NZVN May16

MAY 2015

T

Vol 213

NAB 2015 - Part One his was my 19th NAB and as “full on” as any previous shows. Some years I get time to myself, but not this year. I didn’t get to the drone pavilion or any of the outdoor exhibits, but I did get excited about more of the products on my interview list than ever before.

What struck me at this show, was that most exhibitors were making sensible claims for useful products. There was more 4K in evidence but a whole lot of HD too. I got an overall sense that vendors were offering product that was both better and cheaper than last year – in some cases, extremely so.

Although I missed many exhibits that I would like to have spent time at, I did pick up some really good background to products that our advertising supporters have coming for you. Let’s start with the Sony offer.

Sony at NAB – Part One We’re on the stand with Nick Buchner from Sony.

Ed: Once again, the press conference was very interesting with not just the new products that were announced, but also the overall theme that Sony is heading in, and it’s in a good direction. The theme is …

Nick: Sony’s overall theme here at NAB is “Beyond Definition.”

That breaks out into a whole lot of areas – of course, 4K in terms of beyond high definition is a strong theme, but we’re also talking about developments such as video over IP offering new ways of moving video signals around - and wireless streaming, enabling newer, cheaper, easier ways of moving video from place to place – also new ways of storing video such as our Optical Disc Archive.

These elements are all incorporated in the overall theme.

Nick in the Sony camera section.

We’ll talk about some of those key product areas shortly – video over IP, developments in 4K, developments in streaming, and also High Dynamic Range. With the latter, there’s growing interest in being able to deliver

images to the home and elsewhere that maintain the sort of dynamic range that today’s cameras are actually capable of capturing. However there are lots of steps to that process!

Ed: I’m sure you’d agree with me though that if you don’t need 4K, Sony is still producing a very fine range of HD product, and for many markets, that’s still a vast improvement over what they’re currently using?

16 bit system – the RAW recorders used on our F65, F55 and F5 are capable of 16 bit RAW – now that gives the post-production people and the visual effects people a huge amount of information to work with when they’re trying to grade and manipulate the image and still output at the highest possible quality.

Ed:

Okay, speaking of recorders?

Nick: That’s right, we basically don’t produce SD product anymore, we have a huge array of HD product.

However 4K is becoming more and more accessible and one of the things I’ll elaborate on is my long-held mantra of “4K in is not all about 4K out”.

4K technology enables you to do things for HD production that I’ll describe in detail shortly.

Ed: Because this is something that’s certainly come to the fore with streaming – all right, you can record 4K onto your camera’s recording system in 4K, but there is the option to have the streaming output at a lower resolution?

Nick: That’s possible, although the sorts of common applications that are interested in streaming the pictures from one place to another probably are more interested in HD, or to be totally frank, possibly only using an SD picture in the end. However, we are talking about being able to do that more cheaply and easily, certainly in HD. Ed: And one of the codecs that you are using in many of these products is your XAVC which has been described as having “higher bit depth”. Now there was a term that I didn’t understand?

Nick: The term that was used at the press conference regarding higher bit depth was not only with reference to XAVC, but also working with RAW content.

In the case of XAVC though, this system does support up to 12 bit depth which basically gives you more steps to work with – more levels of luminance, more levels of colour. At the moment, we don’t have XAVC equipment that utilises 12 bit. All of our current XAVC product supports 10 bit, although some utilise 8 bit as well. The bit depth is not necessarily about greater spatial resolution in the overall image, it’s about greater ability to manipulate that image – to store at a higher quality to begin with, and then have more to work with in postproduction, whether it’s in a grading suite or in a simple desktop suite.

Ed:

Is it like a block of information?

Nick: It’s the amount of detail. For example, if you think of having a certain number of levels between black and white, as you increase the bit depth, you increase the number of levels – not that you’re getting greater white or greater black, simply more steps in what is recorded. The same applies for levels of colour.

Ed: In computer terms, you talk about 10 bit, 12 bit – is it exactly the same?

Nick: No it’s not exactly the same because in a 12 bit system, you have more steps than 10 bit. In a

Nick: We just happen to be passing the audio section so I thought we’d spend a few hours here!

There’s no brand new audio product here at the show, but there’s a strong presence for our digital DWX wireless mic system which has been around in North America and Europe for a while, but from a local point of view, it’s really pleasing that TVNZ has now adopted this system as a result of the restack of your frequencies effective from March.

Ed:

Oh you had that too, didn’t you?

Nick: The new frequency ranges took effect three months earlier in Australia. Aside from the need to change to new frequencies, TVNZ have adopted the DWX system because it’s a perfect match to the XDCAM cameras they already work with. In Australia – the Seven, Nine, Ten and Prime networks have all adopted DWX for their News and Current Affairs shooting too – shows like 60 Minutes and A Current Affair – so we’ve gone from no DWX, because it wasn’t able to be used in Australia and New Zealand due to restrictions in our

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

Let the Good Times Roll!

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class licensing – all of a sudden they’ve all jumped on board with DWX through necessity, which we’re very pleased about because it delivers fantastic digital quality audio, the flexibility of several transmitter types and the ability to control everything from your camcorder if you’re working with certain common XDCAM shoulder models. It makes it a very versatile and high quality system.

Ed: But you don’t have to be a broadcaster – you’ve got a system there for the small user on a handheld camcorder?

Nick: Yes, we also have our UWP-D wireless system which is going very strongly. That offers small pocket-sized receivers which fit onto quite a number of our camcorders.

We also have something called a Multi-Interface Shoe on many of the camcorders, which allows the UWP-D receiver to be mounted on top of the camera via the shoe, no cables, no batteries. So the power for the receiver is brought up through the shoe from the camera’s battery, while the single channel audio output from the receiver is fed down into the camcorder without having to plug anything in.

sorts of applications you just described.

Also for television stations perhaps setting up a remote camera for a finance reporter or correspondent at a remote site.

Where they need interchangeable lenses with longer range, then you take the leap to a box camera.

We’ve had a high-end box camera, the HDC-P1 for a while and we’ve just updated that to become the HDCP1R, with the same grade of image sensor as our highest level HD studio cameras. However the price jump from a BRC-H900 is significant, so the new HXCP70 box camera I mentioned earlier fits in the middle, allowing a versatile remote camera system to be set up at a lower cost.

In other studio cameras, we have the HSC-100R and HSC-300R. These are very popular HD 3CCD studio cameras and of course we also have the top of our HD range, the very popular HDC-2000 Series cameras.

Ed: Now I understand at the press presentation the other day, there was a whole group of gentleman who came up on the stage when the latest studio camera from Sony was unveiled?

It makes for a fool-proof system for all types of users – you know an extra set of cables, an extra set of batteries you don’t have to worry about. That MI Shoe is common to a lot of our cameras including the new PXW-FS7.

Ed: So now we’re into the camera area?

Nick: This is basically the studio camera display.

We have a whole range of studio cameras commencing with the HXC-D70 which is our entry level in a dedicated studio camera.

It’s a 3 chip two-thirds inch CMOS camera and has been quite popular among small broadcasters, also institutions such as universities and churches.

What’s new at NAB is that we’ve introduced a box camera version, called the HXC-P70. This is a small box, essentially with the same imaging sensors as the larger HXC-D70 studio camera, with the ability to fit B4 lenses, but all in a very small package, so really designed to go onto a robotic head like we’re showing here in an unmanned News studio, or an automated studio, or some kind of observation role. And it’s relatively low cost – it’s round about US$14,000 which for a camera like this is a very good price.

Ed: Now with the move towards combined radio television breakfast shows, where you are in a little space, it gives you the chance to have a really decent quality camera system?

Nick: That’s true. We have our BRC-H900 pan/ tilt/zoom camera that’s been out for a little while.

That’s our flagship P/T/Z model, and in fact, delivers the highest performance on the market. It’s a 3 chip half inch automatic camera, with a 14x zoom and the robotics all built-in. It’s an excellent camera for the

Studio 4K television camera.

Nick: Well what that was highlighting was that in the North American market, the HDC-2000 series is very much an industry standard in outside broadcast – as it is in New Zealand and Australia too. A very high percentage of live content that you’re seeing in outside broadcasts comes out of an HDC camera.

So what we have just launched at NAB, to much fanfare, is the new HDC-4300. This is a 4K HDC, a top grade outside broadcast and studio camera, with three true 4K two-thirds inch sensors.

The significance of the gentlemen who were brought up on stage at the press conference is that they represented some of the major players in outside broadcasting in the US – companies like NEP, Game Creek, Bexel, also CBS, NBC, NBC Sport. These are very significant players who all were showing their support for this new camera by appearing at its unveiling.

The HDC-4300 out of the box is an HD camera. If you want to shoot in 4K that can be switched on at a cost, either permanently or with weekly or monthly licences.

So for example, if you normally do HD work but the

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occasional 4K job comes in, as long as you’ve got the rest of the infrastructure to support 4K, the camera can be switched into 4K for a short term rather than having bought the option outright at the beginning.

Out of the box it does HD with up to 3x super slo-mo.

Again there is a further option for up to 8x super slo -mo in HD that can be enabled permanently, weekly or monthly. It’s a very powerful and versatile camera that now becomes the flagship of our studio camera range.

Ed: Is the base price just in HD with the lowest slomo, is that a very affordable price?

Nick: It’s around 10% higher than our HDC-2000 Series HD cameras, but that includes the 3x slo-mo function. The other beautiful thing about this camera is that it’s fully compatible with all the accessories and infrastructure that we have for our existing HD system, so the large lens adapters, remote control panels and base stations are the same as our existing HDC-2000 Series. There is also an additional 2RU baseband processor unit that has to be added for each base station.

On the stand we’re showing monitors displaying the HD and 4K outputs from the same camera – you can see quite clearly that, even in HD, it’s a beautiful image due to the super-sampling. We believe this is the first true 4K system camera, we’re talking here about 3 CMOS full 4K sensors.

Ed: Well it’s great some workflows that but as I said right dragging some lower def?

talking about 4K and there are are involving 4K at the moment, at the start, it’s still a case of level broadcasters out of standard

Nick: I should at this point say it’s also not all about local broadcasting. Just to give you an idea, the recent Cricket World Cup that played in Australia and partly in New Zealand was actually covered in 4K and transmitted in 4K to India, then transmitted via satellite to viewers on a particular service in India in 4K. It wasn’t a trial, this is a regular 4K channel that is now operating in India. We didn’t get to see it in 4K in Australia or New Zealand, but the Indians did! So that’s an example of actual 4K production.

Another example, late last year in Sydney, Katy Perry was touring and her concert was captured in 4K by 12 of our PMW-F55 and two of our PXW-FS7 4K cameras.

Again, we haven't seen it locally yet, that content is going overseas for undetermined ( at this stage ) use.

But again that was using our 4K equipment to do a local 4K production, even though local broadcasters in both our countries aren’t looking at 4K yet.

What we’re also showing at NAB are ways you can use 4K cameras to enhance HD production. There are a number of systems that we’ve shown in conceptual form over recent years at these exhibitions – these are now all real products that can be purchased and are being used.

Where stitching takes place.

For example, we’re showing a basketball court being covered by two 4K cameras that are locked off high up in the stands, stitched together to give a wide shot of the court. This system will stitch these shots together in real time and we then have up to three cut-outs, with a virtual camera application which the operator drives just via a mouse – he’s the cameraman essentially.

So how can you use this? Well for example, there may be a play or some incident – a fight or something that’s been captured by the wide shot …

Ed:

Australian rugby we’re talking?

Nick: If that’s what people want to see … something that’s happened on a part of the field that the cameras are not covering at that moment. If this was captured in isolation, the director can go back using a replay device and drive this virtual camera to show the missed area.

The resolution in this example is two x 4K, so you could realistically go into an eighth of this total frame and still have an HD quality output. So this is a great example of how you could use a system that starts with 4K cameras to enhance HD production.

In Australasia, there have been some tests using this on things like Australian Rules football and I believe the producers and the networks involved were very happy.

Ed: And that’s it, for most situations, even one of the crops there is below HD I’d say, but certainly you’re getting away with it?

Nick: You can set limits on the zoom in, so the producers can specify “look, there’s no way I want to go in more than a certain amount so that we don’t degrade the quality” … even so, I’d say, those pictures are quite acceptable for an HD broadcast.

It doesn’t have to be two 4K cameras – we’re also showing a similar application with a single 4K camera, still with the virtual camera or the cut-out function. You could still go into a quarter of that frame and bag things.

Another application for our 4K camera systems, whether they’re derived from the new HDC-4300 or using our digital cinema camera, the PMW-F55, these cameras can be capable of up to 8x super slo-mo in HD. We’re showing our own replay server to support this.

The very common EVS replay servers support up to 3x

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now and I’m told by the end of the year will support up to 8x. Now as I’ve mentioned the F55 …

camera produces a very good picture. Secondly is the versatility.

As you mentioned, there are a lot of accessories from Sony and other manufacturers that allow both the F55 and F5 cameras to be configured in different ways. That makes them a very versatile package, whether you’re doing production style work, commercial work, drama work, motion picture work, single operator run-and-gun style reality television or whatever.

And the third key point is workflow.

Both cameras offer the versatility of a whole range of codecs.

One of the newest things we are now shipping, but actually announced here last year, is an option board for the cameras that allow them to record ProRes or DNxHD. Whilst the cameras have always had quite a versatile range of codecs – XAVC, MPEG50, SStP, as well as the option for RAW, we’ve now added the option for ProRes and DNxHD, both in a number of flavours.

So they become even more versatile … increasing their ability to deliver a whole range of file formats, depending on what the customer needs.

Ed: What makes the F55 suitable for the higher end movie market I understand, is the 16 bit RAW capability?

The F55 fully kitted out.

Ed: Well I wanted to mention it to start with, because again the buzz that I’ve heard around the tracks is that the F55 has become the standard for a lot of production in the high corporate end, documentary, reality show – basically people choose the F55 because they know it works and they know it produces an excellent picture, and it has a workflow that is easy to share?

Nick: Certainly the F55 has found great acceptance in all those kinds of production, but a big area where it’s used is for drama. In the US, the F55 is being used to shoot a reasonable proportion of television drama.

In Australia, there’s also an increasing number of drama series being shot on the F55. Here in the States quite a number of feature films are being shot on the F55 or a combination of F55 and our flagship CineAlta F65 camera – a number of DOPs I’ve heard speak have commented how easily the pictures from an F55 intercut with an F65. A number of projects have used this camera as a B or a C camera, or for situations where they need something more compact and need to get back into the corner or a tight space.

Both the F55 and F5 are certainly growing strongly, not only for drama but also documentary, reality and even current affairs programmes – in Australia 60 Minutes have moved to shooting with them.

Ed: But it’s not just picking it for a particular genre, I think people would be picking it because it does the job and does it easily. It’s easy to operate and in post it’s easy to handle the files. Also the number of accessories that are available for it – it just goes on and on.

Nick: I think there are three key points. The first one has got to be the pictures – people love the pictures. They think the pictures are beautiful and the

Nick: Again, there are probably three key things that make the camera suitable for that level. The ability to very simply attach a compact RAW recorder at the back and record 16 bit RAW is one thing. Note, the F5 can also do this.

Working in RAW gives the post-production team the most versatility regardless of whether the production is being delivered in 4K or more likely going out in HD or possibly 2K for the cinema. Capturing in 4K gives post the most to work with. For example, the first motion picture that I’m aware of to be shot in Australasia on the F55 was the recent Turkey Shoot: Reloaded – that was released in 2K, not 4K, but it was very effects intensive and they wanted to give the post-production team the most to work with.

Secondly, being able to fit PL mount cinema-style lenses to the camera is extremely important. The third thing is the fact that the sensor has such a wide colour gamut – in fact it’s very much akin to the F65, it’s an extremely wide colour gamut which means very subtle nuances of colour can be reproduced, all contributing to its reputation for great pictures.

Ed: Nick: Ed:

And the fourth thing?

Oh whatever, who’s counting?!

We just don’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Nick: A further key point is the F55 has what we call frame image scan, which is essentially a global shutter.

All cameras with CMOS sensors exhibit some degree of rolling shutter effect. This is seen as distortion in vertical elements of the picture with fast moving subjects.

More from Nick on shutter effects and NAB product from NZVN Sony next month.

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Rycote Windjammers for Sound Techniques For Sound Techniques, we’re here at Rycote and we have Megan Davies and we have Molly Davies and it’s no coincidence that these two young ladies are actually related to the owner of the company. He’s standing back and he’s got his credit card firmly in his pocket.

Ed: I understand that it depends how well you do with this interview as to whether he gives you the credit card again. We’ll start with you Megan. Tell me about the Cyclone?

Megan: The Cyclone is effectively a windshield with a windjammer on top that is all just compressed into one 3DTex material which is three layers of material compressed from the original windjammer.

Molly and Megan for Rycote.

Ed: Does it work better than a windjammer?

Megan: I would say it’s a higher quality than a windjammer. That’s not to say that the windjammer isn’t just as good.

Ed: So you shouldn’t throw away your British flagged windjammer and buy a Cyclone, but if you’re looking at a new one?

Megan: Yes, if you’re looking at a new one then I’d say this one is definitely what you should be going for in terms of efficiency, like for instance, it would be the same quality in 10 years’ time as it would be the day you bought it. Whereas if you were to buy one with fur, over the years with it, out in the weather extremes, it starts to deteriorate and the fur starts to matt.

Ed: The furry ones don't shed in Spring?

Megan: They can do. The Cyclone, in terms of the material, it’s definitely a lot more efficient.

Ed: And it’s a lot easier to change your microphone I understand?

Megan: Yes. It’s got four different safety brackets, which you unclip from the back, and the whole thing is supported by magnets, so you can actually detach the whole thing very simply, just like that. And the good thing about this also is that this C-Arm can detach too, here. This means that you can record indoors with it being a lighter weight and lower profile. So everything about it is easy. From someone who is not a sound recordist, looking at this you can also just see – like even I understand how it’s a lot easier in terms of the classic one.

Ed: And now we have Molly and Molly’s going to tell me a little bit more about the internals here, the bracket that this particular microphone is supported by – what’s special about the bracket?

Molly: Coming out soon we will have 2 different Lyre suspensions. So we have the MS and the XY which will be surround sound, so that will be much easier for people who are outdoors and using different microphones.

Ed: So there seems to be a different arrangement with the Lyres – these ones are vertical and the other ones are horizontal. Does that make a difference or are they adjustable?

Molly: These are different types. Soon there’ll be lots of different types of suspensions you can buy for the Cyclone. So for whatever microphone you have, there will eventually be a suspension you can use for it.

Ed: Oh I see, so you can use this dual mount Lyre suspension inside the Cyclone if you want stereo recording?

Molly: Yes, you can use it with the basket we have at the moment for the large, medium or small, and you can interchange, change them around, wherever you’re using them basically.

Ed: Has there been any improvement in the material or the way the material is arranged in your Lyre?

Molly: In the Lyre, they haven’t actually changed the main one, for the small, medium or large, but for the ones coming out soon, they are still the same Lyres, they are just using some different brackets in between for the different microphones to fit obviously.

Ed: Perhaps we’d better bring Dad in at this point.

They’ve done very well, and they deserve the credit card tomorrow, but we’re stumbled on the point of the Lyre design here – this particular one is black and hard on the outside, but soft on the inside?

Simon: Yes. Well when you look at the Lyres …

Ed: Listen up girls.

Simon: Did this girl not know the answer to this?

Ed: Oh I can’t remember which girl it was.

Simon: Oh that’s the middle child … ginger as well, yeah. No, we’ve got different hardnesses and what we’ve used is a colour combination to tell which one is which. The lower the number on a Shore Hardness Scale, the softer it is. The standard Lyre that you see here with the grey lining and the black rigid material is 72 Shore and that’s like perfect for "run and gun" with say like 416, a CMIT or a Super CMIT here. We then do softer which is a 62 Shore which would be black and black as you’ll see here with the little Sennheiser. Now 62 Shore is much softer and that just gives more of a compliance for the lighter microphones. They can also use combinations of hardnesses. We also do an 82 Shore which is very stiff, which is a grey Lyre and it’s for different microphones, so if it’s a short microphone very light we go black/black which is 62; medium black with a grey soft grip; 82 Shore is for the long MKH-70s and A16s and things like that and that’s grey.

Ed: And both these other combinations here don’t have microphones in them, but they are also designed to go in the Cyclone casing?

Simon: Yes. Back in September when we brought out the first Cyclone, the large, the reason we did that was because the actual body component of the Cyclone is a single piece, and that’s tooled on an injection mould

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machine about 20 miles away from the Rycote factory in Swindon. It’s the biggest tool and therefore was the one that we had to do first.

The smaller ones are coming and the reason we’ve got those coming is (a) for the smaller microphones, smaller shotguns like the KM series from Neumann and the smaller Schoeps, but also the stereo rigs. So in September-October time, we’re going to have MS stereo rigs bespoke to lots of different rigs like the 30/50 or the 30/60, the Schoeps.

Ed: But can’t you put any combination of base piece inside the different size cases as long as the microphones fit?

Simon: Yes, that’s definitely going to be the case.

When it comes to stereo, it tends to be that it’s either for the MKH range from Sennheiser 25 round or square and then you’ve got a smaller diameter to like the Schoeps and the Neumanns and we’ll do kits for them.

But these are very specialist because we’ve designed the Lyres so they give isolation for MS stereo where at the moment the Lyre is designed for an axial suspension for a mono. This is designed to give good isolation and great coincident distance for MS, which is a new thing for us or anyone else’s mounts out there.

So it’s a good follow through for the Cyclone; it’s phase 3 and then we’ve got some more stuff coming down the track as well.

Ed: And your factory has been able to keep up with the worldwide demand – your orders are up to speed for the New Zealand market?

Simon: The New Zealand market is going very well.

Stephen is a great guy and we’re very, very happy with that. We were, I have to be very honest, taken a little

back by the demand. In September, we expected to get orders of a certain number and our orders in the first 2 months exceeded our initial forecast for the year.

So that brought different problems because as a production base we’re quite a small unit and this is a new product which was quite tricky – magnets, we had to have north and south stations all over the building, never should they get mixed up. But no, it’s been very good and the interest in the material and the shapes and things like that.

Ed:

But the girls can work night shift surely?

Simon: They did, yes exactly. We broke on the 22nd of December having worked nonstop for 6 weeks, 7 days a week, 18 hour days, so they just didn’t have any choice. But they got a present at Christmas … I think!

Ed:

And they get the credit card tomorrow?

Simon: They’ve already been down there with their personal shoppers, so don’t believe anything they say.

NZVN

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BBS Lighting for PLS For PLS we are at BBS Lighting with Peter Plesner.

Ed: My goodness, you’re president? Is that just for the American version or the whole company?

Peter: The world - and that's enough. We are a Denmark based company and we develop and build everything in Denmark, in Copenhagen, and have been doing so for many years since 1999.

Ed: What we’ve seen so far is a 1K panel, but I see the booth is bigger this year and there are some other products? First – just going back to the 1K panel. I know that you came out with the handheld version, the run and gun one – any other developments?

Peter: Yes, we are adding a lot of developments in the remote phosphor part because we believe in the colour fidelity and the way it looks. It’s really a nice soft light, instead of all the colour tweaking instruments, so where you’re sure to use a certain colour temperature, you have the right match. So if you want 56, you get 56, not an accumulative 56. But we’ve taken the development further and the first thing we now make is remote phosphor tubes. This one is specifically called the Pipeline Reporter Kit. It’s made for correspondents, reporters. They travel throughout the world, they even go into war zones, they come back on Sky App from the hotel or on some consumer software and they try to make "picture in picture" to match with the main studio in Copenhagen or London or New York …

Ed:

Or Auckland?

Peter: Or Auckland for instance, so what we’ve done here is a very simple setup. It’s 1.6 kilogram – the whole kit. The kit has everything in it adapted for world power supplies. You’ve got onboard dimmers on the back of these units and we have three different colour temperatures that we’re going to supply with this – you can get a 32, a 43 or a 56 kit and it sets up in minutes. You put each one on each side of the monitor and you have your web camera in front and you’re corresponding and you’re ready to go.

Ed: And your wife can use this to put her makeup on can’t she?

Peter: Yes exactly. We have had requests from a lot of makeup people, especially for features in TV. They really like the quality of this light to do the makeup and that is going to match fine onstage.

Ed: So how do you replace or change the phosphor panel on this?

Peter: You don’t change this one, it’s a fixed colour temperature.

You buy it as a fixed colour temperature because we don’t want people to fumble around with the LEDs and ESD and all that jazz, so that’s the way you do it here.

Ed: This is a bit of a departure because, the Area 48 soft, the special feature of that is that you can change the panel?

Peter: Yes, but here you are pretty certain what you need in the situation, so you just buy that fixed colour temperature. We believe what we see is that people go for something in between 43, you have a great area of colour fidelity, you can match it with daylight and you can match it with tungsten, so it’s pretty in the middle of everything. So now, that being

Peter for BBS Lighting.

said, we have of course also taken that even further, so we are making systems with 1, 2, 3 and 4 foot-long tubes. This is a similar tube in a 2 foot configuration.

It has the DC plug in here and you have got sliding magnets here on your mount, so you can simply mount that to anywhere where you find some steel, like we did here. We are making a variety of different housings for it – that is going to be extremely lightweight, and reflector housings. We have a controller here, this is a DMX controller, it will do colour tweaking; if you insert two different colour temperatures of tubes you can still tweak the colour if you want that. If you are certain of what you’re doing, you would just take a fixed colour temperature and get more blast. This controller can run eight 4 foot tubes and eight 4 foot tubes would give you around 32,000 lumens so it’s extremely powerful.

Ed: But for the smaller user, you’re just taking a simple DC input, you don’t need any special external power?

Peter: For the smaller user, we have an in-cable dimmer, a small dimmer, so for a car kit and stuff like that, you can attach the tube and you have a manual dimmer.

Ed:

But it’s just taking the 12 Volt car supply?

Peter: Yes, exactly, or a D-Tap from a battery or a small DV battery. This is only consuming max 10 Watt, including the dimmer, per foot, so it’s not taking that much power. Here you can see this is also a single reflector housing. This is, mind you, a prototype, but you see how powerful that thing is, and we are making

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these single reflectors because more and more people make the 8 foot height small studios and corporate studios and all the newsrooms they are going media now, they are going moving pictures.

Ed: So would you see this as an alternative to – I guess you must say, the industry standard, the Kino Flo? Peter: Yes, this would work also as a Kino Flo, but that hasn’t really been the thought around it or the rationale around it, but we do have a 4 foot four bank housing – we will have that.

Ed: Flo?

But you’re not doing a “shoot out” with Kino

Peter: No, why would we, the Kino Flo is a great system, it’s been working for ages and they have the advantage. You can go in any office environment and change all the tubes; we cannot do that, so we’re missing out on that market, but it doesn’t matter.

This is definitely fully controllable, it doesn’t change colour temperature when dimmed; it dims very softly to zero – you can see it dimming here, see how soft that is.

Ed: So where would you see the use of this being over and above what a Kino Flo could do?

Peter: This would be in a studio environment – you can make really big studio systems out of this because if you get three controllers and 24 tubes you have a pretty good studio setup for a full studio.

Ed:

Or you can have a very little studio?

Peter: Yes and you can also use a 2 foot mount, put it on a stand, it’s going to give you more than enough light for a face shoot and you can just use a small manual dimmer.

We’re trying to make a very versatile system here, and we will also make different shape reflectors, also some funny shapes – you’ll see that later. But we’ll also be listening to the market and to what all the gaffers and DOPs are telling us and then we’ll slowly develop more and more.

Ed:

So you don’t have to have straight tubes?

Peter:

No, they could be any shape.

Ed: We will look forward to that next year.

Peter: The last thing I would show you – this is what we call the FLYER. It’s made especially for pole operation. The weight of this head is only 4 pounds, which is why we can put it at the end of a pole.

However, this is a product where you walk inside, outside, you walk in every environment and you have to match up, so this is a colour tweaking product.

You have a belt pack mount with a controller, you have the intensity, you have the colour … the colour peak and a blackout button, so you set it to what you need and then when you’re ready to go, you go. It’s very fast – we’ve used this a lot for politicians "walk and talk" in corridors, you have a Steadicam and you have a guy running with light and you also use it a lot for … you know, you have two politicians come out of a meeting, you have 50 photographers around them, they want to be the first one to hear the word – what happened in the meeting?

So we have two guys with these poles, booming over the crowd, and then they can all switch off all their horrible camera lights. That product is made especially for that; it comes complete in a case with soft box … it’s a complete kit.

Ed: Now just tell me again about the colour temperature – is it fixed or you’ve got to …?

Peter: …

No it’s colour tweakable

Ed: Tweakable, what do you mean “tweakable”?

Peter: It goes from 3000 Kelvin to 5600, so you can see this is a 5600 and then we’ll slowly move to 3000.

Ed: And you can read that off your dial there?

Peter: You look at the monitor, use your eyes, don’t trust the digits on the back of things.

Ed: That’s why you don’t have the numbers on there?

Peter: Yes, exactly. Use your eyes, that’s why you’ve got them!

Peter demonstrates how to hold a softbox.

Page 10

Ed:

You sound like Chris McKenzie.

NZVN

Chimera for PLS For PLS, we are at Chimera and we have Lynn Bryson.

Ed: Now Lynn, there are a lot of lights on this stand, but you’re not actually a light selling company are you – you make accessories for lights from many manufacturers?

Lynn: Exactly.

We make light modifiers. We are a partner with most of the major light manufacturers and do some OEM stuff, but primarily, we’ve been shaping and sculpting light for other players. Sounds like Area 48 is probably one of the popular lights for you?

Ed: Well it’s certainly one of the specialty lights that PLS offers.

Lynn for Chimera.

Lynn: Okay, we’ve made a new modifier for it, I got it in time just for the show; I believe I carried it in my suitcase to set up here. It uses the barn doors of the Area 48 to provide the actual product support, so there’s no frame required. It takes the light source and turns it into a small screen. We have a 40 degree grid for it as well.

Ed: There’s a lot of Velcro involved here. It must have been a boon for you when they invented Velcro?

Lynn: It does make our life much simpler, absolutely. I don’t have a lot of knot skills, I’ve never been a rope person … buttons don’t work for us. But the Area 48 attaches to some straps of Velcro underneath the barn doors to hold it in place and then the structure of the softbox itself uses the barn doors.

In the grid there’s also some thin metal pieces that provide some rigidity – I know it’s a little hard to translate onto the microphone but you can hear that “snap” sound. So there’s actually some support in the grid itself that helps keeps the softbox nice and tough.

lights. Some are specific. We made this softbox in large part because we thought the ARRI M8 would work better with the Video Pro than a Quartz Daylight ring, so we needed a slightly larger ring. But coincidentally, it does work with a few other lights as well.

Ed: And you were talking before about angle – you were saying with the BBS's, that’s a 40 degree angle?

Lynn: That’s for the grids I was talking about.

The grids are accessories to our accessories.

So that’s an option that not all softboxes come with a grid. Generally, we build them so they can accept a grid. The grids are designed to prevent light spill so you can keep light off subjects that you don’t want to have light on; keep it exactly where you want it.

Ed: And your degree is related to the depth of the honeycomb?

Lynn: Actually the width of the cell generally defines the degree angle.

We fit the LitePanels Astra of course; we fit all of the Nicams; the original LitePanels we fit for a long time – you probably know about that. We have a new ring for the ARRI M8. It’s a nine and five-eighths inch ring which traditionally you had to use a larger Quartz Daylight series ring. It actually works with the Video Pro series, so you don’t have to upgrade to the larger, more expensive Quartz series. It’s a way of sending the ring sizes up past 9 inches for the ARRI M8. Also that ring works with the Zylight F8 and a few other lights as well, including the Aden.

Ed: So I guess the trick with having these softboxes is that you want them to be able to be put on and taken off quickly and you want them to be robust, and that’s why having it designed for a particular light with particular connections or straps, that’s important?

Lynn: Ed:

Yes absolutely.

And you don’t want spill either?

Lynn: You don’t want spill, you want an even light across the diffusion screen, you don’t want it to be too spotty. Traditionally, Chimera uses speed rings that may be interchangeable between lights … a 7¾ inch ring could probably be used on a bunch of different Page 11

Ed:

Because you have a standard depth?

Lynn: Yes, exactly the same all of them – the wider cells have a wider beam angle.

Ed: Is the angle of the softbox also important – I guess that must vary from light to light?

Lynn: We have two depths, we have the Video Pro and then the Daylight Junior and in the larger series of banks we have the Quartz and Daylight Standard series. The Video Pro and Quartz are the standard depth, they work for most lights, most powers, openfaced lights and whatnot. With some Fresnels that have a very narrow beam angle to begin with, the depth of the Video Pro and the Quartz series isn’t enough for the light to spread properly, so you end up with a hot spot in the middle. In those cases, the Daylight Junior and the Daylight Standard are the banks to use because the extra 10 inches or so depending on the size of the bank, allows the light more time to spread and provides you with a more even illumination of the front screen. You can sort of see there’s a bit of a hot spot in the middle of that one, because it’s got a focus light. If we put a Daylight Junior on that, it would actually look better, we’d have a more even illumination on the front of that screen.

Ed: Now we’ve got a very specialised Chimera softbox here – it looks like a big doughnut?

Lynn: It’s the RingMAXX and it’s our latest product. This is actually still a prototype, we haven’t even begun shipping these yet. It’s designed to work with strobes or with continuous lights. It can fit a wide variety of lights, so long as the actual space limitations aren’t exceeded.

The light mounts are adjustable forwards and backwards and up and down. This is a model designed for high heat, it’s got industrial fabric to withstand the higher temperatures …

Ed:

Is it a carbon material?

Lynn: sure …

Ed:

It’s not a carbon-based material – I’m not

Yarmo is in the circular window today.

Ed:

Lynn: Yes, you can fit four lights. You can mount in two different ways, it comes standard with a stud that’s six on either side to go in a 2½ inch cuphead, or you can use it with a yoke and a sliding stand. You can tilt it forward and back and it makes an incredible round ring to check the round catch lights in this gentleman’s eyes. It makes a very flattering light.

Ed: He’s never looked more beautiful I’d say. So was this something that came from your own brains or did a customer ask "can you make us a ring light?"

Lynn: Probably a brainchild of Yarmo we can’t pronounce his last name, we just call him Yarmo – he’s Finnish. He built one a while ago and we have the resources to make the fabric bodies a little better than he could and we have the distribution actually to get it out there.

So it was his brainchild, but we’re manufacturing it and he’s here helping us market it.

Ed:

Space age is it?

Lynn: Yes, it’s space age, exactly. It’s very heat resistant – we’ll just leave it at that.

There are individual compartments in the RingMAXX so you can turn lights on and off and adjust the spread of light throughout.

It takes a maximum of four does it?

And here you’ve got an over the top light?

Lynn: Yes, this is called a Pancake Lantern. It’s like a similar lantern, it’s just a little bit flatter. It’s designed to be used in a smaller space. It’s a real popular product for lighting like an interview or a kitchen table situation.

If you take the skirts off, you can use it as an omnidirectional light on its side, but with the skirts attached, you can flag off light on either side and roll the skirts up to adjust the light spill as needed.

So it basically has built-in flagging; currently we have it set up with 200 Watt bug light, but any broad source light that fits in a semi-Video Pro ring will work in there.

Ed: Wow. arrangement.

A

very

versatile

Pretty well every light that PLS would offer is represented here with a Chimera softbox.

Lynn:

Yes, absolutely.

We’re friends manufacturers.

Page 12

with

all

lighting NZVN

   

Soft lights that ‘wrap’ around objects Diffused shadows and soft edges Products built to last Constantly evolving and developing for 30+ years  Lightweight, portable, and durable  Heat resistant, easy to assemble “When the light has to be perfect, the best depend on the best, year after year”.

Phone: 09 302 4100

Email: info@kelpls.co.nz

Website: www.kelpls.co.nz

Avid Everywhere for Atomise For Atomise, we are at the Avid stand with Ren Middleton.

Ed: Now Ren, Richard is heavily involved with a large broadcaster in Auckland at the moment and he couldn’t make it, so you’ve been chosen as the sacrificial interviewee.

Ren: Fantastic.

Ed:

I know you enjoy this Ren.

Ren: I do, I love it, I’m a natural.

Ed: Yeah … okay … go! So what’s going to excite us from Avid this year?

Ren: We’ve got a few new things happening. We’re building on our Avid Everywhere strategy and our platform approach, so we’re showing a lot of extra integration with third parties, but also one of the big announcements that we’ve had is that we’ve integrated our asset management Interplay MAM into our Media Central interface.

So from a web browser, now you can look at your archived assets, you can look at your News through iNews and you can also look at your production assets, which gives you the ability to mix and match all of those, add metadata and view media and even edit media in the Cloud via a web browser. So that’s one of the quite exciting things that’s really expanding and bringing all those workflows together.

Ed: Just while we’re on Avid Everywhere, if you’d made that statement a number of years ago, it would have been a bit like Apple, sort of “you know we are the best and we’re going to be everywhere, so you’d better join us.” But from my understanding, the way Avid has gone in the last few years, it is more “come in and share this with us.” It’s much more an open friendly approachable company – you’d agree with that?

Ren: Yes absolutely. I guess what we’re doing is why did we connect with our own platform, it’s exactly the same and we offer exact connectivity toolkit, so all the APIs to third parties. So they can join us as equally well as we can. So it’s just the development. We have put processes in place to help other partners who want to join us to go through a qualifying process because we think that’s important. One of the things that we’ve highlighted – and it was firstly at IBC but now also at this show, is that we’ve got directly competing products as part of our platform.

Ed: I’ve just interviewed 2 of them in the last couple of days, and that was Apace Systems and MOG today, and both of them have said “look, Avid is very big for us and we’re very pleased to be part of a partnership with Avid and we all work nicely together.”

Ren: That’s right and I think we did have the reputation of being very closed and over the last couple of years we’ve wanted to prove that we were very, very open and I think that message is finally getting through now.

Ed: I think “closed” is a euphemism – anyway that’s in the past, we’re moving forward.

Ren: Exactly. I think one of the other exciting things that we’ve announced is Media Composer 1 First. This is effectively a free Media Composer. What we want to do is, we don’t want anybody to have any excuse not to go with a Media Composer which is what all of the professionals use in the industry around the world. I

Ren for Atomise.

don’t have all the details, it’s not released yet, but it’s likely to be a simplified version of Media Composer with maybe limited tracks and things like that and storing your project in the Cloud.

But it will be free, so students can have it and then, if they want to move on to the full blown Media Composer, they can then go through a subscription model, because we’ve got flexible licensing. So the idea is that we work with the industry people and they want to have kids coming up through the system that really know Media Composer.

It gives them no excuse not to use it at the moment.

So I think that’s really exciting.

Ed: Well on the other side though, the sceptic might say “well, there’s some other companies out there who are allowing free access to some pretty powerful editing and colour correcting software, as well as others who are just providing free editing software, so you’re just joining that boat so you don’t miss out?”

Ren: Oh absolutely, but we know that, at the end of the day, the most important thing is that all of the major movies, film, television production houses are edited with Avid.

Every single Academy Award nominated movie was cut on Avid.

So it’s about industry relevance.

Media Composer is industry relevant, so we just want to give all the people that choose and want to have a play and want to have a go, the opportunity to get on those tools and learn those tools for free.

Ed: Because it is a learning curve and I know a few hours ago, I spoke with an Avid person who, when he first was placed before an Avid, thought it was terrible, he didn’t understand it and he didn’t like it and he wanted to go back to his Premiere, which I can understand, but then he did a training course and suddenly it all came clear and now he works for the company?

Ren: Everything’s easy once you know how to do it. If we put those tools and give the young editors the opportunity to do it earlier, that’s the best. I think it’s terrific; there’s no downside as I see it with this plan.

I think one of the other announcements that we’ve just made is in the shared storage environment. You may be familiar with ISIS 7500 and ISIS 5500. Now we’ve brought out ISIS 1000. So that’s a lower cost, it’s 20 terabytes so it’s not tiny, but it can expand up to 80 terabytes and you can hang 24 clients off it. That’s going to be released later in the year as well. So the idea is for those smaller production companies, smaller

Page 14

products have only been ProRes or even RAW, but not DNxHD so by them adding that, it’s obviously showing that more and more people are wanting DNxHD as a compressed high definition codec?

Ren: Yes, and it’s because it’s a ratified standard. Some people want that choice of Mac or PC, so we’ve worked with all of the major camera manufacturers in getting them to develop with us the DNxHD. That’s for high definition workflows; we’re even working with them at the moment to introduce DNxHR so that you can have, for instance, 4K workflows and we can take a lower res version of that, so to save on storage via DNxHR, and they can start cutting that immediately. So we’re working with all of those manufacturers and we’ve got a very good co-operative relationship with all of them. education or commercial editing people, or even enterprises that do a bit of editing, that just have a small work group, they want to get into it at a really cost effective price. That’s where that’s going to come in.

Ed: it?

Is that scalable – can they add further storage to

Ren: They can. At the moment, it’s spec’d to scale up to 80 terabytes, so 4 chassis, but it will probably be capped at about 24 clients. But who knows, it’s early days, so with these things, the expansion capabilities tend to go up over time.

Ed: And to us old fellows a terabyte seems a lot, but I guess these days, when you’re dealing with RAW ...?

Ren: It’s nothing and that’s the thing. workflows – everybody wants 4K. Ed:

High res

You can handle 8K now can you?

Ren: We can. We can do 4K; you can determine your own framerate and size. That’s the highlight here that we go resolution independent, and we’ve got proxy workflows to do that. We’ve developed our own codecs DNxHR to enable that as well, so you don’t have to have all of your big fat files on our storage, you can shove them over somewhere else and use these lower resolutions on our storage and then bring them into your high res files at a later date. So we’ve got all of those workflows covered … I know it’s one of the questions you asked me a few years ago about where were we heading with those high res formats, so we’re well and truly there now.

So have you bought anything at the show Ren?

Ren: Well not too much personally, but we did announce that we’ve got a binding agreement with Orad, so it looks like Avid are going out and purchasing Orad, which is a very high end graphics system. I can’t go into too much detail – I used to know them quite well, but I haven’t even had a chance to go down and have a good look at them. I think that’s a really exciting acquisition because it totally complements what Avid already had.

Ed: So again, you don’t require third party vendors to talk to your Media Composer product; by building it in the system and having it internally, like you did with Pro Tools, it becomes a much easier workflow?

Ren: Yes potentially.

Ed:

Oh now they want 8K Ren?

Ren: That’s right, it keeps going, so we’ve got to make sure that we’ve got workflows to cover all of those, which we do, because of course, we announced “resolution independence” on Media Composer as well, which you may recall last year.

Ed:

Ed:

But it’s early days?

Ren: I can’t even speculate on the workflows you know ... it’s not all signed sealed and delivered, but there’s an intent there, so we’ll have a look at it. I can tell you Orad really is a damn good product, so I think it’s going to really complement what Avid already has on its shelf.

Ed: So the relationship with Orad can only be good, but what develops will certainly help the user?

Ren: Yes, exciting times.

Ed: Now looking at some of the other vendors at the show that make recorders, or the number of little monitors that have built-in recorders that are around, including one that’s just come out from Blackmagic, I was interested to see that finally Blackmagic has added DNxHD to the codecs it supports.

Previously, many of the Page 16

NZVN

Sennheiser at NAB We are here at Sennheiser and we are talking with James Waldron from Australia with Stephen Buckland listening in.

Ed: James, you have two products … well you have lots of products, but you’ve got two new ones?

James: There are two new ones that we’re launching here at NAB. One of them has two models in the range, the ClipMic Digital and the MKE 2 Digital.

They’re both fairly similar. The ClipMic is our traditional ME2 Lavalier microphone, it’s typically supplied with an Evolution wireless kit and, in this case, it has a high quality analogue to digital converter in the cable designed and built by Apogee and the lightning connector on the end of the cable, so you can connect your lapel mic directly into your Apple iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and record high quality audio into your Apple device. Because it’s a lightning connector, you still have a headphone socket free for monitoring, sample rates up to 96 kHz and 24 bits are supported and, because it’s an Apogee A to D converter, it has all of the high quality attributes that Apogee are famous for. It’s a great way to deliver high quality audio from a lapel mic into an Apple device.

Ed: So you could use this as a reporter and not buy an expensive specialist recording device, but just use your cell phone?

James: Correct.

Ed: Is that a good thing for Sennheiser to promote?

James: We don’t sell the recorder!

Ed: But Stephen does – Stephen, what do you think?

Stephen: I think it’s an interesting thing. They asked us for many years about “can I record on my iPhone?”

There are other issues which become involved …

Ed: A phone call right in the middle of the shoot?

Stephen: I don’t know what happens then.

James: Well if you’re doing that I assume you put your phone in flight mode, so that doesn’t happen.

Ed:

Well Apple users mightn’t figure that out?

James: Yes, well they’ll figure it out fairly quickly.

But the concept is that there are lots of people who use these devices for recording now. This is a great way to get high quality audio recorded into your Apple device.

Apogee also have a very nice piece of software that you can download for free called the MetaRecorder and this is a very practical recording interface, adjustable audio levels for example and easy monitoring. The thing

James for Sennheiser.

about it is that you can enter the clip details on your device and then when you transfer your files into Final Cut Pro or one of those postproduction tools, all of your clip data and everything goes along with it, so all your file names and so on, making the post side of things really quick. I mentioned there are two versions – one is the ME2 which is the traditional mic supplied with the Evolution systems; the other one is the broadcast quality MKE 2 high quality lapel mic.

Ed: Because, as it shows here, this is 48 kHz, 24 bit?

James: That’s part of the setup, that’s right.

Ed: And when you go into settings, you can record from 22 kHz right up to 96 kHz … so there is a lot of versatility in the application that you can download for either your phone or your tablet device, which makes it into a professional recorder?

James: Yes, the microphone will record audio into any application you’ve got that can record audio in your phone, but the Apogee software is really nice and integrates well into the postproduction scene, so it’s a good choice.

It’s free from Apogee, so it’s an even better choice.

Ed: So this is a professional product designed for a professional user?

James: Ed:

Yes absolutely.

So it will be available through …

James: Through the pro dealer network.

It’s not designed as a consumer product at all.

Page 18

Ed: So you could actually use the camera function at the same time as you’re using a phone …

James: And the microphone becomes the audio input for your video camera, yes. So it’s perfect for somebody shooting video. It gives them high quality audio to go with it.

Ed: But they’re not recorded as separate files, they’re co-recorded?

James: It would be recorded as part of whatever the video file is, yes.

Ed: Okay, so we’ve just heard that you can have both apps open – you can have the camera app open and the Apogee app open and start recording the audio as a high quality WAV file, then start recording your camera and just take the picture from the camera app, put the both of them into Final Cut, sync them, and then you’ve got a much higher audio quality than you would have if you didn’t use the Apogee app and just used the camera one. In that situation, the microphone would provide audio to the camera recording application, but not at the same high quality.

Now, new product number two?

James: This is the product that we weren’t able to talk about until now. It’s a new wireless microphone system designed for videographers.

It’s a digital wireless microphone system and it’s based on DECT ( Digitally Enhanced Cordless Telephone ) technology.

Working on that basis, expanding some of the concepts in there a little bit, we are able to deliver high quality digital audio over a wireless link.

Traditional form factors, there’s a handheld transmitter, with a lithium

ion battery pack, rechargeable either in a charger or through a USB connector that’s built into the battery pack. The nice thing with lithium ion of course is that you can charge it up and it doesn’t go flat before you use it. It also allows you to have a readout in the display of the time left in hours / minutes. So that’s good.

One of the microphone capsules on the handheld that is available is an omnidirectional mic capsule from the MD 42, so the reporter mic capsule is now available for the handheld transmitter in the AVX range. That capsule also works in the Evolution range, so that will become quite a valuable tool in Evolution wireless mics as well.

So that’s the handheld transmitter. The body pack transmitter – traditional body pack type format, it’s all metal construction, the input connector is the standard Sennheiser 3.5mm mini jack, so all of your standard ME2, ME4 and other Evolution based mics will plug into it. It has a lithium ion rechargeable battery pack, battery charging contacts on the bottom and also a USB port in the bottom so you can recharge it via USB or drop it in a charger. The same with the handheld – charging contacts on the bottom, drop it into a charger.

What’s different here also, the antenna is now a little shape like this …

Ed: It’s not a flexible aerial anymore, it’s a solid little block and the same I guess, with the receiver?

James: Well the receiver is quite different in terms of its shape and form factor. The receiver is very, very small and the output is on a built-in XLR connector, so if you’re recording into a proper video camera with an XLR input, you can plug it straight into the camera.

Page 19

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Ed:

And it winds round 360 degrees?

James: Well about 300 degrees rotation. Again, it’s powered with a lithium ion battery, which you can recharge in a charger or through the USB port.

Ed: So you could actually provide external power if you’ve a particularly long recording …

James: No. Ed: Oh, is the USB port hidden?

James: The USB port is for recharging it, it’s not for operation. There are four LEDs for audio level and a green light that indicates that it’s on and also the green light indicates that it’s paired with a transmitter. DECT technology is a pairing technology, so the transmitter and the receiver are linked together.

Ed: You don’t have to tune them?

James: You don’t have to do anything about it at all. When you pull them out of the box, if they were paired when you put them away and turned them off, you just pull them out and turn them on and they work.

You don’t have to worry about frequencies or tuning or anything.

Ed: So there must be a frequency range that it operates in?

James: It operates between 1880 and 1900 MHz which is a part of the spectrum specifically allocated to DECT devices.

Ed: Aaah – so if you’ve got a remote phone in your house?

James: That’s fine, because they talk to each other and allocate different frequencies for each other and keep out of each other’s way. They’re intelligent like that.

Ed: So one would hope this would be futureproof – that no one’s going to steal that spectrum?

James: Well I think there’s enough installed base of house phones that it’s unlikely it’s going to be taken in a hurry.

Ed: Well I’ve been waiting in this show to find a product that really makes me go “wow” and excites me and James, I think you’ve delivered it. You can tell me about the price?

James: I don’t know the price in Australia yet.

Here in the US it’s $899.

Ed: For the pair?

James: For the kit, yes.

Ed: Well that translates pretty well.

James: That’s not too bad at all. If you’re using a DSLR camera, it probably doesn’t have an XLR input, so

we have a little adapter here with a hot shoe mount, so now you can put it on your hot shoe and we have an adapter cable supplied with a mini jack on the end to plug into your camera. If you don’t have that, there’s a little belt clip accessory, so you can clip it onto your belt or onto the strap or whatever. So there you go.

Ed: And another beautiful thing about it is …

James: DECT is pretty well standardised around the world, so if somebody buys one of these in Australia or New Zealand they can use them in New Zealand or Australia and they can use them in Europe.

The frequencies are the same across those two regions.

There is a different band in the US that operates right across North America. So the ones you buy in Australia and New Zealand, will work in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Middle East, Africa and Europe, but not in North America and vice versa. So just be aware of that.

Ed: But if you were going overseas for a production, then just buying a couple of these wouldn’t break the budget?

James: It won’t break the budget, but it’s a waste of money if you’re going to North America.

Ed: Oh you just buy the US ones?

James: Yes you’d buy the North American version, but you have to buy them in North America. Taiwan, Japan and Brasil are all different from everywhere else, and also from each other.

Ed: There must be some downside to such a wonderful device that looks as though it’s a world-beater?

James: Well some people might think that the latency could be an issue … you know, all digital devices have some latency. This system has 19 milliseconds.

People typically will go “whoa, 19 milliseconds, that’s enormous.” In fact, it’s half a frame; if you’re doing 25 frames a second, it’s a half a frame so I don’t think it’s an issue. Certainly the people we’ve spoken to in all the pre-testing, nobody notices. So not an issue really for anybody to be concerned about, but it’s good to know that it’s there. So if you go into Final Cut or something like that, it’s very simple to just move your audio and you’re back in sync.

Ed: If you’ve got a close up of the lips moving?

James: That’s right.

Half a frame … there’s probably more delay in your television!

Ed: Okay James, even with that US price when it’s converted, it’s more expensive than a basic Evolution package?

James: It is more expensive Grant than a standard Evolution package, that’s right. But it’s completely adjustment free.

You don’t need to think about frequencies, you don’t have to set any levels. Nothing … you pull it out of the box and it works. So for the person who is just looking for something really straightforward, it’s ideal.

Ed: And probably more futureproof … possibly. It’s a question you don’t know the answer to?

James: I think the implication in that question is that FM systems have a limited life. I think the reality is that most people who own an FM system now will see it operating for a long, long time and they’ll get good value out of it for a long time. And the same applies here – you’ll get good value out of it for a long time.

But futureproof … how far is the future?

Ed: Well it just depends what the government does with the spectrum?

James: Ed:

The DECT radio mic from Sennheiser.

It’s out of our hands?

James: Page 21

Yes that’s true.

It is out of our hands.

NZVN

Tiffen Cine Filters for Panavision For Panavision, at Tiffen Filters we have Carey Duffy.

Ed:

We’re interested in cinema filters. Anything new?

Carey: We have three new diffusers out this year.

We have Black Glimmer, Black Pearlescent and Black Soft FX. In fact at the moment, we have the Black Pearlescent on Zoolander 2 shooting ALEXA out of Panavision Italia with Dan Mindel and he’s taken the Black Pearlescent and he’s using the same lenses he used on Star Wars.

Ed:

So explain to me why you want a black filter?

Carey: It just lowers the contrast in a different way to a white halation diffuser. It’s just an aesthetical thing. We have Pearlescents which are a white diffuser, so we’ve made the yin and the yang – we’ve made a Black Pearlescent, because someone wants it. We have Satin, we have Black Satin; we have Pro-mist, we have Black Pro-mist.

Ed: And they shoot everything in RAW so that they can do more in postproduction?

Carey: No, no, no diffusers still affect the image in RAW, you don’t get rid of it …

Ed: Yes I know that’s right, but they still want to do … they’re changing the image in the recording, and shooting it in RAW so they can change it in post?

Carey: Well it depends what they mean … they’re grading RAW. You have a greater ability to grade that dynamic range in RAW. But the texture – this is the buzz word – the “texture” of the image which digital lacks – or it doesn’t lack it, it sort of "hyper-accents" it, because its texture is super-unnatural shall we say, the bigger the resolution we get. So to bring back a texture to this resolution, that’s why diffusers are king for us at the moment.

They’re king because it gives cinematographers the ability to add the texture that they like, and that’s because the newer lenses are sharper. Obviously, newer lenses are great because the mechanics are better and they can be matched possibly more easily. So the push towards vintage lenses is fine for looks, but it’s hard matching the lenses. If you take new lenses, delivering great resolution onto the sensor, diffusers give you the ability to build your texture in the way you like it. So we have to produce yin and yangs, black and whites of any one texture we make, because people want to think they’re unique.

Ed:

And these are of course all 4K capable?

Carey for Tiffen Filters.

Carey: Anything’s 4K capable, or 8K capable as long as it covers the sensor. "Do you like it" is the question, it’s not "is it capable?" I mean, a milk bottle base is 4K capable and it’s probably good for you.

Ed:

It has a certain look I’d say?

Carey: It has a milky look – milky glass! There’s engineer’s talk and there’s artistic talk … it’s not all plug and play, we want to make it a bit difficult and interesting and that’s what makes the stories interesting hopefully.

Ed: So there’s something new in the actual filter technology?

Carey: We’ve brought out two new variable NDs. We had some samples here last year. We’ve got a 138 donut that goes in the back of ARRI, Panavision, Chrosziel, Vocas, TLS, Bright Tangerine matte boxes, 2 to 6 stops H dot range, so you can use it in conjunction with internal NDs inside the cameras. And then we have a new 4x5.65 single tray that has three filters in one. It’s a rotor polar tray, it’s a VND and it’s called Warm FX. Ed:

Because you can?

Carey: Because you can and we do. product of VNDs which is cross-polarising …

Ed:

It’s a by-

Explain a VND that's not contractible?

Carey:

Variable Neutral Density. When we grind our glass, it’s normally 3.9-4mm thick, for example, like some little trays are … so what we’ve done is we’ve ground it to 2mm and now we can get two filters in one tray.

Now it’s obviously more delicate which could mean it breaks more easily, but it’s designed for fitting in clipons, reducing weight for handheld and Steadicam.

Again, VND people like using a run and gun, they can use it with the internal NDs with inside cameras; rotor polars are always useful when you’ve got a clipon because you can’t rotate the matte box and if you flick the back 4x5.65 circular polar in the opposite direction, it produces a warm / cool effect. It’s just a by-product. So you get three filters in one tray.

Ed:

Out of actually two pieces of glass?

Carey: Correct.

One of them geared, one of them standard 4x5.65 Page 22

milled to 2mm thick, making the tray the normal 6mm thick, but we’ve engineered it so that this is possible.

Ed:

Most things are possible Carey?

Carey: Most things are possible and this is. We’re expecting this to be a big owner / operator product, because owner / operators buy clip-ons primarily, they don’t buy the full bar system. It’s got the two basic exterior light control filters you need – ND and

polariser, and if you get a two tray clip-on you can still add your diffuser that you’ve got anyway. So you’ve got three filters, less glass, less refractive index in that glass to cause flares possibly – not necessarily, but possibly. It’s just a great little product … no one else has got it, there’s a couple of patents pending on application with it, it should be deliverable in a month.

Ed:

Get yours at Panavision.

Freefly for Panavision For Panavision, we are at Freefly and we have Nick Hegge.

Ed: Now Freefly, I can see some very large drones, a motorised car, but you’re not just limiting yourself to stabilised equipment with motors are you?

Nick: No, absolutely not.

We started in the aerial cinematography industry a long time back and really all the technology that we put into getting stable footage in the air, we then brought to the ground. So we have a handheld system called the MōVI and what the MōVI does is that it compensates for your pan tilt and roll, to make sure that your footage is as smooth as possible. You have complete camera control and it’s unrestrictive of the traditional methodology.

Nick flies all these planes at once.

Ed: And that’s what that guy there with the hair is holding?

Nick: Yes. So we have three different models on the MōVI line – we have the M5, M10 and M15. The M5 holds 5 pounds, the M10 holds 12, and the M15 holds 15.

Ed: The different weights that it takes … so this is really just designed for DSLR type cameras?

Nick: No absolutely not. The M5 is more for your DSLR, your under 5 pound weight restriction, up to about a Canon C100. The M10 will hold 12 pounds, so that’s a little bit more robust, you can fly a Scarlet or C300. And then you have the M15 and that’s the big dog, so that will hold a 15 pound payload which includes the brand new ALEXA Mini or a RED EPIC DRAGON or an F55.

Ed: So it’s not really designed to replace a Steadicam type system is it, because you couldn’t go all day holding this?

Nick: You know, it’s not there to replace it; it’s a new way of moving the camera. We have a lot of adventure videographers out there, and wedding videographers who use the M5 with like an A7S and an Atomos Shogun and they run all day with it because it’s so lightweight. I mean we’re talking about 5 pound gimbal with like not much of a camera weight – they can run all day with that thing, no problem.

Ed: Are there any developments this particular year in the MōVI? Nick: In the MōVI line this year we’ve added a new feature to control the MōVI which is what we call MIMIC. So when you move your body, the MōVI moves with you. We’ve attached the MIMIC to a pair of handlebars and added a monitor and a downlink to the Page 24

The MōVI rig.

NZVN

camera and when you tilt or pan or roll even, the MōVI follows. So it’s a brand new intuitive way that really gives you that relationship and that connection with the camera again.

Ed:

Ed:

Ed: Right, but you do make … it looks like a tracked vehicle?

Nick: Ed:

But still maintains the stabilisation?

Exactly.

So you can turn it on or off?

Nick: Correct. We’re entering in a Beta phase of it right now where we’re going to offer it to the public in Beta to really get their feedback and all of the features that they’re looking for.

Do you have smaller versions of the multirotor?

Nick: No, we don’t. The ALTA is designed for the professional cinematography industry. We don’t make anything smaller than that currently.

Nick: We do. We have the Tero chase car which is actually just back in stock.

We were sold out immediately after we announced it last year, and it’s taken us a while to get everything back up and running, but now it’s back.

Ed: Because I would imagine you could also damp it so it wasn’t instantaneous, there was a little bit of drag involved?

Nick: Yes, so we’ll learn a lot more throughout the Beta programme as far as what people need, as far as features are concerned.

Ed: Is this able to be retrofitted or do you have to buy a new MōVI? Nick: Ed:

No, no it works with all of our MōVIs. So it’s just an attachment?

Nick: Exactly, yes, it’s a US$500 Beta unit that you can add to your MōVI and all of a sudden you can move and your MōVI moves with you.

Ed: Wow, okay. Now you’re very keen to talk about your rotors?

Nick: Yes, so we have a new multirotor. We originally launched with the CineStar line a few years back, but that was more of a kit where the owners had to provide their own electronics and flight control. Well the ALTA solves all that. Everything’s from us, the flight controller, it’s quick modular, it can fly a 15 pound payload for 14 minutes and it collapses down into a small little Pelican case. So you’ll go from a Pelican to flying within 5 minutes.

Ed:

And this particular model’s upside down?

Nick: Well the great thing about the ALTA is that you can mount it both on the top or the bottom, so it just provides a different angle that people can utilise the camera. Say you want to fly underneath the train tracks and look up, well with Top Knot, you can do that.

Tero chase car.

Ed:

And the features of it?

Nick: The features of the Tero – you can mount M15, 15 pound payload, it can travel up to 40 miles an hour.

I wouldn’t recommend it though because no one wants to bank on a turn and have a very expensive camera go in the other direction!

Ed:

So it does have a gimbal?

Nick: It doesn’t come with a gimbal, but it has a quick release. So you can mount the gimbal directly on the top.

Ed: But otherwise damping involved?

is

there

Nick: It has isolation within the actual RC car itself.

Ed:

any

devices

But it’s not designed for off-road?

Nick: You can go over bumps pretty well and it will be smooth, because it has the built-in shocks of the actual RC and we also have some isolation dampers and then you have the MōVI on top of that, so it really is going to compensate for a lot of movement.

Ed: Aaah okay, so you’ve combined a tracked vehicle with a MōVI and that’s how it works?

Nick:

Yep, that is it.

Ed: So if you’ve got your own MōVI, you just have to buy the bottom bit?

Nick:

Exactly.

Ed: Tremendous possibilities for that NZVN combination.

It’s a big drone for heavy loads.

Page 25

Rabble TV An interesting concept caught my attention at an NAB press event and, to tell us what was on offer, we have Gerald Mortensen from Rabble.TV. Ed: But Gerald, it’s not actually a TV show that you’re promoting here is it?

Gerald: Not at all.

It’s a new platform that provides TV viewers alternative audio commentary for whatever is on their TV. Ed: So if they don’t like what people are saying about a sporting game or it could even be a reality TV show, you can produce your own audio track for this, put it on air and people could … well how do they listen to it and watch the TV at the same time?

Gerald: Okay so that’s the thing, great question too.

Ed: I’m full of great questions actually.

Gerald: You nailed two great points. You reminded me of a “director’s cut”, which it is. If it’s a reality show, it could be a director’s cut or automatic alternative commentary.

Then if it’s sports, for instance, let’s say the All Blacks are playing and you don’t like the current announcers and you think you know more about the All Blacks – there are a few of those people that think like that down there, I think I’ve met a few of ‘em.

Ed: Yes well most of them are Australians actually.

Gerald: Nice! I kinda miss it down there. Anyway, then you can basically provide your own very, very All Blacks biased commentary. Everything’s contained in the website right now and it’s never meshed with the visuals. So there’s no visuals on Rabble.TV, it’s all audio. You simply use your television to view and your mute button on your remote to mute - then you just let it rip. Whatever you want to talk about, let’s say the All Blacks, if you think you’re an expert or if you’re a stat geek or if you simply want to sit around with your mates, drink pints and talk smart and use words that maybe wouldn’t be heard in Disney films …

Ed: Yes “look at those thighs” for example?

Gerald: Yes – so that’s the concept and then let’s say you miss the game but you aren’t able to see the match even on the replay, but you just want to listen to the match, you’re going to listen to your buddies watch the game, then you just go back to our site, you go to Rabble.TV archive broadcast, previous broadcast whatever we’ll call it tomorrow, and you can play that broadcast and listen to it.

Ed: But for the producer, this is something that happens live, so if you’ve signed up to Rabble.TV and you’ve got yourself a connection … I must say, this is actually free at the moment isn’t it?

Gerald: Yes, 100% free, the app is free, the site is free, you just sign up. In fact, if you just want to listen you don’t even have to create an account right now, because we want people to listen to other people “rabbling” if you will. So basically, all you need is your computer and a mic.

Right now, some guys are bringing in mixing boards, multiple mics, Skype connections with their buddy across the country. Other guys like me, simpletons, I open my laptop and I rabble a baseball game you know, or a football game, a soccer match. It’s been very interesting in the first 7 days of

our product being launched, seeing what different people are doing and how they’re doing it. I hope, selfishly, that people get creative, because you know they will. You can see how creative – or uncreative – some people get with YouTube, with Twitter, with all this kind of stuff. It’s going to be real interesting to see how people embrace the product and how they use it.

Ed: Now we’re in the USA and this is a very litigatious nation, how do you get around copyright?

Gerald: There is no native audio.

On all our material, there’s the word “mute” and there’s the word “mic”. So native audio from your television is not coming through – it’s coming through Rabble.TV. So first and foremost, in your agreement, is “mute your television” and then you can start speaking. So that’s what we’ve got going on right now.

Ed: Well I’m sure somebody’s going to have a go at this, and it’s going to be a huge success.

Gerald: Thank you very much and I for one, selfishly again, need someone to rabble All Blacks very, very soon, because our announcers up here are crap!

Go to www.rabble.tv and see what you can add to the NZVN culture of our airwaves.

Premiere Audio Editing Tip ( especially relevant to DECT radio mic recording where audio is delayed ) To adjust the audio position on the Premiere timeline for less than one frame 

Left click the = symbol at the top right-hand corner of the timeline panel



Select “show audio time units”



Zoom to desired resolution on the audio track you wish to adjust

 Trim as usual To return to one frame editing, uncheck the “show audio time units.”

NB: If it’s only one track of a stereo pair, first right click the file in the Project panel, click “modify” then “audio channels” and set to mono.

Page 26

Datavideo for Protel For Protel we are with Ken Brooke at Datavideo talking with John Basile.

Ed:

John, excite us.

John: Gentlemen, what we have here is a very ambitious product in terms of pricing, features and just absolute design. It’s the Datavideo SE-700. It is a standalone four input switcher with two HD-SDI, and two HDMI inputs, so that gives you a total of four; and you have three outputs – two HD-SDI, one HDMI output.

A thing to note about the system is that, for the price point of NZ$2,958+GST, you get a really nice switcher that gives you six customisable user profiles.

You have customisable wipes, and the ability to have transitions that you can adjust right here in the system, as well as chroma key, one downstream key and one picture in picture channel. The SE-700 is a product that we’re very proud of; we can see that it will work its way into houses of worship and predominantly the educational sector, because of price point and features. Like all Datavideo products, it’s solidly built and easy to use.

Ed: Now Ken, does this also have applications in the streaming market?

Ken: Yes it certainly could when combined with an attached Datavideo streaming device or other product.

I can see a lot of people wanting to buy the SE-700 because of the fact that it has a great control panel and wonderful feature set and the price point is just amazing! With some other products, you have to buy an additional expensive control panel.

Ed: You won’t be able to make any money out of it then?

Ken: We will just have to sell many of them. great product.

It’s a

John: Well that’s the beauty of Datavideo products – we take a modular approach to the things that we do. So you start off with the switcher and, if the client needs to have independent title graphics, we have a title generator programme called the TC-200 that can work downstream of the SDI channel going out to the programme.

That’s another NZ$1,150+GST,

John for Datavideo.

including the module as well as the CG-200 software, but also the ability to record and stream.

Now, another product is our NVS-25 H264 video streaming server. This product allows you to take in a signal through composite, HD over SDI, or HDMI and it gives you the ability to take it in its native format and stream it. It does real 1080p encoding; it also gives you the ability to record through a USB thumb drive and/or a stick.

So what you’re able to do for NZ$1,315+GST, is have a solid recording and streaming solution all in the one box.

But it doesn’t end just there. You’re also able to add our NVD, which stands for Network Video Decoder, for another $617+GST to the system. That gives you a point to point video transfer system over a network.

So let’s say for instance, you have two churches that are located in different parts of the city, they want to see the sermon from one to another – this is a very cost effective solution to stream out one point, set the mode to RTSP streaming which stands our box out a little bit from the competition, and take your decoder to read that RTSP stream and you’re able to affordably send video from one point to another.

Ed: Is the idea of the encoding so that nobody else can log into that stream?

Ken: You would need a decoder and be told the link to see the stream and also hopefully your network is secure from hackers.

We’ve definitely got applications in New Zealand such as Churches and Corporates and Live Event Companies, where they want to send a stream across town and up and down the country.

John: Well the other application too is that you could multicast from the NVS on the same network; if you have a VLC player on your machine, you’re able to access the unit and are able to watch the stream.

So this is a very cost effective way to broadcast to a small network, such as maybe a school that is having an assembly in the main auditorium and wants to send videos cost effectively to other points in the building or, as you mentioned, the corporate environment where maybe you have a CEO who is addressing the board and they have people who aren’t necessarily able to fit in one room – they can now affordably send high quality video across their network and onto other machines.

Page 27

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Ed: Okay, it’s all fine having a device that does streaming, but of course, people are interested also in the data rate that it will handle?

John: Yes and the nice part about our products is that you’re able to set the data rate. You could go anywhere from 800 kilobits all the way up to 6 Megs and it allows you the ability to give variance between your CDN so that way, depending on who you’re using, through an RTSP or RTMP style encoding it gives you the chance to fix the quality, if you will. The other thing that’s nice is that units give you the ability to scale if needed. You just select your input and then you select what you would like to stream at your output rate and it will allow you to change those parameters. The box also allows you to put analogue audio into it. So you have the ability for XLR channels into the box as well as RCA connectors. So for podcasters that want to just stream audio, this could be a very good solution.

in terms of its overall footprint which is good. The buttons are large, they’re easy for novices to clearly hit the right button during the time of a possibly stressful production, which was kind of the idea and keeping in the Datavideo theme of making sure things are of quality and also easy to use. This is why we actually have tactile control buttons, as opposed to a touchscreen.

The other thing that’s nice about the HRS-30 is that it’s SDI in, but it will also allow you to have SDI loopthrough out, another SDI out in addition to HDMI. I used this for a production in the past week and I’ve had very good performance out of it. In fact, one of the things I thoroughly enjoyed is that all the outputs are completely active at all times, so I was able to send an HDMI signal to a competitor’s encoding device because that was part of the job spec for the other client, and then I was able to send an SDI signal back to my confidence monitor, so I could see exactly just for redundancy, that everything was going okay. It was very nice I have to say.

Ken: In a production you can also use the HRS-30 as an additional source to go back into your switcher.

Ed: What I like is that the buttons are lit individually, so this is something you could use in a conference situation where you couldn’t have lots of light. It has its own little LED light if you want to have it on, but having the individual buttons lit, you don’t need a lot of light disturbing your clients. Okay, the next product – HDR-10 – instant replay recorder?

John: We’re very happy to announce that we’re able to bring basic instant replay to the masses. With the HDR-10, what we have here is – I like to call it a “brick style” design, and if you lift it up it feels – well it’s solid as a brick. It allows you to do SDI in and out and it creates instant replay clips quickly and easily. So say for instance, as a play is coming up, within one button push, you’re able to mark an in-point, another button push your out point and then a third push you’re able to play it back instantly. For $2,136+GST you get the HDR-10 Event/Replayer Recorder without HDD and Shuttle; you’re able to connect a little jog shuttle and a hard drive to the unit. The best part is coming soon – we’re going to have the ability to link multiple units together, so that in that way, you are able to have instant replay on multiple channels for a very affordable cost. At $2,136+GST a channel, there are not too many instant replay systems in this headspace that can compete with what this has to offer. So right now, because this is the pre-release model, we’re still in the process of integrating different types of slo-mo replay.

Ed: Okay, we’re now looking at the HRS-30 hand carry recorder system. Now there are so many little recording systems either in the camera or in the monitor, people are coming out with some very, very cost effective solutions in the monitor … why would you want a slightly larger box like this Ken? Ken: Well basically, you’ve got a real nice player with built-in monitor, so you can play back your media. You put your media in the front there – a solid state drive, and just play back your media. It also has the capacity to charge up your cell phone if you want it. It has a large internal battery so it’ll work for quite a long time.

Ed: Basically all I want to know is that it will do a slomo replay?

John: Yes and you can use the jog dial to go “point by point” or you could actually set the different play speed.

It is uncompressed video, progressive format, so you have a very high quality playback from the unit. What’s also nice is that it buffers up to 30 seconds internally, or you could store actual clips right in the unit, pop out that solid state drive and then pull it into your editor to create a meld of clips.

Ed: You can use this as a playback unit for your streaming solution?

Ken: So if you’re watching a game, you could actually mark in-out, in-out and get all the score footage off it and then go back and play the replay, and all the scores will play back and you can play it back in slow motion.

John: Correct, and what’s nice about the HRS-30 is that it has a very sharp quality monitor that’s built right in. It’s a little bit bigger than the on-camera units

Ed: And because of the buffer, you could actually mark an in-point prior to the actual live point that you see it. So if you’re watching a game and you just miss

Page 29

the point where the shooter does a fantastic shot, you can use the buffer to go back to set an in-point before that live position?

John: Yes, as you can see right here, I’m actually able to take the jog shuttle and backup beyond it and now I could drop my start marker back there and just create my new clip.

Ken: You could have multiples of these going into one of these vision mixers, with several cameras on the same shot.

Ed: Because you wouldn’t want to have the customers at the end of the pipe watching you fiddle around with a jog shuttle would you?

John: No, you would not want that.

We’re actually working on different types of shortcuts as well too.

Ed:

So this is a game changer Ken?

Ken: It is, it’s fantastic, look at the price.

Ed: The price is one thing – it’s got to actually perform hasn’t it?

Ken: Well it does perform and it will be very useful for schools and universities or anyone doing sports events.

Ed:

Why wouldn’t a little OB truck be able to use this?

Ken: Well yes they could, absolutely.

Ed: Now we’re looking at a rather large beast, the SE1200MU and it says it’s a six channel digital video switcher. But it’s more than that isn’t it John?

John: Absolutely it is.

Like most Datavideo products, we tend to put a little bit something special into our units to make them standout and also to give more value for the money. Now in our SE-1200MU, what you see here is actually a flight pack showing a bundle. You have your NVS-25 for your recording and streaming. We also added our NVP ( which stands for Network Video Playback ) and this player is used to funnel in the video that you see there on the multiscreen. But really the SE-1200MU is a single 1RU rackmount unit that has four SDI inputs, two HDMI and two HDMI outputs and two SDI outputs fully configurable. The nice part about the SE-1200MU, like its sibling, the SE-700, is that you have a computer control interface with this one, you don’t have a tactile control surface. Now unlike our competitors where the computer actually drives a lot of the features of the switcher, this is truly the opposite. You use a computer simply to access a control panel and view it through a

computer. Eventually it’s going to roll out so we can use it to be accessed via an Android or an iOS device.

So you’ll be able to control this anywhere on the network remotely. This is the same software that’s in the SE-700 and you can do the same thing with the 700.

So, say for instance, you have a bunch of students who are running a game and the coach decides that they want to see what the students are doing. They could remotely see the control surface from anywhere on the network and actually see how they’re able to make their plays or what moves they’ve done, and things that they’ve done to make a switch.

Or, eventually, somebody could just remotely log into a computer, via team viewer, and drive a show from anywhere in the world. Granted, there will be some latency in that case, but this is truly ambitious … oh, and it also has two channels of chroma key as well and XLR inputs just like the 700. So need I keep toting how much Datavideo puts in our products in value for the clients?

Ed:

And a nice price point Ken?

Ken: Yes absolutely – NZ $2,465+GST. That’s amazing actually. Does that include the monitor on top?

John: No it does not. We’re good, but we’re not that great!

Ed: Now, in the remote camera department, we have the PTC-150?

John:

Ah yes, the PTC-150. As you know, last year we came out with our PTC-120 HD PTZ camera. Well now we decided to add on to the success by developing a PTC-150 counterpart to it. Whereas the PTC-120 uses a VISCA protocol that’s daisy chained for the controls, we decided to do “point-to-point” for the PTC-150. So capitalising on the VISCA 422 protocol, we have allowed you to connect up to four cameras through the RMC-180 control surface, which is great for remote applications such as wedding videographers who decide that they want to use PTZ cameras to set up multiple shots. They can put these on tripods, run their SDI cables back to their switchers and have just two cables to worry about, and not have to worry about another cable in the daisy chain configuration.

Another great feature of the unit is the speed; up to 150 degrees per second in rotation. We also improved significantly on our low-lux rating; it now has a 0.4 lux rating. Another thing that’s great about it – integrated tally and the ability to have 52mm lens filters or wide-angle lenses using standard DSLR style lens mounts.

Those are great, especially if you’re bringing these cameras into situations where high contrast lighting may be an issue. You could put a polarising filter on this and enhance the performance of the unit. But my favourite feature that carried over from the PTC-120 is the fact that you have simultaneous outputs from the unit. On the back of the unit, you have one SDI, one HDMI, one composite, but we allowed all outputs to be active at all times. How is this beneficial?

Well you’re able to run SDI to a switcher and maybe HDMI to a recording unit that you may want to use for ISO recording of that camera, or you could use it to go to another external monitor nearby the camera. The other application that we see

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describe it in words, it’s something that either Ken’s going to get one of these for you to come in and play with, or Datavideo are going to produce a video showing how it works, so you can see the capabilities of this very, very capable device that not only does the virtual set, which you can pan and zoom around, but it also does a 3D virtual set which is rather cool. It doesn’t mean that it’s stereoscopic but …

Ken: The TVS-1000 is trackless, so it won’t adapt to the movement of the camera.

You do not need expensive tracking equipment to use the TVS-1000.

In the software, it is possible to zoom and pan into three phases i.e move around on the set and zoom in and look sideways.

Ed: But it’s not just that is it … this box does everything else? here in the States is that the standard definition, composite BNC connection is used for security camera applications as well. They could take that composite, run it there for a security camera, while the SDI is being used for broadcast. So the camera’s become dual -purpose.

Ed:

And the killer is the price point Ken?

Ken: Well no doubt that comes into the equation however not just that, because it is the specifications of the product as well combined with the price of NZ$4,900+GST. The thing I was waiting for was that you only have to have the one network cable to control it, rather than daisy chaining on the 120’s which made it installationwise a little bit more difficult. So it’s going to be brilliant; I think it will sell well. Not only that, delivery’s pretty fast out of Datavideo.

Ken: Yes it does everything else that you’d need to do for full virtual set production. Amazing.

The TVS-1000 software supports up to 6 layers, including a UV map, so it is possible to place a virtual desk on the virtual set. There is also support for background images, like a logo on the floor or a TV in the background, so you can customise your own virtual studio. There is no longer need for a separate recorder, as the TVS-1000 has a hard drive recorder built-in. It even has a streaming encoder built-in, so streaming your show to different content delivery networks like Livestream.com is very easy to set up!

The Price NZ$11,000+GST. Call Protel to discuss.

Ed: Now we’re coming to the even bigger units and this one has a number TVS-1200?

John: Yes. The TVS-1200 is the newest addition to our foray into virtual site environments. The TVS1000 was a single input box that allowed you to create your own virtual sets and it would be used not necessarily as a virtual set switcher, but rather as a complement to a bigger switcher and be used in like say an educational environment where maybe you had a student or two that needed to use virtual sets for their workflow, but they had a traditional switcher that wouldn’t allow that. So the TVS-1000 would allow you to do that, but we also added some other useful features, such as web video encoding, recording and the ability for still grabs, and of course the biggest feature is being able to have virtual sets built easily right in the box.

Ken: I was talking to the software developer for virtual sets here on the stand, a young chap who has been writing the 3D virtual set code for six years and it’s just amazing what you can do with his software. Datavideo are integrating it with their virtual set product and are setting up a website so that students around the world can create virtual sets with the software and sell them via Datavideo, it will enable the kids to make some pocket money and share their sets. http://www.datavideovirtualset.com Ed: Okay, having a look at the virtual set capability of this particular machine, it really is spectacular. I can’t Page 32

NZVN

Livestream for Protel We are here at Livestream for Protel with Ken Brooke and Mark Hall from Corsair Solutions, the distributor of Livestream products in Australia and New Zealand.

Ed: Mark, lots and lots of things on the stand – it looks like an even smaller little red box?

Mark: Yes, look there have been some significant announcements this year at NAB. These little boxes were released before NAB, so first of all, we have the Broadcaster mini. Previously to these, there was the Broadcaster that would stream at 720p 2.3 Megabit per second. The new Broadcaster mini is a dramatically lower cost version; it will stream at 1080p 4 Meg anywhere from probably as low as 198K right up to 1080p 4 Meg. The great thing about it is it’s very small, it’s got a rechargeable battery inside of there that will last two hours; it will connect to 2.4 or 5 Gig network, so that’s the A B G N wireless network.

Essentially, you have your mobile phone, you connect it with your mobile phone via a Bluetooth and wireless network and you can actually get full control from your mobile phone, you can get previews from your mobile phone, you can go live from the mobile phone from the Livestream app and also the Web page when it’s all connected up. Essentially, it’s a cut down version of the previous Broadcaster, with a higher bandwidth, and we do have the Broadcaster Pro that we’ll go to in a minute. You’ll see the front, you’ve got all your LED indicators there for the battery, the HDMI input, the WiFi and an indicator that you’re ready to go.

Ken and Mark at Livestream.

Ed: Well I guess it’s a smaller package, the resolution at 1080 is going to be attractive and what it means is that, even though having your streaming capability built into a camera is great, if you’ve got a good camera anyway, you don’t need to buy a new one, you can just add this little box and “bingo”, you’re streaming?

Mark: Well that’s right. The majority of cameras out there don’t necessarily have WiFi on them, so this can be used for pretty much anything which has got an HDMI and it enables you to stream. It’s very small, it’s very transportable. It does, as the previous model did, an adaptive bit rate and a constant bit rate stream, so 1080p 4Meg is very, very high and most people don’t stream at that resolution and at that bit rate. So we can do an adaptive bit rate where you put in a specific bit rate, and it will try and maintain that and, if the connection is not as good, it will actually drop that down and then ramp it up when needed. There’s also quite a substantial amount of HDMI settings in there; I believe there’s also settings for RED 1 cameras and other cameras in there.

Ed:

And now a slightly bigger red box?

Small red.

We have “go live” off on the righthand side, and we have the USB power and we have the micro HDMI on the other side. And of course it comes with the hot shoe and all the adapters as needed. It has an internal lithium ion battery so it will last approximately about 2 hours.

Ed:

Or you’re feeding it from a USB cable?

Mark: USB’s actually giving it power, so it’s got a battery, but at NAB, they’re running it 24/7 when the show’s on, so it’s powered all the time. You can also see over there we’ve actually got very good retail packaging for the unit, so it looks like a Go Pro in their boxes and that’s been very attractive to people in the DSLR market and retailers.

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Big red.

Mark: Yes, this is a Broadcaster Pro, so this is the next step up. Now in terms of the final output, 1080p at 5Meg, so you go from 1080p at 4Meg to 1080p at 5Meg for this. So about a 1Meg difference in terms of the streaming, still very, very high. The difference with this one is, apart from just connecting to the A B G N wireless networks, we also can connect via Ethernet or via USB modem, say your Telstra modem or your modems that you have in New Zealand as well, and go straight into it. We have the DC power in the back as you can see there; we also have audio in and audio out as well on the unit, and a three hour battery life. It is the next step up and you can see it’s obviously got a display on it like the previous Broadcaster, where you can actually go through and see all your quality, your video inputs, your audio inputs as needed, as you would have had from the previous Broadcaster.

Ed:

Right, now, the good stuff?

Mark: Well there’s some pretty amazing stuff that we have here. Before we get into the Studio 3 that has been released this week at NAB, we’ll show you the new HD550. Similar inputs and outputs to the old HD510, but a few more bells and whistles.

Obviously, a dramatic reduction in size. It’s very slim, it’s got the screen in the front like the previous HD500 which is about a year ago. It’s not a touchscreen, the previous HD510 had a touchscreen but most customers didn’t use it, it is very slim and very light so that can be taken once again as carry-on luggage with the included carry bag.

But, some of the other little things down the side, apart from the standard 5 HDMI/HDSDI input cards and a HDMI/HDSDI output card, you also have a HDMI multiviewer output. Livestream Studio has the functionality to take external audio inputs into it, but the HD550 has actually got two XLR inputs installed on the unit. And you’ll see we’ve actually got four modems coming out of it on this demo so this bonding is now full production release as well. In the front of this, we now have what’s called the “Studio Surface Go”, so Livestream brought out a Studio Surface last year, a very nice unit that had a few dollars attached to it. Now they’ve brought out the Surface Go. This is a very nicely made unit, you’ve got all your programme and preview buttons for 5 channels; you’ve got your T-Bar with your LEDs on the side, record, go live, cuts, autos and all the preview, push and pull buttons for your graphics engines. The Surface Go connects into the unit by a single USB cable. This can be used in conjunction with your keyboard surface so you can actually have multiple operators. You might have an operator over there controlling the switcher with the keyboard and the mouse, and another person using the Surface Go. Ed:

And Ken’s just pressed a button and it worked?

Ken: Ken’s just fiddling. But it looks really nice doesn’t it.

Ed: Is a bonding solution particularly good for New Zealand with our potentially dodgy Telcos?

Ken: Definitely. Particularly out in the country side you can bond several devices to get the bandwidth required.

Ed: So you can put a couple of Spark ones and a couple of Vodafone ones there and you might get a signal?

Ken: Yes you definitely could actually.

Mark: The Livestream Studio 3 software is now available so anyone with a previous version of Studio 2

will get prompted for a free upgrade.

As always with Livestream Studio, software upgrades are free.

Now the very first thing you see, we’ve got three Go Pro’s sitting there, so Go Pro 3 and Go Pro 4 will now come into the Livestream Studio system directly via WiFi as a remote camera input.

Say you were a University and you had your Go Pro’s on their The HD550 with modems. wireless network, they can come directly into the Livestream Studio.

Livestream Studio has supported a Windows based Remote Camera since version 1, so the PC’s desktop could be shared to Livestream Studio as an input over the network. This week Livestream released a Mac version, which means that we can support Mac desktops as Remote Camera inputs.

Ed:

So you mean the actual screen from the laptop?

Mark: Yes, let’s take a school for example. They have a media department, a HD550 and a wireless network throughout the school. They could have people walking around with any HDMI camera and a Broadcaster Mini, and that could be brought into the HD550 as a Remote Camera input via the network connection that the HD550 would also be connected to; but as well as that, we can have Go Pro’s doing the same thing. We can actually also have PC and Mac desktops on the network being brought into the HD550 via the same method.

Ed: Now what I find interesting with this is the potential that, not only are you bringing in the camera image through your streaming product, you’re also bringing the screen from your PC or your Mac, so it gives the opportunity to do a streamed demonstration of a process that you’re doing on your computer, such as a demonstration of Photoshop to a class, and you can mix that from any of the monitors that are coming out of your PC. So you might have 3 monitors, you can choose the monitor that you’re bringing in, or you can bring in cameras. So very, very versatile?

Mark: Of course, we’re only just starting. We’ve also got AirPlay support now. So regarding those just using the wireless, we can come in via AirPlay. You see here Windows, Android, Google Glass, Macs, iPhones, Broadcasters, AirPlays, Go Pro’s – we can do up to 10 of those. The software actually supports 25 inputs, 25 outputs and 10 remote cameras, so theoretically we could have 25 inputs coming from capture cards if we had the hardware to support it, and 10 camera sources from Go Pro’s and Broadcasters. Now with that Studio Mode we talked about, if we had a HD550 set up in Auckland, and I was in Melbourne, Australia with a

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Broadcaster streaming to the Livestream Platform, I can bring that in from the Cloud as a source into the HD550 as well as the local sources, such as a studio environment or people walking around a university campus using their smartphone.

Ed:

And you’re not losing any quality in the transfer?

Mark: Well you can actually set the quality to come in at the optimal bit rate, or you can specify a certain bit rate that you want to come in, but it’s actually very good in terms of the quality. As you can see here, well there’s your GoPro Hero coming in there.

The other major update is we now support up to 25 input devices, up to 25 output devices, we have our four multi-viewers on there as we’ve had since version 2, we’ve got our two media players, we’ve got our 10 remote cameras. We still have our 4 ISO recordings, and we have a new recovery functionality. So if you’re producing a live event with 4 ISO records, and there is a power failure, we can recover those damaged videos where previously they would be corrupted. That’s now standard in every Livestream Studio product. We’ve also got 4K support as well in Livestream Studio now, so I can go and select 4K as my project resolution.

Ed: Now this is software based, so you don’t have to have this new unit, you can use this on a previous unit?

Mark: Yes, previous Livestream Studio systems get the software upgrade too. You can also buy the software and build up you own system if you want, so you’d just have to make sure that it’s really up to the task, whatever you want to do on it.

Ed:

A very flexible system Ken?

Ken: Yes. I have had customers talk about building their own boxes, but when you work out the cost of the specification for the computer and add appropriate cards, it actually works out at pretty much the same or marginally better to purchase the warranted Livestream units.

Ed: Well you’re not going to convince everybody of that.

They’re going to want to do it themselves anyway?

Ken: Yes, some of them will and I would suggest they be very careful with what they spec into the PC box.

Mark: The price for the HD550 is NZ$12,536.00+GST. Another very big thing that they’ve announced at NAB which is really amazing is called Interview Mode using WebRTC. Have you heard of WebRTC? It is an open standard for web

communications. Have you heard of products around doing things like Skype that are needing separate physical hardware boxes?

Ed:

Yes.

Mark: Okay, so we had a few customers talking about that and asking us when will Livestream l do it.

They’ve brought out this Interview Mode feature in version 3.0 software which uses WebRTC technology and is nothing short of amazing. Essentially, what I can do from the Livestream Studio is send out a link to people anywhere around the world. They pull up that link in Chrome with the webcam and they’re brought straight into the Interview Mode within Studio. No additional software is needed, no plugins are needed – all they need is Chrome and a webcam. As you see here, we send links out to moderators and we just send links out to the people we want. So we have 5 people there and we can switch between people located anywhere around the world.

Ed:

How do you create the link?

Mark: It’s all created in the system automatically.

When we get over here, we’ll show you. But while we’re waiting for the system, you’ll also see there’s a chat function there as well. So apart from bringing the interviewee in as an input you’ve also got the chat function built straight into it as well.

Ken: That’s amazing – Livestream just keep on adding features to their software at no charge.

Mark: And this is included for free with every Studio product, no additional hardware box needed whatsoever.

No extra cost, so obviously the competitors are going to be very disappointed seeing this sort of technology, but for the consumers out there it’s fantastic.

Ed: Right, now we’re talking about bonding and this sounds very interesting?

Mark: Okay, so Livestream have released bonded streaming in the new version 3 of Studio. Essentially the bonded streaming means that we can use up to four internet connections on the unit to give you a more stable streaming experience.

You can bond your stream over multiple Internet connections, including Ethernet, WiFi, 3G or say 4G LTE modems, or any other connection that you can configure in Windows. You can also set up a backup Internet connection that will be used only if your primary Internet connection fails or becomes too slow, avoiding expensive data charges.

You can turn that feature on manually, you can have it on all the time, and you’ve got full metrics of exactly what’s happening such as bandwidth usage. This demo shows that we have 4 connections. We’ve got an Intel gigabit connection, that’s currently got 700 Megabit of available bandwidth, and is showing perfect streaming; we’ve got our WiFi connection and 2 LTE connections – the WiFi has 150 Megabit of available bandwidth and the 2 LTE connections are not being used in the bond. So think about it, if you have say, 1 Megabit of upload bandwidth, and you add more modems into the bond, you could have 2, 3 or 4 Megabit of upload bandwidth and you’ve also added in a level of

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redundancy. As you were saying earlier, in those regional areas, so someone’s doing an OB van for example, you have that redundancy which is available to keep your stream up and to get better bandwidth and that’s very important.

And that’s all included in Livestream Studio version 3.

We now grabbed Mr Nathan Lundie who was presenting another very special Livestream feature.

Nathan: This is interview mode which is a WebRTC function very similar to Google Hangouts or Skype.

You can bring it in without the need for a scan converter and without the need for anyone on the interview side to download any special hardware or software.

What they do is open up interview mode inside of the remote camera feature in Livestream Studio, you’re going to get a link for the interviewee, you’re going to send that link to them, then they’re going to click on it, it will open up this web browser that’ll show the programme feed that’s currently going on. It’ll also open their webcam and show them themselves in the bottom lefthand corner. So they’re watching the programme.

This second link right here, the interview mode inside remote cam generates as the moderator link. That allows your assistant to be on another laptop at the venue chatting with the person you’re about to bring in and they can say “okay, we’ve got one more question with this speaker and then we’re going to bring you in next” – like cue them up.

have launched a special promo that we’ll have through platinum resellers such as Protel.

If you buy any Livestream Studio product and bundle a Surface Go, you get a discounted price of NZ$626.00+GST on the Surface with any Livestream Studio package.

Ed: You can’t get better than that. details.

In Livestream Studio, when I put that interview mode in the programme on the web browser, they’re going to see that they’re on air, their audio’s going to come back mix minus, so they don’t get any feedback or anything like that, and they’re going to watch themselves in programme so they can see what’s going on. Then once they come out of programme they sign off, thank you for joining us from, you know, Dubai, “I appreciate it, have a good day” and then you switch back and they see that they’re off air again.

Ed:

Oh that’s amazing.

Nathan: So whereas some other companies like to charge you four grand for this function, we give it to you for free right inside of Studio.

Ken: Yes, that’s amazing, and not only that, they’ve got a built-in hybrid for the audio.

So the radio stations will love this … I know one existing customer who would love this feature, and obviously any broadcasters who want to bring in some live guests. Fantastic.

Ed: So are you going to have one of these to show people?

Ken: Yes well we already have a Studio HD510 in stock, I’m just going to upload the new version 3.0 software and it will work.

Ed: It’s as simple as that – just putting the new software in there?

Ken: Yep, simple as that.

Mark: Okay, just quickly, the new Surface Go is priced at NZ$1,409.00+GST retail price, but Livestream Page 37

Call Protel for NZVN

Blackmagic Design We’re now at Blackmagic Design and we are speaking with Dan May. Ed: Now you’re obviously from the American branch Dan and you’ve yet to try a flat white, but next time you’re at the home office in Aus you need to?

Dan: I’ll definitely have it – I’m prone to their lattes but I will definitely try a flat white next time I go.

Ed: Excellent.

Now your boss, Mr Petty, at the press conference this morning, rattled through an extensive range of new developments and he started off with a pretty good one which was 12G. And there was a very good reason for not all Blackmagic product going 12G but certainly a lot of it. Can you explain why that is important?

Dan: The big thing with 12 Gig SDI is the desire to have high framerate Ultra HD. For creative filmmakers this may not seem as big an issue for them, but specifically for the broadcast space where they want to have this higher framerate, they’ve been working with 60p for a while and we’ve had places in Europe that have gone to 720 60p just because they wanted the 60 frame content, but the actual framerate was more important than resolution for things like sports.

Ed: Now we’re always talking about futureproofing and having that ability, so having 12G doesn’t mean that you can’t have standard definition going through the same system?

Dan: Correct. At the very least, they’re being able to have high definition or Ultra HD … but for a single individual, that means maybe saying "I’m going to buy one of these to use for a year or two". If you look at a broadcaster, they’re making plans for years down the road, having to put in builds and generate the ROI that they’re going to have on that equipment, they want to buy equipment and buy quantities of that equipment knowing that it’s going to be able to handle what they’re looking for down the road, so there’s a need for us to develop these products with 12G-SDI. But 12GSDI is a more expensive thing to develop, it does not run as far as regular 6 Gig or 3 Gig SDI, so not all operations need to have it. We need to have solutions that don’t necessarily have 12G-SDI, but we also need to develop – or we’ve now got this plethora of new 12GSDI products for I/O, for video hub, for the ATEM switcher, I think inside a couple of new I/O devices so the 12G-SDI is still a very important part of what our development cycle is, but not every product needs to be laced with it, because we can make more cost-effective products if you don’t need 12G-SDI. Ed: And for the smaller user, the high framerate capability that now many cameras – not only the Blackmagic ones, but other cameras are coming out with, with high framerates, it means that the rest of the infrastructure can cope with that?

Dan: That’s correct. There are ways of being able to deal with Ultra HD with 4 cables or 2 cables, but we prefer the single SDI because of the simplicity of that solution, having one piece of cable that can go out, handle that high framerate, and of course there’s been a tie-in to the development of the 12 Gig fibre as well … the idea that I want to run out a kilometre of fibre and being able to have that 12G-SDI. Now a single individual user, again, may find that important too, because I’m not building that but if I’m building a stadium or I’m building a large facility that I need to go

Dan from Blackmagic.

up 13 floors and have interconnectivity, that’s why that’s called Gig-SDI fibre is going to come as well and you’re going to see that throughout the Teranex Mini line-up as well as a number of other products that we have.

Ed: Now speaking of the Teranex Mini, it’s unusual that you’ve taken a mini converter and actually made it bigger?

Dan: Yes, it’s one of the things we’re so known for is making things smaller in many ways. The challenge with the Teranex Minis was a multi-folded challenge.

We wanted to build 12Gig SDI mini converters. The problem becomes that 12G-SDI, in addition to being more expensive, generates a lot more heat. So in our normal mini converter body, we really weren’t able to put that together. The other challenge we had is we really wanted to create an efficient rackmount solution, you know, so many of our products we’ve developed have been for this great rackmount solution we’ve been able to build for big broadcast rooms or small flight packs. We wanted to create something that could be not only 12 Gig SDI but something that I could put on the table or something that I could rackmount. And that’s Teranex Mini – it is all a bit bigger because it has to have that 1RU size, but then we can put three of them nicely together in that one rack and have that really elegant rack solution. I personally love it with the new faceplate that has the LCD in it, because I know for broadcasters that want to have that … I want to see that the video’s going through, but I want to be able to push buttons, we know that broadcast people like to push buttons, as opposed to putting my laptop around and just hook it up and change it to USB. But power to Ethernet, being able to control it over your software, they’re so robust as far as the unit that at the US$500 price-point for the non-fibre units, I think they will do tremendously well in our space.

Ed: And then we moved onto the pocket camera and I think there were a lot of gasps and oohs and aahs because what had looked like a standard pocket camera that would be made by a Japanese producer, has become something that’s a little bit more "boxy", but obviously a lot more suited to the sport market or the action market?

Dan: There are things that we know we want to develop because we’re fairly intelligent people and can figure out what we want. We have a lot of customer feedback and the ways we sometimes see our products being used are the indicators of "well, we could actually do that better." So when we look at things like the

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create a really micro camera body design. feedback that for us.

cost-effective high quality is really what drove that That was all really user helped drive that design

Ed: And at a price of US$995 – that includes the lens?

Dan: It doesn’t include the lens, but that’s the good news right. You get to put your own optics on there as well, so it’s still a cinema style camera at US$995, for you to choose which lens you want to put on there.

Ed: Whereas with a lot of the smaller action cameras, you’ve got a fixed plastic lens and that’s what you live with?

Dan: Yes, that’s exactly right. There are different tools that apply to these different jobs, but for the guys that want to have that cinema style, cinema quality, ProRes or RAW capabilities – that’s what those micro cameras are for. micro cinema camera, we had seen our own cameras and our pocket cameras being used on drones or in sports or tied to people’s bodies to view activities, so what we realised was there was a better way we could do that for functionality, and that’s probably where those micro cameras have come from.

I’ve walked into live production studios, the guys are doing a streaming studio set. They don’t have eight people walking around with video cameras, they’ve just got a couple of fixed point cameras, so being able to

Ed: And there’s a pretty spectacular addition to that.

You’ve got this Video Assist device. I don’t know if that’s the right name for it, because it’s actually an offboard recorder with a monitor?

Dan: I think when we were originally talking about it, to us it was like an advancement of our HyperDeck Shuttle unit, you know, a little HyperDeck Shuttle is a recorder. We went with “Video Assist” because, at US$500, you don’t really have to actually use it as a recorder. People may just use it as a monitor that has

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the VU meters and the histogram on there, and just use it as an assist for a camera. When they throw that on the back of an ATEM to have another confidence monitor going off, you know, before I hit my actual live production switcher, so the Video Assist made it feel like more of a product that we could fit into different spaces, even though I’m sure a lot of people will be using it as a recorder in the field. So it is still a recorder in the field being able to record to those SD cards with ProRes or DNxHD and for just $500 having that beautiful HD monitor on there, people may just use it as a very efficient monitor as well.

Ed: Now I was interested to hear you say that the Video Assist now had DNxHD and ProRes so that you can have it as an Avid codec or as an Apple codec, and the reason for that is?

Dan: There’s no RAW recording in the Video Assist. It’s going straight to the SD cards in HD, so we wanted to have another codec choice for people in the Video Assist since we don’t have the RAW recording in there.

Ed: Okay, now onto the big camera, the URSA, and it certainly was a question amongst the press last NAB – "why have they built this camera with a removable sensor?"

There was something fishy going on here, perhaps they weren’t happy with the sensor that they had, and well, it was announced today that you’ve got a better sensor?

Dan: We knew the viewfinder was an important piece of what we wanted to do. One of the things that we knew was going to come last year was we wanted to build that full size camera that could add a lot of capabilities because of the size of the body, but we knew that one of the drawbacks would be that people, especially folks who came from the DSLR world who were working with smaller cameras would say it’s a big camera.

Now people who were working with ENG cameras and film certainly were used to big cameras, but there’s a certain population that was looking for smaller cameras.

One of the things that we knew we needed to do even with the regular URSA, was to add our own viewfinder on there, so we’ve basically spent the last year developing this really nice HD OLED display that has all of the focus peaking, all of the focus charts on there, that is really a gorgeous viewfinder that we have on there, and of course we’ve built it so that it can be used between both of our URSA family.

Ed: Right, the URSA Mini. So we’re not talking about the same resolution as the big URSA – the sensor, but the actual recording ability?

Dan: The thing there was that we do quite like that 4K sensor and we’ve continued to do more development. We put out an update just last Friday that gave more features to that current 4K sensor, but we had also been working on having this new sensor developed that met a lot of the demands that we thought we wanted to see out of our next sensor – so being able to have that 4.6K resolution, having that higher dynamic range with the 15 stops of dynamic range, a little better ISO latitude – it’s a native 800 ISO sensor.

So being able to say "look, we want URSA to be upgradeable", something that you could buy today and be very happy with, would be upgradeable, but also knowing that we wanted to create this sensor so that we could put it into other new cameras like the URSA Mini as well, and even URSA Mini itself you can still buy it in its 4K iteration for a lot less, or for the 4.6K, because that 4.6K sensor is US$2000 so there’s a point for us to have a very even more so cost-effective 4K sensor and to pay a premium for that US$2000 for that 4.6K sensor, whether it be in the URSA Mini or in the original URSA camera.

Ed: With the URSA camera, you’ve made it easier now for people to get into it, you’ve actually lowered the price of the original sensor?

Dan: Yes that’s correct. We wanted to build this lineup between the URSA Mini 4K, the URSA Mini 4.6K, the original URSA 4K and now the URSA 4.6K, so there are a lot of options that people have in there to decide what is the right camera and the right sensor. The nice part here is they all blend together very well. You can have someone working with one URSA and two URSA Minis and different sensors, but it’s all going to cut together very nicely.

Ed: And before we get onto the URSA Mini, which I was going to save till a bit later, but you keep talking about it, a new viewfinder for the URSA?

URSA Mini all kitted out.

Dan: The biggest difference is when we look at the URSA Mini, we wanted to go back to create a newer handheld version. You know the original 2½K was kinda designed to be that handheld version and URSA was designed to be that full size production camera.

What URSA Mini is, you look at it and you say "oh, it’s a video camera", you know it’s something that’s handheld that a single operator can go ahead and use.

Now that has some limitations in itself … it doesn’t have the upgradeable sensor, it doesn’t have the ability to do as high a framerate because we can’t deal with the heat and the electronic needs that the bigger URSA does, but for the price of what you’re getting, you’re still getting the same with the dual CFast recordings being able to record that RAW, you have the option of buying the 4K version or the 4.6K version, and you have a lot of the capability in a three kilo camera that gives that single operator a lot of flexibility.

Ed: And all for US$2995?

Dan: US$2995 is the starting price for the 4K EF version and again, if we look at going to the 4.6K, it’s always US$2000 more, regardless of which model we’re looking at. So I think it builds out a really nice family for people to choose which sensor, which camera is the right one for them.

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Ed: While we’re on the subject of heat … I have had reports from a number of people in New Zealand that the Blackmagic cards that they have in their systems are a lot hotter running than other cards. Is there anything in the Research & Development that’s looking into heat production?

Dan: We’ve definitely continued to look at heat of all sources from all of these products. We’ve brought on more folks that have specialties in thermal heating and we continue to look at that, especially as we look at things like 12 Gig products which do generate more heat, we need to be very careful about designing products that can deal with that heat and deal with the extra processing power that’s needed with that. So we’re constantly looking at developing better products and making new developments. This year, I think with this plethora of 12 Gig, we’ve done a good job of that, but we always want to hear feedback from customers if they’re finding things, because we obviously develop at a very rapid pace, we’re quite capable of changing and making improvements, so we try to get as much feedback as we can, especially at shows like this where we can engage with a great many customers and as a company we continue to grow ourselves. In a short period of time, we have grown pretty exponentially and we can indeed add specialties and professions within our company to be able to deal with the challenges that arise on all levels, so the thermal heating and dynamics, is definitely something that we’re paying a great deal of attention to as we continue to move forward with some of these more complex products that we’ve been developing.

Ed: So that’s it, you heard it here, and if you do have a problem with any Blackmagic product in terms of heat or anything else, please let Blackmagic know, as well as your dealer. It’s important for their own Research & Development that they know where they can improve.

Dan: Absolutely, we want to get feedback into either our info@ or support@ boxes. Obviously a lot of what we do is based off of feedback and guidance, and the only way we can know is if we get that feedback and guidance from folk, so it is extremely important to us.

Ed: Now, last but not least, you’ve been putting an awful lot of effort, according to Grant, into Resolve, making that even better and it’s still free?

Dan: You know, the way I look at it is, for us to be able to feel comfortable now calling it an NLE, the marketing that you see out the very front of the building is “NLE and colour grader in one.” For Grant and the rest of us to feel comfortable enough to call it that means that it’s

a tremendous amount of work and effort and energy to raise it to that status. Last year we added a great number of editing features, but we still didn’t really feel comfortable calling it an NLE. This year, with everything we’ve done, with the multiple camera angles and cutting between those, all of the audio updates that we’ve done for the extra audio capabilities, spline adjustments, the export to Pro Tools, the ability to add the AU or the VST plugins – I mean it’s a tremendous amount … it’s hard for people to appreciate how much has gone into it and the only proof that really we can point to is the fact that we are calling it an NLE. For us to feel comfortable with that, you have to believe how much work has gone in to get it to that level. It’s still an amazing colour grader, it’s still an amazing finishing tool, but to actually feel like we can elevate it to that level of calling it a professional NLE, it’s a tremendous amount of work, so we are totally excited for people to come touch and feel it, start using it. We still have a wonderful free version available and we’ll continue to supply the full version with a great number of our cameras and we continue to build a giant user base there and Resolve is kind of the product that glues so many of our products together, so it’s an integral part to our overall business and we are fully vested in making it successful.

Ed: And can we be assured that, if we currently have an NLE from another manufacturer on our system, we can install Resolve and it won’t interfere with anything we’ve got on there?

Dan: Yes. We absolutely continue to work with all of the other NLE partners that we’ve worked with for a dozen years now. We want to continue to work with them. The nice part about adding all of these editing features is that it does make it easier to do round tripping and conforming with those other software products, so we’re quite comfortable with putting another third party software on here, either using it independently or integrating it with a Resolve workflow, and that’s quite a common solution.

We want to continue to pursue that, and we also want to continue to pursue developing our software application to be the best application that we can provide to our customers as well.

Ed: And you just go to the Blackmagic website and download Resolve?

Dan: Currently, we still have Resolve 11 up there; Resolve 12 will continue to be worked on over the next 2-3 months, hopefully sometime in Quarter 3 that will be out. We’ll obviously have a free update for anyone who has already got it or the download will of course always be free for the light version. But for the 12 version, hopefully in a couple of months from now, a free update for anyone who has that as well.

Ed: So what do you get in the first paid version that you don’t get in the light?

Dan: The biggest difference is you’ll see – and it’s not much – 3D stereoscopic is all in the paid version. All of your like noise reduction is in the paid version, and all of your multiuser capability … so if I want to have multiple users or remote access, or we have a new remote rendering and we can send it off to other Resolve machines, these are really high end, high clientele level stuff. But as you can tell, if that’s it, most individual users are quite happy working with the free version of Resolve Light.

NZVN Ed: I’ll let you know.

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TVLogic Monitors for Techtel We are at TVLogic for Techtel and we have Wes Donahue from TVLogic and David Colthorpe from Techtel.

Ed: Now we’re on Day 3 and it has been pointed out to me that there are an awful lot of monitor manufacturers here at the show, all showing the latest of different sizes, with histograms and buttons that you can press and all sorts of things. I guess the question that any potential customer would love to know is “why is TVLogic the one that they should seriously consider choosing?

Wes: Well what’s happened in the monitor business over the last couple of years is the same thing that’s happened in most of the rest of the business, which is that everything’s commoditising. So like you said, when you walk around the show, looking at monitors from every different country in the world, there’s a certain similarity to much of what you’re seeing.

They all seem to have waveform and vectorscope and audio meters and a lot of the same knobs and buttons and things on there. But that’s really what you see on the outside and that’s the stuff that’s easy to duplicate, that, when you’re in a show and you’re showing people product, it’s easy to say “yeah, we have that too.” But where you have to really make your decision is like when you buy a car, you’ve got to look under the hood. And when you look under the hood of the TVLogic product, the thing that really sets us apart from I would say every other company out there, No 1 ( because there’s more than one thing ) but No 1 is colour accuracy. Colour accuracy comes from understanding colour science. If you understand colour science that means you have to understand how lookup tables work and how the electronics can control the way the monitor responds using a lookup table. That is something that most companies that build video monitor systems don’t get, and you’ll go around and – even here at this show, you’ll see companies that say “we’ve got a 3D LUT.” I would tell you flat out that 99% of those companies that say they’ve got a 3D LUT don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, because what they’ve got is something they’ve bought from somebody who says “this will let you import a 3D LUT.” But that’s a meaningless thing, to import a 3D LUT, if your monitor has not been profiled and calibrated so that the monitor itself knows what to do with that 3D LUT once it’s imported.

Ed: So just to put it in terms that I understand, this means that, when you’re recording on your camera and you have applied a LUT to the image that you’re recording, you can take that same LUT, put it in the monitor, so that when you connect your camera footage to the monitor, you’re getting the correct look?

Wes: Right. So a lot of times – and this is specific to field production – you’re in the field, you’ve got a guy that they might call a DIT or some type of assistant who is pre-visualising what is coming out of the camera.

He’s looking at that with the director or somebody else and saying “this is the look I’m trying to achieve.” And then they’re saving that as either a lookup table or some way to capture that image and take it off to postproduction to send that out as a daily of that scene.

Wes from TVLogic.

You know, if you’re working on a film production, in order for that to have any meaning whatsoever, the monitor that you’re looking at on set and the monitor that you’re looking at in post that interpolates that have to have the same basis of understanding of that LUT you’ve created. So in order to do that, both monitors have to have some sort of calibration LUT which means, I put the monitor in its native colour space, which is the full colour gamut that that display is capable of reproducing, and then I measure what that space is as a LUT. So a LUT is a lookup table; a 3D LUT is a three dimensional lookup table – it’s a cube; a 1D LUT is a one dimensional lookup table, so that’s just X and Y. The 3D LUT is X, Y and Z. So obviously the 3D LUT gives you a lot more data to work with to see what that colour is represented as. So if you have a 3D LUT that says “this is what the native capability of this monitor is”, that’s the big cube … think of that as the big cube.

And then you have a 3D LUT of the monitor back in the postproduction room and that’s another big cube. Now we’re on set and we’re pushing all the buttons around and we’re saying “this is what we want it to look like.”

Once we figure out what we want it to look like, we save that “look” as a representative LUT and then I want to export that and bring it back over to this other monitor and get it to look exactly the same way. That won’t work unless we know what we’re starting from … where’s our starting point? So the missing link in most of these things is that, once you leave the environment that you’re in and take it to another monitor, you’ve completely lost your reference. There’s no reference anymore. So you load that LUT in another monitor and it doesn’t look the same and everyone scratches their head and goes “why doesn’t this look the same?”

Because there’s no reference between the two of them.

The reference is the calibration LUT. Now this stuff we’re talking about is all really heavy duty colour science, so even within our own range we don’t have 3D LUTs in every monitor.

Ed:

But if you have them, you state it?

Wes: Yes. But the reason I’m explaining this is to say that, by having that, if you have a colour critical application, you cannot find a more accurate monitor to work with or set of monitors than what TVLogic offers.

Ed: Okay, so how can a customer know that your 3D LUT is in fact accurate and true, whereas Company B is pulling the wool over their eyes?

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Wes: That’s an excellent question, and the way you can learn that is that there are now software applications – SpectraCal is an example – that are sold for calibration, that have LUT checkers. You put the probe in front of the monitor and they’ve told you that this monitor has been calibrated to an accurate 709 colour space. Then you put the colour checker on there and you check to see what the 3D LUT really looks like and see if the 709 colour space is correct – and a lot of times, a lot of times you’re going to find out that that so-called calibrated 709 monitor is not correct at all.

Ed: Or you could go to Plan B and in fact purchase your monitor from a reputable dealer who assures you that the measurement is correct. Is that right David?

David: Well that’s right. The quality assurance programme within Techtel puts the products through our QA team to be sure that their colourimetry is correct.

Ed: So is that for every monitor that passes through the Techtel stable?

David: Ed:

Yes it is. Every monitor has a QA process.

Do you reject some?

David:

I don’t believe there’s much rejection.

Wes: One thing to add to that is that the TVLogic monitors are calibrated at the factory with a software programme called CL-SOFT that TVLogic designed. It’s a very, very powerful software programme and it’s free to everyone who buys a TVLogic monitor. The only thing you need to use that software programme, the same way they use it at the factory, is a colour probe

that has been serialised to that particular software. So for example, in the US anyway, X-Rite makes a probe called the X-Rite i1Pro, very well known around the world. That’s about a $400-$500 probe. You buy one of those and now you can calibrate all your TVLogic monitors using the CL-SOFT software and that’s how you can know that they’re in calibration, because you can have this software for free and be able to do that on your own once you purchase … and that’s an automated calibration, it’s not something where you have to go in and adjust reds and greens and blues, you just hang the probe in front of the monitor, push Go and it does the whole calibration for you.

Ed: So is calibration something that goes out over time, that one should check one’s monitors every now and again?

Wes: Not so much. What usually drifts over time is white point, because white point shifts as the monitors age, so usually what’s done in the follow-up calibrations is simply a white point adjustment. Then if you’re talking about a colourist who’s looking at that, if he looks at it after the white point’s adjusted and says “it’s still not quite like what I remember seeing,” then you can run the full cal and keep everybody assured that they’re seeing the proper 709. It’s also worth noting that not every single monitor in our line is designed to give you 100% of Rec 709 colour space. You know we’ve got little onboard monitors that are terrific for pulling focus and stuff like that, but they don’t do 100% of the 709, but that’s not what they’re for, so if colour is what you’re looking for – accurate colour – then we

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have monitors that will provide that for you. If you’re just looking for a good accurate reference display just for confidence or something like that, you don’t have to spend a lot of money to get the same level of colour accuracy if you buy a TVLogic product. That’s really what we’re selling, accurate colour that you can be confident you’re getting what it is you’re shooting.

Ed: Now Wes has dashed off to do a prize draw so David is going to tell us about the product range.

Today I’m going to be particularly pleasant to David.

David: Alright, so we’re going to talk a bit about the sort of monitors that have been popular in New Zealand from TVLogic.

One of them that’s a real standout is the VFM-056W which is a small on-camera monitor. It’s been really popular I think for about 3 years now. It’s found a sweet spot in terms of cost efficiency and performance. They’re totally proven in terms of their reliability, you can throw them around in your gear in the van, generally abuse the hell out of them and they just keep coming back for more.

Ed:

That sounds like you David?

David: It sounds like me and my interviews with you Grant, yes. So the 056 has a 1280 x 800 resolution and that was quite adequate but if you are looking to find your sharps in HD work more resolution is desirable so we’ve introduced the full 1920 x 1080 resolution VFM -058W to fulfil this requirement. But it still has the heritage of the 056 and again has that stability and durability that everybody likes. A lot of the users of this 058 monitor are typically people who are using ARRI, REDs or even FS7 users, so one thing that’s notable about this 058 is a new feature providing the ability to display metadata from the ALEXA. Obviously that’s a pretty handy feature.

Ed:

Ed: I come back to the question about many, many monitors on the market from all sorts of different people – why do the people come to you to buy the TVLogic version? Have you actually asked them … is it just because they like you?

David: Well it’s a lot because they like me Grant, but no I think TVLogic have established a position in the market …

Ed:

You used the term “sweet spot” before?

David: Well yes, they’ve established a sweet spot whereby there’s an optimum return on investment, if you like, that a customer wants to make.

You don’t want to buy the cheapest thing, you really don’t want to spend more money than you need, you want to get the optimum performance, and that’s really where I think TVLogic have it worked out.

They are very, very rigorous in their design and their manufacturing process. I’ve been to their plant and I’ve seen the way they work and frankly, you could eat your dinner off the floor in that place.

It is spectacularly clean and tidy and organised and they are very meticulous.

Also they’re small enough to care about their monitors, that is their speciality. Monitors aren’t just one of the many other things that they make. Monitors are their passion and I think that’s what comes out. You can see it. They know that price is important and they work towards getting an optimum performance out at the NZVN price point that people are willing to pay.

Also the contrast ratio is doubled?

David: The contrast ratio is significantly improved over the 056; most of the parameters are improved, yes.

Ed:

And it’s got a lot more buttons on it?

David: Yes, more control. There’s a raft of user features which have been introduced on the 058.

Ed: So that includes buttons F1, F2, F3 and a menu dial?

David: You’ve got soft buttons, so you can programme those for commonly required functions, yes.

Ed: And the 058 – they’ve redesigned where the buttons are and where the “ins” and “outs” are, but they’ve also put a pretty whopping heat sync on the back?

David: Well yes, again as part of the general drive towards reliability, and the cool running of the monitor is a pretty essential requirement in that regard, so stability, maintenance of the correct calibration and so on, it’s good to keep the monitor cool.

Ed: Now that’s the 5.6 or 5.8 inch size, but there are larger field monitors as well and one that is sunlight readable?

David: Yes that’s right. Actually there are two models in the sunlight readable line-up. One is a 7.4 inch and the other is a 9.5 inch. In both sizes you’ve got a sunlight readable version and a standard version – the multi-format version. In this case, the SRM074W, you press the button and you can increase the luminance up to 1500 candelas versus a more normal 400 candela. So that obviously is jolly useful in outdoor shooting and that same general principle applies for the 9.5 inch, the SRM-095W. Page 45

David is the one to see for monitors.

JVC for Quinto We’re here at JVC with Pete Fullerton from Quinto Communications.

Ed: Pete, obviously the signs around here are all about streaming. There are a few new little cameras, there are certainly improvements to current cameras, but the mood, the presentations are all about JVC streaming capability. I was particularly impressed by the line “No 1 News Camera in the World.” That must be good?

Pete: Look of course, JVC are the only camera manufacturer that’s really managed to nail the live streaming technology.

Whereas other camera manufacturers have added streaming capabilities, or have promised streaming capabilities, JVC are the only ones that have managed to make it work, and make it work properly.

Ed: Okay, and they’ve done that by some partnering I understand?

Pete: I think it’s more accurate to say that they’ve done this by themselves and when other people who are in this technology area have seen what they’ve done, they’ve become quite impressed and then they’ve joined forces with JVC. So Zixi for example, STREAMSTAR … everybody wants to get in and to create a complete workflow solution.

We saw the STREAMSTAR product a wee while ago in New Zealand and how well that fits in. We’ve talked about Zixi in the past and how well that fits in. So it’s a matter of JVC saying “what we want to do is make something that creates easy live streaming, takes all the technical hassle out of it and makes it easy and affordable for everybody to be doing it.”

To that extent now, there’s been a software upgrade on their cameras which allows you to go straight into YouTube. So there’s direct live streaming off the cameras into YouTube or other suppliers.

Ed: And what I really appreciated when I took part in a demonstration here, was that the same camera providing this stream back to a base station, could either go out live streaming, or it can be used in a broadcast situation – a live broadcast situation or it could even be recorded for later use. Now in the past, the quality hasn’t really been there, but what I saw today was a scene from a very leafy forest, the trees were moving in the wind, the presenter was there with

Pete and Charlie at JVC.

his black camera, black shirt, but he had a white jacket on … he was moving around and there was no sign of any edge movement, any degradation, and the colour was great.

To me it could have been out of a microwave truck.

Now we had a chance to talk with one of the presenters at the demonstration, Charlie Yeagley, who is at WWSB in Florida and they’re an ABC affiliate so they’re not a little fly-by-night broadcaster shall we say.

Ed: Charlie, you provide material for ABC and you’re not using a microwave truck. How are you doing it?

Charlie: Well I wouldn’t say we’re not using a microwave truck. We do currently own two, but I think probably both of them are 20 years old.

So the business case to get them fixed is probably never going to happen. If something major catastrophic happens to say the engine, the only way we would continue would be to tow them to a location, because the microwave would still work. That’s the joke around the station. So the JVC product for us – we got our first one about 2 years ago.

Charlie (left) streaming on location.

Page 46

Ed:

What product’s this we’re talking about?

Charlie: It’s the JVC 650U, the streaming camera.

For the price point, it’s an incredibly affordable way to go “live” and do live television.

Ed: So this is a camera that replaces a microwave truck and a camera?

Charlie: Correct. It uses 4G LTE technology with a single modem. So basically, the camera connects to a hot spot. That hot spot can be a 4G LTE hot spot, sometimes I connect it to my phone which acts as a hot spot and what I do, when I’m in the field, is I determine which is faster, by using an app called Speed Test, where it tells me what my “up” speed is. If I get somewhere between 3 Megs and 5 Megs, then I know I’m in a pretty good spot. Then what happens is a NAD device connects to a unit back at the station which receives a video through IP and moves it to SDI video and straight into the …

Ed:

So what resolution are we talking about?

Charlie: We’re using typically 1.5 Meg and that in our field works just fine. We’re an SD station still, we up-convert to HD, so we’re feeding back SD anamorphic video and the latency is less than 2 seconds. In our scenario, we have to have the ability to do talkback, so the anchor throws to a reporter in the field, that reporter is typically by themselves, one man band, also performing their own live shots, so there’s not even a truck involved. Then that person has to have a conversation so if you’re getting more than a 2 second delay it starts to become a little bit obvious.

Ed: But I saw that in the demo and to me that’s something that the talent can work out as part of their workflow, that they don’t engage in short banter, they have large sentences and they know what question is coming, so that they can be prepared for it. It’s just a case of a little workaround and the viewer shouldn’t notice.

Charlie: I have heard in other markets that they do that. They know what line is coming at them, so that they back-time their first line to get to eliminate that delay. In our case, it’s less than 2 seconds, so we don’t ask our reporters to try to do that.

Ed:

Could you do higher than 1.5 Meg if you wanted?

Charlie: We could go to 3.0 and we have in some scenarios where there isn’t talent talking back, where I just want to throw to, maybe a car accident, some live traffic, something that doesn’t require throwing to somebody who’s talking, we can raise the quality of it.

But to be honest with you, I don’t believe our end viewer notices the difference. The person I always ask is my mother and when she says it looks good … because that’s our average viewer. We have an older population of people who, let’s face it, they’re not nitpicking it like I would.

Ed:

There’s no Spec Savers in Florida?

Charlie:

No, I don’t think so.

Ed: It’s all right, it’s a local joke. You’ve still got the microwave trucks, so why do you use the microwave trucks as opposed to the cameras? Obviously for them you need a driver and you need opera-tors and all the other bits and pieces. Why not just go totally JVC camera stream-ing?

Charlie: There is an advantage to a live truck in some situations.

Ed: Is it also that ABC are not quite ready for a total streaming supply, that they prefer you to use the microwave truck?

Charlie: No I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it’s more of a preference – some photographers on our staff might feel more comfortable going to a certain location with a truck. There could be a large crowd which could affect your 4G LTE signal. If you’re at a stadium with 4-5000 people all on their cell phones, it could affect your signal. So we have to be aware of that. Sometimes we bring the JVC camera in the live truck, we get there, we run a speed test to determine whether we could go live with it. If we think that there’s going to be a problem, then we’ll put the mast up and use the live truck. There could be some scenarios where you can’t get out. You are still at the mercy of cell phone service.

Ed: Right. But if you were equipping yourself again, you’d go …

Charlie: Oh absolutely. Like I said, our group is the Calkins Media Group and we have 3 TV stations, 1 in Sarasota, 1 in Huntsville, Alabama, and 1 in Tallahassee, for a total of 24 of these cameras – 24 cameras probably for the price of one microwave truck.

In Huntsville for example, it’s a very hilly area, so microwave is tough, so they couldn’t go “live” in certain scenarios.

Also for us, a lot of our population is 50 miles south of our tower, so we can’t go live, so there are some areas where we would never be able to go live, even with microwave, until 2 years ago when we got these cameras. Now we can cover them like we’ve never been able to cover them before with this camera, because microwave wasn’t even an option. It’s a game changer for our station.

Ed: Okay, so we’ve just heard from Charlie, and those are very impressive words, so I guess Pete, now the ball’s in your court, you’ve got to impress the New

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Zealand broadcasters to take on JVC streaming cameras. Is that a bridge too far do you think?

Pete: Is that a loaded question – maybe. Live streaming is becoming very important and more and more relevant.

When you can utilise the advantages of the public internet for low cost contribution direct from your camera and still get great pictures – well that’s a pretty powerful story.

Ed: If we take Charlie’s example, that he’s replaced much of the need for microwave trucks with the JVC streaming camera, do you see a very strong place for this in New Zealand with our topography and our isolated freelancers who could do News from anywhere in the country with one of these cameras and the 4G network?

Pete: That’s a very good question Grant. What really struck me was Charlie was talking about all the problems that we suffer from. He was talking about the fact that they’re in a mountainous area in some places and microwave just won’t work to get out of there, but the cell phone will. He talked about the fact that it’s really expensive to run microwave trucks and yet it’s a lot cheaper to run a camera that will enable you to do it. We’re not saying that this technology will take over completely from microwave and satellite, but there’s a massive opportunity for a lot more live situations using this technology.

Ed: And if it’s not live, it’s close to live and at least you’re getting content from places that you could never get a microwave truck to in time?

Pete: Even if it wasn’t live, it’s immediate and it’s there and that’s really what drives viewers to News, it’s immediate, it’s there.

Ed: Well we’ll watch for this from our broadcasters in the coming years, months, whatever.

But in the meantime, also in the JVC camera range, you’ve gone small form, 35mm 4K?

That enables you to get back to the studio and put your high res version on.

Ed:

So you upload the high res version?

Pete: It’s like sending your proxies back and having a proxy immediately there, whether it’s an event, so that you can show … like the Vodafone Music Awards for example. You can record the Vodafone Music Awards in glorious 4K resolution, that’s about getting the highest quality and then down-res’ing into what can be broadcast …

Ed:

Or what can be streamed?

Pete: Yes, but it’s also you’re down-res’ing to maybe 1080 to broadcast, but while you’re shooting stream live to the web, so that even if people are not there, they get a feeling of what’s happening.

Ed: Pete:

Immediate for the peeps eh?

Yes and a teaser for the live event.

Pete: Yes, JVC have released three 4K cameras – the GY-HM200, the GY-HM170, and the GY-LS300 - all capable of recording 4K resolution. The GY-LS300 has a full 35mm sensor and a micro four-thirds inch mount with some very clever scaling technology in there, which is well worth having a look at, in order for you to use any lens you like with a micro four-thirds adapter to get some very beautiful pictures. I’ve had a look at some of the pictures that you can get off this camera and I’m amazed. I’ve talked about 4K, and I’m not a big 4K convert as many people would know, but you look at the camera and these pictures – just beautiful.

Ed: Now the question comes – and I’m not a great 4K proponent for most situations; for some I see it as being the way to go, but for streaming – 4K – I mean even Charlie says that when they’re using the JVC streaming camera, most of the time they’re using it at 1.5 Meg in standard def and then upscaling to high def.

So why would you want to stream 4K? Pete: Well maybe it’s not necessarily about streaming 4K, but it’s capturing at the highest quality that you can and having a high quality original and then streaming out a low-res proxy. Now for example, if you were shooting some live News footage, you might want to send a low-res proxy as your immediate, and that could be your teaser for your lead into the News, so coming up at 6 o’clock we’ll have full pictures from this.

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Charlie with all he needs to stream.

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Plura for Gencom For Gencom, we have Ray Kalo at Plura – and I can't say "just monitors" anymore as you will read.

Ed: Ray, you are going to excite me aren’t you, because I’ve been wandering around the booths this morning and there’s nothing that’s really grabbed me.

What have you got?

Ray: Excitement only happens at the Plura booth, you know that. That’s why we are an exciting company.

We have quite a few new products – we have a 4K monitor …

Ed: Oh really Ray! I remember asking you a number of times “when are you going to have a 4K monitor?” and you would say “oh it’s not really the time for 4K” … so now’s the time?

Ray: Maybe – it’s still “maybe”. We decided to start with the LCM series, the 84 inch size monitor as the biggest size we’re going to go with, and then we’re going to go down to 50 and 30 – probably at IBC. We’re testing the market to see if there’s really a true potential 4K business.

Ed: So this is not just in the home theatre – you’re not selling this for somebody to watch at home, unless they’re really, really well off, but this is a grade monitor for a studio?

Ray: Yes, for QC, for quality control.

Ed:

And showing clients?

Ray: Showing clients of course, but our objective from this is that it shows we are a player in the 4K business if it ends up being a valid business environment; if there’s a business to be had, we are in there. Plura is willing and able to enter the 4K marketplace hoping there will be gradual and steady customer demands.

Ed:

What technology are you using behind that?

Ray: It’s LED backlit technology.

Ed:

So you haven’t gone the OLED way?

Ray: At this point OLED is not a reliable technology we can trust.

Ed: I must say, looking at those pictures, they are stunning in the clarity and colour rendition. I can’t see that another monitor could do it any better?

Ray with a really big monitor.

Ed:

Ed: So you don’t need to huddle behind a hood with a towel over your head?

Ray: Exactly, you don’t need a hood, you don’t need anything. As you can see from our demo here, a beautiful clear, high contrast and colourful video under the 5000 Lumens light we have here to simulate being under the sun in the desert of Arizona or somewhere in the Valley.

Ray: It’s pretty neat, it’s a nice monitor, it has good colour reproduction.

Ed: There’s nothing good content?

And this is not just for Steadicam operators is it?

Ray: No, no, field, outdoor applications.

like

Ray: Absolutely, good content shows the best out of the monitor – unlike bad content.

Ed: Exactly, and who wants to watch bad content.

And now another monitor in your very bright light series?

Ray: Sure. The 7 inch PHB series – we’re adding a 7 inch to the series.

We started with 9 inch at IBC and now we have a 7 inch; just a little brother to the 9 inch.

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Ed:

Okay, keep exciting me?

Ray: We also have a J2K – JPEG-2000 decoder built into the monitor so you can directly go from your router with J2K output into the monitor, with the SFP series.

Ed: Now I see in a Perspex case here, there’s a little camera with the name Plura on the side of it. What’s going on here?

Ray: Just a toy for now.

Ed:

You just want to get people interested I guess?

Ray: Yes, we just want to show people that we can make cameras, not just monitors … actually it’s a true product that we are introducing unofficially to the market, because this product was designed and built for a different market and we’re trying to make it fit for our broadcast market.

Ed: It looks as though it might have had security camera origins?

Ray: Not really, it had more government use in undisclosed locations – high end, undisclosed location applications.

Ed: Oh dear, I’m stepping away now Ray, I don’t want to get too close to it.

Ray: It’s a very, very good quality camera; it was built more than two years ago for a specific application.

Ed:

So what application do you see it being used for?

Ray: Sports, POV, BeautyCam, reality shows, all other applications with limited space and the need for a high quality camera …

Ed: Because there’s lots of little cameras out there at this show?

Ray: But this is the smallest true HD camera in the world.

Ed:

Oh, so you’re not claiming 4K?

Ray: It’s not a 4K, it’s a full HD and it’s two-thirds inch CMOS, 3 chips built-in inside.

Ed:

Three chips inside there?

Ray: Inside that beautiful small camera.

Ed: And of course, it’s true HD as opposed to "possibly 4K" in other cameras?

The piece at the bottom of the picture is the JPEG-2000 decoder and it plugs into the monitor board.

Ed:

So is JPEG-2000 quite prominent in Europe?

Ray: Europe, the US … in the US there’s quite a few high end broadcasters who are using J2K to distribute their content over the facilities. In the past they’ve been using Black Boxes to convert J2K to HD-SDI or HDMI and of course this creates multiple points of failure. Our solution prevents this issue and provides a streamline video infrastructure, one point of failure and one direct connection to the monitor, eliminating multiple adaptors and unreliable consumer monitors, comparable to a reliable trusted one point of failure broadcast monitor J2K solution.

Ray: Right, it’s a true HD camera. It can support up to 120 frames, so it’s great for slo-mo’s as well.

Ed:

Anything else?

Ray: We have more rack-mountable monitors, a dual 7 inch, a dual 9 inch.

Of course, we also have a Plura app for timers, so you can actually use your Android phone or tablet as a timer display, with our SPTs – Studio Production Timers – as well. This is the follow through of our acquisition last year of Alpermann-Velte.

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Ed: Right, I don’t think it’s particularly popular in the Australia-New Zealand market, but I’m sure Nicki will correct me, do you think it will become more popular?

Ray: It will become, yes. You know you can transport high bitrate over a fibre or coax or a CAT-5 and that’s very significant.

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Ikegami Cameras for Gencom For Gencom, we have Alan Keil from Ikegami USA with Kentaro Tanaka, Overseas Sales, following our words closely.

Ed: Alan, Ikegami – it’s been a product represented by Gencom for quite some time, but I guess it’s fair to say, it’s now become a serious competitor especially in the studio camera market for New Zealand and that’s because the pricing has become more competitive.

Now people have a chance to really compare products that they know with Ikegami. What is there in the Ikegami range that would excite a studio user in New Zealand?

Alan for Ikegami.

Alan: This year at NAB we’re really introducing products at the high end and at the low end …

Ed: I wouldn’t say “low” – I mean you could go to medium?

Alan: Well that’s a matter of opinion – we do have products in the middle as well. But as far as new introductions are concerned, those are the areas this year.

Ed:

Well, let’s start low and go high?

Alan: Okay. So this year we’ve introduced the HC-HD300 model. Those familiar with Ikegami will know that, years ago, we used to have an HC series of cameras as economical standard definition cameras.

Since the transition to high definition, we lost that product range, but now we’ve reintroduced it. This is a purposely built studio camera, but using 3 one-third inch sensors and some other approaches to keep the cost quite affordable. We would consider this, in some ways, our first affordable HD camera. But I think we’ve done a good job as far as selecting where to save the cost. The build quality of the product is very high; the feature set is quite complete; and the performance is good – almost equal to the top end cameras, a little sacrifice in performance. It is a very nice studio camera, it includes all the studio camera features …

Ed: And takes all standard lenses that other cameras would?

camera. The next product that we introduced is a twothirds inch, very high quality but still affordable product, using three CMOS sensors, the HDK-65C is the model designation.

Customers will normally decide the format, whether it’s 1080 or 720 – I’m not 100% sure in New Zealand if there are customers using different formats …

Ed:

Yes, 1080, 720 but it is PAL, so we’re into 50i …

Alan: Okay so it would do 50. You can order it to do both formats if you need to, but the most affordable package is when you select one format with it, but then you can upgrade it. It comes with Triax or SMPTE fibre, and the performance level is very high on that particular camera.

And then on the high end this year, we’ve introduced 4K and 8K cameras. These are of course high resolution cameras. The 8K camera is using a 33 million pixel sensor and it’s using a PL mount lens, so it’s in a Super 35mm format. This is the fourth generation 8k camera Ikegami has developed in co-operation with NHK. It’s become a practical camera; early versions of 8K were kind of experimental cameras and not practical pieces.

the any

Alan: Actually, because of the one-third inch format, we are talking about using one-third inch lenses.

It’s packaged with a very nice 17 to 1 lens as the standard studio configuration; there are alternate lenses available.

You can use two-thirds inch lenses with an adapter; there’s an adapter that mounts the two-thirds inch lens to the one-third inch Page 53

Ed:

They were all quite big from what I’ve seen?

Alan: camera.

Ed:

You can see it over here, it’s just a portable

You could almost put that on your shoulder?

Alan: You could put it on your shoulder, not with that studio viewfinder, but you could put that camera on your shoulder. It uses SMPTE fibre, that happens to be a 40 gigabit transmission system on the SMPTE fibre, but it’s using a conventional connector and conventional cable to a CCU. The viewfinder is 4K, the monitor above it is 4K, but here on the front of the booth, you have the live image available as an 8K image, using 4x4K 58 inch monitors to make the 8K. Ed:

But at the moment, you’re just using a 4K lens?

Alan: This is a PL mount lens, probably not a true 8K lens, but it is a high quality cinema type of lens, a cine zoom lens.

Ed: And speaking of cinema, Ikegami is not really in the cinema ballpark is it – it really is a true television camera manufacturer?

Alan: We are television, but we are bridging the gap with the 8K camera, and also with the HDK-97ARRI that we developed in co-operation with ARRI, where we take the front end of the ALEXA camera and build it into a studio camera, so people who are looking for the cine video image but still want a multi-camera situation, that camera’s very well suited. MTV for example, uses those cameras to shoot their concert series.

geared for the sports production market where we want to have more depth of field – so the opposite of cinema, we want everything to be in focus.

Ed: Weird eh – some people actually like having everything in focus?

Alan: It depends. In Cine, we want only one thing in focus, but for sports and other things, then we’re happy when everything’s in focus. That’s a new prototype, it is using three 4K sensors, so it’s not a single sensor approach where only green has full resolution … this has full resolution in all colours, so it’s using a fairly conventional optical block with 4K sensors for red, green and blue.

Ed: So, in summary, how would you say that Ikegami is different from other camera manufacturers in what they can offer either in terms of technology and support or just beautiful cameras?

Alan: I think it really is built on our experience of making cameras for many, many years and the colour reproduction, the detail reproduction and the general build quality of the product is what distinguishes us from the competitors more than any one single feature.

Ed: Because you do focus on studio cameras and studio television?

Alan: yes.

Ed: Alan:

Correct. We have done that for years now, So they should be good?

They are good!

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When they do the VMA – Video Music Awards – they shoot it with those cameras as the primary cameras.

It’s a mix of cameras, but those are the cameras that are on the floor doing the close-up shots. They like the cinema look that they get from that camera, but of course it is a live multi-camera shoot, so they need a system type camera that has all the features.

Ed: Being a studio camera manufacturer, you’re not into the recorder side of it, none of your cameras have built-in recorders?

Alan: We do not have built-in recorders at this point. We have docking style cameras, so in theory, we could have a docking recorder, but the recorders have become very small these days and so we’re actually using clip-on type recorders when recorders are needed. The other new introduction is a 4K camera and this particular one is in the two-thirds inch format. It’s

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Page 54

ARRI Lighting We are at ARRI looking at lights with Stefan Sedlmeier from ARRI Australia.

Ed Stefan, there are some LED panels here, but also some new Fresnels to talk about?

Stefan: Yes, that’s true, but firstly, I would like to give you an overview about our Australian / New Zealand operation which has been trading for 10 years now.

It’s my 9th year in Australia this year; this NAB 2015 is my 18th NAB, my 19th time in Las Vegas.

Ed: So we’re going to have some specials are we – some "Stefan 10 year" specials?

Stefan: There are always specials. We really look after our customers and distributors in Australia / New Zealand and I really love working with my clients, so this is very good. We start with lighting which is a major part of our business. I would say it’s about 40-45% of all ARRI sales worldwide. We manufacture 60,000 lights a year – from a 150 tungsten to an 18 kilowatt HMI and everything in between and now there’s also a complete line-up of LED lights.

Maybe we start with the new light completing the Lfamily. There is the launch of the L10 which is a 10 inch Fresnel LED, controllable or available as a tuneable tungsten or a tuneable daylight; as powerful, comparable like a 2½K tungsten and fully controllable.

Ed: You say "the 10 inch" – I mean, you’re a European company, but yet you use Imperial measurements?

Stefan: Yes, this is true for all the LED lights, like the L5 is a 5 inch, the L7 a 7 inch, the L10 a 10 inch.

Ed: Are you catering for a particular market do you think?

Stefan: No, I think this is just the way it was designed and I know when you get spare parts for Fresnels, they are usually measured in millimetres, this is correct, but here the line-up is basically defined in the front lens diameter of the Fresnel.

Ed: Alright, I’ll let you get away with that – we are outnumbered here.

Stefan: So what you see on the ceiling, this is basically all kinds of LED fixtures. I think there’s not a single tungsten on the ceiling anymore, it’s all LED here. So L5, L7, L10. What’s new for powerful HMIs like the M-Series is the BigBee and you reminded me it was already shown at IBC last year. The BigBee is the successor of the MaxMover – so basically pan and tilt and focus anything from an M18, M40, M90 and the ARRIMAX 18K remotely.

Ed: Now you say you’ve only got the LEDs up in the ceiling, apart from a couple of HMIs, but tungsten’s not dead is it?

Stefan under many ARRI lights.

Stefan: No, not at all. Tungsten is not dead at all.

On an exhibition booth, LED is quite good because you don’t need any gels, you can dial in any colour; you don’t have any temperature problems, you can even illuminate ice cream and it will not melt. I know that the actors and actresses sometimes complain because they are now freezing in front of the lights, because it’s just cool and lights are usually warm when it’s a studio with tungsten lights. But this is not the case with LED lighting.

Ed:

So tungsten still has its place in the ARRI stable?

Stefan: Absolutely and we are still refining and relaunching, so tungsten is part of a complete line-up for us. LED is not a replacement for tungsten fixtures, it’s just a completion of the entire series.

Ed: It just gives a different sort of light for different situations?

Stefan: There are applications where tungsten is absolutely preferable – in terms of robustness, price point, output. And also HMI – there’s also not yet any replacement for strong HMIs because of their power factor. Basically, their efficiency is unsurpassed. We are still further developing HMI as well. What we are also showing is the high speed ballast for the ARRIMAX 18K, so high speed 1000Hz ballast. That’s also in the booth just behind me here.

Ed: And the importance of having a high speed ballast is because high speed cameras don’t want to pick up any flicker, is that right?

Stefan: Ed:

Absolutely correct.

You see, I do learn things as I go along Stefan.

Stefan: I learn from you most of the time, because you have a very broad knowledge and this is always good to be open to pick up input from left and right and from other manufacturers and countries, because we should be open minded and this is very important.

Many markets use the same equipment in a different mode and this is why sometimes, also for cameras, they ask us "why do we have this menu or this button?" We say "it may not be relevant for you, but it’s very relevant in the US market because the operators like that." But back to the high speed ballast, yes, you are right. High speed cameras need a flicker-free, high speed ballast – at 1000Hz in our case … it’s very sophisticated to control an HMI globe at a high frequency so that you have a stable arc. The new high

Page 55

speed ballast basically scans the frequency range around 1000Hz to get the best frequency where the arc is absolutely stable, to have it like that and this is done automatically.

You can also dial in the frequency manually and this is done basically on the ballast by itself.

Ed: So if you’ve already got a large HMI, can you just buy the new ballast?

Stefan: Yes. There’s a complete line-up of high speed ballasts, so any ballast from ARRI is now available in a high speed option as well.

Ed: Okay, so you don’t have to have a ballast for a particular light, you could use one ballast for the whole HMI range?

Stefan: No, this is not the case, but all ballasts are now available as high speed models.

Usually the ballasts are current sensing, so all directors use the same light head, like with the M90 current sensing, and then depending what globe you put in the fixture, it’s a 6K or 9K globe, the ballast will run the globe correctly at the right current.

So the ballasts are quite sophisticated and this also extends the lifetime of the globe, the safety of the entire system and its reliability.

Ed: That’s sort of where I’d come to with my questions; are there a lot of lights out there from, shall we say, less sophisticated manufacturers where you just don’t have that reliability, that Research & Development that’s gone into the design of the lights and also the manufacture of the lights?

Stefan: Yes this is correct. There are many aspects to consider, but they all make light and most of them are also bright. But there are two features. One is really reliability – if you have ever seen a ballast which had an exploding capacitor inside or a lamphead where the globe is continuously exploding because of overheating, then you might reconsider a more reliable brand with a light which doesn’t let you down. Also in terms of colour rendering … I always advise that when you compare lights ( and this especially applies to LED fixtures ) choose a digital camera to compare the lights.

Because, to the human eye, they’re all okay, they all look bright. The human eye will somehow compensate for a greenish illumination, but the camera is basically more analytical and it’s good to look through a camera viewfinder – you can use a DSLR or …

Ed: Well you should use the camera that you’re going to be using most of the time on your shoot?

Stefan: Yes, if you want you can use an ALEXA or an AMIRA of course, if practical, if feasible, but basically any CMOS sensor will do because it will analytically show you how the skin tones will be represented once you shoot. I think this is relevant ( unless you’re using it for architectural lighting ), because usually you use it for motion picture film lighting on set, on stage, in a theatre, for a live production, for a TV commercial – and then it is relevant that the skin tones are represented best with the correct LED light.

Ed: So, for example, if you find that your particular CMOS camera has a little bit of a shift in the green, which I understand some of the Canon cameras do, you can actually adjust for that with your white balance by using a slightly warmer card?

Stefan: First there is the colour temperature which you can change, and there’s the green/magenta tilt which you can also adjust to accommodate that or to match the LED to an existing environment. Let’s say you’re shooting in an office building which has residential fluoros in the ceiling, but you need additional LED lighting. The camera will already be balanced by its own white balance to neutralise the greenish fluoros in the ceiling, but you want to match the LED light, which is the LED panel to the installed ceiling lights, so that it’s all the same colour temperature. So when you’re panning the camera, the actor is moving his head and gets more or less light from the ceiling or from the LED light so that it doesn’t change the colour in his face, in his skin tones, as you get to match it all.

The camera will take care to equalise the overall colour temperature, but then it can match any additional light to installed lighting.

Ed: And that’s where you need a panel that has colour adjustment?

Stefan:

Exactly.

Ed: Right. And now something that is very different – a SkyPanel?

Stefan: Yes the SkyPanel is brand new. It’s our LED softlight. There are two models, the S60 and the smaller S30 – the same technology and you have the choice in terms of size and power output.

SkyPanel front view ...

Ed: And of course, a very robust case. It looks as though this is particularly good for the rental market?

Stefan: Yes. It’s basically very easy to handle, lightweight, separate power supply, grip stands, multiple in and outputs and the control panel at the rear. It’s about 75cm wide and 32cm high and 13cm deep. SkyPanel will be a revolution because you can use this for softlights, for spacelights. There are two versions, the colour controllable one, so this is –C and the remote phosphor version, the –RP. For the remote phosphor version, there are also different phosphors available so you can have it in daylight or tungsten or fluoro …

Ed: So this is where you put the phosphor panel in the front of the light, so you just have a standard LED bank and you slot in a phosphor panel?

Stefan: Correct, exactly right. In the case of the S60-RP, this is illuminated with pure blue LEDs to stimulate the phosphor and then you have the choice of

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you want the light to be thrown; by putting on a different diffuser, you can have a different distance away from the subject?

Stefan: Correct – and however the lighting DOP is setting up his lights, he wants to use the larger eggcrate or the more narrow one.

This is more like the lighting style, but for us it’s important at the launch date all the accessories are already available like barn doors and eggcrates and different diffusers, so it’s a complete system, a complete line-up.

Ed: So now we’re looking at … well it’s the same design panel, but this is the remote phosphor version?

… and rear view.

five different phosphor panels to put in front for the light output – and it’s even about 10% more light output for the remote phosphor to what the controllable LED SkyPanel has.

Ed: I notice on the back of the SkyPanel that you’ve got three dials here, one intensity I understand, the other one is CCT hue.

What’s that … oh, colour temperature?

Stefan: Colour temperature. This depends on the mode; you can change it into hue mode then you basically dial in the colour temperature. Then you have hue saturation mode, or when it is colour temperature, then this dial is controlling the green/magenta tilt. So when we look at the audience here, it’s close to 7000 Kelvin, now we do green/magenta tilt.

Ed:

So that’s a way of adjusting for your camera?

Stefan: Exactly. Or to comply with existing lighting conditions, or to pre-equalise for a greenish or a magenta-ish camera, which is not as neutral as a camera should be, you can help by basically equalising the light source for better skin tones.

Ed: So you wouldn’t need that for any of your ARRI cameras would you Stefan?

Stefan: No, I don’t think so. But most important is the light output when you start, because this is always how we demonstrate it. We turn it on and say this is as bright as it gets.

Stefan: This is the remote phosphor version and it’s a technology which we also utilise because the price point is lower. In some studios, you may not need controllable colour temperature, so one colour temperature might be fine. It’s very stable and there’s a little bit more light output from the phosphor technology, compared to the tuneable LEDs. Ed: So as well as being different technology, there is actually quite a price difference between the standard panel, which has an adjustable colour temperature, versus the remote phosphor panel?

Stefan: Yes this is correct. The controllable version has more electronics of course, more sophisticated LEDs – red, green, blue and white. The phosphor panel is basically stimulating the phosphor with blue LEDs only.

So there is a price difference between the remote phosphor – this is a little bit more efficient and lower in price, but of course, not colour controllable. You can choose different panels of course. We have a wide range – there are five different panels on offer to accommodate basically a warmer tungsten, standard tungsten, fluoro, daylight and a cooler daylight.

Ed: If you wanted to buy all the panels to cover all those different temperatures, you’d end up paying a lot more than the standard SkyPanel which is colour adjustable?

Stefan: If you want the full range, then I would go for the S60-C. If you want the fixed installation at a certain colour temperature, be it fluoro or tungsten or daylight, you adjust it once and then you leave the NZVN SkyPanel as it is.

Ed: You should have demonstrated that while I wasn’t looking into the panel!

Stefan:

It is quite bright …

Ed: But it’s also very even, that’s what I noticed. There doesn’t seem to be a hot spot there at all. Turn it up again … yes, no visible hot spot. That’s what a panel does isn’t it – or what a panel should do, is not give you any visible hot spot but give you quite a spread. What’s your spread angle on this?

Stefan: Oh, now you’re asking me … for the S60-C there are different diffusion panels available and you can have an intensifier and you have different diffusers.

There are also two kinds of eggcrate available and also a barn door.

Ed: So this is ideal for a studio where you might not know the particular distance that Page 57

ARRI Accessories For ARRI accessories, once more we have Stefan Sedlmeier from ARRI Australia.

Ed: Stefan, we haven’t finished with ARRI yet, because as well as lighting and cameras, ARRI is very well known for its range of accessories that are agnostic – they don’t care which camera they’re on, but they improve whatever that camera can produce, and that includes lenses, matte boxes and other bits.

Centre-stage here today is a Panasonic VariCam with a very large ARRI lens on it, probably worth more than the camera?

Stefan with Pro Camera accessories.

Stefan: This is our PCA section – the Pro Camera Accessories, where we accessorise any camera, not just ARRI, but also Sony, Panasonic, Blackmagic, RED, Canon, JVC – any camera which needs a matte box, a follow focus system, support system like a cage system, hand grips, bridgeplate, baseplate, shoulder set – anything; and also to fit it all together, as you mentioned.

The Panasonic VariCam with the 45-250 Alura zoom lens, is an ARRI zoom lens, manufactured by Fujinon … the prime lenses are manufactured by Zeiss and the zoom lenses are manufactured by Fujinon.

Ed: Right, but built to an ARRI specification as opposed to their own?

Stefan: Correct. Then matte boxes – here we have the new Studio Matte Box SMB-1 which is a 6x6 matte box; SMB-2 which is a new 4x5.65 matte box, all the accessories you need to mount and rig on ARRI cameras, so very famously, we accessorise very well the Sony F55 and the Canon C500 to make them a little more robust, more versatile and useable.

Ed: How do you keep track of all these bits and pieces?

Stefan: It’s actually the other way around. The manufacturers approach us and say "we will be launching a new camera ( like the FS7 ) can you please accessorise it?"

So we have drawings from new cameras even before the market knows about them, because then we build all the mounting plates, the bridge-plate adapters, handles, microphone holder brackets, rod mounts, anything you want to attach or to stabilise the camera … in this case, the lens is probably 3 times the weight of the camera body by itself, but now it’s a complete system with a long dovetail plate, which can hold a heavy zoom lens, also a very long lens, a very fast lens, with a 6x6 matte box, even for the Panasonic VariCam, which is more like a plastic housing, but it makes it more stable, more rigid.

must be behind or at the sensor plane, otherwise on panning, it’s going to look a bit funny?

Stefan: That might well be, yes.

Ed: Right, what developments?

about

other

lenses

–

any

Stefan: Yes, we have an ultra-wide zoom and this is also available as an anamorphic version now – 1938mm anamorphic and this lens is really manufactured

by ARRI themselves. So it is not manufactured by Fujinon or Zeiss, this is built by us. It’s a brand new line-up and it’s a very analytical lens, very straight, it’s very important … wide-angle lenses usually have geometry issues in the corners and this lens is very straight.

It even out performs most of the prime lenses, but it’s a zoom lens for wide-angle shots.

Ed: So now you’re making your own lenses or have you made your own lenses for a long time?

Stefan: This is one “own” lens. This is more like a technology study which became a product.

Ed: So you’ve never made your own lenses before?

Stefan: Yes we did in the past, how should I say … you can’t be winning in all trades. For example, capture drives – we use Sony SxS cards, we use CFast cards for the AMIRA, we use Codex Capture Drives. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel if there is a manufacturer like SanDisk or now, we are even looking into Lexar and other manufacturers who are specialised in storage

Ed: Because the tripod baseplate can’t be directly underneath the camera, it’s got to be somewhere in the middle?

Stefan: Correct, yes.

It’s about the centre of gravity, so it is really useable … I always call it the ergonomics, how it all fits together.

Ed: So that’s a point that might be worth considering for your own setup – the point of access of the tripod Page 58

media, be it SD, SSD, CFast – why should we reinvent that? We just use it, make it open to the public, you can choose your manufacturer and it will work with ARRI. Ed: Those were the hardware accessories – now we’re into software and electronic accessories?

Stefan: In the electronic accessories, we have a wireless lens remote control system and we also control ENG lenses or motorised lenses, such as the new Canon 17-120 zoom lens, the entire series of Fujinon Cabrio lenses and with dedicated lens motors, we can motorise and control any lens for ARRI zoom, iris and focus.

There are several remote motor controllers available – there’s a single motor controller and a universal motor controller and also an ENG motor controller. And for the ALEXA Mini, for weight reduction, we have the active lens motors now. They have the built-in lens controller and driver and they don’t need a controller.

The controller is just a radio interface which is already built into the ALEXA Mini camera body, so you only need the L-Bus which is basically a communication and power interface and then you can daisy chain up to three motors.

Ed:

So again, specialised applications in tight spaces?

Stefan: Yes. And then wireless – we have very good radio remote control for focus pulling, iris and zoom and as well as camera control, so we can also control the camera through our wireless system in terms of exposure index, white balance, shutter angle and framerate.

Ed: And Stefan’s just demonstrated that there’s no delay in the remote operation.

Stefan: It’s not WiFi based, it’s radio based and there’s no latency. This is important for focus pulling; it’s like you are on the camera with your hand but you can be 300 metre away with your monitor pulling focus for something and it’s important when you shoot 4K to be spot on with your focus.

Ed: So who needs a cameraman, the director can do it all?

A very smart remote control unit.

the wireless, he’s just standing wherever … he’s not in the shooting line and he has his monitor anyway, so he can pull focus with the wireless lens remote control system.

Stefan: No, no, you need a good focus puller, you need an assistant cameraman, it’s just that you have more versatility now and you can basically sub-direct – how do you say …

Ed:

Ed:

Ed:

Micro manage?

Stefan: Maybe, yes, because if the focus puller is always next to you, he may be in your way, but over

Good thinking.

Stefan: Yes, and we are quite successful with these systems – Australia and New Zealand, so the Wireless Compact Unit, WCU-4 does zoom, iris and focus.

All in one?

Stefan: Ed:

Page 59

All in one.

That’s the ARRI way.

NZVN