based console is that we can add a lot of features relatively easily, so this is our third release of software and effectively they’ve rewritten the whole architecture behind it again with this release of software, to allow the 64 bit plugins …

Ed: bit?

So now it’s going to be running on Windows 8, 64

David: Yes – embedded, so it’s not like a traditional copy of Windows 8 so it’s very stable, very reliable. Our new S6 console is running on Windows 8 embedded as well.

Ed: The other thing that I really found useful is that this is a console that’s small enough for you to take as “check-in” luggage on a plane. You can take it to a gig, you can use it as a live mixer, but then you can bring it back and use it as your studio mixer?

David: Yes. There’s more and more demand on the sound guy to do a mix of the show every night for the band. The bands want it for quality control and also, one night, they might capture that magic moment and they want to put it on a tour DVD or something like that. So having the ability to mix during the show and, obviously, get a great sound, and then take the surface

back to your hotel room and do a mix down on Pro Tools for the band, bounce it out real easily and quickly … it’s a big plus for a lot of touring guys.

Ed: Okay, so you use the console in conjunction with some sort of recording system?

David: The console comes with a copy of Pro Tools so it’s automatically enabled to have 64 channels recording into Pro Tools as well as 64 channels of playback as well. That comes as standard. It’s the only system out there that allows 64 in and out just through a laptop with Pro Tools.

Ed: But at the same time, you’re recording those 64 tracks in an unmixed state as well as a mixed version, so you can always change it later?

David: Yes absolutely.

You can designate the record source to be from the tops of the signal chain or Pre/Post fader, the choice is yours.

Ed: You’re talking to a video person here, so I’ve got to ask these questions … and another one that you seemed to make a big fuss of is EUCON enabled. Now what is EUCON? David: EUCON is a technology that we acquired when we bought Euphonix.

It’s an Ethernet communication protocol. The best way to describe it to a video guy would be it’s like “MIDI on steroids”! It’s a lot faster, a lot more commands. At the moment, there are 500 plus EUCON commands for Pro Tools. So it allows us a lot of flexibility in terms of interacting with the surface from Pro Tools and vice versa.

Ed: Talking about Ethernet, you also mentioned that AVB is a new standard for getting audio and video across networks – this is something that the AVnu Alliance has ratified and it’s good to be part of it, so how does AVB fit in with EUCON? David: AVB is a big deal and it’s a big deal for video guys as well. It really is going to be the standard going forward for transporting audio and video signals across Ethernet, or in an integrated Ethernet network, where you’ve got switches and other data competing with it. Traditionally, with a lot of Ethernet based audio protocols at the moment, they really don’t cope well

Page 8

Introducing Blackmagic URSA, the world’s first user upgradeable 4K digital film camera!

Blackmagic URSA is the world’s first high end digital film camera designed to revolutionize workflow on set. Built to handle the ergonomics of large film crews as well as single person use, URSA has everything built in, including a massive 10 inch fold out on set monitor, large user upgradeable Super 35 global shutter 4K image sensor, 12G-SDI and internal dual RAW and ProRes recorders.

Super 35 Size Sensor URSA is a true professional digital film camera with a 4K sensor, global shutter and an incredible 12 stops of dynamic range. The wide dynamic range blows away regular video cameras or even high end broadcast cameras, so you get dramatically better images that look like true digital film.

The extra large Super 35 size allows for creative shallow depth of field shooting plus RAW and ProRes means you get incredible quality!

Dual Recorders Blackmagic URSA features dual recorders so you never need to stop recording to change media.

That’s critical if you are shooting an historical event, important interview or where you just cannot stop shooting! Simply load an empty CFast card into the second recorder and when the current card is full, the recording will continue onto the second card, allowing you to change out the full card and keep shooting!

www.blackmagicdesign.com/au

User Upgradeable Sensor Blackmagic URSA features a modular camera turret that can be removed by unscrewing 4 simple bolts! The camera turret includes the sensor, lens mount and lens control connections and can be upgraded in the future when new types of sensors are developed.

This means your next camera will be a fraction of the cost of buying a whole new camera! Choose professional PL mount, popular EF mount and more!

Built in On Set Monitoring!

Say goodbye to bulky on set monitors because you get a massive fold out 10 inch screen built into Blackmagic URSA, making it the world’s biggest viewfinder! The screen is super bright and features an ultra wide viewing angle. URSA also includes two extra 5” touch screens on both sides of the camera showing settings such as format, frame rate, shutter angle plus scopes for checking levels, audio and focus!

Blackmagic URSA EF

7,235 ,235

A$

Blackmagic URSA PL

7,839

A$

when there’s other traffic on the network and really have to be their own dedicated network. The whole point behind AVB is to have inbuilt quality of service for audio and video, which then would allow you to really start routing audio and video anywhere around the building, while dealing with contentious traffic as well.

It’s designed to be super reliable; it’s built into the Macs already, so with Mavericks in Mac, there’s AVB drivers already built in, ready to go. So even though our S3L, and the SC48’s were one of the first devices out there with AVB, there’s going to be a lot more coming down the line – it’s something it’s good to know about.

there’s a particular reverb that they really like and then it’s interesting when they’ve gone to other consoles they have to use a different reverb to kind of get it wherever they want, whereas with our system, they can use the same reverb or whatever plugin between Pro Tools and between the live system … it just gives them a lot more peace of mind, and gives them the sound that they want.

Ed: Now you also mentioned virtual soundcheck. I can understand going into a venue and, rather than having to set the whole process up right from scratch and get every little channel working, you can cut the time on this dramatically?

David: That’s the whole concept of the hybrid nature of the S3L system. We designed it for guys who want to get the best of both worlds, so they want to use the surface in the studio, they want to take the same technology live …

David: Virtual soundcheck is a huge time saver for the sound guys. Basically, the way it works is you record a gig from the previous night, bring it into the new gig, have the virtual soundcheck sending all those channels via playback through Pro Tools back to the console. You basically get your levels for the room roughly right, the band comes in and does a quick line check to make sure all their signals on stage are good for them, and then you’re ready to go with minimal fuss.

Ed: So it would seem that, if you’re using Pro Tools and some other mixer, you should really have a look at one of these – you might be doing a lot more work when this could be doing a lot better things for you?

Ed:

And it’s all combined with Pro Tools?

David:

Absolutely – you can’t go past it, it’s great.

And the other Avid presenter at the show is Stuart Newman who explained the Avid S6 console and more.

Ed: So this is providing it’s the same room you’re in?

David: Well no – virtual soundcheck can be used in different rooms. It’s just a way of getting a rough level ready for the band without having to reinvent the wheel.

Ed: Last thing – you mentioned HDX-powered E3 engine?

David: Our top of the line audio platform is based on our HDX card, which is a DSP audio card.

Our previous live system consoles have been using the older HD card; S3L is the first using the HDX card, so it has an enormous amount of processing power for audio, it’s very reliable, there’s 18 DSP chips onboard. It just means that it gives you a really great clarity of sound and super low latency.

It gives you the peace of mind that it’s rock solid and reliable and proven. It also allows us to use all the AAX plugins which is our new format of plugins which work with Pro Tools 11, to work on the S3L console as well.

Ed: And there’s a lot of plugins that come free with the package?

David: Oh yes, there’s over 30 I think now and, with the AAX plugins coming out, the DSP based plugins – there’s nearly 200 of them, so you get a lot of choice when you’re live sound mixing. But also, when you’re mixing in Pro Tools, you’re using those plugins and then you can take those same plugins and use them live. So for a lot of sound guys, that’s a really big thing because

Ed: Now consoles are wonderful things but really, the best way to get to know what the console does is to come and have a look at it yourself so it’s very heartening to know that Protel are actually going to have an S6 console in their new premises. You can come in and, not play with it, but actually bring in a session and try it out on this large console. So if you find that the S3 is a bit too small for your future plans and your growth, have a look at an S6. Now rather than going into all the fancy details of it, what impressed me was that it’s something that is modular and that, because a lot of the features are software driven, it is future proof?

Stuart: Yes, that’s absolutely right.

We don’t define it as a console as such; we actually define it as a control surface. We do have consoles like the System 5, but in the nature of the way that the S6 works, it’s just an Ethernet connection between software, not just Pro Tools, but anything that’s EUCON compatible, and the surface. The system is customisable in terms of the way that you want it to work. So it’s modular in its

Page 10

nature, which means you can start off small and be a lot more cost effective with it; it’s a lot better with ergonomics. We’ve put a lot more in a smaller space, a lot better visual feedback as well – so colour coding, scrolling waveforms, input meters right next to the faders – you know, these are the main things that our control surface customers wanted to see so we think we’ve delivered on it.

Ed: You also spoke about Avid Everywhere, because this is something that we’ve seen developing over the years with the Cloud, and it’s good to see this in the audio side because here’s something that will improve dramatically the collaboration between audio people.

What are the sorts of features that are upcoming in Avid Everywhere for audio people?

Stuart: Well, I can’t speak specifically to the features and to be quite honest the final details are sure to change.

What you saw today and what was presented at NAB is just really a high level overview … it’s mainly three areas of collaborative features, improved archiving and metadata, and also …

Ed:

Streaming?

Stuart: Well yes streaming is involved in that, but the third thing is the Avid Marketplace. We’re most excited about that because it’s going to give our customers the ability to be able to monetise their creations very effectively and quickly. It means they can get what they’ve created out there, people can use it and they get paid for it.

Ed: So they can put something up there and somebody can say “yes, I want that as a backing track” or something and they can do the deal through the Avid Marketplace?

Stuart:

That’s right.

Ed: On the other side of that, I was most interested that, when you are collaborating, your system might not have all the same plugins as the one you’re collaborating with … you don’t have to go out and buy those plugins straightaway, what can you do?

Stuart: Well the idea is that there’s a thousand plugins out there and no Pro Tools user has all 1000

plugins on their system – they might have 50, 100 or 200, but if someone is using a certain plugin and wants you to collaborate with them, we’re developing a way that you can rent those plugins and instantiate them in your session without even having to close the session that you’re working on, so making it very streamlined.

You know, something that a lot of people who are new to Pro Tools wouldn’t know, but older users would remember – Avid acquired a company called Rocket Network around about 2003 – but that technology was very much a precursor to what we’re doing now.

Rocket Network was reliant on an infrastructure of network speed, internet speed that wasn’t around back in those days, but we’ve had the code lying dormant there in Pro Tools for quite some time. Now we’ve got a chance to take it to the next level, so it’s something we’ve been keeping in mind for a very long time. It’s exciting that we’ve now got a larger infrastructure bringing video shared storage production asset management and audio systems together. You’ve seen Media Composer Cloud and we’re talking Pro Tools Cloud – that’s all to do with Avid Everywhere.

Ed:

PXF – a new format, future proof?

Stuart: PXF, yes, the big headline on that feature is the fact that it is future proof, so a singular file format that you can output at the end of a project or a session from Pro Tools and archive that away and any future version of Pro Tools will be able to open up that format and extract what it needs from it.

Ed: It’s not just a folder containing a whole lot of other types of file?

Stuart: No, that’s basically how our users have had to work up until PXF becomes a reality, is just a basic backup of a folder. That could be off a shared storage system, network hard drive, that sort of thing, but I think PXF will make it a lot easier to have a singular file that can be put up onto the Cloud, it can be backed up by automated hardware and it’s future proof as well.

Ed: I market serious market

believe by now that you must have the audio pretty much sewn up with around 90% of users using Pro Tools. I guess where your has to go is to replace the built-in audio tools that you might get with a video editing programme. I know even with an Avid Media Composer, you’re going to get some basic audio functionality, but to really go that next step, you need a proper audio tool and Pro Tools is something that not just works with Avid, but will work with any other editing programme like Adobe Premiere or with Final Cut Pro or anything else that you can export and do the audio work in Pro Tools?

Stuart: Yes absolutely.

The advent of the AAF, that can be exported out of Final Cut Pro, I believe Adobe Premiere, of course Media Composer as well … we can bring in all of that audio data information in Pro Tools

Page 12

and get the audio part done. In terms of market share, it’s been estimated at 85-90% of professional studios worldwide use Pro Tools and there’s a lot of benefit to the consumers and our professional customers – they know if they’re working in that format and they need to go to another studio, they will be able to walk in and load it up in their system.

Pro Tools comes with somewhere in the order of 65 plugins … you were talking about editing software that has all the effects and the ability to create, you know every version of Pro Tools comes with all these effects.

With Pro Tools 11, we’ve totally overhauled the video engine – so we’ve brought the Media Composer video engine into Pro Tools and now we can natively play back a myriad of different codecs without it having to be QuickTime. That also improves the compatibility with other editors out there, because we can natively bring in those video files and start working with them without having to do a transcode.

Ed: And I’m sure you’d agree that the most important part of any video is actually the audio?

Stuart: Well that’s what George Lucas says and I’m a bit like him I would say.

It’s a bit of a quandary, I mean, I’ve been doing audio now for around about 20 years and I’m still relatively young, but it’s very true when they say that when audio sounds good, no one’s really going to complain, audiences are just going to expect it to sound good.

But when it doesn’t sound good, that’s when you’ll hear about it.

Audio guys are kind of like the unsung heroes in production; if you’re very good, you very rarely actually get accolades for the work.

Ed: I guess the test for me is, if you turn the picture off for 30 seconds and just listen to the audio, you can probably tell you’re not missing much in the story. But if you turn the sound off for 30 seconds, you might not understand the connection to the rest of the programme?

Stuart: Yes, there’s so much emotion especially in sound tracks in music that will set the mood on what’s going on in the scene.

In fact, I think that’s what George Lucas talks about with music – you could take that away and you’d probably still really not have an idea of what that scene is trying to achieve in the movie.

The best part about my job is the customers; and New Zealand, I have to say, has some of the best in the region, not only Auckland, but of course down in Wellington with what they’re doing down there in Park Road. They’re extremely dedicated people.

Ed:

Well there’s still room over here?

Stuart: Yes there is isn’t there, there’s plenty of land still. Hmmmm.

NZVN

Page 14

Media Conference in Auckland We are with Gerry Smith, formerly of Prime Australia, now representing a broadcast industry interest group calling themselves Media Technologies.

They are hosting a locally focused Media Technologies conference in Auckland on 30 and 31 July.

Ed: Gerry, I understand that this is open to anyone, but I guess you have a particular target market?

Gerry: Well, we’re looking at people in the broadcasting and the “beyond broadcasting” world – people who operate in both free to air television and the broadband market. We’re looking at what’s happening in those spaces. So the target is that group of people – people who are playing in a media space, free to air and online.

Ed: And this is something that those, even in production companies who are doing stuff for television, really should know about?

Gerry: I agree that they should know about it, because the days of just sending a 26 minute half hour tape to a television broadcaster and having them play it are virtually dead. Broadcasters are looking for more than that – they’re looking for the raw content, they’re looking for something to put online and widen the audience appeal for the material. So they don’t want just a simple tape anymore, they want the metadata, they want access to all the different outtakes and all the expanded features that they can offer their clients and advertisers.

Ed: Looking at the list of speakers I see that you’ve got somebody from Kordia, you’ve got Telecom who is supposedly telling us where Telecom is going in the connected world and their digital plans; but also somebody from Australia whose presentation is about why metadata matters?

Gerry: This is Julia from HWW in Australia. HWW are a company that manage metadata on behalf of the broadcasters and the content providers. In my time in Australia, we sent all our material to HWW, they managed the metadata and sent it back to all the broadcasters; and metadata matters, because without metadata in a connected world, you can’t find your content. You need keyword searches – all that stuff relates to metadata. The metadata is becoming more and more important in a connected world.

Ed: Now you were also saying that there’s another major technology that broadcasters need to look at and it’s something that’s been adopted in Australia already?

Gerry: Yes. We’ve got HbbTV – Hybrid Broadcast Broadband Television – and it’s been adopted by the broadcasters in Australia. SBS have just gone live with

their trials; the head of technology for Channel Seven, Trevor Bird, is coming across – he’s going to talk about their plans for HbbTV in Australia. What it does is that it enables viewers to seamlessly switch between live television and catch-up television on their Smart and connected TV. So that’s the new trend in Australia; it’s happening there now and I believe Sam Irvine from Freeview is also going to talk about what New Zealand’s plans may be in that space.

Ed: Now to me, this seems as though it would open up the broadcast television market for more of the smaller production companies who might have thought about doing a narrowcast on a web-based system but now, if this was adopted, they’d have wider possibilities?

Page 15

Gerry: Yes, well you can look at the possibilities that smaller narrowcasters can maybe work with some of the big established broadcasters to have their content also available on the HbbTV platform of that broadcaster. The broadcaster would have its free to air channels, its catch-up channels and also access to the smaller second tier type narrowcasters – that content can also be freely available much easier to people with connected TVs via that platform.

Ed: And for conference attendees, when you’re not listening to the speakers, you can network?

Gerry: Well, when you’re not listening to the speakers, we have morning tea, afternoon tea, and a group of suppliers showing their wares.

Lunch is provided and there will be drinks on the first day so people can have a chance to network and talk among themselves and talk to suppliers and look at some of this technology.

Ed:

And they get to ask the questions?

Gerry: They get to ask the questions.

We’re closing the session on the second day with a panel discussion which will hopefully be a big question and answer session and we’ll talk about some of the things we’ve seen and heard during the course of the two days. But also during the course of the event, there’s plenty of time to network, yes.

Ed:

And when do you give your speech?

Gerry: I give my speech at the opening for about 30 seconds – to introduce the Minister of Broadcasting, and then I do the introductions for the rest of the speakers of the day. But I’m not actually planning a large speaking role.

Ed: Because you’ve said now that you’ve retired Gerry?

Gerry: I’ve certainly retired.

I’m back in New Zealand after 14 years in Australia and I’m enjoying being back here, it’s good to be home.

Ed: Right, so the people who you think should come and see this are?

Gerry: I think the people who should come and see it are obviously of course broadcasters in their space, and they’re coming along …

Ed: And broadcast wannabes?

Gerry: ... and broadcast wannabes and anybody who is in that space who is looking to see where the world is going in the online video world, what is happening in that space and how that could affect their current operation and their future operations and their future business models and what they could be doing with their businesses to make their offerings a bit more attractive in a connected world.

Ed: So in fact, it’s wider than broadcasters, it’s for people who are supplying material for broadcast?

Gerry: And that’s the whole idea of the conference, it’s not just broadcast. We’ve themed it “Beyond Broadcast” but what we mean is what is happening out there in the big wide space. If you look at some of the stats, the use of video across the Internet is something like 68% of all traffic. And that’s what’s happening – it’s all about that sort of space and how video is moving, who’s making it, what it is and what opportunities there are.

Ed: And it’s not the same video that people are watching on the net now – it’s broadened a bit?

Gerry: Yes, I think there’s still plenty of that stuff out there but now it’s a much broader offer than that niche.

To register please visit mediatechevents.com

Page 16

NZVN

And the Winner is ...

We are all winners on this occasion because we have Phil Keoghan from ‘The Amazing Race’ here. He’s dressed in a check shirt, which sort of goes back to his New Zealand heritage, and underneath, a New York City Trinity Boxing Club tshirt – perhaps to blunt the Gore-ish image of the check shirt on top.

Ed: Phil, does your wife choose your show clothes for you?

Phil: No ... I have a stylist who works on the show.

The NYC Trinity Boxing Club t-shirt is something I bought.

It’s an amazing boxing gym right next to where the Twin Towers were. We were there for the memorial.

Well, you should know “who’s who” in this pic.

Ed: Now, to catch our readers up, I approached you at the Sony Press event last night, fellow Kiwi and all, because you were on stage lauding the F55.

Phil: Well actually, I am here as a bit of a Sony ambassador, just because Sony worked with me on a film that I shot last year, which was a film that Louise,

Page 17

my wife and producing partner, and I decided to shoot to recognise and honour a New Zealand cyclist who rode in the Tour de France in 1928.

Sony worked with us to help us shoot that film in 4K. It was the first documentary and first time that the F55 had been really tested in the field in the way we used it – 26 days around France, sometimes shooting more than 23 hours in a day, in the rain, on dusty roads, over bumpy roads, up high peaks, up the top of the Galibier, over the Pyrenees, over the Alps, screaming down hills at 80 kilometres an hour and crawling up hills at 10k an hour – and my good friend and director of photography, Scott Shelley, shooting much of the film backwards for almost 6000 kilometres around France.

Ed: Did you get stopped by “les flics” very often?

Phil: We did actually.

Phil on stage with the F55.

Ed: The French police are known for that – you just have to ask Jeremy Clarkson the number of times he’s been stopped.

Phil: Yes, we were stopped – we were trying to follow the exact route and consequently we messed up a few times. Some of the roads that used to be just small roads between towns are now major highways, so we accidentally found ourselves on some highways where it’s illegal to ride bicycles and so we were pulled over a number of times and they were not too happy about it on more than one occasion. We had to talk our way out of it … I handed them some of our energy bars, you know, as a way of saying “hey guys, can you give us a break?”

Ed: And did you use your Kiwi accent, as opposed to the other one?

Phil: Well actually, we were travelling with an exCalifornia Highway Patrol Officer who was riding the motorbike, so as soon as they found out that he was CHiPs you know, they wanted to know what his motorbike was, they wanted to know all his history, so that actually really helped. I just left him to talk and charm his way out of it and he invited them for a ride when they come to California, so they were all happy.

Ed: Right, well back to the technical … you chose the F55 because?

Phil: Well in 2009, Louise and I made a film which was called The Ride and we shot it in HD. Initially, we did not intend to make a film, we were just making video blogs, and in the field, it was just me and a cameraman, our DOP Scott and he rode across America backwards shooting this film.

The blogs were so popular online, that people who were following asked us if we would cut it into a film.

So we ended up making a film when we, again, did not intend to make a film. Thankfully, we had the foresight to shoot it in HD and the film went on to actually earn over a million dollars and we gave the money away to the MS Society. We’ve raised over a million dollars for MS, and that’s why I did the ride in the first place, was to raise money and awareness for MS. So I’ve worked closely with Sony for a number of years and, what ended up happening was, we made a theatrical print from the HD material to play in theatres, Sony heard about it, saw the film and they said “listen, if you ever do another film and you have any intention of putting that film into a theatre, then you should really consider 4K.” At the time, I didn’t really think that 4K was practical to take out into a documentary situation to shoot, and to be honest with you, the new announcements yesterday about what they’ve done to the F55 would have really helped us while we were in France, because there were certain things that were vulnerable about the F55 for the type of “run and gun” shooting that we were doing on this documentary – (a) the vent was exposed at the back of the handle;

Sony would have the largest Press following at NAB. Page 18

(b) the XLR plugs were on the side of the camera rather than in the back; there were only two channels of audio, not four; the viewfinder connection onto the side of the camera came right into the camera at a right angle so it was very vulnerable; there was no mount for an onboard microphone; and the

Phil: They were in different trucks, yep you got it, but you know, this is one of the things that has changed so much from the old days, like when I started as a film camera assistant and I was literally loading film. First of all, you couldn’t see what you’d shot; secondly, you didn’t know if there was a problem until you got back and you actually exposed the film – whether there was a scratch on the emulsion or whether there was a hair in the gate. You didn’t know any of that stuff and then you would do your best to change the mags as fast as you could and then store them all away and you would stress out until it was exposed and everything was okay – especially if you were the camera assistant, because if there was a hair in Yes, it’s a genuine media scrum to get the best pic. the gate or a scratch, that was your fault. So working with digital media was awesome. white balance controls were not where they normally are in, say, an F800.

Every night, we had an editor/media manager/driver – Ed: To be fair, the F55 was designed as a cinema camera but you were not using it as a cinema camera?

Phil: Right, and so we had to make certain adaptations to the camera to make it work for “run and gun” documentary, even right down to the shoulder mount.

So yesterday, I was extremely excited to see that they’ve now configured the camera so that, when you’ve got it on your shoulder and you reach for the controls, it’s almost like you’re holding onto an F800.

Of course, you’re shooting in 4K. Now we went with XAVC codec S-Log rather than going with RAW. We would never have been able to shoot RAW, it would have been impossible, just way too much material. But of course, the proxy on the F55 is HD so there’ll be some places that we’ll deliver this product too that will go out as an HD film, but what we’re doing with this, because it has shelf life – it’s not like a reality show which really does not have a shelf life. A film like this, as we’ve seen with our other film, can have a shelf life indefinitely and so we thought it was worth the investment, it was worth the extra hassle of doing something that had never been done before. We didn’t know how the workflow was going to work; we didn’t know how the camera was going to hold up … it’s not like going in a studio at 20 degrees, perfect temperature, you’ve got all the time in the world. The reality is, you start off with a small box of a camera and then you start to add all the attachments onto it – a zoom control, a handle, a focus, rods and all of these things, and all of a sudden you end up with this very cumbersome looking beast, but when you’re shooting documentary, you’re shooting something where you don’t have the chance to stop and futz around with the camera, you’re moving, you need something that is robust. The camera never missed a beat and we never had any issues, we managed the media very well, we had somebody in the field who dealt with the downloading of all the cards every day – the SXS cards.

Ed:

he did a lot, we all wore many, many hats – he would cut these video blogs and we would post these at an even lower resolution to be able to go online. Just working with the files was great because we actually had our entire movie on one 4 terabyte drive – and then in the end, I think we shot with the 4K material, somewhere around 15-16 terabytes of material.

More from Phil and his plans next month.

So it was all onboard recording?

Phil: All onboard recording, the whole lot. We just had the little card readers and every night, we would come in and we would download the material and then make a backup overnight of all the material that we shot that day and we had two cases to separate our material …

Ed:

And they rode in different trucks?

Page 19

NZVN

Professional Audio and Video Solutions

www.protel.co.nz

Sony Price Reductions effective 1st July call Protel for details.

PXW-Z100 4K Handheld Memory Camcorder

I Both 4096x2160 and 3840x2160 resolution recording supported I XAVC recording format up to 4:2:2 10bit 4K 60p. All intra frame 600Mbps same as PMW-F55.

XAVC HD 223Mbps is supported. Upgrades will add 4K Long GOP and AVCHD 2.0 recording formats

I 30mm to 600mm 4K tuned G lens and 1/2.3 type Exmor R CMOS sensor I New high speed recording media XQD cards I ‘Wifi-remote’ - Focus, zoom, aperture, record start/stop controllable from the browser function of a smartphone or tablet

I 3G-HD SDI / HDMI output. HDMI has 4K output capability I ‘Paint function’ for picture adjustment, gamma curve, black level, skin detail, colour and other parameters

I Professional camcorder functions such as XLR Audio, ND filter, ASSIGN button , Slow and Quick (HD only) etc.

PMW-F55 CineAlta Digital Cinematography Camera

F55 Body Price Now $32,560+GST

PMW-F5 CineAlta Digital Cinematography Camera Super-sampling: Spectacular HD, 2K or 4K 4K/2K RAW options Vast exposure latitude Retaining maximum grayscale Center Scan mode Cache recording Viewfinders as revolutionary as the camera Modularity and versatility Shoulder-mount ENG/documentary dock Choice of recording formats High speed: 240 fps More than just a pretty interface The connections you need Long-life Olivine Battery Sony's 4K universe Sony cameras compared Sony camera accessories Connectivity, flexibility and longer cables

Shoot spectacular HD, 2K or 4K 4K on-board recording—and three other formats 4K/2K RAW options Electronic frame image scan Vast exposure latitude S-Gamut color system Retaining maximum grayscale Center Scan mode Cache recording Viewfinders as revolutionary as the camera Modularity and versatility Shoulder-mount ENG/documentary dock High speed: 240 fps More than just a pretty interface Real-time 4K output and other vital connections Long-life Olivine Battery Sony's 4K universe Sony cameras compared 4K live production via fiber adapter Sony camera accessories Connectivity, flexibility and longer cables

F5 Bundle Protel and Sony are pleased to offer two special discount bundles for the PMW-F5 with selected accessories.

New Price $18,480+GST See our website for more details

PLS – Dedolight Now we’re talking to a man who also enjoys buttons. I know the world has gone touchscreen and swipe this and swipe that, but pressing a good button – I say, “there’s nothing quite like it” but the button man of this hour is Dedo Weigert from Dedolight.

Ed: Dedo, we’re here at the show, lots of people, lots of lighting product, what have you got this year that wows the opposition?

Dedo: Everybody at every street corner has LED lights these days, so LED and digital and LCD displays seem to be what is more needed and more in the foreground than the art of lighting. We’re of course also in LED and that is what interests everybody. Our strength always was the breakthrough in optical systems. The Fresnel light with its spherical lens, lamp and reflector has never changed over the last hundred years. We were the first ones to add a second lens and then turn that into an aspherical system and then also add two extra motions to the focusing to give extended focusing range. At the same time, it’s the character of the light, and our focusing lights – we call them precision lighting instruments – the term “clean beam” is what is important. Totally smooth, even within the beam, nothing outside the beam. If you want to soften the edges of the beam, there are 23 different diffusion materials, but there’s not a single filter that will sharpen the beam. So we start with the highest degree of precision and that’s where you can find our lights, wherever the highest demands are for precision lighting like, let’s say, Harry Potter films – there are some Dedolights in the film for special purposes, but the special effects in Harry Potter are only Dedolight, nothing else.

Lord of the Rings same story.

In American Beauty, roses play a symbolic role … every single rose is lit by a Dedolight and so on. And we’re taking this technology that is being used for the highest budgets of blockbuster films down to the level of the street fighter.

Ed:

That’s me!

Dedo: The new guerrilla style producers, as one of our kids called them. When I started in this business, a BBC documentary team was 12 people. Same work is now done by two people or even one.

Ed: At this point, I’d like to make a comparison because of course, one of the big buzz words of this show is 4K and there’s so many people talking about 4K, but I’ve been talking especially to your friends at ARRI about their cameras, and they’re not 4K, because from their point of view, 4K resolution is just one part of the picture. There are so many other parts to the picture that make up a good picture, a quality picture, a picture with some feeling to it. Resolution is not that important, and if we make that comparison with lighting, it’s, as you say, “there’s a character to a Dedolight that other lights don’t have”.

Today’s cameras are very highly sensitive and very low light capable so you’re not after blindingly large quantities of light, you want character light?

Dedo: A lot of attention is being paid to counting pixels. Everything is digitised, but when we want to tell a story – and that’s what we’re all about – then images can contribute to the quality of a story and with lighting and images we can direct attention; we can transport moods in a way that involves one non-digitised instrument that is of utmost importance, and that’s the human eye. Learning to see and adding a little other non-digitised element, the human soul, and passion to your profession, that’s what we’re all about.

That cannot be qualified or quantified in figures and pixels and 422 and workflow.

Ed: And that’s why it’s important to have someone like PLS representing you in New Zealand, with a showroom, with a whole range of lights that you can go in with your camera and you can have a look, you can see for yourself how that light works and the end result of it, with your camera, what the picture looks like?

Dedo: Yes. It is some concept that I’m following that’s the educational approach, which is expensive, it takes time, it’s a lot of investment, but for me, it’s the best way to let people experience what they can do to improve their storytelling, their image quality, how to direct the attention of the viewer, how to be a magician, an illusionist, in trying to create the illusion of a threedimensional world from a picture that’s seen by a oneeyed camera, which can only give you two dimensions.

So we’re trying to transform that and that is part of the charm, part of the magic. Light is essential for that, just as much as the dark brother of light. You know, the shadow can also transport emotions and feelings to a huge extent, but without controlled light, you cannot build or create the shape to form the impression of your shadows and it’s the eye or it’s the lens that you’re using – the glass that is important … the focal length of it that limits the depth of field, lifts your object of desire out of the background. But with many of the modern cameras, you can’t do that, because the thousands of guerrilla style producers who bought their wonderful super capable camera at the duty free shop at the airport, they can take pictures without light … even in an American restaurant where I have great difficulties reading the menu, those cameras can shoot.

The images look brighter than what your eye can see, but the interpretation of our eye and the piece of glass in the camera and its focal length transforms it into this magic piece of image creation. I felt insulted when Sony last NAB said “our 4K camera, that’s not really needed for television, but it gives the creative freedom

Page 21

to do your framing in postproduction”. If you don’t know how to frame a shot, you should have remained a hairdresser. You don’t belong in this profession. But this is an old-fashioned attitude of a dinosaur when the image creators were a small exclusive club, part of circus people because there was a risk in it, you never knew how the image was going to come out after it was developed. Today you push the button, there it is.

There’s no charm, no secret, no magic to it.

Ed: But you can add the magic by the lighting can’t you?

Dedo: If you look a little bit deeper, all these elements, what your eye can do, what your soul can do, what your lens can do, what the lights can do, what your shadows can do, it’s all part of the tools that we can use to tell a good story. If the story is no good, the best pictures won’t help.

So it goes down to the motions that are not totally digitised yet. Fortunately, there’s no “plug in” in the computer to fix your soul.

The torments of your soul and the creative aspects in all that has not yet been digitised and it may take a little while until it is.

Until it comes to that, with the implanted chip replacing the deficiencies of our brain – until then, there’s hope for this wonderful profession as old-fashioned and dinosaur like all of that may sound.

Okay, to answer your first question, what we’ve done is that we’ve taken our revolutionary optical system and we’re applying it into the LED technology. That’s not so easy. Firstly, we had to find LEDs that will work with our optics. You can’t take any LED from a multi-LED panel light and stick it into an optical system … why, because there are different aspects to it that we didn’t know about, like “colour over angle”. At the edge of the

flood position, you have a different colour than you have in the centre. So we had to overcome that …

Ed: Is that because of the phosphor or because of the LED itself?

Dedo: It’s because of the phosphor layer where the central ray travels a shorter way than the angled ray going a longer way through the phosphor. What you see when it has rained and you see a rain puddle, you see these colours at the edge of it – same thing, quarter lambda shift giving you all the different colours.

But when we want uniform clean colour, edge to edge, then we have to overcome this colour over angle problem and then, once we have the right LED which took us five years to build the communication to the LED manufacturers – they didn’t talk our language, because they measure their LED in very expensive instruments, $100-150,000 instruments in an Ulbricht sphere, that’s a white ball that mixes everything up.

Ed:

I’ve seen the pictures, yes.

Dedo: Yes – but that has nothing to do with optical systems, we had to educate them so that we can start doing the same measurements, talk the same language, have the same understanding and that was a long and very uphill road. We now have LEDs, 10 Watt, 2x10 Watt, bicolour where you can change – great advantage of LEDs from tungsten. And we go further, we go from 2700K to over 6000 for very cool daylight, continuously, no steps in it, no presets, you can choose anything you want and also, another advantage is you can dim those things if you have good electronics.

Usually LED lights, when you come to the lower end of dimming, will behave a little bit “digital”. You see the steps in there and it’s unpleasant. Usually you can live more on page 25

Page 22

Dedolight DLED 4.1  Focusing LED Light Head  Daylight, Tungsten or BiColour Models  Mains or Battery Powered  Famous Dedo Optics  Output equal to 150W  Excellent Colour Rendition  Cool Running and Silent

Bring your camera down to our Cook Street showroom and try this beauty for yourself Phone: 09 302 4100

Email: info@kelpls.co.nz

Website: www.kelpls.co.nz

PRODUCTION | POST | VISUAL EFFECTS

BOOST YOUR PERFORMANCE DVT has the expertise and technology to help you improve quality, increase productivity and unleash your creativity.

速

www.dvt.co.nz

Digital Video Technologies (NZ) Ltd

|

P: 09 525 0788

|

E: sales@dvt.co.nz

|

45 Fairfax Ave Penrose, Auckland

with it, but in a studio you don’t want that. So we had to develop, especially for Disney, a 16 bit dimming process which now can go very smooth all the way down to zero.

That wasn’t easy, it’s very special software. Now we could even include any kind of dimming curve like a halogen lamp. Okay, dimming is an advantage, bicolour for the mobile team is a great advantage, but for the studio, I think those will be daylight. Why? Daylight LEDs give you 25% more light; the daylight can give, on the digital camera, a little deeper colour perception and the camera loves to shoot with 5000 Kelvin. When you go tungsten at the lower end, you may pick up a little noise. So now we have, for the mobile teams, 10 Watt, 20 Watt, 40 Watt, 90 Watt, 250 Watt LEDs and their power consumption is relatively low; their light efficiency is very high. That allows people to work those things by battery and that is a trend that we see – that even when you come to do an interview and there’s the plug in the wall, right there, people prefer to work it from a battery because it’s quicker, there are no cables on the ground. It is important that, all of a sudden, the doors to the biggest studios are wide open. Why? Because our 250 Watt

LED light, the 12.1 pushes out in flood, double the light over the ARRI L7 and also, what may be a consideration for a studio, the ARRI light is 10-12dbs noisier – it has a fan. We don’t want the word “fan” so we call it “active cooling”, sounds more moderate, yes?

But, active cooling in the studio? You want to be the quietest ever, because when you have 20, 30, 40 lights in there, that adds up. So that’s what we’re proud of. We have more light, same good colour quality as the best, and this is what we’ve been after. I cannot say that we’re the only ones on the planet who have the best LED colour, but with confidence, I can say that there’s nobody on this planet with better colour than us. We now reach CRI values 97, 98 and HMI was 92. Is that good enough?

No, because CRI is an old-fashioned standard from 1931; it includes only eight pastel colours, so today we have to work with “expanded CRI” including R9, the very valuable red, very important, and R13 skin colour.

Ed: Now just to clarify something, I understand that CRI is actually a human eye measure rather than a camera measure and shouldn’t we be measuring what the camera is looking at?

Dedo: That is why we transfer all these measurements and we do that right here, and we want all of our agents to do the same, into TLCI. That is a

standard that has been adopted by the European Broadcasting Union – Alan Roberts is the man from exBBC who is behind this, and that gives us a big step closer to the way cameras see it. But studio cameras are cameras with 3CCD sensors. Big step forward, great step closer to evaluating LED colour, but you’re not going to take any such camera to shoot your documentary in the Arctic. Those cameras are the small cameras and they have different sensors called CMOS sensors and, the beastly thing is that every CMOS sensor – even from the same manufacturer – sees LED light differently. They see daylight pretty much the same; they see halogen light, broad spectrum light pretty much the same.

With fluorescent, it’s nearly the same; with HMI nearly the same; with LED it’s vastly different. A Canon 5D Mark II will see an LED light green, but the Nikon does not see green. The Mark III Canon sees it more green, so what camera do you use? Now we have to take into consideration the different colour responses of different CMOS sensors and, even if you have, like the little producers with five EX3 cameras bought the same year in the same studio … on most of the light sources they agree; on LED they show different results. So even from the same manufacturers, same year, same type of camera, you will see some differences.

But the breakthrough that we’ve come to is that we’ve come up to a CRI value around 98 and a TLCI value that’s equally high and anything in TLCI that’s above 85 may need no correction. But we go even further, we shoot hundreds and thousands of tests with human faces and even there, we do those tests with Scandinavian skin tone, Mexican skin tone, Ben from Ethiopia, because they all react differently to light and colour and the reflection of light. So to take all this into consideration is a nightmare and you cannot build a different light source and a different lighting instrument for doing an interview with a guy from Angola rather than another black guy from Rwanda. Because even in black skin, you find differences in the reflection of the backlight.

Some show that as neutral, some show it more blue, but we’re trying to find a balance and respect the different responses of different CMOS sensors and, the higher up we go in colour value, the lesser come these differences, the better we can match when we shoot one side of the face with a reference light, the other one with our LED lights.

Ed: You say this is a nightmare but really that’s what you do … you’re at that end of the market where you are looking at providing a way to light for that fine detail?

Dedo: At the same time, we have to admit colour in our profession was never precise. It only existed in the schoolbooks. Tungsten light, 3200 Kelvin, you find in no studio because they know, if they under-volt their lamps, they last four times as long, so it goes down to 2900. Daylight is only in the books. I was shooting in Poland in a town called Katowice. In the Kodak book, it says, if you’re not up in the mountains, it’s June, no clouds in the sky, 12 o’clock, you have 5600 Kelvin. I pulled out my old-fashioned Minolta colour meter, it was 2800 Kelvin, candlelight colour temperature, a little bit of air pollution.

Daylight is a myth that can be influenced in many ways. So what do we take as a

Page 25

reference light? Open the roof on your car – is that daylight, which day, where, when?

So what we do is what is practical. If we can match halogen light – which we match at 3000, 3200, 3400 Kelvin – and if we can match the Kino Flo daylight lamp, which is about the cleanest colour in our business, then we have a chance to survive in the professional world and that’s what we do every day. In the last five years, we’ve come a big step – that’s why I’m saying not only by CRI figures, TLCI figures, but in the thousands of practical camera tests that we do from the ALEXA, the RED, even to the Fuji, Canon, Nikon, Sony cameras – all the way; and the better we’re getting, the smaller these differences are getting.

And that is something that cannot really be qualified or quantified by the figures that are published on the Internet.

The next thing is light efficiency. We want to save the planet, use LED – they take no energy and give endless amounts of light. Yes, our panel lights take 24 Watt and they have more than double the light output of the Light Panels with 52 Watt. That’s not sales talk, that’s a bigger difference.

So the efficiency of light is important. But that brings us to the next subject and that is LM – lumen maintenance. You equip a studio with LED light, how

much light will you have in two years? So we work with LM80. What can we guarantee – how long will this give you light? At 80% of the original light, we are now at about 20,000 hours and what is beyond that we don’t know.

The next subject is colour maintenance. the same colour in a year or two? We change the LED every six months; we send somebody up the ladder to change

Page 26

Will it give us don’t want to don’t want to the LED every

three weeks. So the longevity of colour consistency is a very important subject and that has to do with the operating temperature in the LED. People think LEDs make no heat. 85% of the energy in LED goes to heat.

But if you have a halogen lamp at 2923 centigrade – what is that 3200 Kelvin – it’s happy, it dances. If you have an LED at 85 centigrade, it’s at its utmost limit, it loses colour, it loses output. Warm it up further to 100 centigrade, it’s dead, goodbye. But if you operate it at 85, you’re not going to have much fun with it. So we’re trying to keep it at 65, and that takes modern cooling technologies and we’re very proud that everything up to our 90 Watt lights is passively cooled, no fan, no noise.

In active cooling, we may be the quietest, but we’re 8X quieter than one of our most famous competitors. And that doesn’t all come overnight and on its own. That’s what we’re proud of, that’s what we’re presenting, are people willing to listen to it … no. Because most people think LED is one big pot of goulash – you stir it, it’s all the same.

that’s double the output of the AREA 48, gives us 210 LUX. Of course, double the money of my light, so for the big studio, the Ledrama offers 25 LUX per Watt and the other lights offer 5.5, 5 and 4 LUX per Watt over that distance. So that’s a difference that is bigger than the sales tax. It augments the focusing 250 Watt light that was also built for big distance, high light output, highly controllable, big focus range.

Now if a TV channel wants to go all LED, we have already equipped many studios like the one from the United Nations, Al Jazeera studios, Brazilian studios with the Felloni lights, hundreds of them, mixed in with our 40 Watt and 90 Watt focusing lights. It’s a nice practical mix depending on what character of lighting you want in the studio, and now the bigger studios have opened doors for us and we’re now building the same for mobile drama. It’s a heavy light, not for the handbag. It’s a heavy light that’s for studios or for lighting trucks, for mobile drama and we have that in bicolour, the same big range of adjusting colour temperature and the same high output.

Ed: Well let’s hope we can convince our readersNZVN that quality is important – and not just quantity. Now everyone wants to know about new product from Dedolight at the show, what are we looking at now?

Ed: Let’s just finish off with that bicolour. In talking with you and talking about daylight not being always 5600K, if you’re in a polluted atmosphere, just for example, you’re in Beijing and you’re doing a shoot, having something that has adjustable colour is so important, because you’re not just going to light a scene, you actually want to match the background light as well don’t you?

Dedo: The full range of the five focusing Dedolights – 10 Watt, 20, 40, 90, 250 Watt; double aspheric optics, good performance in daylight, in tungsten and in bicolour. Then we have the panel lights where the Felloni 2 that we’re introducing now, gives us for the same power consumption, 25% more light, and we’re introducing the utmost in colour, the Dedo Colour

Felloni. With the Felloni 2, everybody has been very happy, but the Dedo Colour is for the highest demands in colour rendition TLCI and so on; and also for the big studios, we have a completely new light called Ledrama.

That is a huge multi-LED panel light that has a tremendous reach for the big studios. Let’s compare – the Ledrama at 6 metre distance. It gives us 720 LUX; the Celeb 200 from Kino Flo, which is a beautiful light, gives us 60 LUX. So we’re 12X more power efficient over the big distances. The Celeb is beautiful for mobile drama or anything up to 3 metre distance, perfect, smooth, wonderful, highly controllable, super professional light. The Cineo and the BB&S also have 160 degree angle light output, which does not make them very suitable for a large throw. So the Cineo HS,

Dedo: Yes, it’s not only in polluted air where the colour goes down holding the handrail of the Planck curve, the black body curve. But then, you come into some office that is lit with fluorescent and you have about 4300 “maybe Kelvin”, but a beastly green.

So you add a green filter to the LED light, like a quarter or one-eighth plus green, you do your white balance on the image important area, like on the face, and the rest is beastly green. So matching up and down the Kelvin scale is one thing and then filtering, or theoretically, you could do it with multicolour LEDs where you choose your colour coordinates, but then you need red, green, blue, white and amber – five colours, you need five controllers and maybe you need five sensors to control the controllers and that brings pretty complicated technology like Gecko had developed in England – a very sophisticated system, but you pay more in price, you pay for it in light output, you get less light.

Ed: So in that situation it’s better not to use the local light but to produce your own?

Dedo: The reality today is for the smallest team you have to make it match with everything that you find and then add something that gives the added creative value.

Ed: A slight green colour to the face perhaps?

Dedo:

Why not.

If you want to avoid green faces in your next Beijing production, give PLS a call and try out some Dedolights.

Page 27

NZVN

PLS – ARRI We’re at ARRI but we’re talking lighting for PLS with Stefan Sedlmeier.

Ed: Stefan, lighting, we could crossover to what we were just talking about with the cinematographic look of the ARRI cameras because, I guess, it’s a big help to both sides of the business – you do lighting, you do cameras, you can adjust either according to the knowledge of the lighting people and the knowledge of the camera people who work at ARRI? Stefan: This is exactly right. In terms of lighting, I think it’s quite important to understand that, when you Stefan at ARRI’s NAB lighting booth. have highly sensitive C – “C” for colour controllable so you can tune the light cameras, you still need good lighting for setting high engine between 2,800 and 10,000 Kelvin. And then we contrast in the scene to really bring background and have the L5-T for tungsten, but it’s also a tuneable foreground … tungsten; and the L5-D for tuneable daylight.

Ed: And it’s not just bright lighting is it – it’s not now throwing tonnes of light at it, it’s good lighting?

Ed:

Stefan: Correct.

It’s not about having bright punchy lights it’s about really setting the scene with the atmosphere you want to achieve for the audience who is later on watching the movie or the commercial. In terms of lighting, I think it’s quite important to understand that there is a quality aim or a quality perception in lighting, especially in LED lighting. The advice I give to customers is, when you judge quality of LED lights, look through a camera; use a CMOS camera, it can be a DSLR or a motion picture camera like the ALEXA, because to the human eye, they all look okay, they all make light, but you see the bandwidth of the red, green and blue spectrum and therefore how is the white generated? Suddenly you see that certain colour tones are less saturated than others; suddenly you see that skin tones are not represented as they should, look through a viewfinder of a digital camera when you judge LED lighting. We run workshops and we also compare different manufacturers. We are quite keen on a good colour rendering index – tungsten never had this problem because they always had a wide spectrum or HMI for daylight. LED has sometimes a peak in green when you have cheap Chinese LEDs – they all make bright light, but they don’t give a nice spectrum, so they have a peak around the green, but they have quite a dramatic falloff against red and blue, so when you film a colour test chart like the Macbeth Colour Checker and have all colours, especially the ones which are a little bit at the edge of the spectrum, then you see that it’s not a proper exposure, not in terms of brightness, but in terms of colour rendering. It’s quite important.

Stefan: The number is usually the front lens diameter in inches of the Fresnel, so it’s a 5 inch Fresnel. Its equivalent to a 500 Watt tungsten, power consumption is just 115 Watt, light output is about 500 Watt. Of course LEDs they don’t do much heat, they are very efficient and the L5 is also very lightweight and compact and can also be powered by battery. So this is new, it has a battery input, so it can be powered by DC; it has implemented DMX control and has the same colour quality like the big brother, the L7 series. I should mention that we have a very big passion for lights.

At our factory in Germany, every year we manufacture 60,000 fixtures – 60,000. This is the number of lights which we manufacture and distribute.

This is everything from the 150 Watt small tungsten to the 18K ARRIMAX HMI and everything in between – all the different models, you can have them in black or silver, for stage and event lighting, pole operated, hanging … so any different accessories, DMX control, studio cool fluorescent, any kind of application, different barn doors, egg crates and yes, we are still manufacturing lighting and it is still important also for architectural lighting, stage lighting, but of course for storytelling as well. It’s as important as the camera. If you say your camera is very sensitive I don’t need light, yes you maybe don’t need light in terms of exposure, but you need light to set dramaturgy – to use it for creation of a certain atmosphere in the motion picture.

Ed: So you’re producing LED lights yourself now – what developments have there been since IBC? Stefan: We have a new L7-DT which is an L7 daylight tuneable so it’s a variable colour temperature daylight LED, the L7-DT and we have a small brother to that – this is the L5. It comes in three flavours, the L5-

Does the number give an idea of the Wattage?

Ed: And that’s where it’s so good having someone like Chris at PLS set up in a studio with the equipment that he’s got, so that he can set up a light to show you exactly what it does and how it does it and explain this?

Stefan: I’m so happy that we have Chris McKenzie on board, Professional Lighting Services New Zealand, because we do good business with him and it’s also a passionate business because it’s not just about selling products, but consulting the customers with the right

Page 28

NEW 800 W ARRI M8 ROUNDS OUT M-SERIES

Lens-less MAX Technology      

Extremely Bright Highly mobile fixture Smallest ‘MAX reflector’ lamphead Focusable between 15° and 62° Flicker-free operation at 1,000 Hz Lightweight and compact

The Arri M8 is the latest and smallest lighting fixture in ARRI’s highly successful M-Series of HMI lampheads.

Like the rest of the M-Series available from PLS, the M8 is equipped with MAX Technology, an award-winning reflector design that unifies the benefits of a Fresnel and a PAR fixture.

This reflector, combined with an open face design, makes the M8 exceptionally bright.

The light output from its 800 W lamp comes close to the output from a 1,200 W PAR! PLS now have the; M8, M18, M40, & M90 at our Cook Street premise, this comprehensive daylight toolset comprising state-of-the-art, highest quality lampheads offers a range of 7 evenly-staggered wattage options from 800 W up to 9,000 W Also available in the M-Series is the Arrimax M18k/12k – talk to us about a quote.

Phone: 09 302 4100

Email: info@kelpls.co.nz

Website: www.kelpls.co.nz

ceiling, if you have them on a motorised stirrup you never need to climb up in the rig anymore, because they’re basically self-contained, selfreliant, maintenance free and fully remote controlled.

Ed: But surely to maintain your reputation as quality lighting producers, you’ve got to make sure the LED produces the colour and the look that ARRI is famous for?

Stefan: Yes, it is quite complex to really manufacture good LED lights.

This starts with the design and its LED array, so these are preselected LEDs which are then consolidated onto the so called “light engine”.

advice and it’s like a camera or a car, you want to try it out first. It’s about consulting – look there’s such a big choice of available lighting, but then Chris works with all the gaffers and technicians and system integrators and this is what we need, the transfer of knowledge and to make information available, to have demo models, somebody might want to try it out for a week or so, and this is what keeps me going, this is the passion.

Ed: Is there now more of a shift towards LED with ARRI lights than the tungsten that you’re traditionally well known for?

Stefan: The interesting thing is that, since we launched the LED series like the L7, the total number of fixtures sold and shipped really went up and increased and tungsten is still selling strong, because for certain applications it is still a very attractively priced light, easy to run. LED lighting for studios, no operator so no challenge because you can fully integrate it into a DMX system for variable colour temperature, dimming, adjustable green magenta tilt, you can pre-program the set up, a long lifetime and also don’t forget about the cost saving in terms of air conditioning and power consumption and no light bulbs to be replaced, no cherry picker required because you put them up on the

NZVN ADVERTISING RATES

We also do a burn-in at the factory and the lights also get calibrated. So it is really something which is focused on good colour rendering index and long-term stability and we basically burn them in because, in electronics such as LEDs and power supplies, sometimes you have the so called “dead on arrivals”, so we help to catch them in the factory. Now we don’t want to ship them to any customers; and the ones which last the burn in with test and check, they will probably last for years. So quality and long-term reliability is very important and so far I think for Australia and New Zealand we have shipped about 100 LED L7 in the different models and this is still going strong.

Ed:

You haven’t had one back yet?

Stefan: We had some back, but these are more problems like power supply, sometimes very simple things, it’s the wrong handling.

In Australia, we have one customer who always pulls them out by using the power cord as a rope.

Sometimes it’s the customer not operating the equipment right, but this is part of the rental business that they just damage it; we do a lot of repair for our customers, but sometimes it’s not necessarily a product failure; sometimes it’s just “physical impact” I should call it.

NZVN

NZ Video News is posted free to New Zealand video production professionals - if you know someone in the business who would like NZVN too, tell them to write or phone us

Rates from April 2008 Advertisement A6 (must be set portrait) A5 (must be set landscape) A4 (must be set portrait) Spot colour - a supplement of Full colour - a supplement of Classified 40 words pre-paid cash Loose Inserts are accepted conditionally

NZVN AD RATES: - EXCLUDING GST $ 80 $140 for one $270 for two in the same issue $260 for one $250 each for more than one in the same issue $120 per A3 $420 per A3 $ 20 ($23 including GST)

AD COPY REQUIREMENTS: To qualify for listed rates, all copy and artwork must be submitted in photo copy ready form - black on white, as an Adobe PDF file - print optimised. Email to <finnzed@xtra.co.nz> AD DEADLINES:

SEE FRONT PAGE

Pay by cheque or direct credit to ANZ # 010242-0160111-00 Page 30

PHONE: (09) 360 8766

318 RICHMOND ROAD, GREY LYNN, AUCKLAND

PANAVISION SALES NEW ZEALAND SUPPORT SYSTEMS

LIGHTING SYSTEMS

BAGS & CASES

CAMERA SYSTEMS

BACKGROUND SYSTEMS

AUDIO / VISUAL

System ACE M�� � 4kg payload, 75mm bowl, 4.4kg weight, 78-169cm height range

System ACE L CF 6kg payload, 75mm bowl, 3.9kg weight, 79-170cm height range

Sachtler is a worldwide market leader of premium camera support systems for broadcast and cinematography production. Together with the hottest cameras by Sony, Blackmagic Design, Panasonic, ARRI, Canon etc., the fast, robust and reliable Sachtler tripod heads, tripods, pedestals and camera stabilizer systems engineered in Germany help cameramen all over the world to provide stunning footage.

DV StudioRig Photo follow focus for photo lenses with reverse gear to suit Nikon lenses

...for optical excellence Made in Germany

MB 456 Academy Double mattebox with two filter stages; up to 12mm focal length Cine 35, 135 format – 20mm, 1/3” HD – 2.6mm, 1/2” HD – 4mm, 2/3” – 5.2mm

Chrosziel designs, develops and manufactures precision mechanical, optical and electronic products such as matteboxes, sun shades, fluid zoom drives and follow focus devices which meet the highest user expectations. Wireless control systems such as DigiFOX remote follow focus and Aladin multichannel lens control are unsurpassed in reliability and precision. Chrosziel also make service and testing equipment; the Universal CamCollimator, the Autoreflex Collimator and the Test-Projector MK5. �

Professional video fluid heads, Alu and CF tripods, Dollies and other accessories manfrotto.com

WWW.PANAVISION.CO.NZ