JUNE 2015
Vol 214
NAB 2015 - Part Two ARRI Cameras For ARRI cameras, we have Stefan Sedlmeier from ARRI Australia. Ed: Well there’s a big line-up of ALEXAs here, but we’re not starting with ALEXAs, we’re going to start with the AMIRA. The last time we saw you in Auckland, which was in fact a long time ago Stefan, and I do have to pull you up on this because you did say you were going to visit us more frequently. Now what is your understanding of “more frequently” Stefan? Stefan: It’s just the workload I currently have. We need more staff in the Sydney office and currently there’s much more work on my shoulders than there should be, because the customer base is consistently growing, but maybe let’s start back in New Zealand, Stefan is all smiles beside the ARRI AMIRA. because we have a nice installed base now with AMIRA cameras in New Zealand. First, right time and I get very good feedback from the DOPs, thanks to Paul Richards who was really our pioneer, the so from end users, from rental customers. It’s good to first customer, and now Nutshell Productions have three have a knowledge base in New Zealand where I can send AMIRAs on board. Panavision has followed; they have somebody who is saying “I’m shooting in New Zealand, I purchased cameras for Power Rangers – four AMIRA might need to sub-hire another camera.” So yes, pick cameras are now running at Power Rangers and Niche your rental house of choice and please call them. Camera Rentals Julian Boshier, in partnership with Ed: So if somebody is interested in an AMIRA, to get a Michael Zahn, they have now ordered their 2nd and 3rd "hands on", they could go to any one of these rental AMIRA. So we will have 10 cameras in New Zealand places? which are managed and supported by ARRI Australia. I Stefan: Yes I’m sure all of them, once the camera is think this is quite a good customer base and also confirms available, will allow for that. I know Paul was very that this is the right camera, for the right market, at the
converters, signal processing. You make the sensor twice as wide when it is cut from the silicon wafer. Basically, when you open the camera and look through the lens cavity, then you see it’s a sensor which is twice as wide as it is high, so it’s like a 2:1 sensor, it’s a widescreen sensor. Ed: Aaah okay, not for standard television?
proactive in that, basically promoting the camera and we also co-sponsored a shoot with a New Zealand DOP for some AMIRA tests and he’s quite happy to really showcase the camera. Ed: So nothing new in the camera apart from a software update? Stefan: I would say the camera is now quite complete. There have been some small updates; there are two hardware upgrades as well. There’s a new audio board because there was the requirement to be able to accept line levels at +24 dBu to accept higher audio inputs and there’s a new eyepiece, which is also retrofit, to give improved visibility for the viewfinder. Ed: And the software? Stefan: The software we are now running is Version 2, which brought many new features and soon there will be software release Version 3, which is then also activating the WiFi remote control and other functionality of the camera which is on the roadmap. So this is not too far away. Ed: Right … now, ALEXA – lots of new models there? Stefan: This is true. We have at NAB this year three new ALEXA products, but there are four new ALEXA versions. Let’s start with the ALEXA 65 which is currently a rental only camera, large sensor – 6½K, using 70mm lenses, like from former 70mm cameras or 65mm cameras when you’re shooting on film. There are 30 camera systems worldwide with lenses and this is a camera which is for projects which are for the big screen, shooting spherical large sensor 65mm. Ed:
Is that using the same sensor as all the ALEXAs?
Stefan: width.
Yes it’s the same sensor, but twice the
Ed: Hang on, how can you have the same sensor but twice the width? Stefan: It is the same sensor technology, so it’s basically the same sensor cut, bonding, drivers, A to D
Stefan: It might be overkill. If you want to shoot 6½K and downres to 4K for Ultra HD, yes you can do it, definitely for high end commercials maybe. Ed: But it would be the wrong shape surely? Stefan: Yes, but it’s not about the wrong shape, because sometimes you shoot 1:2.4 for HD broadcast, but then it’s letterboxed. This is more a creative decision as to how you want it scaled and how you want it masked or cropped. Some broadcasters really want it full screen, so they would like to do like a centre zoom, everything you do is left and right, but if it’s scaled for 2.4 on the shoot, you have to screen it with a letterbox. Ed: Okay, I believe you – now onto the other range, the standard ALEXA – new models? Stefan: There is now a new generation which is the SXT – the Super Extended Technology – which is the new platform taking over from the XT series which was quite successful. I think we are about 4500 ALEXAs now worldwide and, to make the camera more futureproof, there is now a new processing core. If you look at what the AMIRA does, now all onboard, onboard Ultra HD, ProRes Ultra HD, ProRes 3.2K, on the current ALEXA if you want to do Ultra HD it’s a post processing pipe, but on the SXT you can do all of that onboard. They can even take up the newer capture drives which are also used in ALEXA 65, the 1 TByte and 2 TByte capture drives, so it can record one hour or two hours in ARRIRAW or 3½ hours in ProRes if you need to. The camera is even more futureproof in terms of possible updates which may be coming. Ed: It was talked about at the launch of the AMIRA that there were some advances in the technology that went into the AMIRA, that hopefully would be moved in the other direction to the ALEXA and we’re now seeing this result? Stefan: Yes, this is now becoming reality and also IT technology moves forward very fast; the FPGAs as well as the printed circuit boards in the camera, the signal processing, slightly lower power consumption despite the fact you have a higher processing power internally to support a higher framerate at a higher resolution, faster write speed when you do anything – and this just makes the camera more versatile and more futureproof and it’s also time for a change. Nevertheless, the ALEXA EV is now the ALEXA classic –
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Ed: So you just don’t have some of the extra features that a standard ALEXA would have? Stefan: No, you cannot put in large capture drives, it has got a single slot CFast card onboard recorder. It can do audio, but it’s not necessarily a studio camera. It’s basically a camera for aerials, gimbals, nosemount or side-mount helicopter applications, underwater housing – something like that. Ed: Something where space is an issue, but you still want to have that high quality; whether you would risk putting a camera of that quality and price on a drone, that’s another decision? Stefan: Of course, this is the customer’s choice. The Go Pro is a great camera but we are now approaching 4K and beyond and to do this at the same image quality that we are used to from the ALEXA imaging sensor … it is not discontinued, I should also say that. On the ALEXA, we are running a software Version 11 now. We are still supporting the Sony SxS cards, and even the PRO+ C series cards are supported with software Version 11, so we are always compatible forwards and backwards to please our customer base, because they can use all their equipment, their storage media, their card readers – it will all work together. We always try to accommodate that. Ed: Now the ALEXA Mini. It looks as though it’s had a bit cut off the back? Stefan: Yes, cool, finally the most exciting gig on the show is the ALEXA Mini which we have here, three models on the show floor. It’s a carbon fibre camera body with a titanium lens mount. The entire camera – and I definitely say “camera” it’s not just a head or a subsystem, it’s a complete camera – is 2.3kg ready to shoot, including recorder. It’s all built-in, recording on CFast 2.0 cards, a 128 GByte card; you can record ARRIRAW with a licence key. It’s a 4:3 enabled camera with a licence key. It can shoot framerates up to 200 frames right from the start – 200 frames. It has the same image quality like any ALEXA camera – so 14½ F stops, natural skin tones, low noise, excellent exposure latitude.
Ed: ( tongue firmly in cheek ) But if you wanted 4K, you could just put a Go Pro on there surely? Stefan: Yes … but 4K is not 4K. As I mentioned, 4K – not compromising on the exposure latitude, on skin tones, on focus, you want to use proper lenses and all of that; because 4K by itself doesn’t give you anything. Ed: Right, is that the camera line-up complete? Stefan: Yes, that is the camera line-up complete. My last comment is that we now have our 19th intern in Sydney. We are running an internship programme, so our trainees work with us for four months in the camera workshop. They get used to camera testing, updates, all the accessories matte boxes, follow focus support systems, bridge-plate, baseplate, how these all fit together, to navigate through all the ARRI accessories, the part numbers, how it’s all structured from an ordering point of view and also from a mounting point of view. So the next trainee will be our 20th trainee in Sydney. Ed: Is this open to Kiwis? Stefan: Of course. Ed: How do they apply? Stefan: Just send me an email please: ssedlmeier@arri.com.au Ed:
What sort of people are you looking for?
Stefan: We employ film school graduates, like in Australia they come from AFTRS, from Sydney Film School, or the Sydney TAFE – anybody who is interested. Also important is the mindset and the attitude because the camera knowledge we train him … Ed:
Or her?
Stefan: Yes we have trained 4 ladies. You can apply and we may do a phone interview or maybe a personal interview. For Kiwis, it should be fine to live in Sydney for half a year, there’s basically no problem with any visa. The cost of living in Sydney is probably a thing, so we remunerate. We pay AU$1,000 a month for the internship programme and we help all of them – boys and girls – to find a foot in the industry. Ed: A very noble, but certainly a very sensible thing to do because it supports your product and your service? Stefan: Yes and you easily get a job afterwards because usually all the rental houses and camera assistants are approaching me “when is your next trainee finished, we need another assistant or prep tech”. The ALEXA Mini.
Ed: That's a level of product support that could be followed by others. NZVN Page 3
Ensemble Designs for Gencom For Gencom, we are at Ensemble Designs with Mondae Hott. Ed: Well, we won’t go into your name in any details … Mondae: My parents were hippies. Ed: And lovely people I'm sure. Now, as director of sales there’s no pressure, but tell us what you’ve got … BrightEye I know, it’s a great product, everybody’s got it or should have it? Mondae: Yes they should. We have some new versions of it. This is the next generation of BrightEyes and some of the differences from the older ones are that it has an Ethernet connection now instead of a USB and, on the front panel, you have a live built-in monitor. So you can actually view your video sources – and the reason I mention this is because this product line will continue to grow and we’ll continue adding products in this with this new generation. But for now the products that we have available that look like this are small routers. Ed: So we actually had the screen at NAB last year, but you’ve improved it? Mondae: Well we have a new model. With this one, we’ve taken everything that was in the model that you saw last year and now we’ve added an MPEG encoder and decoder all still in this tiny little package. It’s incredible. You can go from HDMI, from fibre, SDI and ASI and you can switch MPEG encoding and decoding and you can go back and forth between any of these formats. We can do up-down-cross conversion and clean switching so, if you brought in maybe a 1080p Go Pro camera for example on HDMI, and you were doing everything else in 1080i, we can cross convert it to 1080i then we can send it out on SD-SDI on the BNC connector and also out MPEG encoder for streaming to the Internet or whatever you’re trying to do with it. Ed: And it’s all live, there’s no delay? Mondae: Well there’s always going to be a tiny bit of latency when you’re doing encoding right; there’s about half a second of latency … Ed:
But it syncs to the other signals coming through?
Mondae: Right, this is all clean switched, so when you’re doing transitions, mix transitions between all the different types of signals, that’s all clean, it’s all timed, you’re never going to see a glitch on the screen, the screen’s never going to go black. That’s one of the new things here at this show. Another thing that we’re showing is a hardwire panel, because as we know, some people are not comfortable with the iPad or the web interface that we developed which is, I believe, really awesome, but some people wanted a hardwire panel so we have one now. Again, you’re able to view all your sources through the display there before you make either a transition or a cut, but the new thing that we have is these action panels. The action panels basically allow you to write a macro and you can do cross-point switches, you can change maybe the bit rate on the encoder, you can turn on and off the picture in picture. You can set up all those macros to one button, so when you touch one button it can make all those changes simultaneously. This can be great for events and staging, for trucks. Ed: So each button can have its own combination of any of those things?
Mondae with the latest BrightEyes.
Mondae: Any of those actions, it can perform those actions instantaneously. Ed: How do you remember which one did which? Mondae: You can name them … these have legendable key caps that you can put the name here, or on the web interface, you can name them. So if we look at this, we go in here and we go to the action control panel – you can name each one of those buttons, so it’s meaningful to you. Encoder on, PiP off, you know, whatever. Another new feature we have is picture in picture … Ed: But does the web interface sync with the panel? Mondae: It does! Ed: It does … so when you press the button on the panel … Mondae: This would light up on the correct button that you were on. Ed: Show me? Mondae: See look, see how I have these two … Ed: Oh 1 and 2, yes. So switch it to another one and let’s see the change? Mondae: Okay … see how it switched that? Ed: I didn’t, it was too quick … oh yes, right, it did. Blink and you miss it. Mondae: Another new feature that’s available in many of the routers, not just the new one, is picture in picture, so imagine you’re in a remote track and you
Page 4
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only have one feed back to the studio. How do you get the camera and the live shot and the reporter in the picture at the same time? Yes, they can do that in the studio back at home, but you can only send one camera feed or one signal at a time. This allows you to combine the two signals and actually be able to do that live in the truck, and not have to wait for it to be produced in the studio to do those effects. Right now, we’re looking at the control surface for the picture in picture, the way that we’re able to change it. And I’m not happy with the picture that’s in the background, the live action, so I’m going to go ahead and switch that. I’m going to click this button and it gives me a choice of any of the signals that are coming into the router, so I’m going to pick something else and it’s going to switch. That’s my live action shot. Now this small one, we’re not happy with the size, so let’s grab a hold of this, we’re going to make it bigger, we’re going to change the cropping, let’s change that picture that’s in there … Ed: So you’re doing all of this in the background while another live signal goes through the process? Mondae: That’s right, so what it allows you to do is to take two pictures, combine them into one. They could be of equal size, it could be half and half on the page, it could be one big shot over one small instead of a reporter, it could be PowerPoint slides with the presenter. There’s a lot of different applications for it, but the thing that’s amazing about this is it’s included in
Lupolux Lighting for Gencom For Gencom, we are here at the Lupolux site and we have Andrea Lupo – I should remember that because he owns the company. Ed: Andrea, we were very impressed by last year’s lights, but this year you’ve gone a little bit further into studio mounting? Andrea: Yes, we have now pole operated yokes for both the 650 model and the 1K model. This was a requirement from many studios and now we can provide this accessory. It has very good pan, tilt and focus. This is the first news we have in products. You can’t see the other things I’m going to speak about, but we’re going now into 2K in about a couple of months and it will be almost the same size as the 1K so still very portable and lightweight. A very bright lens and twice the power output of the 1K. And also some bicolour versions of the Fresnels in 650, 1K and later 2K bicolour. These products will come out in about 2 months. They will be launched at Broadcast Asia in Singapore.
this small other box, so you don’t have to put it into a separate effects box in order to do just a simple picture in picture. And you can see how it’s very easy to adjust the size, adjust the cropping, the scale and it happens live on air. Ed:
Amazing. Now we’re talking about the NXT 450.
Mondae: This is the MPEG encoder / decoder with the router and the clean switches and up-down-cross conversion – all that. That is the NXT 450. The hardwire control panel is called the Action Control Panel and the picture in picture is PiP-Efx. Ed:
Is that built into the NXT 450?
Mondae: It’s an option for many of the NXT’s, not just the 450 – so you can put it into any product that has the up-down-cross converter. Ed:
So is it a software upgrade?
Mondae:
It’s a software key.
NZVN
Ed: From last year, it looks as though you’re growing – you started small, but you’re growing quickly, especially with the release of a 2K light so soon? Andrea: Yes because customers like these lights and, in general, LED fixtures are in great demand and now especially LED Fresnels, so we are expanding the range with a 2K, with the pole operated yokes, with the bicolour. We also have panels now. What we can offer goes from LED panels to LED Fresnels, bicolour Fresnels – almost anything anyone can want. Ed: And with the Euro where it is now, it’s good for New Zealand? Andrea: Yes this is the actual best value for the Euro. It’s not 1.4 US Dollars, that’s fake. It doesn’t reflect the real economy … 1.1, even better 1 Euro 1 Dollar, it’s the crack exchange rate that should be applied. But you know, all these are political decisions. One day they woke up and they decided that 1.4 Dollars for 1 Euro was not good, so why not go back to 1 … okay, let’s do it.
Ed: Okay, so these are pole operated and I can see how that works, what about DMX dimmable? Andrea: Yes, all of them can be dimmed with DMX. Any of the lights by default include DMX so, whenever you buy a light, they are DMX inside. It’s a very smooth DMX, you don’t have steps. You know with LEDs often the dimming is not very good … Ed: Especially at the low levels I understand, when you’re down under 10%? Andrea: Yes, but with this new 16 bit software, everything is very smooth. Even better than tungsten; you know when tungsten in hot lamps is dimmed down, it slightly changes colour temperature. This doesn’t happen with LEDs, so it’s good. Page 6
Cartoni for Gencom For Gencom, we are at Cartoni with Luciano Belluzzo. Ed: Luciano, tell me, Cartoni is big in America and I’m impressed by this, knowing that Americans like to purchase American products? Luciano: I’ve been told that the US market represent 30% of the world's total broadcast market. So if you want to be successful in the world, you must be successful in the US. That’s the reason we founded Cartoni USA here in Hollywood; that’s the reason why we really spent a lot of energy and efforts to promote our products and to sell our products, not only to the broadcaster, but to all distributors and the rental companies in the US. Of course, NAB for us is a tremendous important shop to talk with customers from every part of the world coming here, because Las Vegas represents the point of attraction for the broadcast business. Ed: It’s all the technology that’s available here isn’t it – nothing to do with the "off show" offerings? Luciano: That’s absolutely true and we used to say in Italy "those who are not present are always wrong", so you need to be here. Ed:
Right, so what are you showing them this year?
Luciano: This year we are showing three main products. We are showing a new OB van and studio head, the Magnum, which is up to 95 kilo. This has been tremendously successful in Italy and in Europe. Ed: I didn’t think they made cameras that heavy anymore? Luciano: Yes they do, because it’s what they are putting above the cameras – lights, recorders, all the TV, the DIP people like to be lighted by light, so what is above the head of the camera is getting heavier and heavier. Ed:
And I guess these stereoscopic rigs?
Luciano: Yes exactly. And then we are promoting a new head of the medium size, 100mm bowl and the tracker wheel goes from 2 kilo to 20 kilo and this wheel allows us to cancel three products from our product range with one product. So with one product we cover three applications. Ed: Now just give me a little bit more info on this, because to the uninitiated, they might not understand what you mean by "tracking from 2 kilogram to 20 kilogram"?
Luciano for Cartoni.
it’s from zero to 12 if we have the Focus. From 2 to 22 we have the Tracker. So we also cover zero kilo up to 12 kilo maximum weight, because this is a question of the movement and the liquid that we are putting inside the head. Ed: So it’s really the feel of the head that, by adjusting the head’s weight to the camera, you get the best feel? Luciano: Exactly. You can move the tracker without any weight, but you will never get the same
Luciano: This is the weight the head can stand; the head needs some weight to start the moving from – at least a minimum weight of 2 kilo cameras above but up to 20 kilo, and we guarantee full drag and tilt continuously up to 90 degrees plus or minus. Ed: If you had a camera that was too light for the setting of the head, what happens then? Luciano: The head will always work, but we will not guarantee the same performance, because it’s too light. We need a certain weight to start moving all the inner gears which are inside the head. So we need a minimum kilo and
The Magnum is on the right. Page 7
performance as when you have the weight above the head. That’s the difference, because the head has been conceived to stand from 2 to 22 kilo. Ed:
Is there an adjustment for that on the head?
Luciano:
Continuous adjustment.
Ed: It’s continuous, so you don’t have to actually physically adjust anything? Luciano: Cartoni has developed its range to have a continuous adjustment. That’s our trademark in the world, that we don’t have scale adjustment, we have a continuous adjustment. We have realised that the operators or even the amateur – everybody has a different system of making movies, making pictures, etc. So we keep everybody free to handle and to adjust the head as they like. Ed:
And the smaller version?
Luciano: The small 75mm. For our cheaper range, we have introduced vertical insert of the plate which will allow the camera to get in this direction. It was previously on the side. This is a change of the upper part of the head because the majority of end users like the vertical insert of the plate and not on the side as we developed in the past.
Luciano: We allow the customer to make his choice. That’s the strength of Cartoni. We have a huge range of products and tailor-made products, so we are able to fulfil any specific requirements of the customers, because we are a 50 people factory, so we are able to modify the production process and make something special for each customer. It happens, for example, in Thailand, the operators are definitely smaller than in New Zealand and in Australia. So what we did, we reduced by 5mm the height of the tripod. Just ask the big manufacturers all over the world to do this. They will say "no, you buy the standard product". We did it. Ed:
And you can have any colour as long as it’s black?
Luciano: You know, we have a new logo because this year we celebrate the 80th anniversary of Cartoni. Cartoni was founded in 1965, but the first prototype, the first patent was made in 1935 by the grandfather of Elisabetta, who was the director of Italian radio-TV and he developed the first tripod, the first head on a wooden tripod. There wasn’t a metal tripod, there was a wooden tripod. So we celebrated the 80 year anniversary from the foundation of the first concept of the first design of the family Cartoni. Ed:
But you didn’t make a wooden tripod?
Then we also develop a new range of V12 remote cameras and they are controlled by joystick at least 100 metre far away from their work. In effect, the business and the job of the operator slowly, slowly is going to be replaced by computers and by joystick. I also offered this to Vatican Television, because they have the CTV – Centro Televisivo Vaticano – and they told me "not yet", we have one person to take the Pope and the Pope moves without any sort of preparation, so we need to have an operator there always following him like a nice lady. So the joystick, for the moment, we are not interested. But we are supplier of the Vatican of course.
Luciano: No, because now the wooden tripods aren’t even used to make roads or construction; they are using plastics.
Ed: I guess when you’re at that top position, you can go where you like?
Ed: Ah well, I’ll go back to New Zealand knowing that we’re far away.
Luciano:
Luciano: Absolutely you are, definitely you are – NZVN you're in a fantastic place.
Absolutely.
Ed: Now, tell me about the tripods themselves. We’ve talked about the heads, are there any developments in the tripods?
Ed:
Ed:
Even in Italy you have homeland security?
Luciano: Yes, we are not secure. Every time we open the newspaper we realise that we are not secure.
Luciano: Not yet. We have kept steady our performance, our production on the tripods. We have the Stabilo which is the lighter one, also manufactured in aluminium, carbon fibre, one stage or two stages according to customer requirements. We have all our standard tripods range which are fitted to stand our head, and we have the pedestals which range from 20 kilo up to 90 kilo. Ed: I see some that you’ve got the floor spreaders and some the midrange spreaders – are these interchangeable? Luciano:
But these are not plastic?
Luciano: No, these are aluminium and there must also be carbon fibre somewhere, which is lighter. And also, the special application of Cartoni is not any longer in media and broadcast, it’s in the military; military tripods for surveillance and homeland security.
Yes absolutely they are.
Ed: So again, it’s just a matter of preference? Page 8
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Marshall Electronics for Quinto For Quinto Communications we are here at Marshall with Devan Cress. Ed: Now Devan, I see lots of new product here since last NAB? Devan: Marshall is obviously known for doing rackmount monitors, as its Orchid high end broadcast centric monitors with waveform and vectorscope. We’ve had our MD series which is Modular Design, which is very nice and you can put various different inputs. What we’ve expanded since our last NAB is what I would call our “value price series”, which is our LYNX series. Last year, we had the LYNX-702, a dual 7 inch monitor with all the controls on the front – composite, component, HD-SDI and HDMI inputs on the back. This product with a cost starting at US$779, is fantastic for the marketplace. We’ve had some improved features, like we allow now the ability for this to tilt with some arms in the front. We’ve also added in a couple of new versions – we have the LYNX-702W. This has waveform and vectorscope capabilities as well as audio monitoring. So now the LYNX-702’s brother, the LYNX-702W has these advanced features – waveform, vectorscope, as well as audio bars – all builtin. They can go full screen or they can be overlaid. That’s a unique feature in this price point, to be able to overlay the scoping on this. This product has a list cost of US$1229. Ed:
Devan from Marshall.
the marketplace in about two months – sometime in June 2015. Ed:
And this is for the two monitors?
Devan: It’s for two monitors with waveform and vectorscope on it and all those inputs on the back. Ed: Wow. true HD?
That’s certainly good value.
Devanh: Next on the line are our POV cameras. Our booth as been absolutely packed with these new POV cameras that we’re producing. These are point of view cameras.
Okay, so what’s the resolution … is this
Devan: Absolutely. These are going to be 1024 x 600 for the LYNX-702 and then the LYNX-702W is going to be a little bit higher resolution at 1280 x 800. So we continue with this particular line up to the V-LCD-17HR. This is a 17 inch rackmount or desktop monitor, US$1029 list cost. This is going to be a full resolution 1920 x 1080 panel on it. This is once again in our LYNX series, its part number is V-LCD-17HR. This has been updated to have a full resolution panel this year. Coming out in about two months, this has been such a popular line for us that we’ve decided to expand it into a triple wide monitor. So we have the LYNX-503, a 5 inch triple monitor rack. All the controls are in the front, you can have multiple inputs in the back, you’re going to have composite HDMI and HD-SDI inputs. You going to have high resolution panels on this; you’re going to have the ability to add tally, you can tilt this monitor, and this has a projected list cost of US$1499. So in the market for triple wides, that’s a significant drop and no one is doing a value priced triple wide monitor right now. So for those that can’t afford the space, can’t have 3-4 RU or sometimes 6RU to get some of these monitors in, we have a very nice 2RU triple rack monitor that is entering Page 10
We have a number of these that are available. Last year, we introduced the CV550. This has been such a popular camera with multiple applications. These cameras are cameras that would fit in the palm of your hand. You have multiple lenses that are available – that’s a key feature, you can quickly and easily change the lenses on them. The list price on these cameras with a 3.7mm lens is about US$500 list. The cost on the lenses is only about $30 apiece, so you can change anything from a 2mm all the way up to a 50mm lens. You have an onscreen menu on these that allows you to control all the feature sets on it. So you can change the white balance, the colour, the exposure, the night and day feature. These cameras require about .01 lux, so they can go in a near dark environment. With the popularity of this camera, we’ve seen it pushed into a lot of different applications – reality TV, we’ve used this in racing venues, they buried these cameras in the ground and then had the cars going zooming across them. We’ve used these as basketball dunk cams … Ed:
For a US$30 lens, hey.
Devan: If the lens breaks or the camera breaks, it doesn’t hurt the pocket. So very value priced point of view cameras. We’ve expanded this line. We’ve sold this to reality TV, the Ellen DeGeneres Show, Rob Dietrich’s Skate House; we’ve sold to rental and staging companies that put these in the drums at concerts that they’re doing; we’ve sold this to the house of worship
market too. It can go on the pulpit, where it can go on a microphone stand to get a unique view of the camera. We’ve expanded this line as well to the CV200. We had hockey teams utilising the CV500 – unfortunately, it is not weather resistant, so we built this camera here, the CV200. This camera is IP67 rated which means it can go in an outdoor environment, it can rain sleet or snow on the thing and you’re going to be fine. We have an outdoor rated enclosure for one of our miniature cameras that will fit in the palm of your hand. This is still going to be the same price, we haven’t raised it, it’s still going to be about US$500 list, still uses the M12 mount lens and you still have all the broadcast sets of controls with the onscreen menu to change the resolution, the colour, the balance, etc on this camera. Ed: And it’s so compact because all your power supply, all the other bits are external? Devan: Absolutely. We have a full line of these cameras – in fact, we’ve gone into some higher end cameras that I have over here. The main feature set on our CV360 is that it adds genlock, so if you need sync, we now have a genlock camera. We also added the CV350. This is a camera that has a remote control, there’s an IR receiver on front and back so that I can zoom in and zoom out with this camera. So it gives you the ability to remotely control the camera. As you can see, this POV camera line has been very popular for us. A lot of people have asked us to enter the video conferencing side of the business. So if you need fixed cameras for conferencing we have the POV cameras. We’re now introducing two PTZ capable cameras for the conference room scenarios. These will be a 10X as well as a 20X optical zoom; they will have HD-SDI, they will use Sony VISCA protocol as well as PELCO-D protocol to control. So we have two conference PTZ cameras and we have some other devices that then help us move into the video conferencing side of things. Now that I’ve got all of the cameras fixed in PTZ, I want to be able to move multiples of those into a soft-codec of some sort. I have a new switch – this is a CMOS switch. It has four HD-SDI inputs on it. I then have a quad output so I can put it into any HDMI monitor and I will see 1 channel, 2 channel, 3 channel, 4 channels of the video; whatever HD-SDI inputs I put in, I will create a quad view of that. And then you’ll see that I have an HD-SDI in, HDMI live output. So I can switch between those, via the front of the unit, an iPhone or Android app, RS-232 or an IR remote control. We give you a lot of flexibility. So the video conferencing side, I’ve got the cameras, I’ve got a switch to move four units in,
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and the last piece that I need is a USB 3.0 converter. So if I have the cameras, the switch, I need to move that into a computer and you have to get that over via USB. So we’re using the new USB 3.0 technology. We’re building HD-SDI and HDMI converters; these will allow you to transport full 1080p 60 video. That means that, in the past, 1080p 60 video was not possible over USB 2.0 – it would jump and skip all around. This has a 5 gig transport stream on it, while 2.0 had a 0.5 gig transport stream. This will be able to handle full 1080p 60 video. I can move all this video, all these cameras into Microsoft Skype link, the Blue Jeans network, any of the soft-codecs that are in the marketplace today. The last new product that we have that I’d like to show you is a 4K signal test generator that we’ve had a lot of interest in. This box has an HDMI output, it will allow you to generate multiple patterns to a screen. You have a little box that can generate up to 15-20 different patterns. You have the ability to control it on the front and it can change resolution. There’s a little screen where it will show you what the resolution is, it will integrate with the monitor and you’ll see that it is at something like 1080p 25 or 1080p 50 – whatever
Canon Lenses for Quinto We at the Canon booth for Quinto Communications with Pete and Paul Stewart from Canon Australia. Ed: Paul, we’re talking lenses – new and improved? Paul: We do have a couple of new lenses … Ed: May I say, right at the start, there’s certainly a lot of interest now in Canon lenses from the cinematographers who have bought themselves a Sony or a Canon camera, or another cinema camera, who want very good glass on it and they specify Canon. Is that what you’re finding? Paul: Well yes – obviously Canon’s got a very long legacy of lens technology and clearly a rich history in the broadcast market in terms of ult lenses, but also in the 1970s, for example, we won a couple of technical Academy Awards for some cinema lenses. So we’ve got a long history of making very good glass for consumer through to professional cinema products. The significance of our EF lens range – over 100 million built in the last 25-30 years, so that’s a big platform of lenses, a lot of lenses in the field to obviously then leverage our nice platform for a camera system. So regardless if you are using the Canon cinema series, or you might be purchasing a high end Sony camera, obviously the Canon lens has always been a choice. It’s applicable to many camera systems. Ed: Okay, so we’ve got some new choices for 2015 … let’s look at what’s new in the cinema lenses. Paul, that’s a decent size cinema lens? Paul: I guess it has broken a few of the records in terms of the longest focal length and highest magnification cinema lens currently available. There are some similar products from Angénieux but they are much heavier and very expensive.
resolution you’re looking for. You will also notice that this can be powered by computer, or a USB port, because it only requires 5 Volt. We also have a free software package that allows you to do a lot more things. This will give you the ability to read the EDID from the monitor; you also have the ability to change the colour depth from 24 bit to 48 bit; you have the ability to control the sampling rate on the audio; you have the ability to also turn on HDCP or turn off HDCP. All of this is able to be controlled via the WebGUI. So this is a very powerful product. The list price on this product is about US$539. You look at the capabilities of what this is doing, and other test generators in the marketplace might cost US$5-10K, so you’re getting a great value for the price with this product. That’s our BSG4K-HDI. That goes over some of the main new products that Marshall is doing. As always, it’s fantastic to report with you and go over the new products that we see – I’ll see you at the next NAB, right? Ed:
You will Devan, and you’re seamless.
For more information contact Quinto Communications NZVN on 09 486 1204 or sales@quinto.co.nz
Ed: Are you talking about the Angénieux being very expensive, as opposed to the Canon being well priced? Paul: Well obviously this is a unique lens built for a unique situation, so yes it is expensive – it is over A$90,000. But when we compare this to a large, twothird inch, B4 box lens of around the same focal length or 40X or over, you’re looking well beyond that price point. Considering it’s 4K right through the zoom range, so obviously 50-1000, it’s optically beautiful at every focal length point on the lens. What we’ve already seen is that there are calls for this type of lens for high end 4K spectacle events, sporting events, concerts, people like your friendly guys in SHOTOVER in New Zealand are using them on the helicopter rig which is going up and down outside the NAB area showing clients their latest stabilisation systems. They’re getting a great response with this particular product on the front of the C500 – on the front of that gimbal they’re using. Obviously this is all about special projects, this is not for everyone, but in Australia, I can give you a couple of examples of where this lens is already being used, and that is obviously the World Cup Cricket and similar events. Ed:
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Now, in a box lens?
Paul: I guess with the rise of 4K production within Australia, we have some of our customers now actually shooting on 4K cameras for sporting events and similar occasional events. They’re asking us “what’s our future in terms of that next generation of resolution” which is the big buzz word at this event, and that’s 4K. We’ve announced this lens at this event. It’s an Ultra High Definition DIGISUPER box lens. It is a prototype at this stage, so I really don’t have any details about the actual focal length, the actual zoom range … Ed: But the key thing is that Canon is keeping up with the demand from the broadcasters who want to go into 4K, who want that really high quality lens on their studio and field production. Pete: One example of where a lens like this would fit in is with a product called the DreamCatcher from Evertz which is a 4K slo-mo replay machine with zoom and tracking functions. For sporting events you can capture a wide image at 4K and then zoom in on the action. With the wide shot you’ve got less chance of missing something important and because a 4K picture is made up of four 1920 x 1080 images you have a lot of leeway to get crisp pictures on your zoom. This system was used at the last Super Bowl for example. 4K glass is critical to a system like this. Ed: That’s the thing, you can have something spec’d as a 4K camera, but if the lens on them doesn’t match the 4K capability of the camera, as soon as you zoom in to get HD, you’re not really getting true HD. That’s the failure of the lens to keep up with the resolution, rather than the camera? Pete: Well to a certain extent, a camera is only as good as the glass on the front of it and the message here is not necessarily that you’d be delivering in 4K, but the highest quality acquisition. Ed: And we haven’t forgotten Canon in the ENG area, because this continues and ENG for those cinematographers out there, this is true television and you have a new lens in this range? Paul: Yes, I guess this is quite an exciting announcement for us. It was actually announced a few weeks ago. The first version of this lens, basically the HJ 22, has been a stalwart of the Canon ENG lens system for some time. It was one of our largest sellers actually in the ENG range. So it’s exciting to have this new product that gives you longer zoom, less weight – you can see in this actual lens it’s approximately the same size, but we’re running about 20grams lighter on this unit, wide-angle starts at 7.5mm now and runs right out to 180mm. In a very small package we’re
giving a very high quality lens, optically superior to the previous model. In terms of servo units upgraded, a bit of virtual opportunities – everything that’s … obviously same connectivity with the controllers, zoom demands for example. So we’re expecting big things out of this lens. It’s obviously not a 4K lens, but … Ed: ... does well in an ENG environment. Paul: Yes, in a broadcast world. So we’re looking forward to starting to sell this lens in June and obviously rolling the last of the 22’s out over the next couple of months. Ed: Oh, at a discount? Paul: Maybe! Ed: Talk to Pete. Pete: There’s a small ringing in my ear … Ed: Are you going to fall Peter? Pete: My ears are still ringing with the “d” word. Ed: You’ll cope. Now in a Perspex case, 8K SHV lens and that’s a big bit of glass? Paul: Yes, again I guess this is a prototype type of a product we’re showing here at NAB. It is a 10X optical zoom, 8K cine lens, so super 35mm coverage. This particular one is in a PL format, a full servo on board, the weight is around 10 kilo it’s telling me here. Apart from that, I don’t have a lot of other information I can give you. Obviously again, it’s about Canon’s leadership in lens technology and staying abreast of the current resolution requirements of the camera systems and I guess with the hype of where that’s all heading at the moment. Ed: So we’re looking forward to a picture of this attached to a little Blackmagic compact camera and then the rig that has to go along with it. I’m sure somebody will do it? Paul: Yeah well Everyone’s got a 5D.
5D
of
course.
Pete: You know we’ve seen NHK already have an 8K – or prove 8K broadcast ability. Ed: Well it’s movies really. This is how you should be shooting movies? Pete: On the highest quality piece of glass you can get. You do not want the glass to get in the way … Ed:
... of a good time.
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OConnor for Panavision For Panavision we are at OConnor with Steve Turner. Ed: Steve you’ve got a nice little kit here – I think we saw this kit last year at NAB, but … Steve: It’s a different kit. Ed: Oh, it’s a different kit, you’re making another kit? Steve: What you saw last year was our follow focus kit, which was provided in a strong case with custom cut forms, but this is something quite different. This is the OConnor O-Rig and this is a camera and lens agnostic shoulder rig. What this will do is, like our 1030 head, it will support every camera and lens combination on the market. Ed: That’s quite a claim? Steve: Every camera and lens combination on the market. You may need an adapter for a couple of the cameras, but in general, every one you would use to shoot digital cinema. Ed: So in other words, immediately every rental house should have at least one of these? Steve: Of course, of course. I would recommend more than one! But it’s good for the owner / operator who wants to futureproof his purchase. We wanted to make something that would last as long as a 1030 – a 10 year rig that doesn’t care about camera and lens changes. So the first thing you do, you get this table and you read up where your camera is down the lefthand side and you get a baseplate and adjust it to the number that it says on the table, lock it off, and now that’s the baseplate for that camera. It also gives you a letter, and that letter is for the bridge, and it tells you the holes to put your rods through and then you attach your matte box or your follow focus to the bridge. You get a set of the award winning O-Grips with it – this is a previous product launch. You also get a shoulder pad. The shoulder pad is hand stitched leather and we really looked hard to find the best type of leather. It’s got memory foam inside and it’s got places to mount your O-Grips to and it can also be mounted in four different ways. You can mount it so it tucks into your chest, so that it hooks over your back, or sits square on top. So that’s the shoulder pad. It comes with this set of counterweights … as you can see, we haven’t really spared the rod when it comes to quality, cast stainless steel, there’s an O-ring down inside there to stop it being able to slide off the rods, and then we’ve just scraped across the top with a fly cutter to pick out the OConnor brand on there. Also in the kit, you get this offset bracket. Typically people are used to seeing these things – it’s a solid piece of metal and your shoulder pad goes here for your
Steve for OConnor.
shoulder and, say your digital SLR would go on your baseplate attached to these rods. Normally they’re fixed, but this one is fully articulable, a super strong clamp, so what you can do is you can run the shoulder pad underneath the camera, back through another set of rods, or you can put just a slight offset in for your shoulder, because no one’s got a horizontal shoulder, or you can do something really cool where you can flip the whole rig round that way, you can mount your O-Grip on top and use it as a body mount. So you can pull it into your body, shoot in low mode, high mode and anywhere in between. So it’s a body mount, not a shoulder mount, it can fit horizontally or vertically.
Page 15
Steve: Absolutely. The fact is that this is a market where camera bodies change every 5 seconds and that is not OConnor’s business. We’re used to making tripods that last 30 years and the reason they do that is because they’re futureproofed – they’re camera and lens agnostic, so it doesn’t matter what camera comes out, as long as it’s within its parameters, as in more than zero pounds and less than 30 pounds, it works with the tripod.
Ed: Well I should have started this interview with the question "show me something that excites me?" but you’ve done it because I’ve seen lots of rigs and I’ve been very, shall we say, "scathing" about many of them because the amount of effort it takes to set them up and then somebody else comes along and has to do a setup for them, but with this it just seems to be infinitely scalable? Steve: It is infinitely scalable. It takes a standard camera slide plate, so you put your camera on a slide plate, your camera slips into the top or into the O-Rig or into the tripod. Or you can put your camera slide plate on the top so you can clip your whole rig down onto the tripod, shoot from the tripod, back onto the shoulder. It’s a completely toolless setup, you use an Allen key to attach an O-Grip, but other than that, everything is completely toolless. We’ve taken real care of the quality – all of the controls are captive so you can’t lose anything, the screws will not wind back out, it’s all aluminium, steel and … Ed: And simple things like those O-rings … obviously a lot of thought has gone into the user friendliness of this setup?
The same thing with the new O-Rig. As long as the camera sits within the parameters of the O-Rig, which is that the distance from the lens centre to the base of the camera is more than 32mm and less than 107mm, it fits. We’ve checked, and that’s pretty much every camera and lens on the market – anything from the Sony A7S right up to an ARRI film camera. So it literally works with everything. The other kind of requirement is that the camera has holes in the bottom to mount the plate, which most cameras do and if not there’s normally an adapter that you can get. Ed: Or the camera’s not actually designed to go on any sort of rig? Steve: Yeah well, you get surprised at what the camera manufacturers sometimes do … Ed: Alright, we won’t talk about them. What about tripods themselves – this is what OConnor is very well known for. Any big changes there? Steve: I can’t say anything right now, but what I can say is that we’ll be launching something interesting at Cine Gear in June. Ed:
Is that for the big person, or the smaller one?
Steve: maybe.
It’s for someone somewhere in the middle
Ed: But the OConnor brand continues to expand and excite their users? Steve: It certainly does, yes, of course. No one ever got kicked off set for walking on there with an OConnor, right? NZVN
Stabilised Gimbal for Panavision We are here at the Vitec stand for Panavision and we have Andrew Butler. Ed: Now Andrew, this particular product is called the … well what is it? Andrew: It’s called the SMX30. It’s a 3 axis, stabilised gimbal. What’s unique about this gimbal, as opposed to the myriad of other gimbals on the market, is this can take the big boy cameras. This has a working payload of 30 kg, or 66 pounds, and it has no length limitation on the camera, which means you can put a full size ALEXA on this with a decent sized cine PL mount lens and you will have that stabilised in full 3 axis. If you were strong enough, you could run around handheld like that for as long as the battery held up. Ed: But this isn’t meant to be a replacement for the Artemis is it … how does it fit in the market segment?
Andrew with the SMX30 rig.
Page 16
Andrew: It’s absolutely complementary to the Artemis, so what’s really clever about this is the way it couples into the Artemis system. You can have this handheld and fly it like a regular gimbal, but you can couple this onto the pin on the end of an Artemis spring arm. So you wear the Artemis vest, you wear the Artemis spring arm and you sit this on the pin on the end. The Artemis vest and spring arm distribute the weight into your body much more efficiently than trying to hold it with your arms. You actually only need a very, very light touch on the gimbal once you’ve got it on the arm and then you can shoot for a very protracted period. I was shooting with this for half an hour nonstop yesterday, just playing with it and I wasn’t fatigued. You can see I’m not a big guy, about 75 kg, and I was fine. So it’s really cool. It completely complements the Artemis range. The traditional kind of inertial stabiliser which we’d all be familiar with as a Steadicam, that has certain capabilities; the gimbal has complementary sort of capabilities. I’d never say that gimbals are going to replace body mounted stabilising systems but they certainly do complement each other. Ed: You can’t use the word “Steadicam” unless could you actually put the SMX30 onto a Steadicam if you had one of those? Andrew: If you were a Steadicam owner and you had the Steadicam vest and the Steadicam arm, then you can fit the pin on the end of your Steadicam arm into the Spider on the bottom of the SMX30 and you could support the weight just the same. Ed: Right. So it seems you’ve got a number of accessories on there. Is that important to actually have those accessories mounted on the frame? Andrew: Well one thing that you’re looking at here is one of the Anton Bauer Digital 90 batteries. That’s powering this whole thing, it’s powering the gimbal, it’s powering the camera, it’s also powering the little monitor we have on the back here which, in this case, is a Transvideo Starlite Monitor. You can see the runtime indication on the battery, we’ve got 2 hours 47 minutes of runtime on that one 90 Watt hour battery and that’s been on there most of today. The rig enables you to pass power through the gimbal into the camera without wires tangling things up, so it’s all very slick to rig, you don’t have to worry about getting caught up in anything.
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Ed: I guess that’s the important thing isn’t it – you’ve thought of everything, everything’s connected so that it doesn’t impinge on the freedom of motion that the gimbal provides? Andrew: Absolutely, that’s fundamental. If you start to compromise the freedom of the gimbal to do its job, you’re compromising the quality of the shot you’re going to make. So this is completely free to stabilise in all 3 of its axes all of the time. Additionally, on here, we’ve got a little Teradek Bolt. Now if you’re not familiar with this product, this is a point to point video transmission system. It’s zero latency and it’s uncompressed. So we’re feeding, in this case, the video from an F5 into the Teradek; the Teradek is also powered from the Dionic 90 via D-tap and we can go completely handheld and wireless with this and run round to our heart’s content. Ed: And you’ve connected the little monitor there with a Manfrotto clamp? Andrew: Yes, we’ve got a little magic arm on the back there just to make it easy to articulate the monitor into where you want to go. Ed:
And keeping it all in the family?
Andrew: We do like to keep it in the family as much as possible, yes. NZVN
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Timecode Systems at NAB2015 Now this is a product that is of value to the audio and video production worlds and is currently available from Sound Techniques and Panavision. To tell us all about Timecode Buddy, we have Paul Scurrell at Timecode Systems who are the suppliers, makers, owners of the Timecode Buddy. Ed: Now, this has been around for a year or two? Paul: We actually launched first product here at NAB in 2012.
the
Ed: Now timecode, it’s something that certainly used to be very important with synchronising recorders in post but these days, with file systems, I didn’t think timecode was so important. Obviously it is?
Paul for Timecode Systems.
Paul: Well strangely enough, through my background as a sound mixer, and I was an ex-BBC sound supervisor, it was like that, as in the very early days, timecode was very important in film and separate sound recording in film. Then it went away from that as multi-camera was all cables and vision mixed and post produced obviously as it went along. But as the file based systems have come on board – file based cameras, and the cameras have become cheaper, and audio recorders have obviously become file based, so the whole industry is based around isolated recording of cameras, isolated recording of audio tracks, and post producing everything. Obviously, everything being digitally based, there are a lot more inherent latencies involved with digital kit than there was with analogue kit. So actually, it’s now swivelled right around to the point where sync is incredibly important, because you’ve got so many different sources of so many different types you’re trying to synchronise together and, if you don’t do it at source, on the shoot, on location, it takes an age in postproduction to resync everything. That was the basis of where we started – it was just purely from a sync point of view, and my job – why we started the company – was to create some new elegant ways we could do that, that would make very easy setup, long range RF to try and sync everything together, so there’s no manually jamming everything together, everything would stay locked all day long with zero drift.
there are many layers of error checking. If it can’t see valid sync packets of genuine data, it just forgets them, otherwise it carries on. It won’t sync to any bad packets if you like, any bad data. Ed: So what do you have to have on the unit? For example, if you had a setup with a couple of studio type cameras, but then a couple of Go Pro’s, could you actually sync up the Go Pro’s to the studio cameras? Paul: Well what we do with the smaller cameras, the whole system is developed so that first of all we can sync all together the completely professional cameras, which have got timecoded Genlock inputs but, as you say, for things like Go Pro’s, we’ve got another set of problems. Those cameras are being used a lot, as you know, in production now, for TV and movie production. So what we do with a Go Pro at the moment for instance, we would either use one of our mini products and take the timecode out and put it into the audio input of the camera … Ed: That would probably sound better than the original audio? Paul: It probably would. So effectively, you can then decode that LTC that’s on the audio track in the edit and resync that camera or, one of the unique selling points of our products right from the beginning
Ed: So is it a case of locking it up to start with, or do you have to have a continuous RF signal to each device? Paul: What we do is we have an incredibly accurate crystal generator – temperature controlled generator in each product, but then we just configure one as the master clock and the other ones are the slave-receive units. But we’re constantly re-jamming the internal generator, so if you lose the RF it doesn’t matter, it will carry on with its own internal generator. Ed: But if the RF gets out of sync, it will resync it? Paul: The RF would never get out of sync because, if you had corrupt data coming in, the data gets discarded and it’ll carry on until it has good data. So Page 19
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was the fact that we also had a WiFi module built into each of our products, which meant that, not only were all our products synchronised on our long range RF system, we’ve got this simultaneous interface of this WiFi which means that we can stream frame accurate timecode to an iPad app or an iPhone. So what that means is that if you’ve got a camera such as a Go Pro and you don’t want to use the audio track, but you want to give it a visual reference like a good old -fashioned clapper slate, you can just launch the app on your iPhone or your iPad, log onto our WiFi network which is out there and then sync the camera with the visual timecode, frame accurate. The editor just obviously freeze frames that, matches the timecode up with the other cameras, and away you go. Ed:
So how does that work with the Go Pro?
Paul: With the Go Pro, you would literally get someone with their iPhone or their iPad, they would just log onto the WiFi network generated by the Timecode Buddy on set. That then creates a frame accurate timecode display using your own personal phone or your iPad and you literally show it to the front of the camera. So the editor, when he freeze frames that frame, he can then sync it up with the rest of the … Ed: Right, and as long as you don’t stop recording that Go Pro, it will maintain that accuracy you hope, or I guess it’s worth doing it at the end of the shoot as well, just to make sure that the Go Pro didn’t skip a beat? Paul: You could do. I mean the main thing with footage from cameras like Go Pro is that a lot of the time editors don’t have a clue sync-wise where that camera sits. So at least, if at the beginning of the clip they’ve got a visual reference, to be honest, they’re pretty happy with that. Ed: So this is something that works obviously not only in the video world, but also the audio, so that one master clock can sync up the timecode on a portable audio recorder at the same time it syncs to a television camera? Paul: Correct, yes. So effectively a standard configuration would be that the sound guy would be configured as the master clock, the timecode and word clock from our unit will be going into his audio recorder, so that’s all sunk …. Ed: “Sunk”? You mean “sync’d”. The past of "sync" is not "sunk" … was your father in the navy? I thought you were English and not American? Paul: Ed:
I am English. Never mind. Carry on.
Paul: So the master clock is generating the sync for the set, everyone else is listening to that sync and then they’re slaving their cameras either visually or through the timecode and Genlock ports of our products, so that everybody’s got exactly the same timecode and exactly the same Genlock. Ed:
And it works until somebody turns the power off?
Paul: If someone turned the power off of the sound department, all the units on the cameras will effectively carry it on their own. If someone turned the power off the whole lot – yeah, the whole lot goes off. Ed: Paul: Ed:
And then you resync again? That’s it. Now you’ve made some improvements?
URGENT NOTICE FOR SONY ALPHA 7S USERS Cinematographer David Paul has found an issue with an Alpha 7S – if you have one, it’s something you need to be very careful with. David: What we have discovered shooting with an Alpha 7S onto an off-board recorder such as an Atomos Shogun or a Convergent Design Odyssey or the Ninja is you must hit record on the camera body. Never record on the recorder directly. If you hit record on the “off-board”, you will get images that are unusable. The best way we can describe it is if the camera, the source of the image, is not told that you now require 4K images from it, it goes into like a sleep mode – it’s not sleeping, the cameras are set to not shut down for 30 minutes – it’s just like it stops scanning the image. It stops sending out a 4K image to the “off-board”, until you hit the record on the camera, then that wakes it up and it says “oh, I’m connected through my HDMI to the “off-board”, you want a 4K image, I’ll now give you a clean image.” If you don’t, you will get such a compressed image … you’ll never have seen anything like it, it’s worse than Hi8 video. It’s unusable and we’ve learnt the hard way; we’ve got reshoots to do. I’ve spent a day, 7 hours testing this stuff and I can replicate it within seconds, so please always record from the camera body only, never on the recorder. Ed: So there you go. If any of you know a website that has good professional information about the Alpha 7S, can you let us know and we’ll put that up so that other people can find out more information about it. NZVN Paul: We have. The original system was based around very accurate wireless sync and then suddenly we realised that we weren’t really using a lot of the capability of our own wireless system in terms of data space. We had requests from the camera guys and from the sound guys asking if they can use our robust RF network to transport metadata around the set as well. So not only do we synchronise everything in one direction, also with our new Blink network, which is our own Buddy link network – we can now get metadata back out of sound recorders, out of cameras and feed that back into the master unit and then via the WiFi interface we can have all that information on one application, collecting all the metadata from the different departments, as well as synchronising all the cameras. Ed: So instant feedback for the director, whatever, or a centralised location for all your metadata before you start an edit? Paul: Exactly. So that is the real point that we’re now creating a system where all the metadata is collecting in one place. And also on the application screen, we can actually see the status of all of our products that are dotted around the set, so we can check the battery life, whether they’re locked, whether they’re the right framerate. So we’ve not only got a metadata exchange, we’ve got status information from all the pieces of kit as well, from one app. Ed:
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It sounds like every set should have one.
NZVN
Lectrosonics for Sound Techniques We are at Lectrosonics for Sound Techniques with Stephen Buckland and Karl Winkler from Lectrosonics. Ed: Karl, you’ve got a very little radio transmitter? Karl: This is the SSM transmitter. It’s two-thirds the size and weight of our SMV or SMB type transmitter, so it’s very small. We went to a new connector so we could make it smaller and we went to a new battery using a lithium ion rechargeable pack like what you’d find in a small digital camera. So all metal housing, very small, but with a full featured backlit LCD display, as well as a nice easy to use keypad. It’s also got an infrared sync port, so with compatible receivers, you can set it up in a matter of seconds, and it’s got a USB port as well, so as different features are added down the line, we can upload them in the field. Ed: Wow, and is this one shipping? Karl: It will be shipping shortly, it’s already passed FCC regulations here in the US and we’re going to be ramping up production and submitting it to other countries for compliance. So it’s definitely a 2015 product. Ed: So this as a transmitter can be used with other receivers, you don’t have to have a dedicated receiver? Karl: Any one of our receivers will work. This also tunes across 75 MHz or three of our standard frequency blocks, so it’s very flexible that way. It’s along the lines of our L-Series – again, that tune across three blocks, so this is the coming trend, wider tuning range and a lot more flexibility. Ed: And a lot smaller, so this is the bikini model is it? Karl: Yes. Hide it on the talent anywhere you can find. Ed: Wow, and for the larger person? Karl: It will work for that too. Okay, now the series that’s just arrived in New Zealand Stephen – you’ve been waiting for these for a little while? Stephen: We have been waiting for these a little while due to various engineering and manufacturing considerations, and they are finally rolling out of the factory. This is the LT transmitter with the LR receiver. There’s also the LMb transmitter which is a step up from the pretty well seen everywhere LMa transmitter which is now discontinued, and being phased out as we speak. These two work over 75 MHz of spectrum, so a fair amount of frequency agility there if you’re concerned about not being able to work because of the RF congestion and environment. Ed: And this is it, you’ve chosen a block for Lectrosonics to make these in what was probably the most reliably safe block in New Zealand?
Karl with a very small transmitter.
Stephen: Yes, we’ve chosen the one that’s the most useable in New Zealand which avoids the digital television channels. It’s mostly free space and it should work reasonably well in New Zealand no matter where you are. Ed: So back to you Karl, the L-Series, they’re a bit larger than the SSM, so are you actually missing out on anything by having the smaller one? Karl: No, you’re not, although the LT does transmit at a higher power, so maybe that’s what you’re missing out. The SSM transmits at 25 or 50 milliWatt which is terrific for a TV studio, a film sound stage or a theatrical production – that sort of thing; whereas the LT with 100 milliWatt can transmit quite a bit further. Ed: And does the LT take standard batteries? Karl: The LT does, yes AA batteries. Ed: But apart from that otherwise totally compatible? Karl: Yes, they’re almost identical in many ways, same kind of control surface, a lot of the same options, they both respond to the remote commands from the phone app that’s available for $20 and that will change settings on the transmitters. They both do that as well. Ed: Do you want to add anything Stephen? Stephen: The limiting factor in the size of the transmitter has always been the battery, an AA battery or even an AAA battery takes up a certain amount of volume. By going to a flat pack type of lithium ion battery, rechargeable, Lectrosonics has got over two issues – (1) is the disposable battery issue – it isn’t disposable; and (2) is the size of the transmitter; it means they can make it smaller. Ed: Okay, moving along a bit we have a D-Box and a D-Transmitter. What does the “D” stand for Karl? Karl: D is for Digital – the DSW series, a Digital Secure Wireless and, like our older Venue system, this one is also a modular receiver, so you can get up to 6 channels in one rack space. The main design feature of this is to have digital audio studio quality sound, that 24 bit, 48 kHz sampling, but also that the information is secure. So this is government grade security as a
Page 22
matter of fact. It’s AES encryption standard, 256 bit encryption key, so uncrackable as far as we know. Not only is it a great wireless – and it is – but it also offers that security for those kinds of customers that need it – corporations, government offices and so on. Ed:
And its application in New Zealand Stephen?
Stephen: Well obviously it’s useful for security applications, like boardrooms and such where the information isn’t allowed to go beyond the room, but even in television and filmmaking with the growth of social media, with analogue gear it’s possible for someone to sit outside the studio with a scanner and listen to what’s going on, on set. So therefore scripts and stuff can be released to the general public and the producer’s investment can be kind of undermined. There have been candidates thinking that this is a very good way to go for that very reason – apart from the digital quality. The other thing about it is the range. There’s a wonderful video on YouTube https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFTqL8dUD9U of one of the vice-presidents of Lectrosonics driving along this road in his Mini Cooper and he goes one mile and he’s still receiving; reception is still available one mile away. So the range of them can’t be disputed and then you’ve got the fact that it’s secure, so no one can actually monitor them and I think it’s got application even in general use … reality TV shows where they don’t want to know who the winner is. Ed: Does it have a particularly high price point in comparison to non-secure?
He tried to get into every picture!
Stephen: I believe there is a premium to pay, yes, but what’s a production worth? To be honest, I can’t tell you what the premium is just yet. ( Pricing and units are now available – call Sound Techniques.) NZVN
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Sound Devices for Sound Techniques For Sound Techniques, we are here at Sound Devices with Paul Isaacs and Stephen Buckland. Ed: Now Paul, the PIX recorder continues to evolve. It’s been really, really successful I believe and there’s a number of people who specify the PIX recorder in their recordings, so you’ve done that good in the world of television. This looks like a smaller version? Paul: Yes it certainly is and that’s why we call it the PIX-E. The PIX-E is actually a series of recording monitors, so there are actually 3 models in this family. There are two 5 inch models and there’s a 7 inch model. The 5 inch models are the smallest, most compact 4K recording monitors in existence. They have a full range of monitoring features, including scopes, false colours, peaking and zebras and guide markers. And they have built-in ProRes 4x4 recording – 4K recording. Ed: Only ProRes or do you cater for the Avid people as well? Paul: Only ProRes. Now the LCDs themselves on the 5 inch are 1920 x 1080, so they’re full HD pixel for pixel. That is really high resolution. They’re also 500 nit brightness, which means they’re ideal for use outside in the sunlight, and there is actually a sun-hood accessory which we provide too. Now the monitoring tools are really professional tools. It’s a ruggedly built product just like the predecessor, the PIX 240 – diecast aluminium chassis, the LCD’s protected by Gorilla Glass 2, so it’s scratch resistant, really rugged. In fact, we tested this by shooting potatoes at the LCD and they survived without a problem. We created mashed potato! So there are two 5 inch models; there’s an HDMI only model which is called the PIX-E5H and then there’s a 5 inch one called the PIX-E5 which adds SDI to the HDMI. As I said, let’s talk about recording on these things, because this is one of the most amazing aspects of this product. Here it is … it looks like a USB 3 thumb drive and it is that, but it’s way, way more. Sound Devices has developed this enclosure – it’s a custom enclosure, but inside it is an industry standard mSATA SSD drive. These are freely available from many outlets, like Amazon, Newegg – they’re very cost effective, and they come in sizes from 128 Gig all the way up to 1 terabyte. So all the user needs to do is buy an empty enclosure for $59, unscrew the 3 screws, open it up, slide in the mSATA, close it up and then record. Then all they do is just slide into the USB 3 socket on the PIX-E, click it in, it’s locked in place, can’t move, and now they can record. Now the really clever thing about this – we’re recording 4K and we’re recording ProRes 4x4 XQ which can be huge data rates right. How do we achieve that? Well, when we plug in this USB 3 drive, it automatically converts to SATA interface and we can
Paul with PIX-E.
get the high speed data writing. And then when we remove the drive after recording, it becomes just a USB 3 thumb drive again. And you can transfer very fast off this – about a Gig every 5 seconds. Ed:
So what’s the card slot in the side for?
Paul: The SD card is there for loading custom LUTs, lookup tables. Ed:
So not actually recording onto that?
Paul: Correct – and it also does saving of setup files and stuff like that too. Ed: Now I see on the screen here that it’s got SDI 1080p 23.98 and 10 bit – it is a 10 bit recorder? Paul: No, we can go up to 12 bit. So ProRes 4444 XQ is a 12 bit codec and we can achieve that. Now in terms of resolutions and framerates, we can record 4K in both DCI and UHD formats. So what that means is 4096 x 2160 up to 24 frames per second; and then we can record 3840 x 2160 which is UHD up to 30 frames per second. In terms of standard HD, we can record 1080p at up to 60 frames per second, so this is a really powerful device. Let’s just take a quick look at some of these cool monitoring tools, because we’ve added some really quite cool tools to help focusing really quickly.
Page 24
many frames as you like and you can set aspect ratios. You can custom aspect ratios, so I can come in here and I can change the aspect, come out of here … so it’s a very powerful guide marker system. Ed: Those are guide markers only, recording that particular frame size?
that’s
not
Paul: No, it's a framing guide. Then we have the menu for navigating all the rest of the machine. On the side here, there’s line input for 2 channel line audio, but I want to show you the audio accessory that goes with this, called the PIX-LR. Here we have the PIX-LR bolted onto the bottom of the board and there’s a connector which connects between the two units, which conveys all the serial information. On the back we have 2 mic line inputs, line outputs, phantom limiters high pass filters – all the stuff you’d expect from Sound Devices mic pre’s and then nice LED metering, chunky transport controls and even little gain controls. Ed: So this is if you’re not taking the audio from the camera? Paul: Correct, yes. You could actually combine it; you could combine audio from the camera with audio from the mic pre’s here. Ed:
Paul: Well in fact up to 8 channel, because we have 2 line in here, 2 more inputs, that’s 4 analogue, plus we can have up to 8 SDI …
Well located data recorder.
Ed: Before you do that, does this replace the other devices, the 240 for example? Paul: No, it does not. The PIX 240 still has a unique place. That does DNxHD; it has up-down and cross conversion; it has built-in ambient timecode generator; and it has built-in mic preamps. Ed:
Oh, so in other words have 4 channel?
So the 240 and 270 will continue?
Paul: Oh yes, absolutely, they have their own market. Well the 270 is actually a rack mount, so that’s a totally different market altogether. There is an audio accessory called the PIX-LR which adds mic pre’s. It’s an option which screws into the bottom of the PIX-E to provide really high quality mic pre’s, transport controls, gain controls and LED metering. But let’s quickly look at something which is really cool. There’s a cool feature for focusing called Taps-in. It’s the quickest way to focus on the market. So if I touch anywhere on this screen – here we go, I’m going to focus on this guy here … let’s do four times. I’m going to put my peaking on as well … there, that’s how quick it is. I can come in again and I can drag the display if I’m not right on the point and then I can adjust my focus. So it’s tap in, tap out. That’s the fastest it’s ever been for a focus puller. It’s never been faster. That’s a really cool feature. Now, in addition to that, we add false colours and you can set them up to be either 4 colour or 12 colour, depending on your preference. You’ve got zebra mode for exposure; you’ve got waveform monitor; you’ve got this 4-way view, effects, scope way, full monitor and histogram, and we can set up LUTs (lookup tables) to decode the S-Log signal coming in to rack 709 on the display. We support S-Log, S-Log2, S-Log3 Canon and ARRI, but you can load custom LUTs off SDCard2. So peaking we’ve spoken about, this is actually called throb mode, but we’re going to change the name of that because we might offend someone. Ed: So you can still be in ProRes 444 and have S-Log in its infinite varieties? Paul: Correct. So then we have our guide markers and we can customise one of those as well, so we’ve got as
Ed: So you can daisy chain this bottom part – put 2 of those on? Paul: No Ed:
Well how do you get 8?
Paul: So 2 here, 2 XLRs on the back here, so that’s 4 analogue okay … and now we can also take audio over HDMI and SDI to give us more channels. So that’s pretty much the PIX-E5, then here sitting next to it is a PIX-E7, the 7 inch monitor. The LCD is 1920 x 1200 pixel, very high resolution. It has all the features of the PIX-E5; the only other major difference is that it has dual link SDI inputs, which will allow us to do 4K from some cameras. Ed: And both units operate on two batteries and I guess it drains the power of one before it runs out? Paul: Exactly, so you can always change your battery. Ed:
Are you going to sell heaps of these Stephen?
Stephen: Well we’ll do our best. establish the New Zealand price.
We have yet to
Paul: The pricing in the US is very cost effective. It’s $1195 which is a third of the price of the PIX 240. That’s the PIX-E5H model with only HDMI. If you go to the next model which has the SDI, it’s US$1395 and the E7 is US$1595. Stephen: I think we’ll sell quite a few of them at that sort of relative price in New Zealand. Paul: How Zealand?
popular
are
A7S’s
and
GH4’s
in
New
Stephen: Well there’s probably going to be something cheaper, but Sound Devices and Video Devices have built their reputation on providing products which last the distance. They have extra functionality over most of their competitors and they have more inputs outputs and ways that they deal with the information. They’re more robust, they’ve gone to a lot of effort to find out what industry standards are and to make stuff which is for professional use, not semi-professional use.
Page 25
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Paul: It’s an investment. Anyone coming in who wants to have a career in what they’re doing, it’s an investment for them. The product will last with them, it will grow with them and it’s actually going to save them dollars in the end. Ed: Now Devices?
into
the
audio
portion
only
of
Sound
Paul: So basically the 688 – it’s been shipping now for a month. It’s a great story, it’s still pretty fresh for NAB, you know with its 12 inputs, 16 track, it’s got this mix assist and it’s a whole new digital architecture upgrade effectively from the 664. But really what I want to talk about today is the optional wireless and powering accessory, the SL-6. We’re looking at a unit here and you can see effectively, this chassis bolts onto the top of the 688 by a screw here and a screw here and 2 at the back, and the reason for this is to really declutter the production sound mixer’s bag. If you look at a typical production sound mixer’s bag now, it’s got a lot of receivers in there and there are cables hanging out in all directions, there are powering looms running in all directions and that can’t help with reliability or weight. So we thought we needed to come up with a solution which sort of decluttered and removed all those cables and that’s what you’re looking at here. So the SL-6 has three slots in the front. Each slot will take a 2 channel Uni-Slot or SuperSlot receiver. Now Uni-Slot is actually a standard that’s been around for many years. It’s a 25 pin standard which allows for powering and 2 channel analogue audio from a receiver. They were used frequently with cameras. So we looked at that standard and we thought that’s great, we can use the UniSlot interface. But then we thought we can do way more than this. Why don’t we extend Uni-Slot and create a new standard that adds digital audio, not just analogue audio, but also control. Wouldn’t it be great if a sound mixer could control all the receivers, set them all up from that actual mixer/recorder’s interface. So basically, Sound Devices developed the SuperSlot standard, but we did it in collaboration with leading wireless manufacturers such as Sennheiser, Lectrosonics, Wisycom and Audio Limited. So what you’re looking at in front of you, we actually had like a Lectrosonics SRb dual channel signal in one of our slots and a Wisycom MCR42 in another slot. At the moment, we’re receiving 4 channels. So we can mix and match receivers, which is great. Ed:
But you’ve only got 2 aerials there?
Paul: Yes, this is an antenna distribution system with built-in filtering. Basically, we take in an A and B antenna and we loop them through machines that will distribute, but there’s actually a front end filter on there too. We’ve got SMA loop through connectors which go from the input and output of each receiver, and that’s how we distribute the RF. Ed: And it’s got its own battery supply. How do you actually connect the audio to the mixer – I can’t see any cables going into the input? Paul: And that’s the whole point. Because we’ve got rid of the cables, it’s all magic. When you connect an SL-6 there’s a little hole at the bottom of it that you connect a ribbon cable into here and it folds neatly away and then you sort of solidify it down. So pretty neat.
Ed:
That is very neat.
Paul: Let me give you a little bit of an example of the control … Ed: Did you actually plan this when you designed this 688? Paul: Yes, it was all part of the concept. We knew we were going to do it. So we had to add specific hardware to accommodate SuperSlot but it can’t be backdated to our older mixers like the 664. Let’s take a look at a typical screen. If I press these two buttons, now we’re looking at our receiver overview screen, where we can see the RF and audio from all the 6 receivers. So the orange is the RF level, here is the audio level, we can even see transmitter battery level, so you know you’re getting warnings when you need to change batteries, lost pilot tone and you can see which antenna is receiving the signal in diversity mode. We can navigate through these and select any one and select a particular receiver and then we can set up the frequency of that receiver.
Right side unit shows connection point.
Now isn’t it nice that you can do it from such a nice sized screen instead of having to go into these smaller menus of the receivers themselves. All the parameters and menus that you can find in a Lectrosonics receiver are there, and you can access them from the 688. And likewise, with the Wisycom which has a different set of menus to Lectrosonics, but the 688 will display the relevant menus according to the receiver it’s detected. Ed: Okay, just tell me a little bit more about the battery arrangement – so the base 688 has got its own battery and your SL-6 has its own battery, or do they share? Paul: When the 688 is on its own, it can be powered via internal batteries, or an external DC port here, which typically has an NP1 style battery powering it in a bag. So when an SL-6 is attached, notice it has an NP1 slot of its own and also an external DC input of its own. It’s actually the power that’s in the SL-6 that powers the whole box. So this NP1 is currently powering the whole system. We don’t need any separate power in the 688. Ed: But if you pull the NP1 out to change it, then what happens? Paul: Well there’s an internal power reserve, called PowerSafe which will allow you to change over the
Page 27
battery and carry on, and that will keep the whole unit powered up, all receivers. I’ll demonstrate it – if I pull the DC here, now the whole box is being powered from an internal power supply and everything’s still running. Now as long as I get power into this box within 10 seconds, then we’re still going. PowerSafe it’s called. Ed: Stephen, that’s got to be a clever arrangement? Stephen: Well all the most recent Sound Devices gear has this capacity – the 633, the 270, the 970 – all the stuff that’s come out in the last 18 months or 2 years, all has PowerSafe. And in fact, the only time it ever causes any grief is if you actually do want to do a hard reset for any reason, you have to know the Every soundie’s dream - the unit that is! special combination to override the battery, otherwise the machine will keep on thought it was lunch but actually the director calls powering. another take right now … I’m not on, and you’re getting all panicky so you literally just do that, and within less Paul: The other neat feature about this is another thing than 2 seconds you’re into record. It’s called we’re adding to our products called QuickBoot. Notice QuickBoot. that it’s on, have we got a card in here? Yes we do, so if I turn it off for lunch or whatever, although you NZVN Stephen: No more waiting on sound.
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Canon Cameras for Protel We are on the Canon stand for Protel and we’re talking with Ken Brooke. Ed:
Ken, the C300 has had a bit of a makeover?
Ken: It’s actually a totally brand new camera. The C300 Mark II has a slightly larger body to it, because there’s a lot more processing going on in there to cater for the 4K capability. I’ve been told it’s shipping in September and obviously we’ll be placing orders to get into stock, so we invite you to place your order now. Canon will be offering finance options for these cameras. There’s quite a bit of interest in the C300 MK II already in New Zealand, so we think it will be a sought-after camera. Ed: So is the interest coming from existing Canon owners who can use the lenses that they’ve got and just upgrade the body, or is it coming from new people who are looking for that 4K capability in this form factor camera? Ken: For both of those reasons. We have interest from people who hire cameras as well as people new in the video industry wanting physically that size camera. There is a loyal following of Canon from existing Photographers who are also switching to Video as their customers demand it. Obviously a lot of people have Canon lenses they can use in conjunction with the expanded AF system, so it just makes good sense to use their existing Canon glass. Ed: We are now looking at a much smaller camera the XC10. Ken is this for the television camera area or is this a cine camera? Ken: Both. The XC10 is a compact 4K/Full HD video shooting and 12 Megapixel digital still photography camera inheriting many of the features of the Cinema EOS range. It has an HDMI output. I think it’s around about $3500NZ. XC10 offers incredible recording versatility and is the ideal solution as a small, standalone camera for independent film makers or the perfect accompaniment as a supporting camera in larger productions. Ed: So this is the XC range, which is a television camera range, as opposed to a cine camera range? Ken: There are no limits with this camera which actually inherits many Cinema EOS features like C-Log, making it a versatile B-camera too. Film Makers, Journalists, Drone operators, there really are no limits for this camera. Ed: Okay, in terms of details, just looking here it’s got 12 stops of dynamic range, and it’s got a 10x wideangle Canon lens. The camcorder can record H.264 4:2:2/8-bit MXF 4K (QFHD) 3840 x 2160 movies to
Canon observer with Ken.
internal C-Fast 2.0 cards or Full HD 1920 x 1080 video to SD cards at multiple frame and bit rates ( up to 305Mbps in 4K.) The XC10 4K Camcorder also offers 4K 30p movie playback output via its HDMI 1.4 output. So what have they done with the lens? You can even pull an 8MP still image from the 4K data in camera and send it off via WiFi, great for media use. Ken: It has a genuine Canon 4K 10x wide-angle zoom lens with 2x digital teleconverter and optical image stabilisation. Employing a unique Canon compact optical system which has stabilisation guide bars removing lens vibration, this 4K lens offers a zoom ratio of 27.3273mm for movies and 24.1-241mm for photos. The XC10 4K Camcorder also features a specially designed Canon 12 Megapixel one-inch CMOS sensor that can deliver 12 stops of exposure latitude and a shallow depth of field, and the new DIGIC DV5 signal processor that provides the image-processing power and speed to deliver high image quality, incredibly low noise, and innovative new features like the Canon XF-AVC codec for 4K and HD recording. We expect many of our existing customers and new customers to snap these up when they arrive in June. They are versatile, compact, and the XC10 4K Camcorder is a lightweight 4K/HD/still photography hybrid delivering high image quality and convenience to meet the diverse needs of our customers. Ed: Call Protel and ask for Ken (Auckland) or John (Wellington) to discuss your Canon NZVN camera options.
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Ken and Ed visit Panasonic
Ken and his incarnation of Ed tour the NAB Panasonic stand for Protel. Ed: What have we got here Ken? camera?
Another Red
Ken: Well yes it is a red camera, that’s very observant of you Grant. This is the Panasonic DVX200. Ed: So thirteen years after the DVX100 was released we get the new version? Ken: Well yes, I guess they are paying homage to the legend that was the DVX100. Let’s hope that this new camera can continue that legacy. It certainly has some impressive specs. It is a large format sensor using a newer version of the 4/3” sensor from the GH4 but with a 13x fixed Leica lens it will be an ideal run ‘n gun doco camera. Ed:
And the 4K on the side? Is that the price?
Ken: Actually they haven’t announced the price yet except to say that it will be under US$5000. The 4K of course refers to the fact that it can record at 4K or HD. It really is a GH4 with a newer sensor in a video camera body. It will have two SD card slots and will be able to record at up to 200Mbps. The GH4 has been a huge success for Panasonic so we expect that people will welcome that technology in a more usable form factor. Ed: This camera looks like a bit of a step back in time? Ken: Yes it does look rather industrial doesn’t it, but I guess for these types of “box” cameras this is the most functional form. Ed: So I take it you don’t put these cameras on your shoulder then? Ken: No these are designed for things like a pointof-view camera in a studio, or remote controlled cameras for studios, that kind of thing. This is a new 4K box camera. Panasonic have a long history in what they refer to as Systems cameras, there are a lot of them being used back in New Zealand for everything from sports to studios even to all the courtrooms in the country. This is a new 4K version with a 1” sensor, but it still uses your normal 2/3” ENG style lenses. Ed: But is there really a market for 4K in courtrooms? Ken: No, I don’t think we will see this type of camera ending up in court. Maybe a tennis court! One of the interesting applications for this type of camera is to use the 4K sensor to shoot HD. That way you can electronically crop the image to suit while still maintaining HD resolution, kind of like a digital zoom without any loss in quality. Ed:
I can see the lens but where’s the camera?
Ken: Yes the GH4 is certainly lost amongst the paraphernalia isn’t it? Ed: So what are they showing here? Hasn’t the GH4 been around for a while now? Ken: Yes, I guess Panasonic had the GH4 here last year, but they have just released new firmware for it that allows it to use anamorphic lenses. Ed:
Why would I want to do that?
Ken: Well the GH4 has become the “go to” camera for indie film makers and music video makers. By using anamorphic lenses it means that Page 30
the market and make a camera that competes with the very best. Ed: But doesn’t everyone want large sensors these days? Ken: Yes they do and this camera has a Super-35 sensor and PL lens mount. Actually that was apparently part of the delay in getting the camera to market. Panasonic did not want to use anyone else’s sensor so they had to develop their own. Of course they have been making 4/3” sensors but nothing at the Super-35 size. But it has been worth the wait, because they have developed something pretty unique. What they have managed to do is build two gain circuits into the one sensor. This means that it has two native ISO’s; one like most cameras at 800 and a second one at 5000. You saw the set over there where they had the Varicams running under very low light? Ed: Yes I thought that Panasonic had not paid the power bill, but you’re telling me we weren’t meant to be able to see the models? we can utilise more of the 4/3” sensor when shooting in 4K. This means more light and more resolution. Ed: I presume somewhere.
there
is
a
Varicam
in
there
Ken: Yes it is a bit hard to identify. Panavision have bought a large number of Varicams for their rental fleet and they have, well, they have Panavised them. Ed: The Varicam has been around for a long time but we haven’t heard much about it in recent years. Why have Panavision suddenly bought them? Ken: The Varicam started it all really. It was the first video camera to offer filmmakers that cinematic look. Panasonic have taken their time coming out with this new model but it has given them the chance to study
Ken: Yes, we couldn’t see the models but the Varicam could see them perfectly. Ed: Couldn’t they have just turned the lights up? Ken: Sometimes as filmmakers you can’t just “turn the lights up”. Or it costs the production a lot more in lighting to do that. The Varicam offers DOP’s kind of two film stocks in one camera which makes it incredibly versatile. It also has three on-board recorders. So you can for example shoot to the main recorder at 4K with VLog for grading later, and you can record to the subrecorder at 2K with REC-709 baked in and you can record dailies in proxy form to an SD card. Very clever really. Ed: Hmmm … Varicam Variclever I like it. Call Protel for all your Panasonic needs. NZVN
Avid Pro Tools for Protel
For Protel, we are talking Avid Pro Tools with Stuart Newman. Ed: Stuart, you are the Avid Pro Tools man. We were just talking with Ren about how Pro Tools became so much more useable for Media Composer users once it had been integrated into the Avid stable, but it continues to develop as a very serious audio tool on its own, whether you’re using Media Composer or not? Stuart: Yes totally. I think probably the most exciting thing that we’re talking about now is that we’ve got a tech preview where we’re demoing Pro Tools 12 features. If we talk about Cloud collaboration, it’s all about how we share tracks, media and content. We’re setting up a marketplace on the Cloud so people can submit their work, they can put their price and their licence terms and then people can actually purchase that. So people can get paid for the content they’re putting up and also creating a rich community of content providers and a place where people can go to find content. Ed: But on Pro Tools itself, I mean you’ve already got something like 90% of market share – are you working on 91%? Stuart: Well you know you can always do better. We certainly don’t want to rest on our laurels. Ed: No, you’ve got to have some competition out there, otherwise things could get stale? Stuart: Absolutely. I think a lot of people are really excited about the collaboration thing where, if that is true that we have 90% … Ed:
All right, high 80’s anyway.
Stuart and Venue artist.
Stuart: Yes, somewhere round there. But if that is the case, then collaboration means that the majority of studios will be able to use these collaboration features. Let’s say that you’ve finished your project in the US and, for some reason, you need to go to Sydney to finish it there. Well, you just send it up to the Cloud, get on the plane and then just download those tracks when you arrive in Sydney. Plus it’s going to work for postproduction, music production … it’s just going to put up a lot of possibilities. The other thing we’re showing here is Pro Tools | First. I don’t know whether you’ve heard about that? Ed: Well we’ve heard about Media Composer | First. Stuart: Right, so we’ve got Media Composer | First – we actually haven’t got a shipping version of that software yet, but we do have a shipping version of Pro
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going to have to ramp up for a few months. Then when things are over, everyone’s on holiday for a few months, trying to catch up on sleep so you don’t need your Pro Tools then. So yes, it’s flexibility and really that’s what customers are wanting. It’s what Spotify’s doing, it’s what Microsoft are doing with their Office 365. I think people are going to appreciate it. Ed: It’s certainly going to widen the market? Stuart: I would say so, yes. Ed: Now, for the serious Pro Tools user, a very large piece of hardware?
Tools | First. Now when I say “shipping”, it’s free, so you can download it. We’re rolling it out slowly in terms of sending out invitations worldwide, but we’ve just started sending it out to users as of early April. The idea there is that it’s a cut-down version of the software, it’s the same engine, you can’t get lost in it because there’s far fewer areas that you can get lost in, but the majority of the functionality is in the software. It’s a great place for those who are thinking about Pro Tools, who’ve never maybe used it; it’s going to be a free version that they can create projects on and that actually works through the Cloud. You don’t need an iLok, so it’s the first version of Pro Tools for a very long time where it’s authenticated over the Internet rather than using an iLok. Ed: Now having a cut-down version actually is, to me, a very sensible idea, because somebody who’s not familiar with a complicated workflow, when they open up something like that and they look at all the features and all the things it can do, they can be frightened and not want to get involved, because they don’t know what it’s going to do. So having that sort of “base” version is a very, very good way to start? Stuart: Yes, I agree. We don’t have things like … there are no preferences, there are only 2 windows, you don’t have session setup and automation windows which are more for advanced users, but let’s say that you’ve been using First for a few months … well the big thing about Pro Tools 12, sure we don’t have a lot of new features in there yet … Ed: Well, you’ve got pretty much all the features one would think one would need already? Stuart: But Pro Tools 12 is more about a change in the way that we’ve taken it to market, and how people can get into Pro Tools. So not only can you buy Pro Tools like you used to be able to, but with Pro Tools 12, you can subscribe to it. You can subscribe on an annual basis, or even a monthly basis. So if you’re using Pro Tools | First and suddenly you decide “well, I want to subscribe to it, not only just use it for a few months” – if you’re a student, it’s $10 a month, so it’s a very low cost of entry, but something that you can explore. And then if you like it, you can buy it on an annual basis, subscribe to it on an annual basis – we give a discount if you’re going annually rather than monthly. Ed: Also large facilities – I know this happens with other NLEs that, as the work comes in, they can actually buy a licence for the time that the project is going and then, at the end of the project, their licence ends? Stuart: Yes, exactly, they can use the ability to scale up and scale down depending on the size of your project. A good example is a movie – it can be feast or famine in a lot of these facilities and if there’s a project, they might need to bring 50 people onboard and they’re
Stuart: Yes we’re very excited to have launched at NAB 2015, the newest addition to the Venue Live Sound family, which is the S6L. S6L is our new Live Sound console. Basically, you can get it in two models at 24 fader or one 32 fader version. It’s extremely robust using touchscreen technology and elements from our S6 console for our film and postproduction music. We’ve got an updated engine here, which runs either 144 inputs with 64 buses or 192 inputs with 96 buses. We’ve got a new Stage 64 rack which you can configure with 192 inputs; you can connect 8 of those to a system, it’s all running with AVB either via Ethernet or fibre. With Pro Tools Connectivity, one single Thunderbolt cable will allow you to record and play back 192 tracks at 96 kHz 24 bit. You can connect three systems together and share the same I/O with completely transparent gain sharing. It is, we believe, for the price and the specifications on this device, best in class. In talking to some people on the show, we believe we’ve probably taken orders for over 100 and we’ve been showing it for 2 days. Ed: What gets me is we’ve got 2 ears, so why do you need 192 tracks? Stuart: Well 192 is at the top end okay. Ed: I think it could be “over the top” end! Stuart: It could be. Certainly with a classic orchestral recording it could be almost a bare minimum; if you’re talking an 80 piece orchestra with room mics, you’d be starting to get very close to 120-130 channels of input. The ability to be able to share the same stage boxes for monitors, front of house and broadcast, we could quickly switch, let’s say in New Zealand of course, The Big Day Out has always been very popular, 2 stage setup on the main stages, very quick for the Venue console to just change between stage 1 and stage 2 pretty much instantly just using the same front of house desk. A complete change over from one stage box to the other. We’ve rewritten the Venue software, we’ve reskinned it so it’s much more modern. We’re going to have full Show file portability between our legacy systems on the Profile, the SC48 and the D-Show, our newer S3L-X. All of those Show files will be able to be loaded and used on the S6L. Ed: That’s good, you’re thinking of the previous users? Stuart: Absolutely … it goes for pretty much all our products really, especially with Pro Tools, you can always save it as an earlier version, and you can always open an earlier version of a Pro Tools session in the later version. That roll back feature, it’s integral to professional business. You can’t just suddenly restore something from 5 years ago and not be able to access it. That’s not acceptable and we understand that and we understand that customers have made big investments in the Live Sound products and Pro Tools control surfaces, so it’s all interchangeable. Ed: A very good lesson there for manufacturers, possibly. Thank you.
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other NZVN
Sony at NAB – Part Two Nick Buchner continues the Sony coverage from NAB beginning with an explanation of global and rolling shutters. Nick: Standard CMOS cameras exhibit some degree of the rolling shutter effect. This is usually distortion in the vertical elements of the picture with fast motion. Now there are different approaches to reducing this. Our F65, for example, has a mechanical shutter that actually spins around and totally eliminates it. The F55 camera doesn’t have a mechanical shutter, it has an electronic shutter which is permanently on – we call this feature Frame Image Scan. That means that the F55 also does not exhibit any rolling shutter effects whatsoever and, particularly for certain types of content, that’s essential. Ed: At the Sony press conference, we saw a very good example at the Kylie Minogue concert footage where there were a lot of vertical coloured lines as part of the special effects – lasers – and they were moving about all over the place. There was no bend, there was no edging, anything in it. It was just perfect. Nick: Well that was a perfect demonstration! Ed: Now, rolling shutter. When we’re talking global shutter, we’re talking the F65 having a mechanical global and the F55 having an electronic global shutter. When we’re talking rolling shutter, we’re not actually talking any shutter at all are we? Nick: Standard CMOS sensors read out from top to bottom – they “roll” from top to bottom if you like. But the term “rolling shutter” generally refers to the effect. Ed: So there’s no shutter inside your camera called a rolling shutter? Nick: Not as such, the “rolling shutter effect” is basically the artefact that we’re talking about. It exhibits itself in a number of different ways, but one is distortion of vertical moving elements; another is the flash banding effect where flashes, lasers, explosions, that type of thing, can cause banding across the sensor. This doesn’t happen with a CCD and it doesn’t happen if you have a global shutter. Ed: But that’s not to denigrate a CMOS sensor camera, because I have one and I love it because of all the other things it does do; one just is aware and is careful not to use it in an inappropriate way? Nick: That’s right, you need to know what the limitations are. Ed: Now you can have your segue. Nick: Okay, here’s my nice segue … the other area where the F55 has found great acceptance, and we’re screening some excellent examples here, is in live concert coverage, and for that matter live event coverage generally. Up until the release of the HDC-4300, the F55 has been our only solution for live production, whether it be sport, events, concerts etc. Now that the 4300 is here ( or at least it will be from June ), it really becomes the “go to” camera for sport and action events. Viewers want to see everything; they want to see everything in sharp focus, they don’t want to miss a moment of the action. But when we start to talk about event coverage such as major concert movies, these used to have to be shot on 35mm film, they had to be printed and distributed just like any feature film and
they tended to be fairly few and far between. The digital age has really facilitated the concert movie, because distributing them digitally to cinemas that are equipped with 2 or 4K projectors is much easier. At the press conference we heard from Brett Turnbull, a prominent UK director of photography in this genre, who has chosen the F55 for shooting major concerts – he’s shot the Rolling Stones, Kylie Minogue, Katy Perry, Pete Gabriel and various others, and he now chooses the F55. He’s showed some great examples here at NAB – he uses somewhere between a dozen and 25 of these cameras on a shoot. He feels it gives him a very cinematic look and this is the whole point. Whereas the HDC-4300 is a 2/3” broadcast-style camera offering great depth of field … Ed: It’s a television camera? Nick: It’s a television camera – where the F55 is a cinema camera that enables a cinematic look for concert or other footage, and that’s what the clients want. They want something that looks beautiful, looks like a film where you can move the focus plane around, be sure that the artist is the key point for the viewer, and so the F55 is strongly establishing itself in that area as well. Whether they be used in a multi-camera project, either as standalone cameras, each recording their own content and all the footage being assembled in post, or in a live configuration – we also have a fibre adapter that allows the camera to be treated just as in any other kind of outside broadcast, fed back to the truck and switched in 4K or ISO-recorded if necessary. But I hasten to add, with a lot of this sort of music coverage, whilst it looks wonderful in 4K, it’s often more about “the look” than just about 4K. Of course, 4K gives you fantastic detail and resolution – as an example, here we’re screening some Foo Fighters concert footage shot in Christchurch, New Zealand just 6 weeks ago. This was shot in 4K on F55 and F65 cameras and it looks absolutely stunning, but the shallow depth of focus look, even if we’re talking about an HD production, is often what producers are primarily looking for, and these cameras enable that. Ed: And that I guess does segue also to another very popular cinema camera that tends to bridge the gap a little bit with that wonderful zoom lens that it comes with, that everybody’s trying to get their hands on Nick? Nick: You must be talking about the PXW-FS7? Ed: That’s the one. Nick: Well the FS7 is our most recent introduction and we’re told worldwide it is the fastest selling Sony professional camera ever.
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Ed: That’s a pretty bold statement, because I remember when the EX1 came out, that they were just hot cakes and everybody wanted one? Nick: These appear to be our latest “hot cake” and it’s unfortunate for those reading this who have got one on backorder, but there are many on backorder all around the world. I’ve been speaking to my European and American colleagues and they’ve all got the same problem as we do down in New Zealand and Australia. We simply can’t get enough of them. Ed: But the good news is? Nick: The good news is that the factory have doubled production and the Japanese are assuring us that they will catch up very soon. I’m not going to start putting pegs in the sand, but it’s great that the camera’s been so phenomenally popular. Why? For a start, it’s an amazing price. This is a shoulder mount style camera designed for single operator use, ideal for documentary and reality type programming, where people are happy to work with SLR style lenses. It has an E-mount and we have a full selection of lenses including a very nice new 28-135mm servo zoom lens that’s available together with the camera, or separately – that’s one approach. But by using 3rd-party adapters, you can also use Canon EF, Nikon, PL or whatever type of lens system you prefer. Ed: So there’s really no excuse for DSLR operators not to make the jump and get a proper camera? Nick: From what I hear, a good proportion of the buyers are DSLR users. It’s not as huge a jump as to other cameras, allowing them to work with their SLR lenses if they wish, but working more like a proper video camera.
Ed:
Cinema camera?
Nick: A camera designed to shoot moving pictures rather than a still camera, in that it’s not a “hold in front of your face” type design, it doesn’t require some kind of complex rig to actually be handholdable. This one sits on your shoulder, you can put a radio mic on top of it, it’s got XLR audio inputs, it’s got a proper audio section, it’s got ND filters … Ed: Oh don’t talk them up Nick, everyone will want one? Nick: I want a bigger back order list, I want to match the Americans’ back order list! But seriously, the camera’s been very, very popular and we’re already starting to see great content being produced for all sorts of mediums. Ed: Okay, but not everybody wants that cinema style camera which is why the small sensor XDCAM range continues to also grow? Nick: We still have a full range of camcorders from handheld through to shoulder mount. In fact, we’ve launched a new shoulder mount camera here at NAB – it’s called the PXW-X320, it’s a true shoulder mount camera with a 3CMOS 1/2” sensor. It comes as a kit only with a 16x Fujinon zoom lens, and the big new thing about this camera is it aligns with the rest of the XDCAM range in that it adds XAVC codecs. It has XAVC-I or Intra codecs and XAVC long-GOP or XAVC-L codecs too – as well as MPEG50 and DVCAM and several other legacy codecs. That means our whole range at XDCAM level now supports XAVC. The PXW-X320 also has all the operational features that videographers need such as a radio mic slot for a drop-in wireless mic receiver and a full range of interface connections.
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Ed:
So apart from being perfect for News gatherers …
Nick: The broadcasting world do tend to still look at 2/3” cameras. However, you mentioned earlier the EX1 which was followed by the EX3, EX1R,, PMW-200, PMW-300 and PXW-X200 … all these are 3 chip 1/2” cameras and they’ve found great acceptance at many levels including broadcast. So while broadcasters usually consider 2/3” cameras as the standard for everyday ENG use, there are those who will accept 1/2” – and I think this is a very good 1/2” camera. One of the other new things is it’s had a totally upgraded imaging section with improved sensitivity and noise specs, for enhanced performance. Certainly it’s a very well priced and neat package for non-broadcast videographers who are shooting content for all sorts of things, event videography, corporate work, training films etc. So XDCAM continues on strong. Ed: And what you’ve done with the XDCAM range is that most models, I believe, now have WiFi capability. So what’s the value in that? Nick: Quite a number of our cameras have WiFi capability either through an integrated WiFi dongle or integrated into the camera, and that’s provided features such as remote control from a device such as an iPad or Smartphone – recording stop/start, lens control; also remote viewing in some cases where you can see a live picture from the camera; plus file transfer which essentially is a “store and forward” operation where you can record a number of files and then transfer them via WiFi to a 4G phone and then into the phone network back to a base. But the holy grail for some users is actually live streaming, live pictures at full HD quality out of the camera from a remote location back to a TV station or other base. So over the next few months, all our cameras in the XDCAM handheld and shoulder range will be enabled for live streaming, and that’s a key part of our NAB demonstration. We’ve seen live pictures coming in from The Strip in Las Vegas just a couple of km away; we’ve seen live pictures coming in from New York – great HD pictures, you saw them at the press conference, plus good audio – the idea being that it’s simple and relatively inexpensive, because we’re not talking about some kind of complex multiphone bonded solution. We’re talking about a single 4G telephone, or dongle, taking the signal either direct from the camera or by WiFi via another device, into the network, and then received back at the station. We have a small rack-mounted receiving unit that can accept several streams and output SDI, providing a relatively low cost solution for broadcasters and others who want to get pictures back from almost anywhere. Ed: Okay, so this is only going to be applicable to new models, or is this a retrofit? Nick: It’s not necessarily a retrofit. A number of the XDCAM cameras have built-in WiFi dongles, but we also have a WiFi adapter that is about the size of a packet of cigarettes that can be added to any camera and take an SDI input. The degree of integration with the camera varies depending on what you’re using, but in its simplest form, you can take SDI out of something, put it into a WiFi adapter and then use that to move the signal somewhere. If you’re using it with the appropriate Sony camera, you’ve also got USB connections, so it will stop and start and there’s also proxy recording to an SD card built into the WiFi adapter, which allows you to generate lower resolution proxy files at various lower bit rates that you can also send back very quickly because they’re much smaller. That has applications for a breaking news story or something required urgently. They are to some degree retrofittable, but if you want it fully integrated, we’re talking about the current XDCAM range.
Video over IP is also a big part of what we’re showing at NAB. We’ve had a product in the market for a couple of years, the NXL-IP55 which is a solution in a box, that allows you to move up to four video signals in HD together with associated tallies, audio, control signals etc. You can move 3 signals one way and 1 signal the other way, or 2 signals each way, between two points using an Ethernet connection. What we’re seeing here is a live picture coming from Sony Pictures Studios in Los Angeles, via this system across a network and over a single CAT cable – and we’ve got full control from here of that camera 1,000 km away in Culver City. If we zoom it in, you can see that the latency in the control is very minimal and indeed the latency in the video is also extremely low.
As I mentioned, this has been out for a little while. It’s essentially a closed system – a Sony box talking to another Sony box. The video has low latency, less than a video field, it works and it is in use by many customers. The next step is to broaden this out and say “okay, if we’re going to introduce this type of connectivity to a wider range of product, what do we need to do?” So Networked Media Interface is our name for video over IP and we’re working closely with industry partners and standards organisations to see common standards established. Over here we can see camera base stations, switchers and graphics units, all of which are connected up simply with RJ45s. This will start to happen next year. We will see more and more products from cameras to switchers to routers to monitors that, instead of being connected via coaxial SDI cables, are actually connected via CAT6 cable, and that means a lot less cables are needed. Ed: Well I was wondering why these were positioned outside a very large “Beyond Definition 4K” mobile truck?
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Nick: This is a huge brand-new 4K truck, but yes, OB vans are one major beneficiary of this sort of technology because the amount of cable that is required to put a system together is hugely reduced. That means lower cost, it means lower weight and less space, and these are all very important things. But it’s equally applicable to say to a studio or other production complex – less cabling, less space needed, less cost. Ed: Now there’s a big booth here talking about High Dynamic Range. Is this only in television sets or what? Nick: High Dynamic Range (HDR) refers to a system that allows a very wide dynamic range to be displayed – dynamic range meaning the distance between the brightest “brights” and the darkest “darks” in an image. Okay, let’s take a step back … there are cameras now such as our F55 and F65 that are capable of capturing around 14 stops of dynamic range.
up to 100 nits in brightness, where with HDR we’re talking 1,000 nits, so the amount of brightness that the set is capable of delivering is much greater and the range between that and the darkest darks is capable of being reproduced and hence you get more detail. Sony have cameras and professional monitors right now that are capable of working with this, but the missing link is standardisation of the workflow and the delivery medium and that’s something that the industry – it’s not just a Sony thing – as an industry, everyone needs to work together to come up with standards and methods of distribution because in basic terms, HDR requires a different version. So what might we see in the future? I’m hypothesising here – maybe via the Blu -ray disc … Ed: Nick:
Might make a comeback? No comeback needed! Blu-ray for HD is well established out there now, but the 4K version is being worked on; maybe it will carry an HDR graded version or enabled with some kind of embedded lookup table, so for those needing to play it back in SDR it’s capable of mapping it across and delivering what’s suitable for a standard television. That may be … I’m just hypothesising. Ed: Don’t quote me on that says Nick. Nick: Inside our “cave” here we have a range of pro OLED and LCD monitors and we’re also showing SDR versus HDR on a professional monitor.
But regular display technologies can’t deliver that, so in the postproduction process, we grade and reduce that dynamic range and we end up delivering content that meets the Rec 709 standard for display on a television set. It’s broadcast, played from a disc or whatever. HDR refers to a system where that dynamic range can actually be maintained through the postproduction process and graded for that standard and then displayed on a TV or projector, maintaining that high dynamic range. What we’re seeing here are two consumer TV sets. The conventional one on the left is a current BRAVIA with standard dynamic range (SDR). The one on the right is a prototype HDR set and we expect to see these in the market within about 12 months. Both are screening the same original content, but the left has been graded conventionally for SDR, while the right has been graded for HDR and a different colour space, Rec 2020. You can see, looking at the image detail – particularly for example in some close shots of a campfire … the range of colour reproduced, the detail in the shadows, etc, it’s quite something. Why are we doing this? This is to bring display technology to the consumer that delivers the same sort of viewing experience that your eye delivers, because we certainly see more than the 6 or so stops that standard dynamic range is capable of. Ed: So to me, immediately what I see is the skin tone. When you have a large scene with lots of colour, lots of other bits going on in there, with the high dynamic range you get a much better representation of skin tone? Nick: There’s a greater depth I think to the skin tone and another example that might come up surely here is the fire. Have a look at the detail in those embers – it’s because you’ve got more steps of luminance. Essentially, an SDR television set displays
Ed: Okay, now one of my passions, optical disc as an archive storage medium? Nick: Our Optical Disc Archive, or ODA system is developing further. This is a method of storing data, be it video or other data, on optical disc based around our proven professional disc but using cartridges containing 12 of those. At the moment we have cartridges offering up to 1.2 terabytes of rewriteable storage, or 1.5 terabytes of “write once” storage. The system is centred around a drive unit that is available as standalone desktop style drives for small systems, but we’re now pushing this into our PetaSite deep archive system, which is essentially a library system. We have a pair of drives in a robotic system that then has several bins of up to 100 cartridges in each bin, and it can retrieve the discs. We’re showing a system here with three bins. We’re also previewing further development of ODA. Next year we expect to see increased capacity in the “write once” discs up to something like 3.6 terabytes. Essentially what we’re putting forward with ODA is an alternative to the LTO tape-based system. Of course, with LTO, you’ve got some negatives which include the cost and time needed to migrate your material every couple of generations to the latest format, whereas here we’re talking about something that’s read by a laser, which is much easier to make backward-compatible. It’s much more robust than tape, because there’s only a laser contacting the disc rather than a complicated tape drive mechanism. Plus it’s random access rather than having to take time to spool to a particular point on a tape. We are stating that ODA media offers a 50 year archival life, so we think it makes lots of sense as a future for archive systems, particularly in the broadcast and production world but also for applications across other industries. NZVN
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Autodesk for DVT We are at Autodesk with Matt Welker from Shotgun but we’re going to start with Marcus Schioler from Autodesk. Ed: Marcus, every year I look for a thread with Autodesk as to what’s happening. There are always improvements in the product, and I guess the big improvement that I saw, not being a graphic artist, was the move to incorporate more NLE features in the “Smoke on the Mac” product. But this year, at the press presentation, there was Steve Scott who worked on Birdman and, not only worked on Birdman, but actually won an award for the work he’d done. His presentation started with “I’m not a tech person, so I’m letting this chap here connect my laptop for me … I’m an artist” and to me that encapsulated what the Autodesk product is all about – it’s an artist’s tool. Is that a fair statement Marcus?
Matt and Marcus.
Marcus: I think that there’s certainly truth to that, but I think that there’s a little bit more to consider here and actually our show theme this year, interestingly enough, is “artists connected”. We chose that theme because we believe we’re in the midst of a major change in the way people are working, which is because of the collaborative nature … because of the trends that are going on in the industry that are allowing people to work in collaborative ways which weren’t previously possible. So things like Cloud computing, like telecommunications – things like underlying social media and big data and these types of massive trends that are going on at a consumer level, are having an impact on the way everybody works. The goal of these products that people use is to tell stories and do it in creative ways and we’re constantly delighted by the crazy amazing creative things that people come up with, but I think in the background, there still needs to be somebody who knows how to plug in the laptop. And so Flame, Maya, 3ds Max – those are creative tools and granted, some people are more creative with them and other people are a bit more technical with them, and that’s part of the normal balance that goes on there. But then there’s also the glue of connecting all these artists together and this year for us, we have a couple of additions that are new at NAB as part of Autodesk. Shotgun and Tweak are very different in terms of the types of capability that they bring to the portfolio. Ultimately, that allows artists to be as creative as possible in a collaborative way, working wherever they need to work, distributed around the world and taking advantage of all these other tools, to hopefully take away the complexity of the technical side of things in a way that will allow them to focus on what it is that they want to do. Ed: So you really have to focus the artists because, I guess, traditionally an artist has been a bit of an egotist and they do what they want to do because that’s their artistic bent, so with your tools you’re saying, “here are the tools for the artist, but they can use this tool in a collaborative way and still maintain their artistic flair?” Marcus: It’s true that artists want to focus on art, but certainly, I’ve seen many of the fine artists that use our products become very proficient at tools that, I think, some people would argue, are rather technical in nature. The art of 3D compositing, there’s a fair bit of technical stuff that you also need to understand in order to deliver on it. Steve likes to say that he’s just an
artist; he’s an awfully accomplished Lustre artist, he certainly knows his way around the tools out there. Ed: Well I was impressed by the number of nodes in the particular slide that he showed. I didn’t have time to count them all – it was a lot? Marcus: A lot, yes, and the complexity that he brings into his approach to grading is certainly very complex and impressive and I think we see a lot of our artists who do go towards that level of complexity. I think when you get into these collaborative workloads where you have multiple people who need to do things together, trying to take away not only the complexity but also the mistakes that can happen when sharing work back and forth … when we look at the big DFX movies that happen today, people don’t make them by themselves, there are enormous teams that are involved in delivering on these and they have many different parts to that, that all come together into the greater whole. I think a lot of the things that we see Shotgun and Tweak enable, is making sure that the right people are working at the right thing at the right time and as much as possible nobody’s doing things that may not actually be used at some point, which was a problem several years ago. Ed: I did pick up that the whole process is nondestructive, so if somebody makes a change somewhere in the process, you can go back to whatever step that was, make that change, but it doesn’t affect anything else that has been done since or before? Marcus: Yes, that’s the ultimate goal in so many of the processes that we have and I think what we see when we look at collaborative workflows – and I’m thinking about for instance, one of the new features that’s in 3ds Max this year, it’s called XRef Renovations, it’s cross-referencing workflows in 3D animation. The trick here is that you’ll have multiple people who are responsible for a part of the final thing and everything will be referenced together into one giant scene. Giving people the way of making changes to these very complex 3D scenes, while other people are working on the animation, is a challenge. It all needs to happen and, if it’s destructive, the things that I’m doing won’t even be represented in the work that somebody else is doing, so non-destructive workflows are a big goal and certainly 3ds Max, in this release, we’ve been working towards improving that and many other things.
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Ed: Well I did note that there were developments in the Flame, the Maya, and the 3D Studio Max. In Maya you talked about GPU, CPU and multithreading all happening at the same time? Marcus: The new parallel rig evaluation system in Maya is to enable big performance improvements in animation workflows, and what we see is, by fully leveraging the extent of the capabilities of the system it allowed us to – it depends on use case – but we’ve seen a number of different performance improvements, anywhere in the vicinity of two to five times. And there’s a tool that is part of this for profiling where the bottlenecks may be happening in the various cores, the way your animations are built, and the goal here is to allow somebody to then go in and do optimisation specifically to make their animations perform at higher rates. So the goal for somebody, when they’re animating, is for it to be as interactive as possible, so that they can get the sense of the movement. Certainly you would want it to be real time if you could have it in real time and even faster if you’re just trying to get the sense of how something’s going to move. We’re seeing now some amazing performance improvements which are the kind of features that we think frankly people are going to want right away, because there’s an immediate benefit to using it.
Ed: So is it a continuous race between making it faster, but then increasing the resolution because, well, if you increase the resolution without increasing the speed, people are going to get annoyed and not want to work at that resolution and you go back to proxy resolutions. So you want to work at that full resolution but at real time and I guess that’s what you’ve tasked the engineers to do? Marcus: I think the race is on the artists’ side, where their goal is to deliver more and more incredibly compelling animations and the trend now for years is just growing more and more complex. So for us, it’s what we can do to enable them in doing the type of work they do. We see certainly the animations, the models, the scenes getting more complex, but also the formats that they need to deliver, the framerates, the bit rates … Ed: This is it, I mean talk about delivering and then you have to produce something that is highly complicated and dumb it down for a Smartphone – does that make you feel sad? Marcus: Well hopefully it’s not the only version that they’re doing; they might have an IMAX version in there also!
Ed: Well I’m thinking of the Bjork presentation that really was stunning, but it’s very hard to explain here how complicated it was, how it really was a work of art, that unless you go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, you’ll never see it. Can you see bits of it on the Autodesk site? Marcus: There’s a trailer that’s available, yes. I’m not sure where it is actually, but it’s certainly available online and I think it’s true, we make these amazing images and ideally, they should be seen the way that the creative visionaries intended for them to be seen, so you can get the full benefit. But of course, I think people now are also keeping in mind the fact that there’s a good chance that a lot of it will be watched on smartphones for instance – and then that brings a whole other element into it, where you have to encode for that device. The target device has different characteristics. If you’re going to look at it on something that big, you might not want to have 8000 characters. Ed: Well somebody will go into the presentation with their Google Glasses and record it and then you’ll find it on the Internet and that’s the version that everybody will see? Marcus:
At the end of the day, that’s not my preferred way, but the customer is getting their footage out there, that’s for sure.
Ed: Now you talked about a new look and feel for Maya – was it just Maya or was that across the range? Marcus: No, that’s specific to Maya, there’s been a number of changes to the Maya UI. Part of that was to modernise the look of it; also to adjust some of the functions so that they’re regrouped into slightly new menus, and they’re easier for people to find. There’s a bit of a discoverability thing that’s going on here, where we want people to be able to figure out the application more easily. One of the important things for the icons was also to keep in mind the fact that people will be working on many different size of displays depending on what they’re working on from tablet up to even 5K displays, and so you need your UI to scale, so that you can see the icons that you’re working on. There are other initiatives that are going on in terms of making the user interface easier to use Maya. One of the big areas is in terms of material development in Hypershade and that’s an area where we’ve done some work to provide people with more flexibility in terms of being able to see what they’re trying to achieve. So they’ll be building their nodes, but then they’ll be able to see a little preview, they can have the viewport up at the same time, and this is a view that is available now that will make it easier for people in material development. So there are a number of things in that regard that are meant to make it easier to use. That’s also true in 3ds Max, but they’re a little different … for instance, in 3ds Max, what we’re adding here is a thing called Template System which makes it very easy to get up and running into a project quickly. So let’s say you want to do an architectural visualisation or a studio pack shot render or something along those lines where it’s a completely different setup that’s needed – using these templates, you’ll get your environment, you’ll get your lights, you’ll have units all set up appropriately and you can get working very quickly. Then to get the image out, there’s a new physical
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camera in 3ds Max which gives your photo realistic render quality without having to do a lot of fiddling with renders that used to get a good quality output. So these are just meant to make it easier for people to start working and get a result. There are a number of things making it easier that we’ve been focusing on. Ed: But you’re still keeping it as two groups – I understand from years ago, and I asked this question, you’ve got two products, they seem very similar to me, but if you’re a user of one, you don’t like the other and vice versa. You seem to have two dedicated followings and you’ve got to keep the two separate, but it makes sense? Marcus: We certainly have two separate groups. We’re not trying to force anybody to change if they don’t want to, they’ll use the product that they think is the one. People are very loyal to the products they work on, for sure, and if it’s got the tools that they need, then they should be able to use them. But there are certainly opportunities for them to interop and we want to make sure that that’s something that they can do. For instance, there are some enhancements we did again to the Material ShaderFX workflow where you create your materials and we want those to be interoperable between applications, so if somebody makes something in Max they can share it with somebody in Maya. It’s very likely that a facility will be made up of some of both seats – it’s not necessarily an exclusive thing, and we’re not trying to push people in any one direction if they have a preference. Ed: Shall we finish up with Shotgun and RV6 … these were companies that Autodesk purchased to enhance the whole animation and artistic workflow. We’ve never talked about them in NZ Video News before, so can you just give us a quick explanation. We are now talking with Matt Welker from Shotgun. Matt: Autodesk acquired Shotgun at the end of June, beginning of July last year 2014. We create production management, review and approval and Pipeline Toolkit software. The production management side is for scheduling out your work, keeping track of the status of all the tasks that go into it. It’s a single repository. Traditionally, production companies have used Filemaker databases, Excel spreadsheets, email Google docs, post-it notes, whiteboards – just a whole mess of different things and there was never one real good look at all the data in one place. You’d assemble a weekly report and it would immediately be out of date. So this was a way to give the production management side one look at what the production looked like. We got into review and approval software from there and so that’s when we started our
relationship with the people at Tweak Software. Several years ago, we used to share booth space with them at trade shows and we integrated our review and approval with RV as the native player. We have a web playback system, so you can review your transcoded media streaming on the Internet; we have a mobile app so supervisors can do reviews on their iPhones; we have a client site and all the client accounts are free – so you can create playlists and send those to your clients and they can do annotations and take notes on all your shots and get those back right into the Shotgun system. Then we have this integration with RV where you have our screening room tools, a timeline, an annotation and our note system embedded in RV, but you could do native playback, look at stuff on your file system that was uncompressed, view it in real time. It was good for when you get to that back end of your production and you’re looking at lighting, you’re looking at compositing, you’re trying to finalise things. It was great for the screening room situations there. So we got deeper into that and I think how that really fits in with what’s happening at Autodesk this year is that we’re trying to allow supervisors and artists to integrate faster. Traditionally, you would have a morning review session, you would have dailies, they’d render overnight, they’d come in in the morning, they’d look at their stuff, they’d get their notes, they’d go to work … and then maybe the supervisor could do some walk throughs, but now if he’s standing in line for coffee, he’s got his iPhone out, he’s making notes on the animations, he’s on set, he’s got some layout that was done, he can show it to the director on set, and he can get those notes back in your real time and we can get feedback from clients really quickly and there’s no cost for those accounts. So it’s been sort of a speed up process. The Pipeline Toolkit – what we’ve done there is we’ve written some engines that plug into all the DCCs Maya, 3D Studio, Flame, Nuke and other third party tools that allow artists to launch directly from Shotgun in a context specific way, so the application knows what they’re working on, where to find the files, how to name them when they publish them, so they don’t even have to think about those things, it just makes that faster, more iterations, less mistakes. Ed: So how does it work – does Shotgun come bundled with 3ds Max or Maya or is it a separate purchase? Matt: Shotgun is a monthly subscription service that runs in the Cloud. It’s US$30 per user, per month. Ed:
Well that’s not a lot. So if you were an artist on your own somewhere, you would need to sign up to Shotgun so you could collaborate with somebody else somewhere who also had that ability? Matt: They would have it all in one site, and they would add your account. You pay for every active account, so they would just make an account for you and then it would pay for your site. A studio would add artists as a scale and they would turn them off when they didn’t need them and so that’s how they can control their costs. Ed: So really there’s an effective way of managing your workflows of artists, whether they’re in the same building as you, or they could be anywhere in the world?
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Matt: That’s right, yes. We have several studios that have multiple locations around the world and they’re working 24/7 all on a hosted server. Ed: It sounds like hard work to me? Matt: It makes it a lot easier though, because they don’t have to send all those emails – they’re doing their reviews, they’re taking notes and the next people wake up in the morning and come to work and they can see the work that was done, they know the status of things, they’ve gotten their notes, they know what they need to work on and that would be a process that can just continue happening. Ed: And we’re talking about these new product releases? Marcus: The releases available from April 16th.
will
be
Ed: So people on the subscription service will automatically get updated?
Ed:
Marcus: Right, that’ll be available. They will have to download and get the new versions, it’s not like a Cloud server that magically updates – that would be interesting. Matt: Shotgun 6 and RV6 will be available at the end of the month, so the dates are a little different, and Shotgun is Cloud server so that will be automatically updated for all our hosted accounts. RV will be a download – you just start it up and log in with your Shotgun credentials and you’ll get a free licence of RV. Ed: Let’s finish off with something magical. Flame?
And they’re tracked as they go?
Marcus: Well the lights can either be floating in space or they can be animated. But I think the point here is that suddenly, you don’t have to think about colour correction as a process that comes after the fact, it can be baked into this look development. For us it’s something that’s very exciting in terms of opening up new possibilities. I believe it’s something that doesn’t exist anywhere else, so it’s very exciting to see what people are going to do with this. Ed:
Marcus,
Marcus: There is one very exciting new feature in Flame that I’d like to talk about. It’s called Lightbox. I’ll give you a little background. Flame has a 3D compositing environment which is used to combine 2D and 3D elements. They can be very complex and because all of these elements are coming together in a way that is, different cameras, different source material; they all look different and the goal is to bring them into a common look. The question is “what is that look supposed to be”, and that’s an artistic decision that has to be made. So often the look would be made in grading or finishing after you’d done your comp. But one of the exciting things that we’re bringing into Flame now is this tool called Lightbox which is a way of working directly inside your 3D compositing environment by placing lights in 3D space and having those lights cast colour correction. Imagine your layers that are spread out in space and you put a light over here shining a white balance, it will only touch things that are close, and other things might even be occluded and the light wouldn’t even touch them – they would not get the white balance. Ed: So it’s not a global white balance, it’s just where the light strikes and related to the intensity of that light? Marcus: Exactly, and so you can use spotlights, you can use directional lights, you can use box shaped lights, you can use bleach bypass – all these different types of colour corrections are available. And so you of course can place lights in different places to help them do different things throughout the scene. But the nice thing about that is that objects move around in 3D space; they can move in and out of different colour corrections. Page 43
Magic!
NZVN
Dedolight for PLS We are here at Dedolight with Dedo Weigert himself. This morning, I was privileged to be invited to the dealer presentation which featured some new product, but what impressed me, and continues to impress me with a company like Dedolight, is that so much time is spent on education – giving the dealership the information they need to make good comparisons with competing product, but also to understand more the nature of light in today’s television world. Ed: It has changed, hasn’t it Dedo? Dedo: One change is definitely that you don’t need as much light anymore. Ed: As you said in the demo, your modern camera, you can go into a room and it will tell you there’s enough light here to take a picture, but it’s not about taking pictures? Dedo: The new cameras will teach you instantaneously that, for exposure, you don’t need light anymore. But if you want to tell a story, if you want to create the illusion of space, of three-dimensionality, if you want to transport emotions and if you want to create depth in an image to make it attractive, then lighting plays a major part, or without light it can’t be done. There are the two approaches … one is the voyeur, the hunter, the stalker, you find light and you just augment it with the minimum of tools, often unnoticeable. The other approach is to create your lighting style, whatever is suitable for the story, and then you may employ more lights and take a little bit more time to tune them, and then again, they are very different approaches. Whether you work with direct light or softlight or even the CRLS ( Cinema Reflect Lighting System ) using a parallel beam and all kinds of different reflective surfaces to reflect different light characters out of that parallel beam, that can be a technique that could be very exciting and it can create its own style and emotion. Christian Berger, who is one of the originators and a friend and collaborator, just finished a film in Malta with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt that was shot only with this parallel beam and reflector lighting system. This was only artificial lighting of huge sets and you don’t have any stands on the set anymore; you don’t have a lot of instruments – you just have this collection of relatively small reflectors and so on. So there are many toys, there are many tools that can be employed and, of course, lights that we build are focusing lights and we excel in being able to shape the light, give it different characters and have very precise control over the light. At the same time, our softlights are finding more and more acceptance, like lights that simulate the light from a really large window facing north, like you will find in old Dutch paintings – very gentle, loving, seemingly unnoticeable light. Ed: One area that particularly interested me, because of this move in the camera world to cinema type cameras where using depth of field you generate a foreground and an out of focus background, so you concentrate on the actors, and this is used as a particular means of setting a scene, of concentrating your image in one particular area, or your viewer to look in one particular area. But from what you said today, I can see you could also do this with a television camera by lighting for depth? Dedo: In lighting, even when you have a small sensor and a short focal length lens where everything is in focus from here to Beijing, you seem to lose the wonderful ability to lift your object of desire out of the
Dedo and Elena.
background – and with lighting you can do that, be it backlight, be it a kicker, but also by projecting a background that seems to be recognisable, you throw it out of focus and you can make a small room become a very large stage. That’s only one approach of creating a three-dimensional impression. Even in the old films, this is basic lighting from 100 years ago. The films of James Wong Howe when there were several levels of lighting in the background that you could walk into and have this feeling of enormous spaces and for this lighting can be essential to get this feeling of attention to the object of desire, but placing it into a defined room that seems to go on forever and have layers of depth. Christian Berger called it “zoning” – the different zones of levels of depth that you can walk into with your eye. Ed: What also impressed me today was – and I know you’ve said this before – that there’s no one particular light that’s suitable for everybody. Most of your talk was about lighting and not about the actual technology; that LED is just one way of lighting a scene – tungsten, fluorescent, HMI – they all still have places? Dedo: LED is just one of the many light sources. But then you put them into different lighting instruments – be it a multi-LED panel light which usually gives you a multitude of unpleasant shadows, or you pack them tight and put new optics on them so that it appears like a softlight, but at the same time has reach and power, which has been attempted in many different ways, like the Kino Flo VistaBeam. The Vista 600 also has a lot of punch and throw and at the same time a particular unique beauty … the same as we’re trying with our LED LedRama light where the LEDs are packed so closely together with newly developed optics
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that they don’t appear to be as aggressive anymore. You can use that light without a diffuser, have the punch, have the reach and still have a more pleasant character than you get from stronger LEDs that are not spaced close enough together to give it a uniform appearance. There are many different approaches as to how to handle the light sources; Kino Flo and CINEO are perfect, very smooth, softlights with a large angle of exit. They work in close proximity for drama at 8-10 feet. Perfect, wonderful. What we’re doing with the LedRama is that we supply also for the huge studio, where multi-LED panel lights usually didn’t offer the punch. That’s the new thing that we’re bringing with the LedRama light in three sizes.
Dedo: So we can switch on each of these lights from 8 bit to 16 bit. Ed: And it doesn’t cost them anymore? Dedo: No. But the development of our 16 bit dimming was a very complex programming and the actual cost of it in the end is just another little chip that has all the knowledge inside. And I said are we worried that somebody copies the chip and I was told that when somebody is good enough to copy it, he can write the software himself! I used to try and protect my ideas with patents. Each patent for the duration costs Є100,000. That’s a lot of money. Ed: Some countries don’t care about that. Dedo: And after 30 years, we had over 30 worldwide patents, but to protect them, if somebody infringes on a patent of mine in Japan, then it’s not anymore the measly Є100,000 that we spent for the patent. To have a patent court case is many hundred thousands of Euros, dollars, whatever, and that’s good for Siemens or Matsushita … Ed: And good for the lawyers? Dedo: And it makes lawyers filthy rich, so I decided no more patents, I take that money and I put it into Research & Development. Let me try and be another step ahead of others and if they copy what I’ve done, then I’ll just take a deep breath and see it as a compliment. I think that’s a better way, because patents are looking over your shoulder to what you’ve done in the past. Ed: And not forward? Dedo: Yes.
Ed: What I picked up from that was when you were making comparisons with the fluorescents, the angle of spread of the fluorescent was much greater than the LedRama and I thought first of all "that’s not such a good point", but then you explained, by having a narrower angle, you can have that light a bit further back and therefore you’re not cluttering the scene with the light, you don’t have the stands in the way to worry about, but also it would give you a more even light over the same distance, because your inverse square law will give you a little bit more room to move with the same intensity? Dedo: Yes. Ed: Having said that, 45 degrees of spread is pretty good? Dedo: And of course then you use the other tools like honeycombs if you want to make it more narrow, or you can put a diffuser in front to have the larger spread. There’s an endless choice in which you can widen the angle, make the light softer, gentler and of course then the big advantages of LED – one is you can dim all the way down without any change of colour. That’s a distinct advantage. The other one for the mobile team, or the work in practical locations, is the bicolour where our LED lights can tune from 2700 Kelvin all the way up above 6000. So without any filter, you can adjust to pretty much any lighting situation, and without filter, you can make a fill light a little warmer, a backlight a little cooler and tune it and that’s a distinct advantage. Ed: I did notice when you were talking about the LedRama, that for a particular company, you made a 16 bit dimmer as opposed to an 8 bit? Dedo: And we now transfer that into all of these lights, but not everybody works very well with 16 bit dimming … Ed:
But it’s an option, if you can …
Ed: Also with your kits, you mentioned the accessories that go with lights and when you see the makeup of many of your kits, there’s the light there, there’s the stand there, but there’s all these other little bits and pieces that again goes to show that the lighting kit is there to create that feeling, that emotion that somebody would want in a scene. And one of them was a lens – I think you call them collimators in light don’t you rather than lenses, or do you still call them lenses? Dedo: No, they perform different tasks. They’re the condensers that you need when you want to project images or lighten shadow patterns for background structures and play with the focusing of the structures. Then there’s the aspherical wide-angle attachment that we have that people know from the cameras, but they’ve never seen them on lights. So you can widen the angle of exit to over 90 degrees and still focus if you need that. The way we do it, the light will be perfectly even from edge to edge and also the colour distribution will be perfectly even, which with LEDs is not so easy. Ed: You made a very bold statement that these lenses could actually be used on cameras? Dedo: The projection lenses that we developed – the idea was that I went to my optical designer with whom I’ve been working now for 30-40 years and I said "I want a high transmission lens, but not for that measly little film format, I want it for a format that is bigger than Hasselblad." There you don’t have many high transmission lenses. "I want perfect resolution, perfect contrast, no flair, no halation, no internal reflexes, no curvature of field, none of the 7 sins of imaging and still high transmission for the large format, which has never been done before. But you’re not allowed to use expensive glasses, because that’s the secret with all modern optics – very expensive, very highly selected glass types. And you’re not allowed to use many non-spherical elements."
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So that becomes a nearly impossible task. So the designer would just open the window and jump out and we did it anyhow! We have an entire series of super high transmission, high class lenses of superb optical qualities at absolute minimal cost, because nobody would spend $20,000 to stick a lens on a light. So we have that for cheap refugees and John Bowring from Lemac was the first one to say "since you’re covering this huge format, why don’t you make a tilt-shift lens for the RED camera?" Okay, we could still do that, I haven’t gotten around to it, but it just means putting an iris in there, because our lenses have to work absolutely perfectly at the fullest opening; whereas many of the good lenses, even the expensive ones, you say "let me stop down 1 or 2 stops and I’ll have a better image", and we don’t do that. Ed: Talking about selection – and you were talking about selecting glass – there was also a portion of the presentation where you talked about selecting the LEDs and you take a very narrow series of blocks which you call “bins” across the Planck curve of light, so that you’re right in that sweet spot and then each bin has a number and you put that number in your product code? Dedo: So we can reproduce that. Because even with the tightest selection, there’s still a little bit of variation of the colour coordinates and, if somebody wants to have exactly the same light again, we tell them read us the serial number because that hides the bin number and we can select the lights to build for him with exactly that same bin number. Ed: And this is especially applicable in a studio where they might want to expand the studio, putting in more light? Dedo: Yes. So if you have 20 lights and you want to order another 20, we can come close to the hopes of having them identical, but then what people don’t really always consider is that, when you think of LEDs having an endless lifetime, there is a degradation of light intensity and a degradation of colour quality over time. With a fluorescent light, after 5000 hours you still have light output, but you do have also degradation, but then you change the tube and you’re new born. With an HMI lamp you change the lamp and you’re back to the start. Ed: So in fact in a studio, if you had an LED studio that ran 24/7 after a year or so you wouldn’t expect that a light using an LED from the same bin as the original, would actually have the same colour temperature? Dedo: It depends on the working temperature. If you operate those lights always only at 80%, they will
last a lot longer, keep the same colour, the same output. But if you run them 24 hours a day continuously at fullest output, you will see a degradation depending on the way it’s built, depending on the cooling, depending on the working temperature, that may exceed 20%, it may exceed 40%. So that’s what people don’t often figure. They believe that, for LEDs, I buy them once and it’s forever. In continuous day in, day out, 24 hour use, they may show degradation after 5-6-7000 hours, although the manufacturers seem to guarantee LM80 – Lumen Maintenance 80% after 20,000 hours. Ed: So it would be a good idea for studios with large banks of LED lights to keep some sort of track of the hours and the temperature they’re running at? Dedo: Try and keep track of how much output you have, because over the years, the output will go down, let’s say, figure on 20%, and you have to plan that in, in the beginning. And then comes also a colour shift and with ours, we’ve worked very hard on this, the colour shift stays on the Planck curve, the deviation from the Planck curve called DeltaUV – it sometimes even gets better over a longer time with our LEDs. But we’ve worked 5 years with 4 different manufacturers of LED light sources to develop a common language, because they measure differently than what we do – and especially for the focusing light for the optics, that is a very difficult language that you have to find, because they measure in Ulbricht spheres that integrate everything. Ed: I actually looked up an Ulbricht sphere and found it on the Internet. A very interesting concept – you’ve got one at home have you? Dedo: No I hate those things because when you work with optics, the integrated light that the Ulbricht sphere measures is a goulash mixing up everything; whereas what we need to do is look at the rays in the centre, the rays at the edge of the optical system have to give us the same colour and that problem was difficult to fight with, called colour over angle. We have overcome this in cooperation with the LED manufacturers to our specifications and with our optics. It’s not easy and not typical, because usually, you go to the centre of the light and you measure it, then go to the edge and you may be very surprised, you have a different colour. So there are still some tricks and traps in LED and focusing lights and we’re very proud how far we’ve come. But the biggest hold-back is that every camera seems to see sunlight pretty much identical, halogen light identical, fluorescent somewhat identical, HMI also. But LED they see very differently. The response of the sensor to LED light varies, even between the Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 5D Mark III, there are vast differences – one showed more green than the other, whereas with the same light, the Sony camera showed a magenta. And green and magenta are killers. We want to have our lights dead on the Planck curve and not that one camera shows it in the green and one camera shows it in the magenta. And this took us 5 years. Ed: Is this something that the camera person could correct if they were using an LED lit source, that when they white balanced, if they knew that there was going to be a shift to the green, they should use a card that was slightly shifted to the red? Dedo: But also you can filter – there are +green and –green filters of ⅛, ¼, ½ and so on and they can help to remove excess colour.
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Ed:
They just can’t add it?
Dedo: If a colour is missing, and in most of the lights, even starting with fluorescent or HMI lights, the red R9 is very low and in many LEDs we’ve measured R9 with a minus factor. You want to be up to 100, and you never are, but if you can go in the 70s or 80s, you’re already pretty good with R9. If red is missing, no postproduction can add that, no filter can ever help you to bring that red back that is not in the light. If it’s not in the light, you’re done with. Ed: And this leads me on to what was going to be my last question, but will be my penultimate – the old value from 1931 of CRI has now been replaced by a new measure and one that is so important that you don’t check it by your eye, but you check it with your camera? Dedo: Well CRI took into consideration 8 colours and they were pastel colours, leaving out R9 the important full red and the skin tone R13. Ed: What does CRI stand for? Dedo: Colour Rendition Index. So we are now working with an expanded Colour Rendition Index with 15 colours, including R9 and R13. So often the information that you find on the Internet about quality of light and CRI, they talk about what’s easiest, the old 8 colours. Once you add the R9, their values may go down drastically. But that is not good enough, because that relates to the human eye. The studio camera with 3 CCD sensors sees it differently, and that’s what TLCI ( Television Lighting Consistency Index ) is based on – Alan Roberts – and you can convert the measurements of CRI into TLCI by downloading the algorithms from Alan Roberts. That tells you how most studio cameras will see it. But there’s an abundance of cameras out there that don’t work with 3 CCD sensors. They work with CMOS sensors and they all see the LED light different. So this took years and we had the discrepancy between one camera and the next one and the next one, and only now have we reached congruence when we tried to conquer the most difficult task and that is matching traditional halogen light, or let’s say the Kino Flo daylight, and that’s not a scientific standard, that’s a practical standard seen from a cameraman. Match it with traditional light sources. Light one side of the face with a reference light, the other side with the LED light and each camera will give you an impression of different colours. We make both sides of the face match in skin tone, even when they are lit from one side with reference light and from the other side with LED light. We’ve now conquered that and we make those colours match on Scandinavian skin, on Mexican skin, on Ethiopian skin and on totally black Angolan skin, because they all react differently. Ed: And they’re all your employees? Dedo: Yes. But it’s thousands of tests. Ed: This leads me onto my last question, which is something that again you’re doing for the industry and to assist people in understanding what you can do with good lighting instruments, and that is a worldwide competition. Just tell us a little about that? Dedo: Usually to give people a hands on experience, at the end of my seminars, we call for a competition with 3 cameras, 3 sets and say “you light” and then “you vote”. It’s not always the best image that wins; usually the one wins who has more friends in the audience! But the winner gets a light. And the results were so stunning, and I don’t have a good track record of keeping those results; there were absolutely fantastic creative ideas, crazy ideas and also very high class lighting. Now I make this an international competition where, through our agents, we’ll make
available complete lighting kits, you light, but we’ll only accept it if you explain how you’ve done it, why you’ve done it and why you chose this angle of the light towards the camera angle, this height for the light, this type of light, this focusing, the setting, these accessories – to create the effect that you wanted to reach and then for the next light, and the next light, and the next light until we step by step can understand how you’ve created your effect. Some of the most talented directors of photography are lousy teachers; they know how to do it, but they cannot verbalise it because it’s a gut feeling that they’re following. And that’s like with many artistic approaches – it’s what comes from your belly. The accumulated experiences, the know-how, I feel this is right, explain to me why. They can’t. So the challenge is explain why you do it and what you’re trying to achieve and so we’ll judge the entries of these videos by the quality of the image – yes, definitely because that’s the ultimate purpose, but also by the level of explanation. How good a teacher are you, were you able to convey what you want to do so that others can learn from what you are offering? Ed: It takes me back to my days as a physics teacher where, if my students gave me the right answer they got zero, but if they showed me how they worked it – even if they got the wrong answer at the end, they’d still get most of the marks because it was all about the process and knowing how it worked, rather than just getting an answer. Dedo: It’s the learning process and lighting – although this wonderful new camera tells you, to get an image, you don’t need any lights, but that’s not an image. That is exposure. Creating an image should be a little bit more challenging, should convey a message, transport moods and emotions, bring about a sense of three-dimensionality although your camera only has one eye, and teaching that cannot be done in an afternoon. It’s a lifetime experience and that’s why I’m looking forward to create this huge number of different approaches – how have you done it, how has he done it, what can I learn from you, what from him? It’s difficult. There used to be lighting seminars at Warner Bros, famous superstar cinematographers, Michael Ballhaus, Allen Daviau, Julio Macat, George Dibie – all showing gimmicks and the only one in my mind who tried to do honest lighting was Haskell Wexler and he’d never done it in this kind of surrounding before, although he has a lifetime of wonderful experience and he’s one of the recognised superstars. As he was waiting for things to happen, he walked up and down, he said something that people thought was a joke. He said "I don’t think lighting is a spectator sport", and it certainly isn’t. It’s very difficult to understand because we can’t see light, we only see the reflection of light. How can you explain light – most cinematographers can’t even see it themselves. I’ve met very few who were capable of seeing, feeling, describing light and then telling others about it so that they can understand it. That’s more difficult than preaching a religion. Ed: You almost need to be a poet? Dedo: Yes … but to be a poet is one thing; to understand poetry and read it to others is another different world again. Ed: Well, we’ll see if we can get Chris involved in that. And to keep Chris and the boys at PLS happy, we’ve talked about one product in particular, the LedRama and the developments there. There were 2 others that really took my interest and they were the Ledzilla, the improvements there, and
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also the battery pack that you can put on your belt and you can power your devices from the battery pack rather than have the battery on the lighting device. Can you just run us through those 2? Dedo: Although the actual light source is not so power efficient, LEDs are still around 60-80 lumen per Watt. That’s at best what an HMI lamp does. But a lot of the light is emitted into one direction so it can be made more useful. So in the end, below the line, there is a saving of power, of energy and that allows the many lights that have relatively high light output, combined with the fact that the cameras have become much more sensitive now, to make battery lighting very interesting. On the little Ledzilla, which is a 1 or a 2 times 10 Watt light, we can run from the smallest Sony NPF battery for an hour and a half; from the NPF 950 we can run 6 or 7 hours. And also, the multi-LED panel lights, the Fellonis or our 40 Watt D-LED lights – even a 90 Watt D-LED light – can be run off a battery, and the amazing thing is that many of the mobile teams really prefer to work from a battery. You say "why don’t you use the plug, it’s right next to you?" and they say "no, I’d rather use the battery, I don’t have that cable mess on the floor, I can work quicker, faster and the interview’s only one hour and my battery does that easily." Only for travel you have to be a little careful, because those lithium batteries, once they exceed 100 Watt hours, you’re not really allowed on an airplane with it. So we have the 95 Watt hour lithium ion battery that you can take on most airplanes and, for the more powerful lights that we can feed with 28 Volt, we will have an adapter with two of those batteries simultaneously to have more capacity to drive even the LedRama. But battery operation has become a key to many of the mobile teams; although they’re trying to travel lightweight, now usually they have an AC ballast and a battery ballast and the battery. Our little 95 Watt hour batteries have the charger built inside the battery, so you don’t even have to carry an extra charger, but still it’s extra weight. Ed: But it’s a handy little belt-clip device that you can put these batteries on your belt, so you can save weight from the lighting …
Ledzilla - small and powerful.
there’s the bicolour Ledzilla and that’s the do it all. Because here you have high light output, you have focusing, you have dimming and you can change from 2700 Kelvin all the way up to 6000, no filters and adjust to pretty much any lighting situation, just by the turn of a knob. That’s the wonderful thing about bicolour. In some of the panel lights, the bicolour used to have half the output, because one row is daylight, one row is tungsten, and in the LedRama as well as in all of our focusing lights. In the LedRama each light source changes colour, so the bicolour in daylight function has the very same output as the pure daylight. So that’s a real powerful instrument and our bicolour 40 Watt is a 2x 40 Watt. The Ledzilla is a 2x 10 Watt; the 20 Watt is a 2x 20 Watt, 2x 90 Watt. So this means packing the daylight little mini chips and the tungsten ones very closely together so that they give the impression of one single light source, and that’s not easy because of the heat issue, because of the physics of bunching them close enough together. I feel with all of the light sources – and we’re just filling the last one with a 2x 220 Watt in a tiny little package, 19mm diameter round – we seem to have mastered that. But that doesn’t mean that we now don’t have to go again through all these endless hours of tests and colour tests, longevity tests, how long does the light output stay stable, how long does the colour stay stable, because these are issues that people don’t think about because they believe I buy an LED and I will give it to my grandson. That can be done if you don’t use the light very often. Ed: A good place to end.
Dedo: You can put it on your belt, or you can take the whole thing and hang it on the lighting stand. But when you need to run and gun shoot, then the belt operation often is nicer, especially when sometimes you want to even put the light on a stick, put it high up, and then you don’t want to be burdened by having another battery 6 feet away from you, you get tired much quicker. So having it on the belt is easier. Ed: And the improvements in the Ledzilla – you say now there are 2 models? Dedo: The Ledzilla, the monocolour, the pure daylight, now has better light distribution and about 30% higher light output. Then Page 49
Matthews for PLS For PLS we are now at Matthews with the lovely Linda Swope. Ed: Linda, only a couple of new products, but still a very busy show for you, people still buying stands? Linda: busy. Ed:
This booth has been nonstop
Well you’re here, so that’s a big attraction?
Linda: Ed:
Like crazy.
Got to be it, right.
All right, but to get onto the new product?
Linda: We’re going to go talk about two new car mounts that we have and we’re reintroducing our Crank -O-Vator line. Ed:
Hence the “Crankologist” badge?
Linda: with.
Hence the badge that you will walk away
Ed: I have … I’ve just taken one for Chris because I’m sure it would be appropriate for him to wear a Crankologist badge in the office. Linda: We’ve been manufacturing Crank-O-Vator big light stands for 35 years and this model is very similar to our original design. We discontinued this design and went to a new design which was all black, little different look, and then kind of got out of the crank stand business permanently, which left a big hole in the market. So we came back to our original design, beefed it up quite a bit … Ed:
Made it even more industrial?
Linda: Yes, beefed up the castings, beefed up the spiders, there’s only two moving parts in each one, which is the crank and the chain. We’ve got several different versions – this is called the Midi, which is the one between the Crank-O-Vator and the Super Crank. We have a LoBoy single riser which we’ve never had before, and a LoBoy double riser and we have the Mega which is the biggest one you see here. They’re all very simple crank stands used for big motion picture lights. Every one comes with a three year warranty. Ed: And they look incredibly secure – that to me must be the major selling point. The colour’s not important, it’s the security of that very heavy light way up high? Linda: It’s the strength, it’s the warranty of course, the reliability, the customer service … and it’s Matthews. And the fact that we have been doing these for 35 years, we’ve refined all of the little problems here, the little problems there and by the mere fact that we got the moving parts down to so minimal, there should be very, very few issues. Ed:
Linda surrounded by cranks.
can see these join together. They’re rods with just the three-eighths studs and they screw right together, so you can make any length that you want, if you need to span across the whole hood. So you can change the length of the rods if you want to span the hood, if you want to put it on the side and go the length of the door. It’s however you want to do it, and it’s adjustable … so you release this and you have movement anywhere along the carriage. So red loosens or tightens – and here, with this ‘kip’ handle … Ed:
And it’s all rubber or steel?
Linda: Ed:
Yes.
And there’s pivoting ability on the …
And I can’t see any plastic there at all?
Linda: all of it.
No, there’s none.
It’s all machine steel –
Ed: Right, as opposed to the suckers we’ve got over here on the car … you don’t call them “suckers”? Linda: We don’t call them suckers. A few years ago, we came out with the PRO mount kit and the MASTER mount kit which were just basic car mount kits, and now we’ve come up with the FREEDOM mount which is the coolest one. This is the one in the front. First of all, everything that is red loosens or tightens, okay. So the red handles, they’re going to affect something. This is the FREEDOM mount because it’s put together with what we call Ricky Rods which you Page 50
Solid construction is a Matthews trademark.
The new Slider Stand from Matthews. A strong, wide-based stand with a low working height for those using camera Sliders, Monitors, Speed Rail/Pipe Dolly etc.
Working Height 61cm to 117cm Operating Capacity 36.3 kg Incredibly stable with dual adjustable legs Stylish Aerospace Inspired design Welded Junior (1-1/8") Receiver Stand Adapters can convert to; (sold separately) o 5/8" baby pin (16mm) o 3/8" Tripod Mount o 5/8" Magic Finger
Works great with the big lights and pairs well with the new DIT Laptop tray Noga Arm • MICROgrip • GoPro Mount …now @ PLS The Matthews innovative 3/8” - 1/4" 20 camera mount system. Attach lights, monitors, iPads. Rig your DSLR / GoPro at any angle.
“Try this, you’ll like it, I guarantee it” Ed Philips, CEO Matthews. Phone: 09 302 4100
Email: info@kelpls.co.nz
Website: www.kelpls.co.nz
a wheel shot; you can mount it to go behind, and it’s so quick to set up and simple. Ed: And having all the little holes in there means you can bolt all the accessories onto the hostess tray, so you don’t have things in your lap, or cables anywhere – it’s all in one place. Linda: Exactly, and you can use this at the halfway point if you don’t need such a big platform, or you can bolt it together and use the whole thing. And it’s all used with like I said, the new Ricky Rods and Matthews grip heads, suction cups, it’s so basic, but so amazing, because you can put the camera anywhere on the car and get the shot that you need.
I couldn’t move it.
Linda: Okay, so if you place your big 10 inch cup, that’s in place, you lift these two cups and release them, you’re free to slide this anywhere you want on the car. That’s the FREEDOM mount. Ed:
And you don’t have to lick the cups first?
Linda: You do not. Actually we don’t recommend that, it’s kinda icky. Ed:
It’s as simple as that.
Ed: I think for New Zealand, we’d probably need one about half the width, because there is a regulation about how far out the side of a car you can have any extension. Linda:
Problem solved.
This hostess tray actually is in two parts, and the chromed pins are there holding the second part on, so you just take that off and you’re within the regulations NZVN for vehicle width in New Zealand. Very clever.
Linda: You can put about 65 pounds on this, so you can put a big camera package. Ed: Now Linda’s demonstrating how you get it to attach to the car bonnet or to any smooth flat surface. They’ve got little pump arrangements so you don’t have any levers, because it’s quite a big suction cup and you’d need quite a big lever. There are just little pump arrangements and well I’m going to try and lift it off now Linda. Oooo … ahhh … heave … grunt! Right, I’ve just attempted to pull it off and it won’t come, which obviously makes the security of your camera that you mounted on this very good. What does move of course is the bonnet of the car, so it is incredibly strong and reliable to keep your camera there. Now I see you’ve got a smaller version actually stuck to the windscreen? Linda: Yes. That’s an older one. That’s one of the first ones we came out with, which is the PRO mount kit, which is the same idea. And the coolest thing about our car mounts is the way that they’re mounted and the strength of them. They move in harmony with the car, so your camera’s doing the car move, your camera’s not vibrating and you’re getting better shots. Ed: Now, attached to the side of the car with a very large platform? Linda: This is called a Brauer mount and it’s a very simple hostess tray kind of idea – this is why we call it the Hostess Tray. It slips down between the window and the door. It’s about an inch down in there, so it allows you to just over-hook the window and it mounts again very simply with the Ricky Rods down here, two suction cups. Simple, simple, simple. That’s where you can mount it to do inside shots; you can mount it to do Page 52
MOG for Atomise We are at the MOG stand with Nuno Magalhães – and a very nice way to start the interview is that I’ve been presented with a small glass of port from Oporto which I will sip through the interview while Nuno tells us all about the value of MOG from Atomise’s point of view with Avid collaboration and more. Ed: Nuno, in a facility that is heavily Avid, what does MOG add to that workflow? Nuno: We have a good integration from the beginning as we are technological and institutional partners with Avid. We can ingest the media to Avid environments very quickly, checking the media to Interplay, generating AES for the Media Composer and also writing the media directly to ISIS environments. So this has been done from the beginning that we started working with Avid. Right now, every latest version that they have implemented, we have been keeping up integrating also with them. We have a lot of projects worldwide that we work together seamlessly, so hopefully in the future we can continue to work even more. It is a privilege on our side to have Avid as our full media integrator in the production environments workflows, and newsrooms everywhere. Ed: All right, so there is some competition with Avid, but mainly it’s a very friendly collaborative effort? Nuno: Yes. Mainly there are a lot of editors and their companies that are working with storage which we can support and also integrate with, but from the beginning of time, we have that close relationship with Avid. So it makes sense to maintain it, because we have a lot of case studies as I’ve mentioned, all over the world and it doesn’t make sense right now to start not spreading this relationship even more than we already have. Ed: So where do you see the greatest use for a MOG installation in a broadcast evironment? What are they looking for in implementing the whole MOG system? Nuno: Having the media quickly available, transcoding the media effectively into the latest formats and the latest codecs – it’s one of our major key points; and integrating with other MAM systems, integrating with storage very well, because we are agnostic is working with almost every brand. So we don’t have problems writing to anywhere. Avid ISIS is one of our major concerns that we are always aware – if anything changes, we pick up very quickly and respond to it. But we also can write up to any other environments. If you need to work with quality check equipment to check all media, we also before that have our own analysers internals, so we are secure that we are going to provide you a good effective media that the quality control equipment scans to check it out and send it for later playout, eventually send it to Media Composer for Media Composer’s editors to start working all those media. And if they want, we’ll export that media later on for archiving, for our OP1F files we have automated process for that purpose. So this is something, a workflow from end to end that we can propose with our products. Ed: Now Nuno, there are other products on the market in the broadcast space that do transcoding, but they also do streaming and they do it very well. From what I understand, your MOG system just does transcoding? Nuno: No, no it’s not just transcoding. Besides the ingest solution that we have, we have also the possibility to transcode, but we do streaming as well and, as you can imagine, very well. We have the SDI
Nuno at MOG.
recorders and also the baseband recorders, so there’s a multiplicity of products that we have to approach the markets. We just don’t combine them all together. We prefer to have the solutions separate. So for each customer’s needs, we’ll supply you with a solution. So basically, for the streaming, live streaming’s VOD preparation of contents, there’s the work stream solution that we came up right now. We will face up the needs of the live steaming customers that they want nowadays to have their media in the Cloud very quickly to promote events or whatever. There are a lot of cases where you can use this kind of equipment. So besides the live streaming, besides the transcoding, the automation processes, the batch ingest features, we have a lot of new stuff that we can help broadcasters all over the world improve their workflows. Ed: Wonderful … and that’s not just Avid users is it, because I understand there’s been a bit of a branchout, that you’re now supporting some other system? Nuno: For a project in Japan, we were asked to develop a plugin for Adobe and we integrated to Adobe very well. So we can now, through that plugin, control the SDI channels from our baseband recorders. So directly inside the editor, you start recording, stop recording, do changes to your metadata, change the workflow profiles directly from the plugin. You don’t have to go to the SPEEDRAIL itself and open up a new browser render, just can do it directly inside the Adobe Premiere. Ed:
But Avid still is your major market?
Nuno:
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Yes, Avid is still our major market.
Ed: And you’ve put all of your products together in one little package? Nuno: This very nice box. We can combine our solutions, our Xpress units that we manufacture ourselves – combine it with our own storage that we also manufacture ourselves to provide the mobility that you can have in OB vans but in studios also. So you can combine all of our solutions stacked together in one smaller box. Usually the servers themselves are 28cm depth, so it’s very light system and not too long, so you can carry it easily around between studios and at that time use it on your events if you have multi-camera recordings and when you’ve finished those events, you can just move it to another studio and start working at the other studio. So you don’t have to have two equipment stacks on each studio waiting to be used. This is very mobile, you can move it around. It’s all interconnected and you just plug it in, power it on and it’s ready to go. Ed: Does it have a special name? Nuno: Yes, it’s Modular Mobile Studio. Ed: Modular Mobile Studio – MMS? Nuno: Yes. You can adapt it to your needs. If you want only four channels, you can have four channels. If you want 10 channels, you can have 10 channels. If you want baseband and file based platform on each machine, you can combine those two systems and, in terms of readiness of content, you can start recording on one platform, on the other platform on the state it was the same server, you already have your media available for the editors to start picking up on them, because we have the functionalities like edit while ingest or edit while capture and immediately the content will be available. Ed: Well you couldn’t want more than that. NZVN
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Atomise Apace For Atomise, we are at Apace Systems with Dennis Bress. Ed: Dennis, have you got something to excite me at this show? The short version! Dennis: Here it is. The industry is vibrant, things are really happening and here at Apace we’re excited to announce our ODM product. ODM is a brilliant design from Dr Lee Hu and Jeanclaude Toma. Basically, this is a 2U or 3U or 4U chassis that has ODM software. What the ODM software does is it allows you to take any of the drives and to slide them either into the ODM chassis for indexing through the ODM software, where we create proxies that are linked to the RAW and then you can add metadata. So you can think of the possibilities as this is an alternative to LTO 6 tape. As you know, tape is a format that a lot of people use to archive their content. The problem with tape is if you’re only using it as a backup, tape is linear. So if I have to do a search through the database in order to pull a particular file up, I have to spin that drive all the way through the tape to the particular location of the file. What ODM has, it’s using SATA drives, so you have random access – so you get instant access to the files based on spinning disc. Well if you have a chassis – let’s say the 4U for example – you have 16 open slots, you can use any of the 6 or 8 terabyte SATA drives that you can get off the shelf from any manufacturer. This is based on Apace’s architecture design; we’re not asking you to be connected to us through proprietary software or proprietary hardware. Dr Lee’s philosophy is this is open source, open democratisation. So now with the ODM product, you have a very viable solution that if you’re looking for archive, but you want the speed of random access, you want a frontend interface that creates proxies linked to the RAW, and we’re in the media business, so everybody would like to be able to view the proxies through a browser interface, to be able to see what content I’m searching for, see the results and then have access to the RAW file from a spinning SATA disc, then the ODM product is a pretty exciting product. Ed: Okay, so that’s an option, but if I remember rightly from previous interviews, Apace supports LTO storage systems, I guess also the Sony optical disc system, basically any archive system that you want to plug in, you can, because it’s the intelligent Apace software that handles it, whatever you connect to it? Dennis: That is correct. So we are still supporting our partners who, you are correct, are in the LTO 6 marketplace. So like our partner XenData has a wonderful range of different products. They don’t manufacture the tape hardware, they use companies like Qualstar and the 10U is the one we really like … but they’re using these particular robots in order to frontend with this XenData 64 bit – I see they call it XenData 64 server software or workgroup software, and then that handles the archive path. What’s nice about the relationship with XenData in particular is that XenData does not have their own media asset manager – they’re not in the MAM business. They like partners like Apace because Apace has a media asset manager that ties into XenData because now folks have the ability to have spinning disc Apace storage, they have Apace’s postMAM that indexes and tracks everything, along with an automated workflow that can be as simple as a client or multiple
Dennis and Dr Lee.
clients simply drag and drop a file into a workspace folder location. Once that file hits, the Apace postMAM through its built list of sequence operations, can do things like create four different proxies, add multitudes of metadata, so that you can then search for the files later, ( because that’s the key to a MAM right, is to search and find stuff later ) and then move a copy over to LTO. Then on the LTO side, once it sees a copy come through, you can set up policies, like I want one copy to go to the current in-house location and I want to create a second tape that then gets offloaded to an offsite location for disaster recovery. End to end, all automated. Ed: Again, from what I understand, you can start very small with an Apace system and then build up and add to it … it’s totally flexible, but also when you have other systems such as an Avid ISIS, it connects and works perfectly with those other systems? Dennis: Absolutely. So a great point is that we are scalable. What we like to say is we’re "à la carte" meaning that you can start out with a smaller system, it can be just one of our storage servers, 2U, 3U or 4U. You start to fill that thing full of media files, since we are in NAS everybody over Ethernet either single GigE or 10 GigE can have access and then at some point because we are in NAS, you are positioning your data and organising your data based on folder and subfolder structures – just like we do when we receive an email or a PDF. We know on our personal computer, Mac or PC, where we want to take that file and store it, so that later on if we want to include it in an email we know where to drill down with the mouse and attach that document. The same thing applies to anyone using NAS, because we’re folder and file based. If you organise your content the way you see fit, then you can go back later and navigate to that folder. If I’m doing a commercial for a client called Coca Cola, I’d probably have a folder called Coca Cola where that’s the master folder and have a bunch of subfolders where I’m keeping all my content and I can navigate to it. Where it really gets complex though is later on down the road after you’ve filled up our entry level storage systems, you might say "I don’t know where this particular file lives". It’s Grant herding cats in New Zealand. Okay, I need that sequence to tell my story. Well, if I don’t know where it’s at, I don’t know where it’s at – and that’s where the media asset management can come in. So like you said, you could start up with the storage and then later
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Editing Solutions Experts The experts providing end–to–end editorial solutions to New Zealand’s film & television industry Authorised Elite Reseller for the complete Avid Video, Interplay & Storage ranges. Official New Zealand Distributor for Avid Media Composer, Avid ISIS & JMR Storage. We are proud to have been selected as one of Avid’s top 100 partners worldwide.
8
Apace Systems
Contact us today for product info, demos and pricing Wellington - Head Office Richard Kelly Ph 021 863 394 richard@atomise.co.nz
Auckland Theo Gibson Ph 021 863 324 theo@atomise.co.nz
on when you get into 48 terabytes or 100 terabytes or wherever you’re at, you can add the MAM at that point and that’s what we call about being scalable and Lego building blocks. Ed: And it will pick up on that previous metadata and incorporate it in its file system? Dennis: Yes, it will index all the files that you’ve created and then, based on the folder names, you can add additional metadata as you see fit. So all this can go on the background based on your original purchase that you’re – the term I like to use is you’re "fuelling" that Apace storage server with media. Once it’s gets so full that you have now an issue of "I need to be able to find things", not based on folder location, but say based on what it is that the content contains, and that’s more than just a file name let’s say in this example, that’s where a MAM comes in. Then, like you alluded to earlier, yes in regards to Avid, we love Avid. The Avid ISIS is a wonderful shared storage tool. As a matter of fact, we just had The Hobbit guys over earlier and they were nice enough to share their success in what they’ve done with the past three feature films that we just loved here in the States – I was one of the first guys at each of the shows in order to see it in 48 frames a second … couldn’t have been prouder about those three projects. But that said, they did allude to and confirm what we all know, and that is for those types of projects, Avid is the tool that people are using, and Apace is, as you know, the backup to The Hobbit. So with our Octopa product, you can have the Apace storage and with the Octopa software it can look into the licences and therefore see the shared storage, the 5000 and the 7000, and we can basically do archive or complete near backups of what’s going on in the ISIS all the way over, and in this case it could be miles down the road via fibre channel, as a backup. That way anything that goes on with the ISIS is replicated real time and incremental changes, to the Apace Octopa system and what Lee has coined it, it’s called Workflow Resilience. That means, for example, if they accidentally deleted something on the ISIS, they can immediately go back to the Apace storage through Octopa, find whatever file was deleted at what day and then restore that back to the ISIS workspace. So it gives them kinda like the ability to really work under the ISIS umbrella under Avid, but they have a safety net, knowing Apace is protecting them. Ed: So why would you want anything else? Dennis: That’s a good question. Ed: I look around the show here and, yes, there are many other examples of storage systems that say they do the job too – are they all telling fibs or what? Dennis: Well no, I think you have to refine what it is that we’re talking about. If you walk around the show, there are a lot of companies selling storage. But if you get into the conversation deeper than "what is storage", the question is "are you just selling storage?" A lot of these guys are just selling storage. Ed: And then just using say, Windows Explorer to find things, which means that you have to label them correctly when you put them in there, otherwise you’ll never find them again? Dennis: And try to use Windows Explorer … it’s funny you mention that, because that leads us to another product that we just released here at the show, and probably one of the products that I’m most excited about because it addresses the very subject you just brought up, and that’s a problem statement that everyone has. If you have storage and you have 48 terabytes and you have thousands of files, if not hundreds of thousands of files with some of these
facilities – you’re not using Windows OS inherent tools, like Windows Explorer or Apple Finder to search for a file. If you do, on that type of storage topography, you may as well search for file 123.movie and let it run and come back in a week and see what the results are. So Apace has designed a product called Finder – it’s called Apace Finder and we just released it this year at the 2015 NAB show. What it does is it runs on the Apace storage servers and it indexes, say Friday night. So you start it off at Friday at 5 o’clock and it runs in the background. It is indexing all the files into its own database and it becomes like a Google search. So now when you come in on Monday, let’s just assume the entire thing is finished and all your files are indexed on 48 terabyte … any time you need to search for a file now, you can go through the browser into the Apace Finder, it becomes your default tool now for searching. This is not media asset management, this is just a unique little tool that gives you the complete power of Google search. So like we all search on Google, when we type in a particular string, it kind of already has intelligence to know – and we don’t even have to finish the word – it knows through intelligence what we’re typing. You know how Google works, if it’s the Academy Awards and you’re typing for an actor, it knows you’re looking for Angelina Jolie for example right, and it gives you the highest result at the very beginning. Well the Apace tool is basically the same. You can type in a partial string and it will globally give you back the result in seconds. So now you’ve got the result and you’re able to say oh my gosh, "here’s where that file lives of Grant herding cats in New Zealand; who filed it here?” But I’ve found it. Ed: So anybody who’s got an Apace system can retrospectively add this Finder to it? Dennis: That is absolutely right, correct, and that’s what is so brilliant about it is that a lot of our clients … we’re not looking for 5000 clients, we’re really dealing with about 500 right now and growing that to about 1000, but a lot of our clients are Tier 1, Tier 2 and then we categorise them as Tier 3 – “mum at op shops”. Ed: So is there a domestic version of Finder available that my wife could install on her home PC so she could find the photos that are filed there that “I can’t remember where I put them”? Dennis: Well we don’t support that, but Google does have a product like that and it’s called Picasa and it’s free. You can get it from Google. Ed: Well that might save something. Dennis, I’ll let you know. Dennis: home.
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You’re welcome Grant.
Thank you
Safe travels back
Yellobrik for Techtel We are now at LYNX Technik, makers of Yellobrik, with David Colthorpe from Techtel and Joehan Tohkingkeo from LYNX. Ed: Joehan, we haven’t got the yellow glasses on this year which David is very happy about. Now product, I must say, a bit like monitors, this year there’s a plethora of companies making little connector boxes – even Blackmagic has come along and said “we’re starting to make even more because people like them”, but you make the yellow ones? Joehan: Well of course there are a lot of options, but making a quality product that lasts and that is reliable, I would say, is hard to come by. We design our products seriously and we design and manufacture for the broadcast industry. It is a 24/7 product whereby you can practically switch it on and leave it there for the next 12 months – nothing will fail you. The components that we select in making the box go through very serious testing to ensure they meet high MTBF standards before we put the components into our box. That’s our differentiation in the box market. Ed: I guess what’s important is that you say you make them for broadcasters, but anybody can buy them? Joehan: Oh yes, support-wise, definitely we have our Asia/Pacific headquarters in Singapore and of course we have our partner in Techtel in Australia and New Zealand and they are always there to support you. These guys are in the frontline and I’m always behind them, working closely with them in supporting the market. Ed: I understand one sign of a good quality product is lack of heat. With something small like this that you’ve packed a lot of components in, it’s got signals going through it all the time, it’s doing a lot of processing – if the components aren’t up to high quality standards, you will get a lot of heat coming out of that little box? Joehan: Definitely. That’s why, if you look at the rack that we use for the Yellobrik, there’s no fan and that tells you something. A lot of people, when they come to our booth, the first thing they do is to touch the box and the first reaction is “why is it not hot?”
David and Joehan.
Ed:
It’s not turned on?
Joehan: It’s turned on and that tells you something about the quality that we manufacture and that’s why we’re very proud of our products. Ed: So you can’t fry an egg on a Yellobrik box? Joehan: I’m sorry, you can’t do that. You have to do it on the frying pan or maybe some other products! Ed: So which particular Yellobrik are you most proud of in this year’s line-up? Joehan: Well, I would say we have a number of models. Just looking at HDMI to SDI converters for example, in the CHD1812 the differentiation is that it features an integrated frame synchroniser. This provides an ideal solution for any application which requires a fully synchronised SDI input from an external asynchronous HDMI source. There’s also the award winning CDH1813 SDI to HDMI converter with a raft of handy audio monitoring and display features. And various burn in features make the CDH1813 a true monitoring tool. These boxes are unique in the sense that, even after conversion, you can plug in an SFP, a standard fibre transceiver, and using a fibre cable transmit to another location. So practically, you don’t need to buy another transmitter. Also the compact box itself can be rack mounted or can be stand alone. It is very flexible and customers like that. Ed: And you’ve got some nice little racks there that you could either lay flat or stack them? Joehan: Yes, we have a standard 19 inch rack which allows you to mount up to 14 Yellobriks onto it and you have a redundancy power supply that can support the system. All our products come with a three year warranty. Ed: David, what do you find is a big seller in the New Zealand market? David: I think actually a lot of multiplex fibre products. Yellobrik offer extremely good solutions in that regard. This is where you can send and receive up to a dozen or more full HD-SDI channels over a single fibre multiplex using CWDM multiplexing. This works well in scenarios in stadiums and large installations where SDI can’t cut it. Here you have kilometre-plus links ( or even much longer ) that you need to put together.
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Ed: But I’m sure you could buy a number of cheaper boxes from other manufacturers than to buy just one Yellobrik? David: Well that’s right – possibly you might, but I think the point needs to be made that often these kinds of devices are critical points of failure in a system. They absolutely need to be 24/7 devices and they’re going to cause havoc if they go wrong so you need to give consideration to ensuring that link, that conversion, whatever it is that’s going on, is secure, because otherwise, the actual cost that will ensue when it goes wrong is much more than the price of that little box. Ed: That’s why you have your mobile on 24/7 and your number is on every box sold? David: As a matter of fact, I do have my mobile on 24/7 Grant. Ed: Well there you are, nobody’s called you yet?
A very clever rack system.
David: Not on Yellobrik with a concern like that, so there you go. Ed: Now Joehan, you’re going to share a story about David? Joehan: No, not about David. I’d like to share a story from China. We came to know about an OB van which was in China for the last 10 years. It was built over a decade ago by a system integrator in Europe and shipped to China. We were interested to see this van and, when we visited the customer, the first response they gave was “your product is still working, why are you here?” We
were quite pleased because the system in that van was the older version of our 5000 series and we were very proud to see that all units were still working fine. That tells you something about our design and build quality. Ed: The van will rust around the Yellobriks and all that will be left is a pile of red dust and some Yellobriks? Joehan: Yes! Anyway they’re still using them and still making good revenue. And now they are talking to us about upgrading the system to HD, so that is NZVN something that we are very proud of.
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