NZVN June 2014

JUNE 2014

NAB 2014 Part Two

Well,

if you thought Part One was packed with goodies, you can look forward to more in Part Two. The great thing

Vol 203

about NAB is the variety – there’s something for everyone. Someone may be about to make the move into 4K cinema recording. They can get a taste of what’s on offer and so educate themselves as to where they might like to investigate further. Another might realise that adding a streaming service to what they do might not be so challenging after all. And then there will be someone who reads of a product or service that they had never even thought of, that provides a solution to something that’s been nagging them for years. Yes, it’s a bit like a “goodie bag” – you never quite know what’s in it until you put your hand in. Sadly, we can’t put every story in as soon as it’s “hot news” so a couple of NAB interviews and recent events in New Zealand will have to wait until July – but well worth waiting for I promise you.

Now, let’s get June underway and I’m sure most of you will agree with my choice of cover photo. With many thanks to our cover sponsors, you get her in full colour – but do read the article too. Enjoy.

Ed

Protel – Atomos

It took a lot of smooth talk to get Tony to agree to having this pic taken. “But what if my wife sees it?” was his concern. We’re impressed.

It took a lot of smooth talk to get Tony to agree to having this pic taken. “But what if my wife sees it?” was his concern. We’re impressed.

For Protel, we’re at Atomos with a real Ocker in Tony Trent.

Ed: Tony, you’ve got the Devil’s girlfriend on the stand there, what’s the idea of that?

Tony: We have to point our cameras at something, so we thought we’d do something where we can really explore the detail and immerse ourselves in the differences in colour – we’ve chosen wisely don’t you think?

Ed: I reckon – there’s a good turnout at your stand, that’s for sure. So what have we got here?

Tony: We’ve had the Samurai Blade for a while; Ninja Blade is a recent addition. In the same way a Ninja is an HDMI field recorder, it takes the better screen of a Samurai Blade and adds in HDMI. So now they’re real simple – Samurai is for SDI and Ninja is for HDMI. That’s a recent addition, but the new stuff for this show is really from that base. That’s really what we’re famous for, this all-in-one monitor and field recorder.

Now we’ve branched out into two ways, both equally exciting I think.

The Ninja Star takes the internals of a Ninja Blade, so it takes all that grade off the sensor, 422 at the ProRes

recording, but takes away the monitor. At a price point of US$295, you’re getting ProRes essentially in your pocket. I’ll take you over and show you, but the form factor is really small. It means that if you’ve already got a monitor that you really like, you can just use that to do ProRes recording or, because it’s so small and light now, you can put it on an action cam like a GoPro or a helicopter and you’re getting ProRes recording on those devices as well. So that is really exciting. I’ve even had guys come through who have explained to me just the fact that it has physical buttons, if you’re filming in really hot locations and you don’t want to have to use a touchscreen, just having physical buttons is a real plus as well. So that’s something I didn’t think of.

Ed: I like physical buttons. I also like the idea of the monitor, but is it a confidence monitor?

Tony: Yes, the Ninja 2 is definitely a confidence monitor. However, depending on the camera and the overall production value, these can be used as a genuine monitor.

It’s got waveform analysis, zebra, focus peaking, so you can use it as a monitor function.

Ed: So are you actually seeing the output, or are you seeing the signal that’s going in when you’re looking at the monitor?

Tony: It still loops through the camera as well, but it just takes it straight off the sensor here, so you’re seeing the image straight off the sensor on a high resolution screen, essentially that’s what it is. So it does a good job as a monitor as well – the Ninja 2 is a confidence monitor, but this one here you’re definitely getting the dual function of higher quality recording and a good quality monitor at the same time.

Ed: But hang on, you say the Ninja 2’s a confidence monitor, there’s no picture you’re showing on it though?

Tony: You can see here this operates on our latest operating system, OS5, so it allows you to have an overlay on the actual thing. This is a menu, so where that one is the previous generation of OS, that has to go into that mode if you like.

Ed: I see, once it’s in the mode, then you see the image?

Tony: You come out of the menu … you can see there that it’s got three buttons, record, play and menu; and this has four – monitor – so you actually have the toggle between going to the monitor or back to this menu, so that’s the reason.

Ed: Now, just a worthy note here, these devices are not triggered by the camera, they are triggered separately from the screen itself or from the keypad to record, stop, play or whatever. So your camera can continue to record on its own media and you can just record the bits that you want, or not. Okay, moving on to the new stuff, what do you mean by “Shogun 4K under 2K”?

Tony: We’re going to give you 4K for under $2000 – that’s what we’re going to do for later in the year. It’s going to be around the September timing, end of third quarter calendar year into fourth quarter. That’s the plan. This is really geared around all of the camera brands now launching 4K product, but what you’re finding is, because of the size expectation with storage of 4K, a lot of them are giving you that 4K just as an

output.

A classic one is the Sony model the Alpha 7S that was launched last night.

They actually launched it in conjunction with us, so our product was launched at the Sony launch because it’s a 4K camera, a beautiful camera and that, but all of that 4K comes out only via the HDMI. So they need a Shogun that can record in 4K as a pair for it to make sure it goes hand in hand. Apart from that, it’s a very clever monitor as well. If you just want to do 1080 HD, you can do up to 120 frames per second, so it’s good super slow mo; it’s got HDMI in and out and it’s also got SDI in and out and a converter inside, so you can have HDMI in SDI out, or SDI in and HDMI out and it’s got balanced XLR on the side as well, so that would split out to a pair so that you could have balanced audio coming into it. And it’s got all those other pieces that we talked about in terms of flexible …

Ed: Which is ideal for a DSLR that has its own pretty crummy microphone?

Tony: Oh yes, absolutely. So that’s going to be launched later on in the year. But we should talk about what the actual media is – that’s a really important point with Atomos as well. We don’t force consumers into their own proprietary hard drive or solid state drive that might be more expensive than what you can get at Amazon or places like that. We’ve got a little caddy that just slots in and you’ve got the choice of either solid state or spinning disc to go in there and you can choose what size you want and what price you’re going to get it for. We’ve got a list of recommended drives on our website that tell you how to do it. So it’s a very flexible system to be able to take advantage of probably the weakest link out of all these beautiful cameras – they’ve got lovely lenses, great sensors, and their weakness is when they crunch everything down to 8 bit for their own storage, and we pick up on that and make devices to make your own camera better.

Ed: And they’re compact devices?

Tony: Yeah, they’re quite small. You want your photo with the little painted devil?

Ed: No, our readers expect more culture from their editor – I’ll take the pic, you have a go.

NZVN

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

Lots more from NAB 2014 Page 3

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Protel – Digital Rapids For Protel, we’re at Digital Rapids which we just heard has been bought by Imagine Communications, but that’s not going to make any change to the work that has been going on and will be going on from the guys at Digital Rapids and to tell us what they’ve been up to we have Mike Mann.

Ed: Now Mike, we’re shortly going to talk about products that you’ve launched or improvements that you’ve made since the last NAB show, but what I’d like to start with is to clarify what your company does. My understanding is that you are in the realm of delivering content to a whole variety of devices and, when we look at the stand here, we can see just some of them.

That’s basically what you do isn’t it?

Mike: It is. We actually started the company back in 2001 on the vision that “TV” was going to be delivered over IP networks. Now of course, we didn’t envisage that there would be devices such as tablets and so forth back then, but things like mobile phones, things like PCs and so forth. So we’ve built up our architecture over the years, fully focused on the idea that it would be a “multiscreen world” as they now call it. Now for us, anything from Smart TVs and game consoles, tablets and phones to PCs and the living room television set – that’s all part of our focus and making sure that all of our solutions can target all of those devices at the same time.

Ed: And this is something that, if you’re a small operator, you can take a project and you can crunch the numbers in your PC and make various copies in a whole variety of file formats, but the Digital Rapids product enables you to take in one file and distribute it to a whole range immediately?

Mike: Precisely.

You could do anything from small volumes as you said – you know, one file, to high volumes. We have fully scalable solutions that we have customers doing 10,000 files a week. But the idea is “one in, many out” because all the different devices … I mean, even if you talk about one device category like mobile phones, there are so many different variances between them, between IOS devices and Android devices and optimal screen resolutions and so forth, so that we have customers who are creating literally 50 different variants for each piece of content, just to have optimised delivery for each of those target devices.

Ed: And I see also on the screen here that there’s a whole range of channel partners that have approved your system for delivery of their material?

Mike: We’ve got the channel partners, we’ve got technology partners, but you know, we’ve got a huge presence in the median entertainment space as the gold standard for creating all these different multiscreen outputs.

We have a fantastic reputation for not only quality, but also being able to conform to all these different device types and for our software solutions – software based solutions to adapt to all the new different device types that are coming and all the new different formats on the fly.

That’s a really big thing actually for media organisations today, because even though yes, we talk about standardisation efforts, every year brings a new format, a new target device, new opportunities for people, and you want to be able to very quickly adapt to those.

So we’ve actually done a lot of work over the last couple of years on our software platform to make it even more adaptable than it has been in the past. So an operator, if they need to go to HEVC or MPEG-Dash, can very quickly integrate that new functionality without any disruption to their operations.

Ed: Okay, so how do people get these new codecs, because they’re coming out all the time … is it a simple download?

Mike: Well you have to pay for them in a lot of cases of course, it’s not quite as simple as just downloading it, but one of the keys for us is that we have moved away from our traditional software model shall we say. Like most companies, we were the kind of company that would have version 4.0 of the software, version 5.0 etc, etc … you know, two big software releases a year, each of which would have like 30 different new features. When you have that, one of the challenges for customers is that if you’re redeploying and upgrading that scale, if you have 10 systems, 20 systems, or you’re in the Cloud, that’s very cumbersome and disruptive to be doing all those upgrades. One of the things that we did with what we called the Kayak platform, is a very modular approach.

Now people have talked about modularity before, but we’ve taken it to a new level where we literally release individual features. So every two months, we’ve been releasing a batch of 20 or 30 new features that you can buy just for the features you need. You don’t have to do a full software upgrade. So that bit is beneficial for the customers in a couple of different respects. It makes the upgrade process a lot easier, because you’re just adding these new features or upgrading them, you don’t have to upgrade everything about it. The other great thing though is that a lot of customers don’t want to touch stuff that’s working; they want the new feature, but they don’t want something that might affect their old functionality, especially if they’ve got a certification like MPA certification where it’s all certified in a certain software version – they don’t want to touch it. So this allows the customers to just add or upgrade those individual functions they need without doing full wholesale software upgrades anymore.

Ed: That’s a very clever way to do it and I wish other companies would take that concept on too?

Mike: We’re okay with other companies not doing that, we’re okay with that being unique to us! That’s been a big thing for us too, because around the Kayak platform, we built a partner ecosystem – you were mentioning partners. A lot of these companies are developing these individual components to go right onto our platform and the great thing is they don’t have to wait for us on our schedules anymore to have the next big software release. You know, there’s a company we partnered with and we announced just before the show called Cinnafilm that does very high end software based standards conversion for file based workflows. The fantastic thing is they were able to do the development to the component completely themselves, using our SDK and as soon as they were ready, they didn’t have to wait for us to have a new software update, it was immediately available to go to market.

So that’s another value proposition of our new approach to software shall we say.

Page 4

Ed: Have you made any big changes in your hardware offer?

Mike: Well, one thing to keep in mind is that, even though we offer some of our things as appliance based form factors, which is the use case a lot of the customers want, at heart, they’re still software solutions. So even if you look at one of our rack mount encoders, all the brain power that’s going on in there is software based.

We did release a new appliance series called the EXs, the live encoders that we launched at IBC. We’re showcasing it here at this show again.

All the evolution since IBC of that product line though has happened on the software within it. That’s a full line of multiscreen encoding solutions, so again targeting all the different devices from tablets to mobile phones and so forth, for live and linear applications, so linear over the top channels, live event streaming and so forth. And we put a new DashBoard A small selection of devices to receive streaming. based interface on top of it. Now one of hood, so we can just start up using individual the really cool things, when we’re talking about the devices, is even if you’re already streaming, if you want components without it disrupting anything else going on to add another device type, you know if you’re a 24/7 operationally. channel, you could just add that new device type in the Ed: That’s gotta be good.

DashBoard without starting and stopping the unit all over again. So it doesn’t interrupt any of the existing Now Ken tells me Protel have supplied a number of streams that are going on.

Digital Rapids products for use by broadcasters and Ed: It’s a clever way to work. postproduction facilities in New Zealand so if you need Digital Rapids products or have a streaming Mike: It is, and again all enabled by the fact that requirement call Protel.

NZVN it’s powered by the same technology platform under the

Page 5

Protel – NewTek For Protel, we have Carter Holland from NewTek. Ed: To those who have been around a while, NewTek is famous for its Video Toaster many, many years ago, but you don’t call it the Toaster anymore, do you?

Carter: We don’t, we call it the TriCaster. So since NAB last year, we’ve been very, very busy. At IBC, we introduced a whole new line of TriCasters – professional TriCasters. That’s four products, so very quickly the products are the TriCaster 410, the 460, the 860 and the 8000. Now the 8000 had existed before and we made major enhancements to that product, but the other three models were brand new.

All of those products have a core feature set that’s common across the board. So for example, all of the TriCasters have rows of Mix Effects and so one of the things that’s really compelling about that is that MEs allow you to do some very complex sequences and work on things in sort of an offline mode while you’re in, and then you can switch back and forth. Our trick for the 410, the price point for that is under US$10,000. You can’t find anywhere on the market a 4 ME system at that price point. But then on top of that, we offer ISO recording for all camera inputs on all of the devices. We offer virtual sets with realistic virtual camera movements that we’ve introduced. So no longer do you need any camera operators; our cameras can be controlled with a TriCaster. In addition to PTZ cameras that we support, or robotic cameras, we can do jib moves, panning, zooms, all of that.

We have something called Holographic Live Sets which in addition to the virtual sets we provide allows you to take any panoramic image – in fact you could shoot a panorama with your Smartphone, drop it into TriCaster and now have your set be that environment. You get the full masking, compositing layers that you would have in a virtual set environment, so it really opens the doors of possibility for where I want my show to take place.

Ed: And this is available over all four in the series?

Carter: All four of them as of last IBC. Ed: So basically the difference is the number of outputs or inputs?

Carter: That’s one primary difference, and then some of the capabilities in terms of, for example, we ship all TriCasters with a library of virtual sets. That content expands as you go up the line. We have other graphics capabilities that expand as you go up the line.

We’ve introduced a lot of control capability in a couple of ways – one is filming macros, so you can actually define a number of complex sequences ahead of time and execute those sequences with the push of a button.

So it takes a lot of that. You can preplan some complex events before your show and then that simplifies the execution during the show. On top of that, we’ve also introduced things like MIDI support.

Carter: A part of that clip – all of that could be controlled actually by somebody else. If I wanted to bring in somebody to just work on publishing social media clips, I can do it directly from the control servers, but if I’ve got a lot of complex operations, I can bring in a colleague of mine who can do the same thing. And all of these capabilities span all four of those systems. So a lot to talk about there and the sort of theme behind it all is that the TriCasters have super powers, that’s what we talked about at IBC. Ed: I see, unlike the presenting couple on stage, you’re not wearing a tight costume with an “N” on your belt?

Carter: No, I’m not.

Ed: They tried to get you to do that did they?

Carter:

No they didn’t.

So any device that is MIDI capable, you can connect to a TriCaster and control it.

I can actually download a MIDI app on my iPad and, let’s say I wanted to execute a simple switch from camera one to camera three, somebody can control that from my iPad. We have also media publishing features right within the TriCaster, so I can mark an in-point and an out-point while my show is going on and just with the push of one button, publish that clip to YouTube or Twitter …

Ed:

A part of that clip?

The presenters were in tight body suits with big “N”s as buckles.

Page 6

Ed:

Oh okay, you must be the boss?

Carter: You could say I had a little influence on the outcome of that. So at NAB this year, we’ve launched a new line of our 3Play systems. Now 3Play is our integrated sports production product.

Essentially, a lot of companies make replay products that are focused on replay in slow motion, but they do so in terms of how linear tape-based replay used to be done. We’re not looking at it that way.

We have a completely different approach, similar to what we do with the TriCaster, which is when we look at all of the things that go into a creating a live sports production, how can we take those capabilities and put them into a 3Play, including replay in slow motion, but you know lower third titles and motion graphic transitions – and you know what, even a switcher, if I didn’t have a TriCaster or a switcher, I could now switch a multi-camera show with a 3Play system. So we’ve taken those super powers if you will and added them to 3Play. We’ve enhanced our top of the line 3Play 4800 with these new capabilities – that’s just under US$40,000.

We’ve introduced a new replay model, the 3Play 440, which is a four input device that has pretty much the same software capabilities as the 4800, but it’s a smaller more compact device, more mobile. That price point is US$24,995. And we have a 3Play 425 system which is also a four channel – a little less of the new capabilities, but it’s under US$10,000. Now replay, four or five years ago, a four camera replay solution device – six figures, well into the six figures to get that.

Ed: And are any of these upgradeable?

Carter: The 440 and the 4800 are upgradeable, but the 425 is not. The 425 has been in the market for probably three years and so for us we see a huge opportunity where replay was never affordable in schools and local teams and sporting events …

Ed: You keep the basic one there, so you can keep the price point?

Carter: Exactly.

Ed: So where does the “3” in the 3Play come from?

Carter: The 3 in the 3Play is really a creative name around when we first introduced the product in terms of “replay” … 3Play had a good ring to it.

Ed: So you don’t want to advance on that?

Carter: Well you know the number 3 is actually a small number in terms of all the things that a 3Play can

do, but it’s been gaining significant traction in the marketplace as a sports production system, so we feel it’s a good name that fits for a sports production.

Ed: I have to say that the market is getting fuller and fuller of this type of product, the “television station in a box”, which I think was a name that you guys coined many years ago, but others have taken it onboard. The market’s filling up, but it seems as though your point of difference is the MEs, that sort of extra technology that you add, so it’s not just a switcher?

Carter: That’s right.

As I said, we’re always looking at all the things that go into a live production, many different components, and saying how many of those can we pack into one system, to really streamline how much gear I need, or how many staff I need to produce a live show. In some cases, it is as simple as taking what 10 people used to do and having one person do it.

But, truth be told, some of these productions are complex, you know you’re doing an eight camera shoot and you’re publishing to social media, you’ve got a lot of challenges. One person is going to have their hands full, and so we’ve also made it easier for other people to join in with the things like automation and control that I’ve talked about, and I will say that we are starting to see other companies looking at how they integrate solutions into a turnkey system, and we actually think that’s pretty validating for the NZVN path that we’ve been on for decades.

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Panavision – Tiffen Filters For Panavision, we are at Tiffen Filters with Carey Duffy and Brett Smith from Tiffen Australia.

Ed: Carey I want to start by asking you about the hat.

This is a “show special” is it?

Carey: Yes, well you know what they say – “Get ahead, get a hat” – and it worked yesterday for me in our presales meeting. This is my hat, I always wear a hat – or I try to, because people don’t recognise me if I don’t wear a hat.

That’s why I camouflage myself. But I’m out on display today, full peacock!

Ed: Fantastic, but we’re going to talk about filters, and I see a new film look filter, in other words you’re taking a sharp image and you’re softening it?

Carey: Yes, we’ve been working very hard on ranges of diffusion because, as someone in Panavision London said the other day to me, “diffusion is king”.

Everybody, every cameraman’s looking for a “look” to define themselves. Everybody’s very used to the ALEXA look now, that sort of rules the world and people want to move away from it. We’ve got different resolutions coming out from different cameras and people want to be able to differentiate the look that they produce from other DPs and the biggest way of doing that now, for a DP, is obviously with glass, with lenses, and with filters.

So we’re pushing hard at selling that message to people and that film look has been born out of some new filters that we designed last year that we now have at the show this year. Some of the DPs who tested them said they had the film look. In fact, I had a lovely quote from Ben Davis BSc who is shooting Ultratron the Avengers – Marvel and from the Black Satins we designed, he said to me, and I can quote this as his testimonial, he said “Carey, by using these filters, it’s the first time I’ve felt digital’s moved into the realm of looking like film.” I said “thank you very much, take that to the bank.” We had the Pearlescents, which were a really luscious, sort of luxury look, very bright wide halations on them; and then we have the Satin range, the Black Satin and the regular Satin, and then we’ve got three new black filters that we’ll be coming out with this year just to give DPs a different look and different edge on whatever they’re using. Filters are a thing that DPs can own themselves, so if they want to make their look “their look”, they can own them – it’s not just down to the rental house all of the time. Obviously, rental houses get orders and they run out of stock, so you know we’re pushing this concept to rental houses and we’re pushing it to the DPs so they get to get the look they want.

Ed: And there’s no problem now with the size of the filter because you’re using …?

Carey: PV size, or 4x5.65 is the standard to cover most lenses. That’s what we’re doing on diffusion.

We’ve also got a range that we’re bringing to market of variable NDs which are professional size variable NDs taken out from the stills concept market with the explosion of the 5D four or five years ago, where people were using variable NDs in the stills market, for “run and gun” for motion capture on still cameras. We’ve brought to show here a 130A variable ND that goes in

the back of any matte box that accepts a 130A gonnah in the back end, so that’s very simple to use. And we’re also looking at a new LMB-5 Tri Clip on variable ND in a tray. I can’t show it to you, we’re just doing some final testing on it, but the 130A one is deliverable and it’s going to come out shortly. It’s a really cool tool.

Ed:

Now this is a very large filter?

Carey: Yes, it’s a 130A to go in the back of a LMB18, LMB-17 …

Ed: And you’ve got markings on the ring there to tell you what ND you’re at?

Carey: Well the ND changes over focal length and incident of light over the focal length of lens you use.

So a wide angle will only get a couple of stops out of it, and a longer standard or telephoto lens will get more stops out of it. It’s just the way that the physics of these two filters cross-polarising works. But it’s also a very quick tool. It’s really neutral; when you’re looking on a waveform you can quickly ND down because you can see on the waveform how much light you’re bringing down. It’s just a tool, and a lot of people have got used to using this tool and I wouldn’t say that oldschool DPs would necessarily be in favour of this, but a lot of younger DPs have to do all sorts of work, they get used to using variable NDs and so therefore they bring it into their workflow on bigger productions.

Ed:

And it’s a lot quicker?

Carey: It can be a lot quicker – you need to know what you’re doing with it, but any tool you’ve got to get used to using it, even a hammer.

Tim: Go to Panavision New Zealand for help.

Carey: with this.

Yes, they’ll know exactly what they’re doing

Ed: Okay, let’s just go back a bit to the Pearlescent film look filter. Why wouldn’t you just adjust the back focus a little bit to take it slightly out of focus?

Wouldn’t you get the same effect?

Carey: No, because the Pearlescent itself adds a halation to a light source as it lowers contrast, smoothes out skin detail that you may want to keep the apparent sharpness in your image. So all three of these have got film looks. If that’s just the feedback we got from DPs, it’s given them a film look in a digital world, and obviously that’s what projection or theatrical release DPs want or long-term dramas want; they want the film look. We’re working on digital formats, but everybody is used to the film look, which is why they’re

Page 8

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7,839

A$

having bigger sensors. I’m not talking shooting everything at T2 or T1.4 so you can’t get focus from your nose to your eye, but people want that look, that’s why they’re going with big sensors, and this just enhances the look, gives people their defined look down to their lighting technique as well. So the more tools there are the better. I liken it to paint, you know you can watercolour or oil paint, you have a palette and filters are a palette, they’re just a part of the palette; the other part of the palette is the glass and then there’s the sensor and matching them all up to get your end desired look.

Ed: So you get everything else right first and then you polish your look with a filter?

Carey: Well yes, or you get the filter and it helps you to polish your look.

One of the things is that people – you know this term’s been bandied around for many years now “fixing it in post” and I always say fix it in post, why did you shoot it broken, because “fixing” in terminology to me means something’s broken. You don’t want to shoot anything broken, you want to shoot it the best way you can. We had a show here in Vegas a few weeks back for the wedding and portrait photographers and the guys told me one of the strap lines they used as a sales pitch was “filters are like Photoshop on the front of your lens.” You know, you’re burning in that look, and film is very much like that when you’re working in continuity. You have a look and you have to address that look over a continuous piece of information that you’re filming and so therefore you don’t chop and change lenses that much … or if you do in post, it’s because you’re using a GoPro, you’re using C300, you’re using an ALEXA, using all those format cameras for different reasons, maybe to get into tight areas or fix on the side of cars, but then in post you try and make them look the same, it’s all to do with the workflow.

But if you can have three or four cameras, or two cameras that you’re shooting the same, be they a 5D, an F5 or whatever, you know filters can marry up a look and that saves time in post.

Post is expensive now we’re moving into 4K. You have massive data and it’s a lot of money.

Ed:

art shall we say, and so the differences now are much NZVN better explained between Carey and the visuals.

Panavision – O’Connor For Panavision, we are at O’Connor support systems with Steve Turner.

Ed: Now Steve, we’ve just taken a photo of you doing your muscle act, holding up a 209 pound capacity tripod with one finger and that must have been hard work?

And the filters to use are?

Carey:

From Tiffen.

Brett: Carey’s done a full 4K video that will be available to Panavision for Cinematographer Society functions where they can see the difference at 4K. Even on a Mac, if you de-resolve, you’re not going to see the subtleties, but for a DOP to come along on 4K and see that, then you will get the gaps between what Carey is saying in terms of description and the visual result. You can see there, that’s a simple thing with the halation on the lamps, but the subtle differences with Carey’s voiceover and those images in 4K complete the story. That’s the tool that we’ll be providing, as well as split filters, so Panavision can actually drop in and have a half size filter so they can see with/without on screen in the test room. So when they do the camera test before their production, they’ve actually got a split system that we’ve got – it’s a little box over there – and a choice of filters that they can actually test … like, don’t like, whatever, move on, or I need a higher density, that kind of thing. Because it is a subtle black Page 10

Ronford-Baker tripods, they’re a real pain, right, but this is lightweight, so it’s portable, so good for a location shoot and that kind of thing. We’ve just had it tested – it’s the most torsionally rigid tripod in its class, so if it’s a lightweight configuration tripod, if you apply a torque to it, it doesn’t twist up.

Ed: Which is especially important I’ve noticed with jib arms?

Steve: Yes, it will cope with jib arms and just anything actually when you’ve got a high drag on your head, so you want a real heavy friction feel. What you don’t want is for the tripod to wind up, because then when you stop and let go, it springs back off target.

Ed:

Yes, I have experienced that.

Steve: Other than that, we’re also launching our follow focus pro kits. The pro kits include absolutely everything you need to shoot regardless of the situation, so it will take 15mm lightweight rods – there’s a bridge in there for that – but also 15mm studio and 19mm studio. You get absolutely all of the gears that you need for all of the different lenses; you’ve got a friction driver for lenses that don’t have gears; you’ve got a whip in there for remote control and the whip actually has this quite nice little idler handle, so that you can get very precise finger control, because you isolate off this shaft here. And also uniquely you can plug the speed crank into the end of the whip, so that you can do remote fast follow focuses too, so it’s great.

Steve: It was relatively hard work. It’s our new lightweight Mitchell tripod, the 60L Mitchell, so it’s capable of taking a fully loaded, 25-75 pan and tilt head but, as you can see, I can lift it with one finger. You know the usual city tripods, like our own tripod and the

There’s been a lot of positive feedback on this. If you were to buy all these items, including the case with the custom forms, you’d be paying over US$1000 more than if you buy it in a kit, so it’s a good discount there.

What we want is for people to buy everything they actually need – and the only reason they don’t buy all this stuff all at once is because it’s a bit one-off expenditure. But now we’ve put a heavy discount on there to try and get people to take what they need.

This floor spreader is also new. We’ve now got a floor spreader for our 30L, 60L Mitchell and 60L and 150 spherical tripods too, because the city guys like it on the floor, put sandbags on it and that kind of thing. NZVN

Panavision – IDX For Panavision, we are at IDX and we are delighted to, once again, have Cathy Fercano to tell us what’s new.

Ed: Cathy, please start by telling me the two models we saw last year?

Cathy: Last year you saw our CW7 Wireless Transmission system which has a range of about 380 feet and zero frame delay because it’s uncompressed signal. The other system you saw last year was our CW -1, our HDMI type Wireless system with a range of 330 feet – again uncompressed signal so zero frame delay.

This year, we’re introducing our CW-3 which is a 3G HD -SDI system, the lightest 3G system on the market – you can feel that.

Ed:

It feels as though there’s nothing in there?

Cathy: Yes it does. This is a one-to-one system, so you can’t do multicast on this at this time. Again zero frame delay, about 380 to 410 feet line of sight.

We’re very excited about this. Like all of our wireless systems it’s “plug and play”, very, very easy to use.

Ed: So if the CW-3 and CW-7 have about the same range, why would you choose one over the other?

Cathy: Well because, with the CW-7, you can do multicast groupings. So you can use as many receivers Page 12

Cathy: Yes it will. Also we have enhanced the internal design of our new line-up of batteries. There are cradles and they’re designed to hold each cell securely to minimise movement and friction between the cells during use and transportation. So the enhanced internal design makes IDX’s new batteries the safest and most reliable professional batteries on the market.

Ed: I certainly see them in TV scrums where you’ve got News crews chasing after somebody … you quite often see IDX on the back of many of those cameras?

Cathy: Yes you do, because they can take the movement and the running – you know, kind of run and gun type environments. to a transmitter as you want.

You can also do groupings, you can use up to four transmitters with groupings that you dial into the frequency for each transmitter, so it gives you a lot more versatility.

Ed: Okay, so that’s in the large batteries. How are you going in the smaller ones?

Ed: So really you’ve got a transmitter and receiver for the whole range of cameras out there?

Cathy: The smaller ones – we’re actually not making any of the 7.4 Volt ones now. We do have two chargers out – an LC-2C for the Canon batteries; and LC-2S for the Sony batteries.

They are both two channel, simultaneous quick chargers, but because there are so many smaller profile cameras and the batteries are so different, and you can buy them anywhere now, we’ve decided to stay with our Endura line.

Cathy:

Ed:

Ed:

Does that take HD-SDI?

Cathy: SDI.

Ed:

The CW-3 is 3G HD-

Exactly.

The CW-3 street price is US$1880.

Wow, for a complete unit?

Cathy: For a complete unit, and for the cables also to come with it.

Ed:

So Cam-Wave is really progressing there?

Cathy: Yes it is. You know, we came out with wireless transmission, we were the first, and we just continue to explore new opportunities with wireless.

Ed:

Stuck to your knitting?

Cathy:

The rough price on the CW-3?

Cathy: Ed:

Yes, that’s HD-SDI.

And the IDX battery range?

Cathy: We have our Q-D95 battery. It’s 91 Watt, has one built-in DTap and four LED readouts for battery capacity. We also have the Q-D75 which is the same – one DTap, 73 Watt. We have the Q-D150 which is 146 Watt, again one DTap built-in and that also is a high load 10 Amp at 120 Watt; and we have our EHL 10DS which is 96 Watt, DTap built-in, also high power battery.

Now these batteries are very economical because we purchase ourselves through Sanyo, and because they’re seeing our competitiveness now within their market and we’ve been working with them for so many years, we’ve been able to reduce the costs, while maintaining the quality of the batteries. So these are top of the line and much more economical.

Ed: Another important thing is that the high load capability of some of these batteries is really important for some of the large sensor Hi Def and 4K cameras that are very power hungry?

Cathy: Absolutely. We see that as a total demand nowadays for the ALEXAs and the RED series of cameras.

Ed: So the Q–D150 will power an ALEXA, just one battery?

Page 13

Yes, exactly.

NZVN

Lacklands – Manfrotto We are at the Vitec Group for Lacklands and we’re looking at the Manfrotto product in the stands, lights and things with Will Holowka.

Ed: Will, you’ve been coming to many of these shows, probably almost as many as me, but you’ve still got a smile on your face and you’re still pleased with the way Manfrotto is developing product?

Will: The great thing about our company is that we are very much an innovative company. What we try to bring to the market is new innovations that hopefully make the life of the videographer in this case, photographer and motion picture guy, that much more user friendly. The new line of LEDs that we have here will hopefully address that. We’re really going after the independent videographer who wants value for their money and, at the same time, wants a quality product that’s going to be consistent, and that’s what they look for. We also developed some new products like stands.

We have a new stand that we’ve introduced here,NZVN first of its kind in the world; we also have a new tilt top that we’ve introduced – all related to the lighting side of the business. And then finally we’ve come up with a new clamp called a Pico Clamp for people who want to attach things to rails if they’re working with rigs, or camera pan bars if they’re working with tripods. So we always try to be innovative with what we come out with. What we’re looking at right now is the Spectra series, we have the Spectra LEDs, these are our pro level LEDs. We have our consumer entry level LEDs which we’ve had in the market for a couple of years.

Pro LEDs we start at US$169.99 price point. They work with double A batteries.

Will with the Nanopole stand.

Then we go up to a bicolour unit and these are onboard units. We have five onboard camera units and they start at US$169.99 and they go as high as US$469.99.

Then in our “one by one” range, we have a flood, a spot and we have a bicolour unit, and the nice thing about these particular units, we start at US$779 – we just announced a brand new price on them, and they go to US$1079.99 for the bicolour unit. The great thing is that they do come with AC; if you like though, there will be an adapter so you can plug it into a battery so you can have a different type of power source if needed.

Another great thing is they have a CRI of higher than 95 CRI and consistently – and that’s the big thing in the market. There are a lot of other units out there, we all know this, but the problem is the consistency during the day. They’re flicker-free at any setting, and the colour temperature is maintained at any setting and that’s the key.

Ed: And longevity is the other one – how long that phosphor will last?

Will: Indefinitely. That has to be key and with any of the products we make in this portfolio, the longevity will certainly be there in the LEDs that we’re using.

Ed: So lights are new for Manfrotto, but within the Vitec Group, you have Light Panels. How does that all fit in?

Will: Correct, you bring up a good point and the big thing here is that, at Manfrotto, we handle from Page 14

broadcast down; they handle from broadcast up. One of the differentiations between our LEDs and theirs is, for instance, our LEDs are not capable of being on a DMX board; theirs are. Again, they’re tailoring to a different type of customer that maybe sets them up and puts them in TV studios; we’re tailoring to a customer who is a “run and gun” type of customer, or the independent who wants to be able to have a solution to be portable to go on set, or go onto a location, or create a set. That’s what we’re bringing to the market with our LEDs, and that’s where we’re driving with right now.

Ed: Obviously, with the background of Manfrotto making stands, you have all the stands to go with them?

Will: Yes, as you are aware, we are known for our stands. We have everything from our Quick Stack stands to a brand new Nanopole stand. What’s really key on this particular stand from an innovation point of view, you look at it, it’s a light stand, it’s small – folded up it’s under 20 inches in length; it also has a levelling leg … but the cool part is, I can pull the column NZVN and I can hold my light up now without having another light stand. Then, when I’m ready to go back into the light stand, I just have to take it and put it back in, and now I’ve got a light stand again. This is an innovation that nobody has seen prior to this show. A very cool piece, rated for about four pounds. Human nature is human nature, we know people will try and put six on it – and it will take it.

anything with a cold shoe mount or a hot shoe mount will mount on the top of this adapter.

The great thing is, for instance, there’s a lot of people who like to get a light up high, so the beauty of the Nanopole stand is we can take the pole, separate it, and now we can have the person hold the light up high if they desire, and they already have an access point to mount the light on top by using the quick connect that’s available on the Snap Tilthead.

Here’s one other cool product, a new product called the Pico Clamp. What’s very cool about this, is this will

Ed: And it has that very versatile Manfrotto function of if you’ve got a number of them, they all clip together?

Will: Not in this case.

Ed:

Oh no!

Will: We still have the Quick Stack family – the Quick Stack is a different family, but this Nanopole is designed for the person who wants something that will go into the luggage or go into a kit and it’s under 20 inches in length.

Ed:

It’s a very portable and capable little stand?

Will: The Nano stand is one of our most popular stands and we sell a number of them throughout the year; with this new feature I think we’ll sell even more. Added to that family, we’ve introduced on the top of the Nano stand, a brand new technology called a Snap head and the cool thing about this is, when you put it on, you just kind of push it down and it locks.

Again, these two items happen to be patented and the nice thing is when you do that, you just take it and you lock it in place like so.

Ed: And what’s that to hold?

Snap head action.

Will: The nice thing is you can put an LED on the top here; you can put a flash on here if you’re a photographer;

mount anything from 8 to 15mm in diameter; it will hold just over a 4½ pound load.

It comes with a little screw called a 147, which is threeeighths and quarter-twenty and allows you to mount monitor arms, allows you to mount anything that you desire or you need to have – either on a rig system or on a light stand or on a pan bar, and you’re doing it with this nice little clamp. This allows you to mount lots of items around the camera. The great thing is also an amazing price point of US$29.99.

Ed: Wow. Well that’s it – in the past I’ve done stories about Manfrotto and the huge variety of clamps that are available for the video and the photographic market, and it really is a case of if you’ve got a situation, you can find a clamp arrangement that will solve it?

Will: Right and the big thing is that, what we bring to the market is a lot of widgets and gadgets that get you out of trouble, and people look at them and right after that they may not have an idea for it, but then things click and all of a sudden an idea comes and they say “hey I have an application for that.”

That’s what we try to do, is we innovate and develop new products.

Ed:

And it’s red and black and very cool?

Will: Correct. Anodised red, nicely done, it reflects our heritage of the red that we’ve always had in the Manfrotto world.

Page 15

And now we continue with Jodi Palm – the tripod lady.

Now for the Manfrotto bags we have Paul Zakrzewski.

Ed:

Ed: We’re here to see what’s new in Manfrotto bags but, for those of you who don’t realise it, Manfrotto have purchased Kata, so the Kata bags are now branded Manfrotto and they’ve undergone a colour change – you’ve taken away the yellow, they are now grey and black with a little bit of red highlighting. So you’ve done that to the bags, but there’s still the same Kata quality in there, the same materials, the same wonderful parachute zippers, clips, clamps, all the bits and pieces, but you have made some improvements?

Jodi, one special new tripod this year?

Paul: Absolutely. So what we’ve done is that, in October, we launched our Pro line of camera bags, specifically for the photo industry, but as you know, with the prevalence of DSLR usage within the video industry, we actually feel like these bags are a very nice addition to the video line.

We learnt a lot by introducing these pro camera bags here, and we’ve incorporated a lot of the technology out of these bags into the video bags. So two things – we have what’s called the Exo-tough, which is a compressed foam exterior coated with material, which starts out at about four inches of foam, and through a heat process, we compress it down to about an eighth of an inch. What that gives you is a very strong, but at the same time, very flexible exterior. Now our feeling is, when you have a camera bag, your gear should not be the support structure for your camera bag, and with a lot of our competitors, there is no support structure until you put your gear in the bag. With these – and it’s kind of hard, but when you press down on this bag, you compress that as hard as you want and you are not going to compress the bag. That is a combination of

Jodi: Yes, we have the new 535 aluminium tripod.

Previously, we had a carbon fibre version and what we’ve done this year is we’ve launched an aluminium version.

This now actually rounds out our entire Bridging Technology series with an aluminium single leg tripod to go with the current club and twin leg tripods that we have.

Ed:

A single leg tripod – this has got three?

Jodi: Instead of our previous midi tripods, as we called them, that would have twin tubes on each leg, this is a single tube per each leg.

Ed:

Right, okay – but how high can it go?

Jodi: It goes to about 7 feet tall, it folds up to four sections, so it folds up a little bit smaller than what the previous carbon fibre did, but it still gives you a full size tripod.

Ed: And I guess the aluminium is a little heavier than the carbon fibre, but it’s considerably cheaper?

Jodi: Yes. It’s about 2½ pounds heavier than the carbon when you have a head on top of it, but what it does is it gives us price ranges from US$380 up to US$799 for a standalone tripod or a full kitted solution.

Ed:

So it’s customer’s choice?

Jodi: Yes. Page 17

what we call the Exo-tough exterior protection, but then you have what we call the camera protection system. What it almost does is that it works like an I-beam and it creates a line of protection down the centre of the bag, denoted by all the red.

So anywhere where you see red, that is where your Exo-tough construction is.

It’s the same material as this exterior, but used on the inside.

Ed: I can attest to the fact that it is very flexible laterally, but when you put any vertical load on it, it’s as solid as.

them actually for the first time anywhere here at NAB. And then we also have a set of roller bags.

We know that light stands are a videographer’s best friend, so we have three rolling bags which again incorporate all these same structural improvements and come in three different sizes because, as we all know, of the different size light stands that a videographer will choose to use, so we make one for each.

They’re fully checkable from an airline standpoint and also have locking mechanisms so that you don’t have to worry about everything opening up. This again is very ergonomic from a backpack standpoint, with a full waist harness that takes the load off your shoulders and puts it on your hips, and again the rubber straps which are incredibly comfortable especially when you’re carrying a heavy load.

So from a videographer’s standpoint, we’re looking at our Pro line of bags which are DSLR bags specifically.

You can move into the backpacks that are in our video line that can carry either a traditional video camera or DSLR with multiple lenses; and then what we call the CC bags which are designed specifically for camcorders and larger video recorders.

Ed:

So you’ve got every base covered?

Paul: That’s our goal.

Our goal is to say “Manfrotto, we have a bag for every need” so that’s really where we’re going, for sure.

NZVN

Paul: Then you also have the dividers. Now the dividers are made of the material which is very much like a memory foam. If you look at a memory foam mattress and you put weight on it, it conforms to your shape.

What we’ve done, is we’ve built that down the centre of the bag because, when you put a lens in here, instead of having a lens that will then rattle around between your dividers, these will conform to the actual lens that you have or to the configuration of the body of the camera.

We took the Kata bags and we kept the DNA of the Kata bags and we’ve incorporated them into the new Manfrotto, what we call “CC bags” and also our video backpacks. What I talked about earlier with the photo bags is the camera protection system. What we’ve done, is we’ve built the camera protection system into the base of this bag, so it gives you extra protection from the bottom of the bag where, in our experience, the camera bag actually takes a lot of the hits. We’ve also modified the Exo-tough, so you’re not going to feel that same material on the outside, but you can see there’s a significant structure to the bag because, again, we feel like your gear should not be the structure of your bag; the bag should have structure to protect your gear.

So we built this; this comes in four sizes, everything from a small camcorder right up to a larger video recorder – we wanted to have a specific size bag that covers each one. We then also have two sizes of a backpack – we have the Pro-V 610 and the Pro-V 410 which again incorporate all the same camera protection system on the inside, every place where it’s red. All the red denotes the camera protection and it has that same stiffness that the Pro backpacks have and all the Pro bags. These are brand new; they’re shipping in the US market probably the first week of June; we’re showing

Page 18

Quinto – Autocue We are at Autocue for Quinto and we’re going to talk firstly to Aaron Brady.

location and have it connected back to the main studio, where it’s controlled by the operator in the studio, rather than sending the operator and full kit out on location.

Ed: So if there’s a change in the script, it’s done back at head office and up it comes?

Pete and Aaron.

Aaron: I’m about to take control of this QBox over the 4K data network.

Ed:

Okay, what’s a QBox?

Aaron: Our QMaster teleprompting software sends the script to a separate hardware device called the QBox – the scripts are sent over IP, rather than being physically connected to the prompter PC. The QBox then generates the video output that is subsequently fed to the on-camera units. The fact that it’s IP-based gives a lot of flexibility around your studio set up, but there are also very powerful applications for OB use, and that’s what I want to demo to you today. The 4G modem here puts this QBox on the Internet, it’s a public IP address, I’m able to launch my QMaster application back in New York via VNC and we’re just going to zoom in to the QBox status panel within the QMaster screen and we’re going to show it connecting to this QBox here in Las Vegas.

Ed:

So the application for this?

Aaron: An OB prompter on an ENG prompter – it means you can send a prompter in to the field in any

Aaron: The script is controlled from back at the office, that’s the other thing that’s pretty huge. Just as an example, a traditional way of doing this is that you would send the video signal up to the satellite and then you’d send it back down from the satellite to the OB truck, and the truck would then send the video out to the prompter. The problem with that is you have a 1½ second encode delay and a 1½ second decode delay, plus whatever other latency you have in your signal flow, and that means the prompter operator is having to jockey a 3 second delay when trying to prompt for talent in a remote location. This is a terrible disaster, you can’t do that, it’s just untenable.

What we’ve done is we’ve cut that delay down to 60 milliseconds, because instead of sending the video, we’re producing the video onsite and we’re just using IP to send the text data information and the control data information.

Ed:

Now we’re all go, what is happening here?

Aaron: This is the script that I’m sending from my computer in New York to this QBox over 4G. Now I’m going to go and control it by bringing on the onscreen scroll panel. I’m going to go out of prompt mode – I’m going to give myself an onscreen display …

Ed: This would be even more precise if you had a tablet I’m sure where your big fat fingers don’t really matter so much?

Aaron: Ed:

Exactly.

Not that you’ve got big fat fingers …

Aaron: I have sausage fingers, they’re enormous, it doesn’t come across on audio.

Right, so we’re prompting …

Ed:

Hey, and away we go.

Aaron:

From Las Vegas to New York and back, and you can see what the latency is. As soon as I hit “halt” …

Ed: Wow, that’s real quick, yes I can see. Now that’s certainly got applications.

And to continue the Autocue story I have Richard Satchell and Richard’s going to talk to us about a virtual product …

Richard: No, no sorry, Master series monitors.

Ed:

our

new

But you haven’t got any here?

Richard: Oh I see – yes, they’re due to start shipping in the summer and so we’re at the prototyping stage now, just about to go into production. The new monitors will have much the same form factor and features of the current range, but the principal addition will be HD-SDI input as standard, which we’ve previously offered as a separate addition Page 19

and charged for it.

It will now be included as standard. As well as that, we’ll take the opportunity to update the panels, just to the very latest LED technology, so they’ll be slightly more power efficient, slightly brighter, slightly better.

Ed:

So it’s HD-SDI input?

Richard: That’s right, yes.

And studios are obviously increasingly using or wanting to run SDI rather than composite, so up until this point, we’ve been adding that on a “by request” basis and now we’re just offering that as standard.

Ed: And for the people in the HDMI area?

Richard: We get asked about HDMI more often in the non-broadcast space and so we have that input as standard on the SSP or Starter Series Units.

Ed:

Richard is all smiles about iAutocue.

So there’s something for everybody?

Richard: Absolutely.

Ed: Now I do remember years ago that you were the first ones to come out with the prompter with the iPad. That’s been good for you?

Richard: That’s right, yes.

Ever since the iPad launched, it’s been a very popular excuse for people to buy an iPad to have an iPad prompter. So yes, more and more people are using that for field use, for simple pieces to camera, it’s a very quick and an easy way to incorporate a prompter into your production.

Ed: And you obviously provide the mechanics, the screen etc, but also the software?

Quinto – Marshall Electronics With Pete Fullerton from Quinto we have Devan Cress from Marshall Electronics.

Ed: Since last NAB, Marshall haven’t been sitting on their bottoms?

Devan: No, not at all, we have some fantastic new products. To start with, Marshall has introduced a value line. This is our LYNX series and it comes in two formats. The first is the M-LYNX-702.

This has a list cost US$695; it has a lot of feature sets on it.

Ed:

Ed:

That’s always good.

NZVN

vectorscope as well as audio bars on it. So for the person in the broadcast industry who needs those feature sets, we came out with a value priced monitor to do that.

Ed:

And that’s US$3000 is it?

Devan: Not $3000 – divide it by three, so it’s US$995.

That’s going to be a dual 7 inch with waveform vectorscope audio bars, with all those inputs

So this is a 7 inch monitor?

Devan: actually.

Ed:

Richard: Yes, we’ve got an Autocue app called iAutocue. What’s unique about that product is that we can generate a video output from the iPad. So a lot of the iPad prompters that you’ll see on the market, they use the iPad as the prompter display, mounted beneath a piece of glass. We can do that of course, but what we can also do with the video output is use the iPad in place of the laptop software and controller that you would typically have in a prompting set up, and use the iPad to feed a traditional teleprompter monitor. It kind of gives you the best of both worlds and minimises the amount of kit that you need to take on location.

This is a dual 7 inch monitor

What, you get two for that price?

Devan: Two for the price of half!

This is going to have multiple inputs on it as well – you’re going to have composite, component, HDMI, HD-SDI – you can also do audio de-embedding on this, so there will be a headphone jack in the front, or you have the ability to do the audio de-embedding in the back.

This particular product also has all the controls located in the front. You can turn it on and off, you have the full menu feature sets on this. This product is US$695.

We also have another version of the LYNX-702, the LYNX702W. It has all those feature sets that I mentioned but also a waveform Page 20

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on the back, all the controls on the front. It’s in our value priced LYNX series and it’s been very popular.

We’ve had these out since about January, we can’t keep them in stock, it’s something that your readers should certainly be looking at. So the LYNX-702 is available now and the low cost dual 7 with waveform and vector the LYNX-702W is available this July.

Ed: So what’s the downside – I mean obviously, you’re known for your high quality monitors, these have got to be lesser quality in some way to come in at that price point, so what’s the difference between this and your standard high spec’s monitors?

Devan: These aren’t going to be colour calibrated, so I would put these more towards confidence viewing.

If this was intended as a colour grader, I don’t think they’re the best monitors for that, but when you want to see that a video signal is coming through, you want to see the scopes on it, these are fantastic monitors for that purpose. Now of course Marshall still has its higher end of monitors that are colour graded, that have much more accurate colour on them, but as you can see by looking at this, the pictures are fantastic, they’ve done a great job on this, if you’re looking for a confidence monitor, these are the monitors you should be looking at.

Ed:

And they’re still in a metal chassis?

Devan: Yes absolutely. Likewise, to the left, you’re going to see a new miniature HD-SDI camera. This is our CB500.

This camera has an HD-SDI output, requires 12 Volt. It also has multiple lenses that are available on it.

So depending upon what your application is, we have wide angle lenses, there are about 15 of them that are available, those have a list cost of US$20 for the lenses and the camera is US$499, so it’s a very nice camera that gives an excellent picture.

So where are we placing these cameras?

We’ve have applications in reality TV shows, we’ve had applications where staging and rental companies want to put one of these on a drum set. They’re very small, about 1 inch by 1 inch and have an excellent picture quality. This has been another popular product for us.

Ed: I can attest to the picture quality, because I’m being recorded at the moment and I’ve never looked as good!

Devan: Ed:

You look absolutely fantastic.

Oh thank you sir.

Devan: A lot of people are using the GoPro cameras these days. Now they do a fantastic job, but you have to pull the SD card out of it. This is a live camera, it has a fantastic picture quality that I would say is built for the broadcast industry.

Ed:

And it’s certainly a lot smaller?

Devan:

Absolutely.

Pete: Devan, if we think about the Marshall range in general, the one word that occurs to me is “options” – there’s a wide range of monitors that suit lots of different applications.

If you’re after a high end monitor, then we’ve got those covered; if you’re after low end confidence monitors, maybe a bit more budget sensitive, we’ve got those covered as well, so it’s all about options for Marshall. Marshall has a wide range, would that be correct?

Devan: It would. I like to categorise all of our product into three categories.

I think that that simplifies it for a lot of people. Marshall has always had the high end broadcast quality monitors – we still do.

Ed: And I can see one here, the OR-3210, Grade One. You can’t get higher than Grade One can you?

Devan: I don’t think so, there’s nothing higher than that. So our Orchid series is going to be our high end broadcast centric, colour calibrated, Grade One monitors. They have waveform vectorscope audio bars, all the features that the broadcasters are looking for.

We then have our MD, or Modular Design, series that offers a lot of flexibility. Instead of purchasing all the video inputs, you have the ability to tune the monitor to what you need. There are modules on the back that can accept HD-SDI, DVI, HDMI. If you have a triple wide rack mount monitor, I can make one screen an HDMI screen and make another a composite screen and then I have the flexibility to change that over time as well, so I don’t have to continue to purchase as my systems change, new monitors. I just have to buy modules for that. And then of course, as we already described, we have the new LYNX series that’s going to be our value priced monitors that obviously have a fantastic picture quality as well.

Ed:

And you’ll be having larger sizes than just 7 inch?

Devan: We’re starting out in the LYNX line with the 7 inch but there are certainly possibilities that we’ll come out with others.

Ed: I would hope so. Now security cameras – you’ve been known to produce quite a range of security cameras, are you still doing that?

Devan: If we go around to the side over here, we’re going to see Marshall’s line of IP product. We do encoders, decoders as well as PTZ cameras and box cameras. Now one of the nice feature sets of our cameras is that they do 1080p 60 resolution. They’re using two megapixel, up to 30X zoom, blocks so a lot of these are utilised as broadcast cameras for TV stations.

If you want to get a picture of the traffic and then broadcast that on air, these cameras can do that.

When you’re looking for a higher quality solution, Marshall certainly has that.

Something new to the cameras that we’re doing is our 577 series that you see here. It actually has a very minimal delay on the HD-SDI output because of a new technology where we’re pulling that HD-SDI directly off the block. So when delay is an issue which can happen with a lot of what are termed “security cameras”, Marshall has solved that to make it more of a broadcast centric product. You’ll also see here our encoders / decoders. New at the show is our VS-104 3GHD-SDI. This is going to have the availability to do 1080p 60 video as well as embedded audio, so there will be no lip sync correct issues – everything goes over one HD-SDI or HDMI cable and we do that with the VS-104. These have the availability to do HD-SDI, HDMI as well as composite video.

Page 22

Pete: And these tie in directly with what JVC are doing. JVC are making streaming cameras. If you want to know what you use to receive the stream, to code the stream and output the signals in HD-SDI or SDI, these are the units.

Devan: Further product that we have includes some of our 2K/4K monitors.

Ed:

A 4K monitor?

Devan: Yes, we now have some 4K monitors. So what you’re going to be looking at is our QVW series.

We make these in multiple sizes – we have them in 17, 24 as well as 27 inch in size. These are going to be able to take four 3GHD-SDI signals. These are all divided into quadrants.

Devan: Outside viewing a very, very bright panel, absolutely. Other new products that we have – we’re going to be in our camera-top side.

Marshall just came out with the industry’s first 7 inch, full resolution, 1920x1080 camera-top monitor. This comes from our MD series, so it’s a very flexible design where you can have multiple modules to put in different signals. It comes natively with HDMI and then you can put HDSDI input modules on it; it’s going to come with false colour, waveform, a peaking filter, but really the new technology is that we’ve been able to find panels in this particular size, our most popular camera-top at 7 inches, that are 1920x1080 resolution.

So for the high end market that needs no scaling, this particular monitor can fit those needs.

Ed:

And again, 800 nits?

Devan: This particular panel is going to be less.

This is great for outdoors, it’s not going to be 800 nits – I believe this one’s in the 600, I don’t know the exact specification on it.

Basically, what we’re doing is scaling each of those to the resolution of the monitor.

One of the higher resolution monitors we have is the QVW-2710. This is going to have a resolution of 2560x1440. You can take your 4K 4096 content and you can view it on this monitor. It comes at the very economical price of around US$6000 to be able to view 4K. You can see the picture and it looks absolutely excellent.

This particular monitor is going to be true 4K, so this will accept 4096 resolution – it’s our V-4K-3110. Same technology as I was describing in the QVW – we’re going to accept four 3GHD-SDI signals; each of the quadrants that we have is going to have 1080p 60 resolution, that we seamlessly stitch together. This is a very bright monitor, it has an 800 nit panel, it has a fantastic picture quality on it.

Ed: It sure does. That’s clever technology … you’re actually taking four smaller monitors and stitching them together into one big one?

Devan: That would be correct. That is currently the standard if you’re looking at the Sony F55s or the Canon cameras that have the native 4K on them, they’re utilising four 3GHD-SDI outputs and each one of those is going to be carrying approximately a 1080p 60 signal and that is how you’re able to put together the 4K image. The difficulty of it is actually stitching it all together seamlessly and our engineers have done a fantastic job at that.

Ed: They sure have – I can’t see the lines at all. You wouldn’t class this as a Grade One monitor though?

Devan: This would be a Grade One monitor, absolutely. So this is a colour calibrated monitor; this would be utilised for those people who are shooting 4K content and the director who needed to be able to do a frame-out and see the accurate colours of it.

Ed:

Wow – and would this one be 800 nits as well?

Devan:

This is an 800 nit panel, yes that’s correct.

Ed: Which is going to be very good for outside viewing?

Ed: And of course it will take a hood, so you can work it in bright sunlight?

Devan: Sure, absolutely, and at 600 nits it’s still going to be able to go out in the sunlight. All Marshall Electronic products are available through Quinto Communications (NZ) Ltd email sales@quinto.co.nz or contact Pete Fullerton on 09 486 1204 for more NZVN information.

Page 23

PLS – Kino Flo For PLS, we are at Kino Flo and we are talking with Frieder Hochheim.

the result of that research.

So we now actually understand what the colour points are. It’s not CRI. CRI is strictly the eye’s perception of light, which is fabulous for your eye, but ask any manufacturer are their cameras set on eye response – hell, no. So I think a CRI meter is a great thing if you’re trying to compare sources, trying to understand the differences, but as a definitive meter to tell you how it will perform, as an imaging link, the CRI meter will fall short, because it’s merely for optical comparison.

Ed: So again, how do you adjust the colour of an LED? Frieder: Well it’s very simple. We’re dealing with a warm tone and a daylight tone and we’re blending the two.

Ed: Okay, so there are two different LEDs in there …?

Frieder: Yes, and they’re full spectrum in each of their elements.

There’s no RGB, none of that.

Ed: That all makes sense – and what I’ve noticed makes the difference with your panels is this honeycomb?

Frieder from Kino Flo.

Frieder: Last year we introduced the Celeb 200 which was a Kelvin variable LED fixture soft light. We also gave a sneak preview of the Celeb 400 at the time, which was a yoke mounted fixture. The Celeb 400 is now showcased at the show here as a centre mount, so it’s a location lighting instrument, it allows orientation either vertically or horizontally. It’s also got universal voltage input 90-240, colour variable between 2700 and 5500. It’s DC operable on 24 Volt DC; as well as DMX. So you basically have the entire range of control that you would expect of an instrument like that.

Ed: Now there are many other lights that adjust their colour temperature by either switching LEDs so they have a different LED that lights up for that, or you put a filter in front of it. How do you get a colour range?

Frieder: In the Celeb 400, we have approximately 1800 LEDs in there. Even before we went into the whole LED product range, it was important for us to understand the new technologies. Electronic cinema is not film, yet electronic cinema is the new film stock. So each camera, really, you have to view it as a new film stock. Even though I sit on the Technology Committee at the American Society of Cinematographers, the data that we want as a lighting company, meaning the spectral response curve of the camera, is something that is not shared with any manufacturer. It is not public information. Now in the film days, Kodak, Fuji would share that information with us readily.

As a manufacturer, we would get an Excel spreadsheet and we knew exactly what the film was capable of seeing and recording and how it was recording it.

Now, with electronic cinema, that is data that’s just not available.

So we’ve actually gone ahead and analysed the cameras, modelled them and essentially reversed out their spectral response curves, and the Celeb line of product is

Frieder: Well the honeycomb is essentially there to collimate the light. We’re dealing with a broad soft source. If we try to direct it and collimate it somewhat more, I can’t do that with a barn door. If I put a barn door on this and it’s a soft source, if I try to close the barn doors, it essentially acts as a douser – it literally dims the light; whereas if I put a honeycomb on it, now it actually channels the light and I can dictate the degree. So we have a 90 degree louvre, a 60 degree louvre; on some instruments we actually even feature a 45 degree louvre, and what it does, is it just narrows that beam down so that you have a nice soft edged spot.

Ed: Okay, so that’s the Celeb series, what else have you done?

Frieder: The classic Kino Flo … our Kino Flo 4Bank, which is a very mature product, it’s been around now for 27 years. We’ve developed some new electronics for it, so now the 4Bank ballast is operating on universal voltage. Anywhere from 90-240 Volt is power

Page 24

Kino Flo Celeb 200 & Celeb 400 – 2ft. & 4ft. LED’s  LED equivalent of the famous 4 ft. 4Bank  CRI of 95 (very high)  2700 to 5500 kelvin  Full range dimming (no flicker)  Silent Operation  Can be powered by 24V DC Honeycomb Louvre, Gel Frame, Stand or Grid mounts available

The classic 4 ft. 4Bank fitting is Still available as the Tegra    

On-Board Power & Dimming Individual lamp select Uses Kino True Match lamps DMX control & Barndoors

Phone: 09 302 4100

Email: info@kelpls.co.nz

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factor corrected, resulting in a power saving of half as much as it’s put out. So basically we’ve cut our power consumption in half on what was already an energy saving product. This in comparison to LEDs is far more energy efficient, let’s say, than most LEDs of this size, this nature, that put out this kind of light. Again, we’re talking about a soft quality of light, high colour rendering … try and compare that to an LED source, short of our own Celeb 400s, you’d be hard pressed to do a comparison. So those are our two new things … I don’t know if you saw the Tegra last year. We’ve made a few little cosmetic changes on that, but essentially it’s like a Diva light, but it’s a 4 foot 4Bank, universal voltage, dimming, DMX, also individual lamp switching on the head. It’s a great cosmetic light for portraiture, any kind of interview situations where you want to have nice broad soft wrap around. It’s works as a beautiful soft key.

Ed:

Has the BarFly been popular?

Frieder: The BarFly’s proven to be very popular.

We’ve outfitted entire studios with those now.

It’s a nice shallow profile, the colour’s great on it.

Again, you know, it’s another soft light tool.

Ed:

Well that’s what Kino Flo’s all about isn’t it?

Frieder:

We’re all about soft light.

We haven’t done a point source yet, but I think for us it’s important to get the colour right, get the spectrum right, understanding where this technology shift is going.

We’ve been on silver halides for the last 115-odd years, now we’re going into the wild world of zeros and ones and hard drives, you know, it’s no more celluloid. So it’s a new game entirely and we need to stay relevant to NZVN that industry.

PLS – Lowel We are at Lowel lighting for PLS and we have Eric Druker from Lowel and Brett Smith from Tiffen Australia.

Ed: Eric, Lowel lighting has been around a long, long time – but still developing?

Eric: Absolutely.

We’ve been around since 1959, that’s when Ross created the first fixture that we had. We’ve always tried to innovate since then, but Lowel’s forte has always been with really lightweight, also very rugged, durable, portable kits used on location. As small as possible, as easy to carry as possible and we’re carrying on with that concept with some new fixtures that we’re developing more and more with LED technology.

Ed: Now this little handgun here, I’m intrigued. We saw it last year when it had just come out, but it’s still here and you’ve got some new versions of it?

Eric: Well new versions and different versions too. The first one that we were just talking about was the GL-1 which was really designed for the high end wedding photographer and people shooting stills. So if you’re in a big dancehall, you can give the light to an assistant, just get a little bit of light on somebody’s face, get some separations from the background. You can also, very selectively, light other things within the dancehall, you can paint with light with it … but the key to it was the efficiency and the quality of the colour, also the focus mechanism. We had something which gave you a really gorgeous quality of light, very even beam, very high colour rendering and extremely efficient. Now if we take that light, which my youthful assistant has in his hand, and he aimed it up at the ceiling of the Convention Centre and spotted it down … how many metres is that, I can still see it. So is that enough to work with at that distance?

Maybe, maybe not. If you just want to get a little bit of light on somebody’s face, you can.

Ed: That’s what it’s all about these days with modern cameras – they’re so low light, it’s just that little spot, that little lift that makes the difference?

Eric: Exactly true. You just want to catch the light in somebody’s eyes, get some separations from the background, because if you’re over-lighting, then you’re forced to stop down, your background goes dark and

Eric from Lowel.

you can’t see anything.

So you don’t want to overpower your background.

But we took that technology, in the handheld form with a self-contained battery, and we’ve come up with a new fixture called the Power Pro LED. The engine is essentially the same, the focus mechanism is essentially the same, but this is really going to get us back to what Lowel’s been known for, because these are lights we can take and put into a kit case. We’ve got a fixture that’s drawing about 17.6 Watt. I can find several tungsten halogen fixtures that are drawing 300 Watt that this is giving us more light than, in full spot, so extremely efficient. Again, quality of colour is excellent.

We have two different versions – there’s either a daylight balance version or a tungsten balance version, one or the other. But here are two, and now we’re getting back into more production oriented accessories, so there’ll be a bracket which if anybody’s used to all Lowel light, you get that familiar sort of keyhole shape, so you could take an umbrella and put it in there; you could use a gel frame if you wanted to add colour, maybe diffuse it a bit more. But here again, the same situation where we could spot to flood by moving the front back and forth, get a lot of control out of the

Page 26

LED Lights from...

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Lowel Blender

Above photo taken by Richard Leonard with the Gl-1 LED at Muriwai Beach, NZ

Phone: 09 302 4100 www.kelpls.co.nz

 5000K Daylight & 3000K Tungsten  Rotary dimmer /mixing controls Compact size 4” x 3” x 3”  Fits on a pistol grip or light stand  AC, 12V, Battery Sleds  Supplied with a set of front diffusers Email: info@kelpls.co.nz

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output and then if we ever did want to use it similar to the way the other one was described, we can attach a handle onto the bottom, use it like an old school Sungun and then run it off of DC as well. We have our own battery holders for it, keyed up so you can put a strap onto it, you can carry it over your shoulder, you could leave it at the base of a stand if you wanted to …

Ed:

It’s a very versatile light?

Eric: Absolutely and the kick on top of all that is the price. So we’re coming in at about US$599.

Ed:

Excellent. Now the panels?

Eric: Right. Well we’ve been working with a series of studio fixtures for approximately three years now. We’ve had a tremendous amount of success – I know Australian Broadcasting has a huge number, maybe 90 of them, but the main draw on these has been, again, the quality of colour, the construction, ease of repair if anything ever happens, and output. So if we’re looking at this one, which is a new version, this is called the Prime Location LED; same type of LEDs and you can see from looking at these that it looks like daylight. You know, we can talk about CRI, we can talk about colour rendering all day, and a lot of other companies have done things to sort of juggle the numbers a little bit; we’re very solid and I wouldn’t want to bet on this, but what we always recommend to anybody is take the light, stick somebody down in a chair, turn on the camera and shoot a test. When you look at skin tones, when you look at all the other colours on your set, it’s the best way to judge.

Every time somebody has done that with one of these or with one of our studio lights, the results have been tremendous.

So this is available in either daylight balance or tungsten balance, and you can see the quality of colour again, it looks like tungsten, it looks like daylight.

Ed: And it’s a good solid frame – what do you put in the slot at the front?

Page 28

Eric: You can drop a gel frame into it; we’re going to have a softbox; there’ll also be barn doors eventually.

They’re mostly just to contain the spill a little bit, because again, it is a big soft source and if you want to hang additional diffusion in front of it, you can increase the size of the source and make it bigger. A couple of things that are really nice about this one, like you say, all metal. So for rental houses especially, you got something, you could just take a bunch of these – here in the States we just throw a bunch of lights into a hamper, wheel it out to the truck, you’re off.

Ed: I understand the grips in the States are pretty brutal with gear?

Eric: I don’t know what to say about that actually.

Ed: You’re an ex-grip are you?

Eric: Well, on behalf of my brethren …

Ed: Oh it’s a union thing is it … and this looks as though it’s mains powered or battery?

Eric: It is exactly, and we’ll have either the V-Lock or the Anton Bauer in the back and just a simple switch on the back will let you go from one to the next. Now the other thing, in addition to the ruggedness and quality of output, the amount of light that’s coming out of it also, which if you compared it to a lot of other 1x1 panels, you’re probably getting 1½-2 times more light, depending on who we’re talking about. The final thing is that we have an IP rating of 65 for these. So you could use those outside in virtually any weather conditions. You can’t immerse it in water, but if you’re outside, even in the driving rain, you have no problem by using it.

Ed: You don’t have to put a cover over it?

Eric: You don’t have to put a cover over it. The only thing we have to address is the battery itself may not be done to that spec, so that might take some sort of rain-hat, but other than that, the fixture itself – hurricane, you’re fine!

Eric: One of the most popular kits that we’ve had in the States of that series consists of two of the Blender lights, the LED fixtures that are colour changing and also one of our 300 Watt Rifa lights which, if anybody’s not familiar with it, it sort of pops open like an umbrella, but it’s its own self-contained softlight. It gives you this gorgeous quality of light, just wraps around, fills in its own shadows, great on people’s faces, great on products, so the whole kit gives you the ability to key with the big soft source, or key with the hard source, depending on what you want to do; so I have two more lights, one that you can throw onto somebody as a hair light or maybe something else you could put onto the background, but especially with the Blenders, since you can do bi-colour and you can mix, you can walk into almost any environment of ambient light and just by eye balance sort things out so you can shoot in a room. Rifa’s tungsten, but it also comes with a couple of sheets of blue gel CTB so that way you can balance to that first and then balance your Blenders to that if you wanted to.

Ed: And again, it just reinforces the idea that lighting these days is not about throwing lots of light on, it’s about the look that you get by correct lighting?

Eric: Absolutely. I mean, back years ago, we needed huge volumes of light, a huge amount of Watts. Now we still need a quantity of fixtures to create a good three-dimensional image, but we don’t need a huge volume of output any longer.

Ed: And this little kit is the one bag, and it comes with the stands as well?

Eric: Right – it’s about the size of a trumpet case NZVN somebody once said to me.

Ed: That’s a very valuable thing to have, especially with Auckland weather. Now I understand this has a diffusion filter on it?

Eric: Well what we have in the front – this is actually new. What we have on some of the other fixtures ( and I’m assuming this is going to do the same thing ) well this looks like it’s just going to soften up the edges a little bit. Again we’re dealing with a multiple point source fixture so that you can sometimes run the risk of getting multiple shadows; with this, it will even that out a little bit, just merge them all into one source a little bit more, than if it were bare. You’re going to cut down on some of the shadows, you’re going to cut down on colour fringing and you’re not going to have to address that problem any other way.

Ed: Brett, do you want to tell us about the kits?

Brett: We’ve got our traditional pro light tungsten light, which has high light output, focusable, barn doorable, with our new Lowel Blender LED. So it gives you a combination of the high output of tungsten, but you’ve also got the low voltage, low power consumption of LED in a single kit. It keeps the price down instead of a full LED kit; so it gives you the best of both worlds and we’ve always made tungsten in that beautiful Lowel light characteristic. What we do with the Blender is we put a light that has a similar characteristic, whereas you’ll often get an LED with a tungsten, and you can instantly see the difference, no matter whether they’re called tungsten or daylight. We’ve got kits that blend both technologies into the one kit; they’re compact as Lowel always is, but they’re like uber-compact, so this is a sling over your shoulder and you can still do a three -point production with a shoulder kit.

Page 29

Brett with Lowel kit.

Sennheiser – NAB 2014 We are at the Sennheiser stand and we have James Waldron from Sennheiser ANZ. Ed: James, you look after and come over to New Zealand every now and again don’t you?

James: I do, we’ll be there in May, to do some training on wireless microphones.

Ed: Fantastic, we’ll report on that in an upcoming issue. But we’re here now and I guess we’re looking at microphones?

James: We’re looking at microphones – the MK4 is a Sennheiser cardioid microphone. It’s our first side address microphone, it’s been out for about a year now; it’s a 1 inch diaphragm true condenser mic.

It’s been really well received in the market. Later this year, we’ll introduce the MK8 which is a dual diaphragm design, so it’s switchable, five patterns – the first time that Sennheiser has produced a microphone like this at all at this kind of price point.

NZVN

James says “Not me, it’s the mic!”

Ed: And the value of this type of mic, which obviously has a particular direction you have to hold it in when you’re recording, as opposed to one of those circular ones?

James: Yes, well it’s a side address microphone designed for studio voice work.

Ed: Oh, this isn’t one you carry around? speaking to a video person here.

You’re

James: I’m sure you need to get voiceovers from time to time Grant?

Ed:

Yeah, okay, I get called a lot for that. So …?

James: It’s a studio mic for voice work, for singers, for voice – so for voiceovers and those kinds of things.

It’s also used a lot for instruments – electric guitars, overheads around a drum kit, brass, all of those things..

So to have a switchable pattern version of this mic will be very popular.

Ed: Well it’s already popular by the look of it – this Mark II has a “Pro Sound Best of Show” label?

James: It does, it’s nice to see. Let’s go over and have a look at the Esfera which will be a lot of interest to people recording sounds outside.

Ed: I think we’ve seen this before; this is this little stereo mic arrangement isn’t it?

James: I doubt you have seen this before Grant – this is the first time it has been shown publicly I believe. Esfera is a microphone system which consists of two main elements, a stereo pair of microphones for recording out in the field, and a signal processor that is able to upmix that stereo signal from the microphones up to 5.1. You can take this stereo pair of mics into the field, bring the signals back to your OB truck or to your recording as a stereo pair and that signal can then be fed into the Esfera Upmixing processor to deliver you a 5.1 surround sound output, from this stereo pair of microphones. The mics are a specially selected pair of MKH 8040 cardioid condenser microphones, selected in the factory for really fine accuracy between the two mics in terms of their directional pattern and their offaxis response; and by selecting them very carefully, the box is able to map or interpret the sound field to deliver

you 5.1. It works very, very well. So it takes a 2 channel input from the microphones, or from a recording from those microphones, and then delivers 5.1 output in the form of three AES stereo signals.

Ed: So you don’t actually have to put it through the box live … you can record it on separate channels and then process it?

James: Correct. So you could take your little 2 channel mic arrangement, plug it into your zoom recorder or something like that onsite and then postproduce it later on to deliver you your 5.1. For location sound recording for atmospheres for example, or for sports broadcasting, it’s a fabulous system.

Ed: Right, we’ve moved on and what are we looking at now?

James: We’re looking at Sennheiser’s pinnacle Wireless Microphone system, the D9000 which is a fully digital wireless microphone system – there’s no data compression, no audio compression either. So it’s a linear PCM wireless microphone. If we start at the receiver rack, there are eight receiver cards in the receiver chassis, fed from a single pair of antenna sockets. The antennas that go with the system are intelligent; they have a booster on the antenna itself, with eight separate very selective 24 megahertz wide filters. When you turn the system on, it communicates with the antenna, the antenna sends a test signal to the receiver, the receiver knows what to expect and calibrates its input gain to compensate for the antenna cable loss. You always have exactly the right RF level going into the receiver, no chance of overload, which can be a problem.

There are “loop-outs” on the receiver so you can loop three of the racks together for 24 channels from one pair of antennae. While we’re on the back panel, you have analogue and digital audio output capabilities and you can mix and match those output modules when you order your system. If we start with the digital one, there are eight XLR connectors there, you can configure those as eight mono outputs or as two sets of four stereo pairs. So you can configure that to give you two separate sets of eight AES outputs.

And then there’s the D-Sub connector which gives you another set of digital audio

Page 30

you. The antennas have a tuning range of 8 x 24 MHz. It’s just a bit more than half of the switching bandwidth of the receiver. So when you come to a new venue, frequency scan is where you start, then you can adjust your output levels, you can set your word clock rate, you can see what your RF levels are there, and there’s the ability to load configurations into the system that you might have saved from previous jobs, or to save the configuration where you are now. It has two modes of operation; one with no data compression at all, and the other which has some data compression to help give you even greater reception reliability over longer distances because the bit rate is lower.

Ed: So if you chose a channel that somebody else was using, what would happen?

James:

You won’t get any audio – it will mute.

Ed: Oh okay, so you can’t listen in on somebody else’s?

James: Well no, because it’s digital, so it can’t decode an FM signal.

Ed: So it just sees its receiving an FM signal, can’t do anything with it and so it blocks it for you?

James: Yes, there’s no digitally modulated signal available, so there’s no output.

So from there you can then manually choose where you’re going to tune your frequencies and you can just dial them in to the quieter parts of the spectrum and off you go. It’s really nice. This is operating it from the front panel; there’s a really nice control system available for it as well, which also does all your frequency calculations.

Ed: D9000 front.

outputs. It basically does your mic split for you at the radio mic rack.

The analogue output module is transformer balanced analogue out on eight XLRs and a second set on another 25 pin D-type connectors – there is a separate set of output transformers for those, so they’re completely isolated; again, this is your mic split.

There’s a blank spot here and it’s been announced this week that there will be a Dante digital audio card available to fit in there; and then the last card here is your networking card. That can be your word clock master if you want it to be, it’s very stable, very accurate; or it can slave to an external word clock if you wish as well. There’s Ethernet control of the system, so there’s a nice GUI; it also interfaces well with the Wireless System Manager software. The power supply is a medical grade power supply, so it is highly reliable for the long-term.

From the receiver front you’ll see it has a nice large colour LCD display, some buttons across the bottom which relate to the 8 channels or the 8 frequency bands available and the menu system is driven through the jog dial wheel.

The receiver is able to tune from 470 MHz up to 798 MHz, so wherever you go in the world, it doesn’t matter, one receiver does the job for

What transmitters have you here?

James: In handheld transmitters, we have a range of new interchangeable capsules with the standard 2000 series fittings.

There’s also a range of Neumann capsules available to go on the handheld transmitter too.

The Sennheiser condenser capsules have a new suspension built-in – there’s a new suspension for the capsules to minimise handling noise, so the patented snowflake suspension here at the top and at the bottom gives you another 10dB of isolation of handling noise, compared to the normal sort of capsule mounts. It’s just remarkable. This is developed by Sennheiser in Germany and they hold some patents on that now. The battery pack is lithium ion, so it’s able to give you a real readout of the remaining time in hours and minutes;

Page 31

more on page 34

D9000 back.

Changes to Radio Microphone Usage in New Zealand ‘Q & A’ with Len Starling from Radio Spectrum Management * range for specific devices, depending on where they will be used.

From time to time, changes to digital television services may affect the frequencies that can be used by radio microphones in a particular area. We therefore recommend that users purchase radio microphones capable of being tuned to different frequencies rather than single frequency devices.

The 174-230 MHz band remains available for radio microphone users under General User Spectrum Licence 202568. There are also other frequency ranges that may be suitable for use under the General User Radio Licences for Short Range Devices (GURL-SRD). However, many of these frequency ranges are shared with other users.

Q: I hear that there are changes taking place that will affect users of radio microphones?

Yes, anyone who currently operates a radio microphone in the 698-806 MHz frequency range will need to make some changes before March 2015.

This is because, from 11 March 2015, radio microphones will only be permitted to operate in the frequency ranges 502606 MHz and 622-698 MHz. Q: Why are these changes taking place?

Radio microphones operate within the frequencies allocated primarily for television broadcasting. They utilise frequencies which are not being used in a particular area (that is ‘gaps’ in the television usage). Previously, the entire 510-806 MHz frequency range was allocated for television broadcasting services. Now that analogue television has been switched off, the 698–806 MHz frequency range (the 700 MHz band) is no longer required for television as the new digital services use less spectrum.

As a result, the 700 MHz band has been allocated for next generation mobile broadband such as fourth generation (4G) cellular. While radio microphones were compatible with the television services that previously utilised the 700 MHz band, they are not compatible with the new 4G cellular services.

This is because 4G cellular services don’t leave the same ‘gaps’ in the spectrum and interference will be more likely.

When the General User Spectrum Licence expires on 11 March 2015, it will no longer be permitted to operate radio microphones in the 700 MHz band.

Q: What frequencies can radio microphones use in the future?

From 11 March 2015, radio microphones must operate within the frequency ranges, 502-606 MHz and 622-698 MHz. The specific frequencies available for radio microphones in any particular area will depend on the frequencies used by television in that area. Radio microphone suppliers should be able to provide advice on the most suitable frequency

502

606 Available

Q: So how can people prepare for these changes?

Users of radio microphones need to check to see if their existing radio microphones can be retuned to a permitted frequency range (these being 502-606 MHz and 622-698 MHz). If radio microphones cannot be retuned then users will need to purchase new equipment.

Q: What do radio microphone users need to know when purchasing new equipment?

It is recommended that new equipment is flexible, meaning that it can be used on the widest possible frequency range. It must not operate in the 606-622 MHz or 698-806 MHz frequency range.

Q: When is the best time to replace equipment?

If a radio microphone cannot be retuned then new equipment will need to be purchased before 11 March 2015. However, we would recommend that new equipment is purchased as soon as is practicable.

Q: What happens if a radio microphone user continues to use their radio microphone in the frequency range 698-806 MHz after 11 March 2015?

If radio microphones continue to be operated in a nonpermitted frequency after 11 March 2015 compliance action may be taken against the user.

Q: How will the changes affect suppliers of radio microphones?

Sale or supply of devices that operate in the 700 MHz band is no longer permitted (this took effect on 1 January 2014).

Suppliers have been provided with brochures they can hand out to their radio microphone customers to ensure they are aware of, and prepared for, the changes.

Q: Why is the frequency range 606-622 MHz unavailable?

The 606–622 MHz frequency range is allocated for the Māori Television Service. The management rights for this frequency range are controlled by Te Putahi Paoho. This means that we do not have the ability to grant a general user licence (or other licences) relating to these frequencies.

Q: How can radio microphone users confirm what frequency their radio microphone is operating on?

622

Not available

698 Available

Page 32

806 Not permitted from 11 March 2015

The first place to check is the radio microphone receiver; look for markings that indicate the frequency it operates on.

If there are no markings on the receiver, then have a look through the user manual. If frequency information can’t be found in either of those places, then contact the supplier or retailer.

Q: Is there any further information available on these changes?

For further information visit: www.retune.co.nz Factsheets on the changes can be downloaded from the website, which also features a comprehensive list of questions and answers to help users and suppliers prepare for the changes.

A brochure with information on the changes can be downloaded from www.retune.co.nz or please email info@rsm.govt.nz and a brochure can be sent to you.

If you would like a more detailed overview of the usage of the digital television channels a chart with this information is available on our website (www.rsm.govt.nz).

Q: If new equipment is purchased, what can be done with the old equipment?

It is worth contacting the supplier to find out whether they will be offering a trade-in deal. If this is not the case there is a list of e-recyclers available on www.retune.co.nz

*

Radio Spectrum Management (RSM) is responsible for efficiently and effectively managing the radio spectrum, including allocating rights for the use of the spectrum, and enforcing compliance with the requirements that protect it as a continuing resource.

In addition RSM is responsible for providing policy advice to the government on spectrum issues, and administering the allocation of any spectrum the government decides to make available as tradable property rights.

Major points and key dates  Radio microphones (including in-ear pieces) will not be permitted to operate within the frequency range 698-806 MHz from 11 March 2015.  It is not permitted to sell or supply radio microphones that operate in the 698-806 MHz frequency range (this came into effect on 1 January 2014).  Users of radio microphones must either retune their existing radio microphone to a permitted frequency or, if they are unable to do this, replace their existing equipment with equipment that can be operated within the permitted frequencies.  Permitted frequency ranges are 502-606 MHz and 622-698 MHz.  The primary use of the 698-806 MHz band is changing from analogue television transmission to 4G mobile network technology.  Radio microphone users are a secondary user in the spectrum and therefore have to work around the primary user (digital television), utilising unused channels and spaces in the spectrum.  When replacing equipment it is recommended that equipment that can be used on the widest possible frequency range is purchased, in order to work around television and other users.  This flexibility is important as the introduction of digital television, combined with the possibility of a gradual increase in television channels, will affect the frequencies available in the future.  Those operating a radio microphone at a nonpermitted frequency from 11 March 2015 may face compliance action.

Page 33

James: Well it has the traditional Neumann sound – I mean, sound is a very difficult thing to …

standard you’ll get about five hours out of a battery pack in a handheld. You can also have a battery carrier to use standard alkaline double A’s if you wish.

Ed:

And there’s a belt pack?

James: There is also a belt pack. When you put the new battery in, it powers on automatically and it boots up really, really quickly, it’s ready to go. That’s quick. The body pack has the standard LEMO connector as the mic input that we’ve been using for years and years and years. There are a range of different mics available and also line input cables and instrument cables are available for it as well, so you can plug in an electric guitar and things like that. Again, it’s a lithium ion battery pack which will plug into a charger, the same recharger.

Ed: Well I’m sure the audio people understand that, so to me it looks like, well they’re both sort of silver, but one’s Neumann and one’s Sennheiser, you sell them both, so there is actually a perceivable difference to the sound?

Ed: And with that belt pack, can you get a receiver just for a single unit?

James: in time.

No, there’s no single receiver at this point

Ed: Okay, so in the single units there’s nothing new, there’s nothing new in the shotguns?

James: No, there’s no new shotguns from Sennheiser at this point in time. Well obviously the 8060 continues on.

Ed: It’s all good stuff anyway?

James: It’s all lovely product, there’s no need to change any of that. What I am keen to show you though is the Neumann TLM 107 which is a brand new model from Neumann – a large diaphragm condenser microphone in the true Neumann tradition. As I said, brand new electronics and this is the first time that they have had a five pattern switchable Neumann microphone at this particular price point.

In New Zealand, the price point is NZD$2,499 retail, which is the first time that Neumann’s been anywhere near that price point for a switchable pattern mic.

Ed: So how does it compare with the Sennheiser one you’ve just shown us?

James: Well it’s a completely different microphone, there’s no common components whatsoever.

Ed:

No, no, no, but in terms of the sound?

James: Oh there’s a perceivable difference in the sound certainly. This has the more traditional Neumann classic sound of the classic microphones; the Sennheiser is … how do I describe the Sennheiser? It’s probably a little brighter, a little …

Ed: And different people have different interests and really, to know which one you want, you’ve got to listen to them both?

James: You need to have a listen to them both and decide what you’d like, that’s right. I’m sure Dan Rowe in our Auckland office will be able to assist in that process. The more time that we spend talking to people about wireless microphones, the more we realise there is for people to learn, and from our point of view an educated customer is a much better customer to have.

NZVN

Sennheiser – Rycote For Sennheiser, we are at Rycote with Simon Davies.

Ed: Now Simon, one can’t go past the stand without noticing that your fluffies are no longer fluffy?

Simon: Yes, we’ve been developing a few new things.

This is the first generation that will see the new material, 3D Tex. You’ll see it on a lot of products nowadays, like running shoes, even on car seats and things like that.

That’s where the similarity stops with ours.

We’ve developed this material specifically to be acoustically transparent but, at the same time, gaining performance that you would normally expect from a fur windscreen. So this material is very robust, very transparent and offers great wind protection. It’s the first of a few more products to come.

Page 34

Ed: And if you dropped it in the mud it’s going to clean easier than fur?

Simon: Exactly, yes. Whereas with fur, you get it wet, you get it dirty, it’s starts matting and you get HF loss or something like that, but with the Super-Softie if it gets wet you just shake it off; if it gets dirty you just rinse it off and you’re good to go.

Ed:

And it comes in a number of shapes and sizes?

Simon: At the moment we’ve got three lengths to match the most popular microphones, 12cm, 15cm and 18cm. That relates to the bore length, so it covers most popular microphones like the Sennheisers, RØDEs, AKGs and brands like that. There will be more to follow, but it’s the shape that really counts with the material, so we just want to launch this as the premium softie. We’re keeping the original softie, it’s going to become the classic, but this is coming in as the top of the line softie product we do at the moment.

Ed: Right, and in the microphone support area – I can’t see anything but Lyres on your stand?

NZVN

The famous Rycote Lyre mount.

Simon: When we introduced the Lyre in 2007 it was one of the biggest things that we’ve ever spent the money with the lawyers on the IP Ed: They’ve got families to feed too Simon – you obviously fed a lot?

Simon: Yes well, we decided to use it in every application we can, whether it’s our product or whether it’s a product for anyone else that we make.

Technically, it’s a great product; commercially it’s a great product as well, because it’s a very simple product, easily adjustable, it can be used for a weight of microphone from Neumann TLM103 or U87 all the way down to a little pencil mic by Ambient. It’s a great solution and I’m sure you’ll see more Lyres out there to come.

Ed: Now to me, one of the great successes of Rycote is that you’re not just selling Rycote product ( and there’s plenty of that out there ) but you go to some of the big manufacturers, the big suppliers of microphones and their accessories and you look under their brand that it’s actually made by Rycote. That must be very heart warming for you?

Simon: In some ways, the best thing about our approach – and I’ve taken it on from my mother who ran the company from the very early 90s until 2-3 years ago – is that the only thing we do are windshields and shock mounts. We’ve dabbled and we do a little in boom poles, but really, our main focus is just those two areas and when you’re talking to any company all you want is someone who can take a problem away. So for the microphone manufacturers, at the end of the day,

The Rycote Super-Softie.

whether it’s a transducer that’s going and recording sound or whether it’s actually going in someone’s gear or on top of someone’s gear, that’s what they’re really interested in, and the actual isolation of handling noise or wind noise to us is exciting – we love that sort of stuff; to them it’s a pain in the what’s a name.

That’s our main focus. We know what we’re good at, we turn down stuff as well, so if jobs come in that we just don’t feel that we’re the right people, we’ll be as honest as we can be and say we’re engineers, we do handling noise and wind noise, there’s someone else better for other sorts of things. Yes, it’s great to see the stuff out there, but we’re still the same people – we’re tucked away in a nice part of the UK, we’ve got engineers and designers who love what they do. The great part about our product is that there’s a solution for someone who has had a problem and it’s recognised straightaway. It’s not complicated what we do, but it comes across as simple because we work so hard and we test in the real sense. Rather than putting it in sort of like a weird environment to test for sweat or anything like that, we’ll hang it from a tree in Canada and hang it from a tree in a hot place in France and it stays there for 1 month, 2 months something like that, and it’s real time testing. That’s what we enjoy.

Ed: And I see you haven’t given up on your fluffies – you’ve got two particularly bright models here. Have you had any takers?

Simon: We started earlier on in the year with a couple of skunks and badgers and various things like that, and then we got a couple of requests for the flags.

I have to say the sales guys are shaking in their boots that anyone would actually want to buy them. They take about five times as long to make, but it’s nice and it’s a talking point as well.

The fur has been around since 1985 and the animal ones that we’re doing at the moment, it’s ironic because when they first tried to convince people to take the fur, we actually had to make little fur dogs to convince people. They were gimmick giveaway fur dogs and we sold more of the dogs than we did of the windjammers when we started, so we’re coming full circle.

Ed: I believe there’d be plenty of badger pelts available for making windsocks at the moment?

Simon: Yes, that’s very topical around us as well.

We usually get rid of most of the incriminating evidence … no …

Ed:

You don’t leave the paws on?

Simon: No, definitely not. We’ve even got stamps now to say everything is synthetic, I hasten to add.

There is not a farm of gerbils at our place at all, I can confirm.

NZVN

Page 35

Sennheiser – Jünger Audio For Sennheiser, we are at Jünger Audio and just to get us started, we’re with James Waldron from Sennheiser Australia.

Ed: James, Jünger, Sennheiser you know, both audio companies, but they can collaborate nicely because, in fact, they work in different areas?

James: Well they do work in different areas.

Obviously, Sennheiser with microphones and headphones and the Neumann monitors and so on, but there is also the tie-up because Jünger is a dynamics processing company.

Essentially and traditionally, their products have been at the end of the broadcast chain or somewhere in the production chain and I know that they have a voice processor product now as well, which ties in nicely with the studio market that uses studio microphones from Sennheiser and Neumann.

Ed: So you could say Sennheiser’s in the capture NZVN and that early processing …?

James: Sennheiser and Neumann are there in the sound capture and then the voice processor from Jünger in the studio production and then of course dynamics processing for the broadcast chain.

Ed: So you’re covering it from one side to the other?

James: That’s right – from breakfast to cigars!

And to carry us on with the Junger story, we have Anthony Wilkins from Junger.

Ed: So what have you been up to since IBC? Anthony: Since IBC, we have fulfilled the promise that we gave. At IBC we talked about the fact that we were moving towards two common hardware platforms for our 1RU boxes – an 8 channel box and a 4 channel box – and within those boxes we were going to be offering different firmware packages which created the end product. Now we have that here at NAB. The 4 channel boxes comprise two firmware packages, what we call an LM additional Level Magic edition – that’s the loudness manager product that finds a place in the TV transmission path, that does the loudness measuring and scaling to give you compliance with all the relevant standards.

The second box is the one James has mentioned – the voice processor. That’s a full on dynamics package aimed at radio applications, voiceover, ADR type situations. It has the option of a high quality mic preamp input, so that dovetails nicely with the Sennheiser products, capture via the Sennheiser microphone, feed through the box, and it has a comprehensive range of dynamics processing, upwards downwards compressor expander, limiter, “deesser”, static EQ, dynamic EQ – the whole range of everything you need for voice processing.

James and Anthony.

Ed:

And a lot of this is automatic, is that right?

Anthony: All of it is automatable in the sense that, the way we set up and address the boxes through our web browser, if you need to integrate that into an automated environment, presets, settings, parameters are possible to be recalled through GPI commands, through automation systems, so they sit very comfortably into an automated situation. Then on the 8 channel box format, the new products that we have are an MAP monitoring audio processor. This is a kind of a 3-in-1 unit; it’s an audio monitor in the sense that you have a DA card possibility so you can listen to your mix; you have the capability to run in 7.1, 5.1, it will downmix, you can audition the mix, you can AB speakers, you can mute isolate etc. Secondly, it is a loudness measuring tool, which also gives logging and storage capabilities; and thirdly it’s a Dolby toolbox with the ability to do metadata emulation. So this is a box that can actually replace the Dolby DP570 which is no longer available from Dolby.

It’s a comprehensive 3-in-1 package.

Another product we have here which is not in a released version yet, but we’re showing a working version of it … also it’s based on our DAP A chassis and we’re calling this the codec edition. This is rather like the MAP but without the audio processing built-in. It really is a complete Dolby toolset. You can equip it with decoding, encoding, metadata emulation, by configuring it in the right way it becomes a replacement for all of the discontinued Dolby boxes.

Ed: So inside the box there is the Dolby hardware, and it’s preloaded with the Dolby software necessary to do all that Dolby processing?

Anthony: Yes exactly. It’s the Dolby OEM hardware modules which sit with our motherboard inside our box and, when compiled together, will allow you to build a box which replicates the functionality of all the now discontinued Dolby blue boxes, the DP series.

Ed:

It was very nice of them to give it to you?

Anthony: We’ve long been OEM customers of theirs and we’re actually the first manufacturer to bring to market the box that uses their new generation decoder, the so-called CAT 1100 decoder … we’re the first one to market with a box that has that inside it. So at the moment, if you need to source a replacement for one of your Dolby blue boxes, Jünger is the place to go and get it.

NZVN Page 36

Techtel – TVLogic We’re here at TVLogic for Techtel with David Colthorpe and Andrew Kim for TVLogic who is going to take us through the TVLogic range of monitors. Now these are not your average monitor, but a huge variety right from the on-camera LED right up to the 4K area.

Ed: There are monitors here.

some

very

nice

little

on-camera

Andrew: For on-board use with DSLRs, camcorders and ENG we have a range of monitors from 5.5 inches to 9 inches.

Of these, this new VFM-058W is particularly exciting as it offers full 1920 x 1080 resolution for easier focus finding and more picture information and detail.

Ed: I guess you can either supply them with power from the camera or from an external battery?

Andrew: Yes, there are three ways to power the monitors. You can use the normal AC adapter for 12 volts, or use the data cable from the camera, and of course we have various battery mounts. Our mounting brackets take various batteries from Sony, Panasonic and Canon, or even AA batteries.

Ed: That’s emergency.

a

very

handy

thing

to

have

in

an

Andrew: Also in the case of the 7 inch LVM-074W and 9 inch LVM-095W, you can use either Sony Vmount, or Anton Bauer Gold Mount, the V-mount being standard on the LVM-095W so no bracket required.

Ed: Okay, now there are two important things of course with on-camera monitors – one is weight, and the second is the number of nits. We’ll start with weight – are these heavy monitors?

Andrew: The 5.5 inch VFM-056W is very light, being made of magnesium it only weighs 300 grams, excluding the battery bracket. And the new 5.8 inch VFM-058W weighs only around 400 grams, which is great for a full HD resolution monitor.

Ed: Now, do you have any of these monitors that are especially high luminance, the nit count is very high, especially for the Steadicam operator?

Andrew: Yes, the 7 inch SRM-074W is a sunlight readable model idea for bright conditions. This model has a max bright function as a hard key on the front of the panel. So if you press the max bright button then it goes up to 1000 candelas per square meter to give you high brightness pictures … 1000 nits.

David, Alicia and Andrew.

well as Class One, so you obviously are at the top end in these precision monitors?

Andrew: Yes, the biggest advantage of using TVLogic monitor products is that we have a full line-up from small monitors to big sized monitors and classifications from general purpose, through broadcast to critical reference. In fact there are nearly 40 models in total. For example we have sizes in 17 inch, 24 inch and 32 inch, which are the typical sizes that people are using in studio and control rooms. The popular sizes of 17 inch and 24 inch are represented by the new general purpose use LVM-176W and LVM-246W, and for broadcast use the LVM-173W-3G and the new LVM245W. And we have three sizes of critical reference

Ed: And I’ve learnt something today, that a candela per square meter is a nit.

That makes a lot of sense. Now let’s try it, let’s press the button and see what happens …yes, it gets much brighter.

Andrew, is there a good reason why you have a button and you don’t just have it at that full illumination all the time?

Andrew: You don’t always need the full brightness all the time, for example this would be tiring in a dark environment.

So you can set it to normal brightness, which is about 350400 nits for normal purposes, and in very bright circumstances, you can see the picture clearly with high brightness on.

Ed: That makes sense. Right, now in the precision monitor area, there are the larger wall mounted ones, and of course, I see the signs up there “4K OLED” as Page 38

monitor, the XVM-175W, XVM-245W and XVM-325W. There’s also new value priced 18.5 inch and 23 inch models, the TSM-182W and TSM-232W, being released shortly.

respectively. They have new 10-bit panels – and as you can see a nicely designed front bezel free of distracting lights or controls. Ideal for studio, control room or OB van multi-viewer systems.

Ed:

Ed: Okay, now swinging to you David, in the market for monitors, there are numerous people making these, so why would you suggest someone should choose a TVLogic?

Where do we see the OLEDs?

Andrew: Actually TVLogic introduced the world’s first AM-OLED broadcast monitor back in 2010. That was the LEM-150, a 15 inch HD resolution OLED. Now we offer a new AM-OLED monitor, the LEM-250A which is a 24.5 inch FHD 10-bit critical reference monitor.

Ed:

Right, but I see a new one here, a LUM-300A?

Andrew: Yes, that’s our new true 4K monitor with a DCI colour gamut. That’s the full 4096 x 2160 with a colour depth of 1.27 billion colours with true 10 bit LED backlit panel. It’s designed for high-end 4K cinema post as well as high-resolution industrial or CAD applications.

Ed: I can see there’s quite a large dynamic range there in the colour?

Andrew:

That is correct.

Ed: And a lot of detail in the black which is exactly what we look for?

Andrew: Yes, this one gives you 1450 to 1 contrast ratio which provides a very good black level.

Ed: Okay, now going even larger, we have what looks like a 55 inch monitor in multi-view mode?

Andrew: Yes, we have three completely new large format monitors. These are the LVM-420A, the LVM460A and the LVM-550A – 42, 46 and 55 inches

David: Well I think there is a significant range of monitors to select from for sure. The thing about TVLogic, the thing that I’ve noticed about them – and I’ve been to Seoul and seen the factory and seen the quality that these guys build into these products – they’re really extremely conscientious designers, conscientious manufacturers, they take a lot of trouble in the quality assurance, the testing of every monitor.

Every monitor is thermally stressed for 24 hours before it gets completed – every monitor is analysed and aligned, and so the result is something that’s extremely reliable, something that’s a real professional piece of equipment.

Ed:

And good true colour?

David:

High colour accuracy, yes.

Ed: Andrew, what’s the warranty that you provide on your monitors?

Andrew: We normally provide two years warranty for all products.

Ed: Now at the top of the line, I guess, 4K multiviewer?

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Andrew: Yes, we’re showing here the TWV-100, which is a 4K multi-viewer system that can put multiple HD images on a 4K display, with the ability to adjust image sizes and locations. Here we have 16 channels of full HD displayed. The TWV-100 maintains the maximum resolution and exploits the very high resolution of the 4K monitor irrespective of the number of channels displayed, so providing better picture quality than any other multi-viewer systems at the moment.

Ed: Okay, so other systems have to take that 4K signal, dumb it down to an HD and then feed it into their multiviewer?

Andrew: That is correct.

Ed: Got it – and this is especially important in OB vans that are doing sports events with 4K cameras.

NZVN

Sony – Part Two

purposes, because the real ones are opaque black and you’re not getting any light in those?

In the archive solutions section of the Sony stand, I met Sam Farnsworth to hear about Optical Disc Archive Technology.

Sam: Exactly.

There is something about the discs themselves – it’s not the typical laser burn that you’ll be using …

Ed: Sam, this is something that I’ve been looking at for a number of years from basically, just a single Bluray disc as an archive format, which I think is a superb way to store critical data, but Sony have developed this a lot further – tell us all about it?

Ed:

Sam: Optical Disc Archive uses 12 Blu-ray discs in a caddy as an easy way to deal with storing information.

Open up the caddy, there’s a little thumbcap to push each individual disc out and there’s all your data right there. The cool thing about ODA is that they are very disaster tolerant. We’re doing some tests on them right now and they have a 50 year shelf life and that’s under extreme conditions, so 104 degrees and like, 80% humidity. They’ll last about 50 years, whereas tape-based formats are not going to last that long. Also with the ODAs, let’s say if Hurricane Katrina comes through or stormwater or any kind of water gets into these, with tape, it’s going to be completely ruined.

With these, because they’re individual discs, you can just open up the cartridge, take all the discs out, clean them off, put them back in together and you’re good to go and you won’t lose any of your data. So a very good safe alternative for data archiving.

Sam:

It’s a deeper burn is it?

I believe so.

Ed: Now in terms of size, this is one of the things that’s been the issue in the past – a Blu-ray disc takes 25 GB, but you’ve gone further, not only with the individual discs, but in the caddy?

Sam: In the caddy, the highest capacity we have right now is a 1.5 TB and that’s a write-only. We do have a 1.2 TB that is a rewritable, so with LTOs, I know that they are currently rated for about 200 rewrites but with the rewrites on ODAs, you have about a thousand rewrites. In terms of “reads”, the laser is never going to get up to a temperature that’s going to damage the disc itself, so you have probably about a million reads on these drives. It’s definitely a very good alternative right now. The 300 GB and 600 GB are both writable and rewritable.

Ed: Another good thing is that nothing’s actually touching the disc – there’s no physical contact to the media, so it’s not going to wear out?

Ed: And because it’s a laser written optical disc, it’s not going to be affected by magnetic fields?

Sam: Yes exactly, so if any bomb goes off or there’s a magnet and it gets too close to it, all your data will still be on there because it’s laser burnt in.

Ed: I guess the only thing you’ve got to keep away is bright light?

Sam: Essentially yes, but because they are in the cases, they’re safe.

Ed: So the case you’re holding is a clear one, but that’s just for display

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in the drive, it’s going to keep it on there and then store it offline. So you can still search it and then when you need to find a file that could be potentially offline it will let you know which caddy it’s on and then you just put it in and get your files.

Ed: You mean it stores it as a filename or actually as a sub-clip?

Sam: It stores it as a filename, it has some proxy info, a little thumbnail that also goes on there as well, so you can watch all the resolution proxy that’s on there and any other metadata that you store with it.

Ed: Wow, that’s very clever. And then for the big boys, you go up into quite a large robotic system?

Sam: Exactly yes, because nothing ever actually physically touches the disc, whereas with tape the heads make constant contact and a tape head could end up being too far forward, too far back and end up cutting the tape, and then you’re ruined at that point.

With the lasers and these cartridges, they’re able to last you potentially up to a hundred years if you’re storing them correctly.

Ed: And I would think that the time for accessing different discs is much quicker than any tape-based system?

Sam: Oh yes, it’s definitely quicker.

The potential speed is I think anywhere from 2 or 3 seconds to be accessing your data up to the longest, I think, is around 27 seconds – and that’s from loading a cartridge to accessing your data is about 27 seconds, whereas with LTO you could be up for waiting about 100 seconds, almost two minutes.

Ed: Now I’m pretty sure that, at the moment, in terms of cost, if cost is one of your concerns, this is going to be more expensive than LTO? Sam: Yes it will be a little more expensive than LTO. Right now, it’s about 10 cents a gigabyte, so you’re looking at the 1.5 TB costing about US$150, but the future is that the capacity is increasing and the cost will likely continue to decrease per gigabyte.

Ed: Okay, so there we’re talking about just a single unit dub, a single drive bay, you can manually replace the caddies into that, but then you go up in size to a twin drive unit which has a robotic feed, so how many caddies can you put in that?

Sam: The robotic one is the L10. The L10 has 10 slots – you know 10 for 10 – it has two drives in the back. You can upgrade from the single drive into the L10 … basically it has two drives stacked on top of each other and then a front robotic arm that’ll move itself around and it stores all of your data onto there through Content Manager which comes with the drives. With the Content Manager software, you’re able to see all of your information whether you’re online or offline, so after you’ve ejected a drive, if you’re using the single unit, it will let you know what was on that drive, even though it’s offline, whereas with LTO, after loading your tape you have to search through it and rely on what you’ve labelled the tape as. With ODA, when you load

Sam: Yes, so for the bigger boys, we have the L10 over there, which has the 10 slots and the two drives and then the larger one which is the L30 which has 30 slots and two drives.

Then as you go into the largest stack, which is the PetaSite, it has 18 drives and 532 slots, so if you’re loading each of the slots with a 1.5 TB, you’re looking at just over 800 TB with the information, so almost a petabyte worth of data in there.

Ed:

How many of those have you sold personally?

Sam: Personally, I might have sold quite a few over this week! We’ve had some people very interested in them – one guy wanted to know how many can you potentially link together, and because you can be working with this for the CatDV and other forms of MAM software, your computer will look at it as just an external hard drive they can dump it onto, so potentially, you can link many of them together. He was asking me if he could link four together, and I’m like you could definitely be linking four together. I might have sold four right there, so who knows.

Ed: Maybe we’ll just start with the single unit for now?

Sam:

That would be nice too.

In the “still camera section”, I met with Mark Weir from Sony Electronics to get the word on the new Alpha 7S. Ed: Mark, one of the highlights of the press show was the unveiling of the Alpha 7S. It’s an amazing little camera – it’s a still camera, but it’s a movie camera.

There have been comparisons with the Canon DSLRs, but this is a game changer for Sony and the Alpha section isn’t it?

Mark: Well thanks very much. Yes, the A7S is the latest member of our Alpha 7 series. It’s really the same size and shape and control layout as the Alpha 7 and the Alpha 7R which we introduced last fall. What’s different is that we have an all new image sensor with 12 megapixels. It’s a full frame image sensor, just like the Alpha 7 and 7R, but with just 12 megapixels, we’re able to achieve a balance of resolution, sensitivity and dynamic range that really no other camera can. By using just 12 megapixels, we’re able to have very, very large photo sites which can gather a tremendous amount of light and have very high saturation level capabilities. In so doing, we can reach ISO from as low as 50 to as high as 409,600 with very, very low noise throughout.

We can also have tremendously wide

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dynamic range from highlight to shadow – we can avoid blowing out the highlights and still maintain tremendous detail in the shadows.

So we have extraordinary dynamic range and sensitivity with low noise with this image sensor. We believe that this will appeal to photographers tremendously. We use the sensitivity of the image sensor to improve focusing so that this camera can actually autofocus in light as low as minus 4 EV and I don’t know of any other camera that can focus in light that low – certainly no digital SLRs. So we’ve got a lot of appeal for stills photographers, but for videographers we’ve also added a number of features.

This is our first camera with the XAVC-S codec, so we can shoot full HD at up to 50 Mbps, so very high data rate of full HD video. We can also shoot AVCHD like our other cameras. We can also shoot a low data rate MP4 for a transfer to the Internet, because the camera has wireless and NFC just like all of the other Alpha 7 models. What a lot of people are very interested in and eager to see, is the camera can also capture 4K video. It is only the second camera ever made with a full frame image sensor to capture 4K video, the first being the Canon 1D C. However, unlike the Canon 1D C, we capture the full frame; we capture the full width of the full frame sensor for 8.3 megapixels without any line skipping, or pixel binning.

So unlike pretty much every other digital SLR which skips lines of pixels because it has too many pixels for full HD or 4K capture, we avoid that, so it’s aliasing and artifact-free video, no colour falsing, no moire and tremendous sensitivity, tremendous dynamic range.

Like the other models, it uses our E-mount so it’s friendly with many different lenses, including our five available full frame E-mount lenses, and our 13 other sub-frame E-mount lenses.

Countless adapters are available to allow third-party lenses to be used with this camera, very popular for Canon and Leica and Nikon as well. We’re showing here at NAB, Zeiss CP.2 Primes – there’s a series of about 6 or 7 Zeiss CP.2 Primes in the native full frame EF E-mount that are available now.

We’re also showing a new Sony lens that’s under development. It’s a 28-135mm, constant aperture, F4 servo zoom lens which will be particularly interesting to videographers who want to shoot full frame video with the tremendous sensitivity and dynamic range of the Alpha 7S. Ed: Now one question I have about lens mounts … it says up there Alpha Mount System, but you keep talking about E-mount?

Mark: Yes, well all of our lenses are part of the Alpha Mount System which encompasses both E-mount

and A-mount and all of our lenses – 54 of them in total right now – can be used directly with this camera, either by direct attachment in the E-mount system or Amount lenses can be used through the two adapters that we have, the LA-EA4 or LA-EA3 so all of our Alpha Mount System are available for use with the Alpha 7 cameras.

Ed: Is the E-mount a newer version, a new type of mount?

Mark: Sure. We introduced E-mount in 2010, about four years ago, with the first E-mount camera, the NEX series, and the nature of an E-mount lens is slightly different than an A-mount lens, because it’s built around the mirrorless structure and the contrast AF which is common to most all mirrorless cameras.

It’s a very different type of lens construction to the

Mark with the Alpha 7S.

conventional or traditional lenses built for SLRs, because these types of lenses have silent AF electronic iris control rather than mechanical iris control, which is common to traditional digital SLR lenses.

You’ll see that these types of lenses are beginning to emerge from other manufacturers as well, as they venture into the world of mirrorless cameras, or even non-sensor phase detect AF systems.

So Canon, for instance, has dual pixel AF which works with a new series of lenses they’re creating called STM and you’ll see a lot of lens development to support these kinds of cameras as we move into the future.

Ed: So from now on, are all the lens mounts going to be E-mount or will you continue with the A-mount?

Mark: Oh we are certainly continuing with our Amount system.

We’ve recently introduced a number of A-mount lenses and we’re absolutely supporting the A-mount system with the SLT cameras as well as the E-mount system with the Alpha 5000, the Alpha 6000, the Alpha 3000 and the Alpha 7 series that we just introduced here – the Alpha 7S. Ed:

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Fantastic.

NZVN

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Gencom – Ensemble Designs For Gencom, we are at Ensemble Designs and Cindy Zuelsdorf is a little bit throaty, but we like that.

Cindy: Hey Grant, good to see you again, my favourite person to do interviews with.

Ed:

Oh, you’re so kind.

Cindy: It’s all true, I’ve been doing interviews all day and this is the best one.

Ed: You’re looking forward to this and I’ve just seen a sign that says “HDMI clean switching instantaneous” and I mean, even I know that’s something that’s a hard nut to crack, but you’ve done it?

NZVN

Cindy showing the alarm feature on the Avenue Multiviewer 2.0.

Cindy: It’s true.

HDMI switching usually means pops with the audio and glitches or going to black on the monitor, and that’s always a tough one, people don’t want to have that; you want to have an instant and clean perfect switching.

Ed: Yes, in any situation and for a lot of people in that arena market, church market with HDMI cabling, clean switching is very important?

Cindy: Correct, and with the BrightEye compact router on your 2.0 here at NAB …

Ed:

NXT

What’s its number?

Cindy: Your favourite … our focus group has come up with a number with you in mind Grant. BrightEye NXT 410 we used some letters in there and we’ve got several numbers.

Ed: That’s a bit of a departure from the normal isn’t it, that many letters?

Cindy: Yes, we wanted to mix it up, keep it memorable. But, more importantly, we wanted to keep it useful – so the product lets you mix between HDMI and SDI. You can mix between two different types of signals and I did say “mix” I didn’t say just cut; you can actually mix now, so that’s part of our new 2.0 version of this product – you can do mixes.

Ed:

As well as HDMI to HDMI?

Cindy: Absolutely, so you can cut cleanly between HDMI and HDMI; cut cleanly between HDMI and SDI; cut cleanly between SDI and SDI – the built-in clean switches give you that, and now brand new is the ability to mix – mix transitions, really increase the usefulness of this product out in the field.

Ed:

And that’s between any of the formats?

Cindy: Between any of the formats. In fact, one of the News companies we’re working with has a News helicopter and they were wanting to do this type of switching between HDMI and SDI, maybe move between a point of view camera, reporter camera, a ball turret camera, and wanted to take it a step further in that they wanted to also be able to have audio breakaway and salvo memory registers so the memory registers help them get back to the settings that they want and also be able to switch multiple outputs simultaneously.

Ed:

And that’s in just one little blue box?

Cindy: It is … and for customers who already have this product, they can get this update free on our

website starting April 25th. You know, in the old days, there’d just be a brand new product with completely new hardware and we would say “oh yeah, that was last year’s model, please buy this one”. We want to provide something better than that; we give this update free to people who already own the product and then anybody who buys it today gets these awesome capabilities.

Ed: Now I don’t see a mixing bar on the device, so how do you do your mixing?

Cindy: From the front here, you can see there’s a push button and you can push the take button to toggle between cuts or mixes, so you just push it twice …

Ed: And you get a fixed time, or can you adjust the time?

Cindy: Of course you can adjust it, so if you want to set it to 25 or …

Ed:

Is there nothing you can’t do Cindy?

Cindy:

I’m sure there’s something.

Ed: I’m still waiting. Now this helicopter company, is that a local one for us?

Cindy: In fact it was.

We were working with Gencom and with ABC in Australia who made some of these requests – in particular, the salvo registers, and they needed that audio breakaway and audio level adjustment for their application.

Ed: And now that you’ve done it, are you finding interest from other operators?

Cindy: We are – in fact one of the things that NASCAR wanted to do was to be able to use this particular BrightEye NXT compact router in the truck and then they wanted to have the same type of audio controls. Additionally, they asked for RS232 control so that the camera operators could use their momentary switches to bring up the signals they want, programme, preview, slo mo, and look at it in their viewfinder. So the things that ABC asked for, other places are using and NASCAR asked for RS232 and we implemented that – and it goes on and on and it just expands the capability throughout the whole customer base.

Ed: Because customers are so demanding aren’t they … they want you to do backflips?

Cindy: Hey, the only reason we build anything is for our customers, so we love getting those requests.

Ed: Now there’s more – you haven’t just been doing that surely?

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Cindy: We do have another product and it’s our brand new Avenue Multiviewer 2.0. This came about because some of our customers were asking for support modes for the operators versus the engineering staff.

So engineering staff want to set up the multiviewer, put all the alarms in, some of the alarming we offer is new, set up captioning which is useful in various markets, have GPIs GPOs set up – all those types of things that the engineering staff want to set up in a precise way.

just pull up their layouts that they’ve made in advance.

Gencom will like it because they will be able to create all the layouts that their customers need for them and maybe email those set ups to them, wherever they are.

Engineers like it – they can log into the multiviewer using the IP address of the multiviewer and look at it from home if they want to.

Ed:

On their tablet at the beach?

Cindy: On their tablet, on their iPhone, any of those things, yes.

Ed: Wow, so they can take their work home at the weekends – that’s what engineers like to do I know.

Cindy: We know they don’t want to do it, but at least they don’t have to go in at 2am to deal with the problem, so maybe there’s an upside for them right.

Ed: When the boss calls and says “No 3’s down, come on in”!

Cindy: It’s true, they need to be able to address that one way or another and if they can still be at home and troubleshoot the multiviewer, much better for them right.

Ed: Now the operators, maybe someone in the control room, a segment producer or someone like that, they have different needs and so we came up with this great system where the operator has his or her own panel where he could recall the morning show multiviewer set up, so maybe he’s got eight images up on the screen.

And then later in the day, they’re going to pull up the sports weekend edition layout. I actually heard from some customers yesterday that they have separate multiviewers for different shows – actual separate hardware, right.

Ed:

Well that would be good for you in a way?

Cindy: In a way, because we give them a way to save money and it’s more efficient because they can

Exactly. So what does an alarm look like?

Cindy: An alarm pops up on the screen and says “video frozen” or “video’s gone away” – it gives the information, maybe “audio’s silent” and the alarm can be set up by engineering to either be persistent, maybe stay on until it is cleared manually, either with a GPI or with the touch of a button from the iPhone or a tablet or a PC; or it can be set up to just appear while the alarm case is occurring and as soon as the alarm situation is cleared, the alarm could go away.

It can be customised.

Ed: A very valuable tool. In the old days, somebody would have had to be looking at the picture and see the fault and then try and describe it to somebody else and then go and look at it and see if they can find it, rather NZVN than having a visual display. Very clever.

Gencom Playbox For Gencom, we are at PlayBox with Marketing Manager, Peter Petrov.

Ed: Peter, the last time I think we saw PlayBox was at SMPTE in Sydney.

You’d made some big improvements, but you’re here at NAB so obviously things have got even bigger and better?

Peter: Yes, things are going very well for us and this is the 10th NAB for PlayBox Technology. More exciting times are to come now since we are partnering with Masstech, a leading provider of powerful tools for media asset management and transcoding

Peter and Iulian.

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technology for the media and entertainment industries, based in Canada. Working together, we will be able to offer A to Z workflows for any broadcaster. I am sure this will strengthen our positions even more and PlayBox Technology will continue dictating global Channel-in-a-Box trends. As far as PlayBox Technology product announcements go, we are announcing three new products at the NAB: Production AirBox, CaptureBox Pro and TimeShiftBox DUO. These brand new products will cover all kinds of broadcast demands from +1 channels to production houses allowing the ingest of four independent channels.

Along with the new products we are changing our graphical user interface as well.

Ed: Are any of the new products available and shipping now?

Peter: Yes, they are available and demos are done at our five demo spots on our booth.

Customers are very happy with our latest solutions, not only because of their functionality but because of the new graphical user interface we have. The feedback we are getting from customers is excellent.

Ed: That is one of the things that I have heard about PlayBox – the stability. Once you get it up and running, it just keeps going. How can you manage that where perhaps some of your competition can’t?

Peter: The key is our team of professionals at the R&D Centre based in Bulgaria. They are receiving all kinds of requests and ideas from our 13 country offices worldwide, so they are able to prepare really great products. 24/7 worldwide support is available as well.

Ed: Now your background platform is Windows 7 and I know from personal experience that is a very stable version of Windows.

Peter: It is a reliable platform but you also need reliable broadcast software in order to have your operations running smoothly.

We’ve now been joined by Iulian Ionesku who is familiar with the New Zealand and Australia markets. He is also familiar with the playout codecs that PlayBox Technology supplies.

Ed: You’re not going 4K yet, but in the HD area, what are you sending out?

Iulian: We can send out two types of signal – SDI as the main digital signal along stream out; and this simultaneously with the new MPO engine.

On the stream side, our customers can configure H264 or MPEG2 UDP transport streams.

Using an agnostic playlist with our mixed playback engine, any type of content SD or HD with different format and containers can be delivered in any configured output, mentioned above.

Ed: We’ve recently had a discussion with the TVNZ OnDemand people and it seems as though H.264 is the way to go for streaming?

Iulian: For the moment I think it’s the best way to go. In future, there will be new codecs such as H265 / HEVC, which will be implemented in our technology as well.

Ed: And that’s it, it is a software upgrade, so somebody who has bought PlayBox can quite often upgrade the software to allow them to use these new codecs, or do they have to buy a whole new system?

Iulian: No, they can upgrade easily having two options on the table. One is to benefit from our ongoing promotion called Hardware Replacement Programme, which gives our customers the opportunity to replace existing systems with a brand new unit, while keeping the cost significantly lower. The second option is just a software upgrade, intended mostly for our two years old customers in which the hardware can still keep up with the latest features and functions of our software. In both cases, the customers will gain a multi parallel output, more format supports, enhanced features and the latest GPU-enhanced graphics mixing engine which allows video rotation effects and depth order laying effects to be performed in real time.

Ed: And that’s it – I suppose if you were to answer “what is the major difference PlayBox has, or major advantage PlayBox has over the competition”, it is that you are both – you are the streaming and you are the SDI broadcast output?

Iulian: And we do this using our MPO engine, multi parallel output over SDI and UDP. Ed: Now we’ve already talked to Peter about the stability of the system, but is there anything else that PlayBox can add – why one would choose PlayBox as opposed to something else?

Iulian: We offer to our customers a lot of features inside the system and it’s really tailored for what they need, avoiding paying extra costs for bundled solutions.

And we have a unique flexibility in how to operate our system, and when this is attached to the easiness of use, our solutions become the number one Channel-in-a -Box solutions. Another important aspect is that with assistance from our local partner, Gencom, we are able to provide localised training and installation with first NZVN level support for New Zealand and Australia.

Page 46

Sound Techniques – Lectrosonics We are at the Lectrosonics booth for Sound Techniques with Mr Buckland and Peter More from Lectrosonics.

Stephen: It’s a good thing, yes. It’s been common in Lectrosonics, this is just an upgrade of the entry level equipment which we’ve sold from Lectrosonics for quite some years – the LMa transmitter, an older model, now about to be superseded with incorporating all the other stuff that Lectrosonics has included in the last few years in other models.

Ed: And the 80 MHz bandwidth is totally safe in New Zealand – nobody’s going to grab it?

Stephen: No, but it gives you a lot of flexibility around the frequencies you can use, because up till now, Lectrosonics gear’s only had 25.6 MHz which is kind of the equivalent of three television blocks, whereas this is giving you a wider choice of frequencies that you can use.

Ed: So there’s going to be something in that 80 MHz range?

Stephen: A better chance that there’s something in that range, yes.

Peter with the LMb transmitter.

Ed: Peter, you’ve got something pretty small in your hand there?

Peter: This is the Lectrosonics LMb transmitter. It is a belt pack transmitter, 50 milliWatt output, 80 MHz bandwidth wide – the tuning range is 80 MHz. It is a digital hybrid transmitter, which means it has a very high dynamic range, no compander … it is compander free …

Ed:

No what?

Stephen: Compander = compressor / expander. It’s a means of squeezing an audio signal into limited bandwidth and can cause audible audio artefacts.

Peter: No compander artefacts using the digital hybrid mode, which is a Lectrosonics exclusive feature.

It offers the advantage of analogue FM with digital audio quality. So this is the Lectrosonics LMb – it is powered by two AA batteries and this has an LCD screen for you to programme your frequency, gain and operating mode.

Ed:

And it comes with a compatible receiver?

Peter: It comes with a compatible receiver. second transmitter I’m going to show you is the LT transmitter with a removable antenna and this one has the added feature that our microphone input uses TA5 Switchcraft connectors and we can programme one of the pins for line level or Hi-Z input ( high impedance input ). So you can plug your instrument cable directly into the transmitter. Also it has 80 MHz tuning range.

Ed:

The

Peter: The wide tuning range is a very important feature. The previous generation has a tuning range of 25.6 MHz. The newer one’s got 80 MHz, so it’s three times the tuning range and it gives you a lot more flexibility as you move from area to area, especially in RF congested neighbourhoods.

Ed: Doesn’t the higher frequency though mean that the transmission distance is reduced?

Peter: Not necessarily. It’s more efficient at the higher frequency up to a certain point, and that is one of the reasons why the cellphone companies wanted to use the 700 MHz band, because it’s got penetration into office buildings. If you don’t have a Microsoft Office available, you can still get email on your cellphone, and that is one of the reasons why they used the 700 MHz, 800 MHz band, so they can penetrate into the building.

Consequently we lost that band for wireless mic use.

We’re down in the below 700 MHz range, which is probably a very efficient way for us to do our production work.

Ed:

Is it also hybrid?

Peter: All of our transmitters are digital hybrid, yes.

Ed: So what does “digital hybrid” mean to the New Zealand market Stephen?

Stephen: Well digital hybrid – the quality of digital audio coupled with the range of analogue audio.

Ed:

Okay, now?

Peter: We have this SR receiver which is a drop in receiver into most professional cameras. It’s a dual

So it’s a good thing?

Page 48

channel – a two channel receiver, so in a very small package.

And this is an interface connector for a Panasonic camera. The baseplate is interchangeable – you can put in a plate that would interface with Sony cameras.

The same receiver, we have a standard battery pack that would mix as a self-powered two channel receiver. TA3 connector outputs, you can also run external power – DC power.

Ed: Are these upgradable … so if you just get the SRb, the standard drop in one, you can add the base to it and have the SRb5P? Peter: This is an SR BATTSLED adapter that fits over the SR battery that will allow your receiver to be self-powered. The same receiver can drop into this new dual pack. The dual pack has two lithium batteries inside in a very compact package that will power the receiver without using an external battery like this. It is a very clean packaging – TA3 connectors output, external power in and you can charge the lithium battery pack inside; very neat packaging here. Our new receiver is the LR, a digital hybrid receiver, single channel, very compact and there’s an accessory where this can be mounted on a shoe for SLR recording; TA3 connector output that will plug into your SLR camera; digital hybrid of course.

Ed: Now Stephen, I guess for the smaller market, the corporate market, the LR series is the way to go?

Stephen: The LR series would be very useful in the corporate market yes, because it can be attached to a

camera. To date, Lectrosonics haven’t had anything at that sort of level that was so convenient, plus the fact that it’s got dual antenna, so it replaces something which only had a single antenna, so the dual antenna guarantees much better reception.

Ed:

Is that called diversity?

Stephen:

It is called diversity.

Lectrosonics has its own way of doing diversity where they switch from one antenna to the other. Other companies have two complete receivers inside the body of the thing, but of course they have to compromise on the quality of electronics to get it at the same sort of price.

One of the issues we have in New Zealand is trying to match the frequencies the manufacturers supply with what is usable or legitimate in New Zealand, and Sound Techniques is exploring the options of knocking out frequencies which are not allowed to be used in New Zealand, so we comply with the regulations and users don’t have to worry about that stuff.

Ed: So that’s something that has to be done in the manufacturing process or can you do it in your workshop?

Stephen: The preferred option is to be able to do it ourselves, because the quantities which sell into New Zealand make for major work for the supplier. So we are exploring the option of being able to do it ourselves NZVN – having the gear to do it.

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Sound Techniques – K-Tek For Sound Techniques and Stephen Buckland we are at K-Tek with Brenda Parker.

the scenes before they put it on the market, because most bags are made by companies that make bags for cameras, and so audio is an offshoot. I thought it was great that K-Tek was exclusively targeting the audio professional. We’re still a bit concerned about what you do with the Y-front but we’ll have a look at that in the photo.

Ed: So in terms of choosing the materials Brenda, you have got your own bag designer?

Brenda with bag model front and back.

Ed: Brenda, bags – K-Tek bags. This is something that I know Stephen’s been looking forward to?

Brenda: We are extremely excited with the K-Tek audio bag division. We’ve taken the customer feedback and suggestions and tried to make the best bag that we can for our customers. We began with the Stingray audio bags. We have one that’s dedicated for the Sound Devices 633 or the Zaxcom MAXX. It’s a black exterior bag with blue interior and the top is completely open, the sides can completely open and you have bottom access as well. It has a dedicated place for multiple wireless transmitter receivers. It has a front pocket that you can use for camera hops, or you can put your headphones, you can put your BDS. It gives you various cabling options; it’s got loops on the front so you can put our cable hangers on the loops and hang your cables neatly. It has a concave back with some mesh so you can get airflow, and it also has a rain cover. The handles retract, it comes with a shoulder strap and it’s absolutely beautiful.

Ed: Stephen, bags have been around for a long time – people have been making audio bags, so what could K -Tek add to the market do you feel?

Stephen: Well the delight in presenting this bag – and we’ve had one shipment which was sold before it arrived in the country – was that no one could find anything wrong with it. It suited them.

Ed: Wow, that’s pretty amazing for audio people, not finding anything wrong?

Stephen: Well it was also extraordinary for a bag because usually someone would wish the manufacturer had done this or that, or could they add on a bit here or a bit there. The K-Tek bag, the original Stingray bag, came ready to sell and that was testament to the amount of research that they must have done behind

Brenda: We do.

We have a bag designer who has created bags for our industry in the past, who has specialised in the materials that are needed in the set environment, in a rugged environment. So he understands the needs of our customers.

We also have our audio specialists who have worked with the bag designer, so we have the best of both worlds … we’ve got the manufacturing, the materials and we also have the audio knowledge, and we put them together to create the Stingray audio bags.

Ed: Now I see a gentleman that you’ve got kitted up here and he looks rather comfortable in his bag, because there’s a very large back brace?

Brenda: Yes, this is Manny and Manny is sporting our new Stingray audio bag for the Sound Devices 664 which we’re introducing at NAB. Manny is introducing our new audio harness.

What makes this harness unique is it actually has a spine, so we have aluminium fixed into the back of the harness, so it keeps your back upright; we have three points of connection to the bag so it puts the weight distribution on your hips and on the second point below your shoulders and your hips, and you do have shoulder straps but you don’t have any kind of weight leaning down on your shoulders. It’s a beautiful harness, we’re very proud of it as well.

Ed:

Is there a mounting point for a K-Tek pole?

Brenda: Right now with your K-Tek pole, you could lay it across the top. I’ve also seen some people lay it underneath the front – I call it “the underwear” – but the front underwear of the bag, you can actually have your pole sitting in there, so there are various points.

Again, the sound mixer is going to choose how they want to use this bag, there’s so many different options with it.

Ed: So now there are a couple of sizes as well – you’ve got the bag for the 633, but there’s another couple of bags there too, by the look of it?

Brenda: Yes, we also have the bag for the 664. And we have our boom pole case bags, so we have the KBLT35 and the 52. So it’s a solid travel bag for your boom pole – you can put two boom poles in it if you’d like a shock mount to your microphone. It’s a great way to travel; it’s got a shoulder strap.

Ed: As well as the pole, so any development in pole technology?

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Brenda: We have been making our classic boom poles for almost 20 years and we have tried to make modifications to it, and every time we do people yell at us. So we’ve actually gone back to our original design from top to bottom and you’ll find our dimpled aluminium collars, you’ll find beautiful smooth graphite and it’ll be incredibly lightweight and it works.

Ed: Now we can’t leave you without talking about Nautilus because this is something where we showed a wonderful picture last year of Brenda stretching a Nautilus and it bounced back to where it was. A very clever microphone holder – doing well for you?

Brenda: It’s doing great. We were actually nominated for a Cinema Audio Society award this year, which we were very proud of, for the design of the Nautilus suspension mount.

Ed:

And it comes in black or black?

Brenda: It comes in black or black … yes, exactly! I wanted to make pink ones but they wouldn’t let me, I don’t know. Dave said they wouldn’t go; I’m not sure, I think pink would have done very well.

Ed:

What do you reckon Stephen?

Stephen: Ed:

About the Nautilus?

Yes, pink ones?

Stephen: Oh any colour is always popular. In other things like windscreens we have a range of colours and every now and then someone comes along wanting something out of the ordinary.

Ed: Well in the soundie world they like different things don’t they?

Stephen: Yes, but let’s be practical – pink is not a great colour if it reflects pink into shot or whatever.

NZVN Black is the new black in sound equipment.

Page 52

Atomise – JMR Electronics For Atomise we are now at JMR Electronics – innovators in storage technologies and we have Miguel Saldate, engineer along with Richard Kelly.

Ed: So Miguel, what do you engineer?

Miguel: I’m a technical product specialist, a product engineer at JMR Electronics and we make a variety of high performance storage systems, server solutions and also some network accelerator products.

A couple of products that we’re focusing on are our Network Storage Server which is a storage server which offers AFP connectivity, NFS connectivity, SMB. We also offer an Apple file protocol cluster which nobody else offers, even if you go to some of the big three letter storage companies it’s a capability they don’t have.

We have full failover, hyperredundancy, multiple 10 gigabit Ethernet links, multiple gigabit links; we offer PCI expansion, so customers who don’t necessarily want to invest in a switch can actually deploy several network cards and direct connect their users to that en masse, providing real fast streaming for media files for IT for oil and gas, so we go across verticals. If you have a mass data need, JMR can fit that solution and tailor fit it to whatever your needs may be. Now our Net Accelerator product is actually a very unique product.

What’s unique about that is, if you have an existing SAN or NAS infrastructure, you can connect two of these nodes at remote locations – so Node 1 for example could be in Los Angeles; Node 2 could be in New York – and just in preliminary testing we’re moving about a terabyte of data over a 10 gigabit Ethernet line in about 10 minutes from New York to Los Angeles, which is pretty remarkable. Also, if you don’t have, let’s say, the fastest storage infrastructure to handle that kind of throughput, we can provide you another appliance, again with the software already preloaded, preconfigured drive pool to ensure quality of service from “point to point”. In conjunction with that, we still offer our BlueStor product line which is 16 bay and soon to be 24 bay rack mount storage enclosures, server enclosures, and our SilverStor line of products which also includes our ThunderStor – our SilverStorThunderStor product which is an 8 bay Thunderbolt attached product with a SAS expansion available, which is also something that is unique to JMR. So instead of having to daisy-chain additional Thunderbolt storages boxes on the line and actually slow down your Thunderbolt connection, we expand via SAS so that you’re able to get and maintain a high level of performance and expand your storage to massive storage amounts, all on the fly.

Ed: Richard, those sorts of speeds, I mean we couldn’t manage that could we – 10 minutes for a terabyte?

Richard: Simply – no, so quite impressive. Well, within New Zealand, most people know they couldn’t, but there are certainly clients that I work with who do actually have that level of bandwidth.

So it is something that’s very applicable …

Ed: And it’s going to come?

Richard: It is going to come, but our problem is the last mile of infrastructure. We’ve got the connectivity

Miguel and Richard.

out of our country and into our country, but what we have for some people is the challenge of that last mile back to the exchange.

Ed: But certainly on a local area network it would work, wouldn’t it?

Richard: Absolutely. I think there’s room for this product knowing the price point it’s at and what it does for independent filmmakers for example doing a shoot, and having a really resilient way of moving their media from out on location back to base. You know we’re talking about a smaller amount of data usually, but it gives a CRC Checksum data pass through, so you know what’s going from one to the other, is what’s supposed to get from one end to the other. I think it’s going to be a great solution and I look forward to using it.

Ed: So the Thunderbolt’s a big thing, or SAS is the other big thing?

Richard: Thunderbolt is a huge thing. Thunderbolt is out everywhere now, so whether you’ve got an HP or an Apple, it gives you a really solid way of connecting to storage and it’s a really great product that these guys have built. That expandability takes some of their competitors’ products and just kicks them out of the ballpark. Once you’ve seen this product, this is what you’re going to buy.

Ed: Okay, so one of the cute little things here on the JMR stand is actually a product by Apple, a new Mac Pro which is a little cylinder and Miguel, you’ve developed something interesting for it?

Miguel: Yes, actually JMR has developed a Mac Pro mounting kit, so you’re able to mount your Mac Pro either in a rack mount, in a horizontal configuration so you can mount two machines side by side, or we also offer a vertical configuration where you can mount machines vertically in your rack. It is of aluminium design, so it keeps the machine cool, it’s very well put together metal, you have padding to make sure that your Mac Pro doesn’t get marked and you’re able to make the most efficient use of your rack space while still using the latest technology that Apple has to offer.

So those are actually on sale now, you can get them through the JMR website or through one of our resellers or distributors, like Atomise in New Zealand. If you need any more information on the JMR product, you can always reach us on http://www.jmr.com

Page 53

array. So we only see things getting faster and faster in the industry and Apple’s really pushing that, so that gives people good options on both the Apple OSX side and also the PC side.

Ed: My question is really about the cylinder design, rather than a box … is there any engineering value in the cylinder, or is it just aesthetic?

Miguel: Well it does have some engineering value in terms of saving desk space and stuff like that. The fact that they’ve deployed PCI SSD as a standard is a big deal because you know eventually the whole industry is going to move more towards SSDs. But at the same time it does create some challenges in terms of folks who have legacy PCIE cards and stuff like that – especially in the professional video market.

Ed: Now tell me, as an engineer, can you see a value in having a cylindrical computer like that?

Miguel: Well absolutely. The thing about it is that Apple always push the envelope in terms of design and engineering when it comes to their products and in our preliminary tests with the Mac Pro it’s a very powerful machine with PCI SSDs built-in, dual graphics, graphics ports for processing, so it does have a place and also has Thunderbolt multiple Thunderbolt 2 connections which work well with our Thunderbolt attached storage

You know, if you’ve invested lots of money in PCIE cards for processing for SDI output, this does present a challenge, but that’s something that we are to meet as well. JMR is actually going to be putting out a series of Thunderbolt 2 to PCIE expansion enclosures, so if you have legacy PCIE product that you need to put in and connect to your Thunderbolt Mac, we’ll provide you a 3slot enclosure or a 1-slot enclosure that you can just simply plug in your card, plug in your Thunderbolt connection and you’re good to go.

Ed:

Available from Atomise.

NZVN

AJA – NAB 2014 We are at AJA with Tony Cacciarelli talking about one exciting product that they’ve just released at this show.

Tony: For five years we’ve been keeping a very big secret but the secret’s out now and it’s called CION. It’s a production camera that’s capable of working at HD, 2K, UHD and 4K resolutions. We record directly onto SSD media onboard on the camera. It’s the same media that we use with our Ki Pro Quad and really, the recording side of this is an extension of the Ki Pro Quad.

We’ve taken the same concept of recording to ProRes which has really helped accelerate that workflow of getting from your camera into your edit and now you have the front end of the camera. We’ve been saying that we’ve been building the back end of cameras for some time and now we’re building the whole thing. So CION is a very open camera in a lot of respects and it’s also the culmination of a lot of thought and really purposeful placement of everything on the camera. We’ve put a lot of effort into designing the camera and thinking through how people want to use the camera, how this camera’s going to be used, and making sure that all the connections that we have – and we have a lot of them – are in the place where you would want them for the purpose for which they’re designed. So at the front end of the camera are connections for the viewfinder, you have an SDI and an HDMI connector at the front end so you can plug in any kind of viewfinder at the front. We have a power tap at the front of the camera, for being able to power accessories like viewfinders and other powered accessories you might want to put on the front. On the back, we have the standard outputs, four SDIs, which can output a 4K baseband output, but we’re also able to output 120 frames per second as our AJA RAW format

Tony with the CION from AJA.

out of those four SDIs, and then we can feed that into other devices that can then decode that.

Ed:

So this is a cinema camera?

Tony: We are going for the cinema camera market with this, yes. We’re not trying to be “the” camera to solve every problem; we think there’s a particular place in the market that was looking for a camera like this.

Ed:

That’s refreshing.

Tony: I hope it is … and really, aiming to design a camera for a very specific market of working professionals who are doing high end work on a regular basis. They need a camera that’s fairly affordable, but still gives them those high quality features. We think there are other cameras that are at the higher end for folks who are doing very high end cinema work, and they have features and image quality and capabilities that are really important to that market. With CION,

Page 54

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DVT – Autodesk Smoke and more We’re here in Auckland with Stuart from DVT to talk about Autodesk post NAB. Ed: Autodesk really has made a big impact on the postproduction industry over recent years, not just the graphics side of it, but the whole editing workflow. With the latest additions to Smoke, they seem to have just gone even further Stuart?

Stuart: Yes they’ve done a great job. Obviously, the advances in Autodesk Smoke were planned to democratise visual effects and bring them to anybody who was an editor or doing basic things with Half an hour before the show closed and there was still interest at the Autodesk demo. compositing in After Effects or wanted to make it very easy for you to move ahead and grading in Resolve. So with Smoke over the years, use their product instead. they’ve certainly added more features and they’ve put a lot of effort into making it much easier to use and of Ed: How can you test that – I mean, it’s good to say course bringing it up to date with the modern that, but do you have to go out and buy a Smoke paradigms that people are used to … for example, if system to actually see whether you could drive it you’re an Adobe Premiere or a Final Cut editor, they yourself?

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Stuart: Not at all. The thing with Smoke is that there’s a 30 day trial where you can download, install and actually use the full version of the software, it’s unlimited. The other really cool thing with Autodesk Smoke is that, on YouTube, there is an Autodesk Smoke learning channel that starts all the way from the basics, how to install the product, how to open it up, create your first project and bring some footage in and start doing some basic editing – all the way to the advanced features now of 3D tracking and grading and compositing and special effects. So it’s very easy.

still got Adobe Premiere and After Effects and SpeedGrade and Photoshop all as separate applications, although they do link to each other. You can take a Photoshop document, embed it in an After Effects composition, embed that After Effects composition into Adobe Premiere’s timeline, and then embed Premiere’s timeline into SpeedGrade and do grading. It’s a little bit cumbersome. Autodesk Smoke, on the other hand, performs all of those functions in a single integrated package, so it’s a few steps ahead I guess of where Adobe is.

The real test with these products, when you know Final Cut or Adobe or now even DaVinci Resolve, when they say you can edit with our product, the reality is that anyone who is experienced in editing in a normal editing package, the real acid test is that they can sit in front of the software and, without knowing a single thing, they can drag a clip up and down the timeline, can they trim the ends of it, can they do an insert edit and mess with the audio levels … and the reality is, they now all work with a very common paradigm across the board. That’s why a lot of vendors, including Autodesk, have been making sure that their software looks and feels like an editing application up the front end.

It depends on what you’re doing. Some people are just editing and, of course, you can use all of these applications now to do just editing if you want to, but the nice thing with Autodesk Smoke is that, when you want to step into moderate to heavy visual effects, you don’t have to leave the application; or if you want to do colour grading, you don’t have to leave the application, and that’s really one of the big advantages of Autodesk Smoke.

Ed: You mentioned DaVinci Resolve, you can download that for free and use it for free, so why would you spend money (a) on Autodesk or (b) on upgrading your Resolve to the full version?

Stuart: It’s interesting when you look at it from a historical perspective. A lot of these products started doing one thing really well, but they realised the problem with that is round-tripping … you know, it’s all very well to have a special effects package, but you’ve got to grade it as well and then getting your footage out of that special effects package and into a grading package is okay, but then you’ve got to edit it and you’ve got to take it out of that and put it into your editor, and that’s a problem. DaVinci Resolve is a good example where it’s a very good grading system, but now of course with the latest versions of DaVinci Resolve they’ve also put editing functions into it as well.

The same with Autodesk – Smoke was always an editing application with special effects attached. It’s also got very good grading tools as well and one could say that Adobe, now you can only buy all of their products, but they’re still separate applications. You’ve

Ed: Now I understand from the press briefing that we had at NAB that the 3D capability now of Smoke has really improved … for example, they said it was used on Gravity?

Stuart: Yes, you know Autodesk Smoke is a very capable package and the one thing that Smoke can do that none of the other systems can really do is bring in a real 3D object and manipulate it in 3D space inside the timeline of the system. That’s sort of unique I suppose to Smoke, and of course, with Autodesk’s legacy of other products like Maya, 3DStudio MAX, Softimage etc, you’ve got all of the tools available to you in the Autodesk world to create 3D objects, texture them, paint them and set them up and render them, or bring them directly into Autodesk Smoke, because it all talks the same language and file format compatibility.

Ed: Yes, because we were told a comparison between Avatar and Gravity and that, in the days of Avatar (and really it wasn’t that long ago), it was fairly high maintenance – there was an intensive effort to get that 3D look, but with Gravity, they used Smoke out of the box?

Stuart: Absolutely.

The ease of use of these products has been a strong focus for Autodesk with Smoke, to make it easier to use. Also, to untangle the technical complexity with which the product needs to run. In the old days, it was a Linux only product that ran on proprietary systems, you needed an engineer to set it up for you and to maintain it; whereas today, it really is just a desktop application that you can install on any modern Mac and run it without any technical complexities. The user interface looks similar; as we talked about before with the editing applications, you can sit there and edit in Smoke with no training whatsoever. It’s very, very straightforward and, to get into the advanced features is really only a few clicks

Page 58

away and there’s the Smoke learning channel to show you how to do that. That’s the change in the last five years – the removing of complexity, streamlining the workflows and adding in creative tools that people have demanded into the application – all in one seamless application.

Ed: And you say, it’s working on all the latest hardware, so it’s working on the new Mac Pro? Stuart: Yes. One of the new features of Smoke 2015 is that they’ve made it fully Mavericks compatible.

It runs on the very latest Mac operating system; and also, they decoupled it from the NVIDIA graphics cards that were required in the past. They have rewritten it; instead of using OpenGL they now use OpenCL, which means it will run on AMD graphics cards. So now that you can run both Mavericks and AMD graphics cards, that means you can now run Autodesk Smoke really well on the latest Mac Pro, or the latest iMac. Of course, the latest Mac Pros and iMacs have wonderful video IO options with the Blackmagic Thunderbolt devices and the AJA Thunderbolt devices and one of the new features in Autodesk Smoke 2015 is the ability to do full stereoscopic work with stereoscopic output from AJA IO cards.

One of the other new features that they’ve put into it is the 3D tracker. If you’ve got handheld camera footage, you might want to put either a 3D element or a 2D element into that shot and the only way to do that realistically, is to track the camera movement that the original handheld camera had so that you can then put elements into the shot that look seamless and move with the image that you’ve shot.

So having the 3D tracker added to Smoke 2015 is an awesome new feature. Some of the “under the hood” stuff that they’ve done in terms of the development of the product – we talked about the OpenCL being re-written to take advantage of that new modern method of doing 3D in an application. They’ve also taken their Connect FX, which is their high end compositing engine, and they’ve redone the timeline, so that also the timeline now uses exactly the same 3D compositing engine as Connect FX does. So you can start something on the timeline – if you’re an editor, you could do a “picture in picture” effect for example, and then you could say “look, I want to move this into 3D space somehow” … you can now step into Connect FX from the timeline and everything that you’ve done in the timeline will carry through and vice versa.

So it’s sort of an “under the hood” enhancement to make things just a little bit more seamless across the application.

Ed: But you can still run the Autodesk application in a group environment so, if you’re not a 3D person, you could be the editor and you could pass on this project to someone to add the fruity bits?

Stuart: Oh absolutely. Autodesk have ensured, like every other vendor, that they can export and import projects and files in just about any format on the

planet, so there’s full support for XML export which works with Adobe Premiere, Media Composer and Final Cut across the board. There’s no problem with starting in one application and bringing stuff into Smoke to finish it, or starting something in Smoke and then sending it to another application. That whole multiapplication workflow has got easier. I guess the point with Autodesk Smoke is that, if you are wanting to do everything in one package, you definitely can stop with just Smoke.

Ed: So what effect is the new Mac Pro going to have on the whole editing landscape, especially with Autodesk?

Stuart: I think the new Mac Pro is fascinating.

Obviously, everyone in the industry was very keen to see if Apple were going to come out with a new Mac Pro; of course they announced a new Mac Pro with a radically different architecture to traditional computing, which is in true Apple style. Now that it’s landed, many of the software vendors have bent over backwards to highly optimise their software to work extremely well on the new Mac Pro and the performance that we’ve seen out of just about every application – whether it’s Adobe or Blackmagic or Autodesk on the new Mac Pro is truly

stunning. So it’s a really wonderful path for people moving forward – and you can run all of these applications on the same machine, at the same time, without any issues now too. So those complexities in the past where we’d set up an Adobe Premiere system and not touch it for years – and I had one customer in recently who had a system that was literally 12 years old, still working – but you know, these days you can run multiple applications on the same platform, at the same time without any issues and it’s remarkable to see. So the new Mac Pro really is a workhorse for the future of this industry for sure.

Ed: And there’s a lot of vendors out there already making accessories for them, including metal bands to hold them into rack mounts?

Stuart: We’ve had no trouble with doing anything on a Mac Pro or with Thunderbolt I must say, for quite some time, so the maturity of the Thunderbolt technology is phenomenal, all the way from cheap little video output devices to get an output to a big screen tele or a broadcast monitor, through to storage,

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through to high speed networking, whatever you want to do. One of the other really cool things about Mavericks particularly is your ability to plug Thunderbolt cables between multiple machines and set up a 20 gigabit high speed network for free; you literally don’t even have to configure anything in the software in order to make that happen, it’s truly remarkable. You can get a 20 gigabit network set up between iMacs and Mac Pros just by plugging Thunderbolt cables between them. And of course, you can get long Thunderbolt cables, now that the Corning optical cables are available. Some people will consider them to be pricey at $3-400 for a 30 metre cable, but if you compare that to the price of a 20 gigabit network card at each end and a 20 gigabit switch, it’s still extremely cheap.

So there’s pretty fascinating high speed networking options that these new Mac Pros give you. What that means for us, of course, is that you could start editing material on one machine and then push that content across to a Smoke system blazingly fast through this 20 gigabit Ethernet network that you can set up with Thunderbolt cables.

We’ve got customers now that we’re working with who are setting these systems up and I’m pretty sure that that might be one of the things we could talk about in a future issue, showing off some of this technology.

Ed: Yes, look forward to that – but I understand there’s a big change in how people are buying Autodesk now?

Stuart: Yes. Autodesk started off selling software products and then doing subscription or maintenance agreements that kept that software up to date and also provided support. They’ve decided to go down the Adobe route now with their software … this is an increasingly common method of delivery that software vendors in our industry are doing. So Adobe now have got what they call Creative Cloud subscription and Autodesk have what they call Desktop Subscription so customers can subscribe to their software for a yearly period. Autodesk are doing the same thing with Maya, 3DStudio MAX and all of their other products as well.

So with Autodesk Smoke, you can subscribe to the product for a month, for a quarter, or for a year.

Obviously, the longer you subscribe to it, the cheaper it is, so the yearly subscription is much more cost effective than doing it month by month, but the beautiful thing is that, if you do subscribe for a year and then you find you’ve got a particular project that comes in where you need another person to come onboard for a couple of months, you can just subscribe to it for a quarter to fulfil that need and then let the licence go.

There’s plenty of flexibility now in terms of licensing options for the product.

Ed: Now this is probably a hard question for you to answer, but the person out there who might be interested in upgrading their software package, or what they want to do their editing and their graphics on – it seems as though they can do everything on the web these days. They can go on the Autodesk site, they can download the software, they can go on YouTube, they can learn how to use it, so why would they actually come and see you Stuart?

Stuart: Well I guess the key thing that we have is the expertise and experience in terms of how to best

Smoke demo at NAB.

put all of these solutions together, and also, most importantly these days, is looking at the projects that people are working on and the best way to go about it.

It’s true today that there are 20 different cameras that you could literally go out and shoot a particular show with; there are 5 or 6 different editing applications that you could potentially use to edit it; there are many different hardware platforms that you could choose.

Having this choice also adds complexity and confusion and one of the things that DVT are experts at is really listening to our customers’ needs and being able to recommend solutions that are the right ones for the job and also help with workflows and the best methods of pushing this data around and massaging it into a finished result. That’s why people constantly come to DVT. Ed: And also, from my own experience, it’s finding out what you’ve got already that can still work, but what extra bits you need to properly use the new software?

Stuart: Oh absolutely. It’s fascinating when, like I say, you talk to customers about where they are today and where they want to move to tomorrow and the plans that we put together are very pragmatic.

The nice thing today is that you quite often don’t have to throw the baby out with the bathwater in order to move forward, and we spend a lot of time with customers saying “right, let’s look at where you want to be in the future” and putting together a plan for that, and then they’ll go “great”, and we’ll put a process in like, today you need to do this, tomorrow you need to do that, and then next year you’ll get to where you need to be.

And then there are other customers where we do have to be a bit harsh and say look, you’re losing money by continuing to use your existing camera or your existing editing system or hardware platform, and you really need to invest in something new so that you can save more time, spend that time on being more creative, more productive to be able to turn your work around quicker.

So, you know, it depends on different customers and really what their needs are.

Ed: But you’d never say that to someone with a tape camera would you?

Stuart: Ed:

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Yes … do you know anyone?

We’ll stop there.

NZVN

AJA story continues from page 54

we’ve tried to give a good cross-section of functionality to an area of the market that may not be able to play in that higher end, but now they have something that’s going to do what they need at a price point that’s going to make them actually be able to have a business model.

Ed: The word you used – functionality – is what I’ve heard from journalists talking about this. It’s got everything, it’s all there, you pick up the camera and you look for where a connector should be or where a button should be, or whatever it is – and it’s in the right place, and you have other options as well.

So it’s been very, very well designed. I guess the big thing is that it’s US$9000?

Tony: Yes – and again that’s that affordable price point that we’re trying to go for – US$9000 for a magnesium body, so it’s a very solid camera, it’s going to stand up to the abuse of being out in the field. We went with an over the shoulder design, because we feel like that’s something that people inevitably end up doing. We see a lot of these smaller format cameras – the first thing people do is go out and buy a bunch of kit to put it on their shoulder.

Ed:

It’s amazing isn’t it?

Tony: This is all ready to go on your shoulder, nice suede shoulder pad, even down to the engineering of the shoulder pad that’s slightly angled because your shoulder isn’t square. I can work out, and you can work out and our shoulders are never going to get square.

Ed:

C’mon, look at me, I don’t work out!

Tony: I’m just saying that, no matter how hard you try, your shoulders are never going to be square and this is actually designed to sit on your shoulder at a natural angle. It’s very light, it’s less than 6½ pounds, so it’s a very light camera.

Ed: And the thing is that US$9000 includes the recorder. If you have to buy a Ki Pro Quad on its own …?

Tony: Yes, that’s a US$2-3000 investment right there.

So yes, you get the recorder capable of recording 4K ProRes files directly onto the removable drives and we support all of the flavours of ProRes on the camera, from Proxy, LT, 422 all the way up to 444.

You can record at a very high quality rate; at 422 we’re able to record 4K at 60 frames per second directly on the camera, so it also is capable of doing those high frame rates that people are looking for with 4K, to kind of eliminate all of that judder that you can get when you move the camera around. We also have a global shutter– the sensor uses a global shutter instead of a rolling shutter, so when you pan around, you have a nice stable image, you don’t get that rolling shutter artifact.

Ed:

So it’s a CMOS chip is it?

Tony: Correct, a CMOS sensor and we’ve done some clever filtering on the front of it too. This is getting into a bit more of the esoterics, but with the infrared filtering that we’ve put on the front of it, that gives us a cleaner colour image coming in. We’ve put an optical low-pass filter built-in to eliminate some of that high frequency noise that you can get with 4K, so

we’ve got a nice clean image, and the infrared filter has this nice side effect of allowing you to use normal ND filters on the front of the camera. You don’t have to go to the more expensive ND IR filters that people typically use if they’re trying to filter out some of that infrared light. So it has that built into it, which is actually a really nice cost saving again.

Ed: And one very important feature which I hadn’t thought about until it was mentioned – you can actually adjust the back focus on this camera?

Tony: Yes, you can adjust the back focus really easily and very precisely. There’s a plate on the top, two screws come off, a little lever in there and it’s a rotating cuff that you just move back and forth and you can get very, very precise back focus adjustment, lock that down and put the plate back on and you’re ready to go.

Ed: And that’s the important thing with cameras with interchangeable lenses and 4K – focus has to be precise?

Tony: Absolutely yes – and this allows you to do that very quickly and easily … especially for rental companies that are going to be renting out the camera.

You know, prepping a camera to go out on a shoot can be a fairly involved process and back focus is one of those critical things they always have to make sure is done properly, and this is much, much easier to do. It just kind of reduces that prep time whether you’re doing it yourself or you’re a rental house prepping the camera to go out.

Ed: And I guess the last little piece that just gives it an AJA touch – it’s got a wooden handle?

Tony: I believe it’s Australian walnut actually on there. Yes, a nice wooden handle and that actually comes with the base camera. You get the camera body and handle for US$9000, and the handle includes a LANC-based start/stop button and tally light so you can trigger recording directly from there.

Ed: Well, I’m sure it’s going to do well?

Tony: We’ve had a really great response so far, so we’re pretty excited – and finally to be able to get out and talk about it after all this time is really just … it’s a great culmination of all the effort and we’re really happy to see the response that’s come back on it.

Ed: Yeah, retention’s very bad for you – it can be very blocking.

Tony: Absolutely, absolutely.

NZVN

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ARRI – Lenses A large part of the ARRI booth is devoted to lenses.

Stefan Sedlmeier talks us through the new releases.

Ed: Stefan, the Alura lenses – and I always get confused all the “As” that ARRI comes along with, everything is called an “A” – you have a new lens in the Alura range?

Stefan: Yes. With the Alura it’s funny because we have got ALEXA, AMIRA, Alura, but this is a new ARRI development, this is an ultra-wide zoom, 9.5-18 for helicopter shots, very straight lines, no breathing …

Ed: What do you mean “no breathing”?

Stefan: Breathing occurs sometimes on lower quality optics and lenses when you pull focus, then the focal length of the lens changes slightly. You could imagine like filming from parchment paper which moves, so its geometry changes in the image while you are changing focus. Lens breathing is basically that slight geometry change and this looks like altering your focal length when you are pulling focus.

Ed: But this lens is not just for helicopters surely?

Stefan: It gives very neat wide angle shots for when you do car commercials, when you do internal shots and there is no room to put the camera further back, that’s where you need wide angle lenses. We always had wide angle lenses like the 8R which is an ultra-wide angle Prime lens, the Ultra Prime 8R, then Master Primes starting at 12mm and this is now an ultra -wide zoom, so variable focal length.

Ed: It seems very long for a wide angle lens?

Stefan: Yes it is very long. With zoom lenses you can’t go shorter; it’s also a very fast lens – T2.9. Just have a look at the monitor then you see what this lens is doing and you show this around.

Ed: And I can concur that it’s a very wide clear picture and very straight lines.

Stefan: You can see when you focus that the geometry doesn’t change while you focus.

Ed: Yes, there’s no movement in the picture – no breathing.

Stefan: Correct, exactly. On some less expensive Prime lenses and smaller Primes you see that when you change focus the geometry changes and this is what we call breathing.

Ed: The picture gets larger or smaller, slightly.

Stefan: Slightly, just slightly.

Ed: And that’s breathing.

Now Stefan’s just showed me something that I didn’t know existed and it is so cool … well it’s very large and it takes more than a driving licence to be able to drive this one.

A very long lens from ARRI.

Ed:

What are we looking at here Stefan?

Stefan: This is the ARRIHEAD 2 – this is a geared head and this is supporting the ALEXA XT Studio and we also show the new Master Anamorphic 135mm lens.

Ed: Okay, we’ll start with the head – it’s not your traditional head, there’s no arm here to swing the camera round with, it’s got a couple of wheels?

Stefan: Yes, it’s got two wheels for horizontal and vertical, so pan and tilt and a gearbox – you have three different gear ratios and DOPs are sometimes used to using the geared heads rather than a fluid head and this is just a different way of mounting the camera.

Ed: I had a try myself, and of course my accuracy was not very good, but I could see … Stefan’s very kind, he’s saying it was good, but we know the reality … but yes, you can adjust the gears to different sensitivities and it doesn’t matter how much pressure you put on that wheel, it’s how much turn you give it that actually causes the camera to move. So you can’t bump it in other words and go past the point that you want to go past. So I would imagine a very accurate way of doing pans, tilts, and at the same time.

Now we can talk about this lens –you say it completes the range?

Stefan: This completes the range of Master Anamorphics, yes. The first sets we’re shipping the 35mm, 50mm and 75mm; now we’re shipping the 40mm and 60mm; we already ship the 100mm and this is the last lens to come, the 135mm.

Ed: So there’s nothing else to do now?

Stefan: No, there’s always something else to do, but this is seven focal lengths for the set of Master Anamorphic lenses.

Let’s see what’s beyond the horizon.

Ed: Okay – and you reckon you’ve got enough fruit hanging off this particular tripod?

Stefan: I guess so, yes. This is a fully loaded camera system, that’s true.

Ed: I would say it’s fully loaded, yes.

Stefan: It’s similar to Cinetape.

Ed: And this looks like a double barrelled canon on the front here?

Stefan: That is the Cinetape equivalent from ARRI called the UDM-1 – UDM for Ultrasonic Distance Measure – and this fully integrates with the ALEXA and the wireless system.

Ed: So you don’t need a gofer with a tape measure?

Stefan: Not anymore. Sometimes it’s not possible when you’re shooting.

NZVN Ed: Another man out of a job.

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PRODUCTION | POST | VISUAL EFFECTS

Autodesk Smoke 2015 is now available from DVT. Visit www.dvt.co.nz/smoke.html for all the details. * Trial products are subject to the terms and conditions of the license and services agreement that accompanies the software.

Autodesk and Smoke are registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk, Inc., and/or its subsidiaries and/or a liates in the USA and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective holders. Autodesk reserves the right to alter product and services o erings, and specifications and pricing at anytime without notice, and is not responsible for typographical or graphical errors that may appear in this document. Š 2012 Autodesk, Inc. All rights reserved.

www.dvt.co.nz Digital Video Technologies (NZ) Ltd | Phone: 09 525 0788 | Email: sales@dvt.co.nz | 45 Fairfax Avenue, Penrose, Auckland

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