NZVN August 2012

AUGUST 2012

Vol 183

The Now Sound Interactive Show In early July, Now Sound staged an interactive audio show in Auckland.

After the technical sessions, the entertainment and beer came out and I arrived. To tell us all about what we missed, we have Conrad Jones from Now Sound.

also throw in a bit of entertainment – we’re showcasing some of the microphones through the Shure endorsees, MC Tali, Tiki Taane, PDiggs and Annie Crummer, so everyone’s getting a nice feel for what the performance

Ed: Conrad, you’ve just had a very hectic day, lots of people here and there’s a live band on stage – what’s been happening?

Conrad: Today was an opportunity to bring our nationwide dealers together to showcase the products that we have available; let them have a listen, have a play and learn a bit more about the products and hear them in the flesh before they make vital purchasing decisions.

These guys are investing a lot of good hard earned cash, so we want to give them the opportunity to hear and experience what Shure, QSC, Inter-M, Cloud, Wekawire and Whirlwind can offer them.

Conrad Jones, Andy Fong and William Chan, the Managing Director of Shure Asia.

Ed: So this is not just for the television industry, this is a Sound Trade Show for the professional sound business? of the product is like in the hands of professional performers.

Conrad: Absolutely, this is across the board from PA

hire companies, broadcast retailers to broadcasters, there’s anyone and anyone in between who uses audio in New Zealand.

Ed: Now this product lying around here, has this been here for a long time? Could people have seen this weeks ago at their local dealer?

Ed: You’ve got the dealers here but also some people who are in charge of big sound budgets?

Conrad: Yes and no. Some has only been in the country for a few days; some has been available in the New Zealand market for a number of years.

Conrad: Ed:

I would hope so.

But don’t forget the little people.

Conrad: No that’s right, everyone’s welcome. We’re trying to cater to a wide spectrum of the market and showcase products that are relevant to everyone. We’ll

Shure are continuously developing their product, so there’s always new products being released.

There’s a whole heap of new Shure broadcast products available.

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

P14 Dedo discusses LED Technology.

P20 Affordable Slow Motion with Sony.

P27 It’s Vegas Baby!

P28 A tale of Fibre and Bandwidth.

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just trying to fit into gaps. It gives customers the chance to compare price and performance with the “Legendary Performance” of Shure. We’re happy to put Shure product up against any competitor. The whole idea is to get the product into the hands of the users and let them try it themselves, so they can make their own decisions when they’re purchasing.

Ed: So that is a Shure policy, that they don’t have to buy it off the shelf or still wrapped up in the box, they can actually try it before they buy it?

The entertainment sounded great.

Ed: And you’ve pretty well got good coverage right across New Zealand with the dealer network that we all know and love?

Conrad: Yes, our products are available through any of our authorised dealers.

Ed: Now the dealers you mentioned have got other audio products as well - then you come along and add Shure to their portfolio – what’s been the reaction?

Conrad: The reaction has been great. Every brand has its good products and its better products and we’re

Conrad: It’s Now Sound policy.

These are fairly serious buying decisions that the end users are making, so we wholeheartedly encourage them to try the product before they buy it, absolutely.

You know you’re talking potentially thousands of dollars’ worth of purchases and they should be entitled to try the product before they spend their money.

Ed:

That’s what we like to hear Conrad.

Now, just to take us to that next step, we have Andy Fong, Product Manager Broadcast, from Shure Asia.

Andy, I’m certain that I’m not alone in wanting the assurance that Shure is a quality product; it’s a name that everyone knows, it’s been around a long time, but more on page 6

Page 2

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in the broadcast space, it’s had a very limited presence.

Now it’s here, it’s supported by the majority of our dealers in New Zealand, but how can a customer know that the product they’re looking at purchasing has been well made? I guess one of the areas that people look for is manufacturing origin?

Andy: First of all, we do have manufacturing plants in Shouzou China, Mexico and Wheeling United States. They all have the same quality standard they have to follow. So it doesn’t really matter where they make them, we always have to maintain the high quality standard to make sure to provide reliable and good quality products.

Ed: Because the owners and originators of the product are still in the business aren’t they, so I guess they’re keeping a close eye on things?

Andy: Yes they do. And also for the high tier wireless system, the Axient, all the technology and innovative features are done by the United States engineering team and they’re keeping a close eye on each production, to make sure it meets the standard and also meets the requirements and standards of the broadcaster.

Ed: That’s it, once you’ve designed a level of technology and put it into your product, you want to ensure that you’re the only ones who are actually using it?

Andy: Yes, we also patent some of the very unique technology, like the ShowLink Access Point and the Frequency Diversity. All these new features are

owned by Shure, you won’t find these anywhere else in the market.

Ed: Can you Diversity” is?

explain

to

me

what

“Frequency

Andy: The term “Frequency Diversity” means that the handheld transmitter can transmit two carrier frequencies at the same time to the receiver. So the receiver is picking two frequencies from one single transmitter. That means whenever one interference comes to Channel 1 for example, normally, without the Frequency Diversity, it will give you very strange noise.

But with the Frequency Diversity mode another channel with have seamless audio and have the continuous audio out. So even if Channel 1 has interference, Channel 2 is still ongoing.

It provides solid, uninterrupted audio.

Ed: Right, because I know diversity from microphones, on the receiving end where it will pick up the signal on two antennae, but this is vastly different?

Andy: Yes, we are talking about Frequency Diversity on the transmitter side. So the handheld transmitter can transmit two carrier frequencies at the same time with the same audio content and the receiver will pick up these two frequencies at the same time, as a backup redundancy, because we understand that, in the critical RF environment, when the performer is doing a very important presentation, doing a very serious performance – whenever the interference comes, it all comes a stutter.

So we provide redundancy because you never see a singer holding two microphones!

Page 6

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interference channel. For Axient, we have ShowLink features so we can remote control the transmitter parameter. So even as the performer sings or the President speaks and interference affects the audio, there is the backup frequency from the Spectrum Manager and the transmitter will change automatically using ShowLink.

Ed: Wow – so if you have interference this system can fix it without the presenter or anyone else realising?

Geoff McKenzie talked about Axient.

Ed:

That’s right, exactly.

Andy: That’s why we take the Axient system; we developed it to solve the very common problem that people are facing today. We also have the very unique device called “Spectrum Manager”. It is a wide band scanner, so at the venue, I can scan the entire RF environment and it can help me to calculate the compatible frequencies for all Shure equipment, but also it helps me to calculate the backup frequency for Axient gear.

So whenever the receiver – the one channel got interference, the Spectrum Manager will assign the clean compatible frequency to that

Andy: We have visited quite a lot of broadcasters in Hong Kong, China – our distributors are doing a great job introducing the new system to broadcasters and also touring sound rental companies. The big problem they are facing every day on the job is that interference is invisible. It comes suddenly. When you hear the noise, the interference causes a very serious situation.

So the Spectrum Manager not only calculates the backup frequency and compatible frequency; it also helps the gear the monitor all this backup frequency continuously. So when you do the first time setup for other wireless, this is maybe 9 o’clock in the morning, but the show is at night, the RF environment will be completely different. But the Spectrum Manager has another feature continuously monitoring the RF environment, especially for all the backup frequency and the compatible frequency, until the show is finished.

Ed: Now one area that I’ve always been interested in with Shure is that I see your shotgun microphone supports and your fluffies look very like a Rycote more on page 11

Page 8

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product – and in fact, I know they are. You’ve decided that you don’t want to make these yourselves so you’ve done a deal with Rycote?

Andy: Well we actually develop these products with Rycote. So the accessories made by Rycote are tailor made for Shure shotgun mics. They are not the same as other “off the shelf” accessories from Rycote.

Ed:

Aaaah – it’s not just a colour change?

Andy: No, it’s not that simple, there’s some mechanical change and the design is always different to the one people purchase as Rycote branded product.

Andy: Oh yes.

Fortunately, with the Axient system, we give them a more easy life.

Ed:

It’s fool-proof is it? That’s a brave statement.

Andy: Because the system, when they integrate with the new software Wireless Workbench 6, they can setup the system in less than a few minutes. Then they can monitor all the system on the same software base and the whole system can also detect interference and avoid interference. So it makes the engineer’s life easier.

Ed:

That’s what we all want to hear. And in terms of spectrum change, you’ve got an eye on what the telcos or the government is doing in New Zealand in terms of selling of the spectrum and what spectrum’s going to be available for radio microphones?

Andy: Well actually we have discussed several times to understand the spectrum situation in New Zealand and in fact after a chat with the government agency, they say that this is not yet finalised.

So the latest news I’ve got is that they have extended the current spectrum that they use in New Zealand to 2020, if I remember correctly.

Shure accessories made by Rycote.

Ed: So it might look the same to the uninitiated but, in fact, your engineers have put the Rycote product along with your microphones and made some adjustments?

Andy: Yes, that’s true – but all our accessories have the Shure logo on them.

Ed: Then you know, because most people would think that the critical part in any audio recording process is the microphone and they tend to forget the support … I know cameramen just sort of clip it onto the camera and away they go, but in fact, I believe the support plays a big part in the dynamics of any microphone?

Andy: Yes. We’re focusing on the microphone part and we co-develop the accessory with Rycote to decide the better mounting accessories to fit all the applications.

We thought they were going to have the spectrum change because of DTV change, but in fact, we cannot get the finalised information from the government.

Ed: it?

Nobody can, but when you do, you’ll be ready for

Andy: It depends.

We have a wide range of wireless systems starting from 470 up to 840MHz. But if they also follow Australia like to use below the 700, we have a bunch of our wireless systems ready.

Ed:

So you’ll be looking after your customers?

Andy: What we do is we do all the approvals for Australia, New Zealand, China, Taiwan, Thailand – for every country that needs that type of approval and we will go and apply for it.

Ed:

Ed: Now I understand from your previous comments your area of expertise is in wireless. This is a bit of a challenge in Australia and New Zealand – actually, it’s a bit of a challenge worldwide isn’t it?

Andy: Yes, mostly for the end users. They use wireless systems for their daily operation, but unfortunately sometimes they do things incorrectly, like the antenna setup and the antenna placement, setting up the system with the incorrect group of channels.

This is a very common mistake. At Shure, we provide a lot of educational material, posted on the shure.com website and we also do lots of training and educational programmes for our dealers and end customers to make sure they use their wireless systems correctly.

Ed: Because that’s it, you might think you know how to set up a wireless system, but in fact as technology changes, that might change too?

Page 11

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Dedo Discusses LED Technology My very last NAB interview is at Dedolight where Mr Weigert is about to tell us what he’s been doing for the last six months.

Dedo: Everybody talks about LEDs so we also have to talk about LEDs. People think LEDs are going to save the planet. Why? Because they produce an enormous amount of light, consume no energy and produce no heat, and they live forever. Amazingly enough, nobody talks about the colour, the character of the light, because we live in a digitised world. We count pixels. But when we count pixels we should also count lumen and lux – how much light do you get – and if you really want to save the planet, the question should be “how much light do I get for how little wattage?” So we already know about the Fellonis, our multi- LED panel lights.

They use half the wattage in the standard version, as opposed to the Lite Panels, and they produce 35% more light. Also they have a much better colour rendition, but white phosphor LEDs today are still limited. There’s a trade-off. You can have some with a high light output and bad colour; you can have some with pretty good colour, but then the light output is not really amazing. So one of the lights that in the last days was very much talked about in the CML ( Cinematography Mailing List ) was a light that has a Zee Kato chip in there. That’s a chip that is 30 Watt and it has 30 lumen per Watt – very good colour, 900 lumen that is 30x30. Our measly Dedolight 150 Watt lamp gives us 6,000 lumen and, if you don’t need that much, you can lamp-down to 100 Watt, 75, 50, 35, 20 Watt.

Then people say “well, this is the great breakthrough in LED technology. For the first time artists can have their work shown in the colours that they meant it to be.” How about sunlight? I think that’s still unbeatable competition for full spectrum high CRI. How about halogen?

Ed: Maybe it’s because our eyes developed in sunlight?

Dedo: Everybody says, everybody knows LEDs produce more light than tungsten. What tungsten?

Well the studio tungsten usually is around 20 lumen per Watt; our little Dedolight lamp is 40 lumen per Watt; whilst an HMI is 80 lumen per Watt; the Kino Flo is 80 lumen per Watt; our tungsten discharge lamps are 80 lumen per Watt; and a white phosphor LED usually is around 60 lumen per Watt. That LEDs making no heat is a big lie. It is true that there is less forward heat in the emitted light, in the beam, but the LED itself produces an exorbitant amount of heat and you need a lot of cooling. Well every light needs cooling … no! If the regular little halogen lamp runs at 600 centigrade, it’s happy; if you give it less than 400, it says “I’m unhappy, my halogen regeneration cycle doesn’t work.”

Ed: And I guess if it’s transferring the heat out quickly enough, heating’s not a problem?

Dedo: And the 600°C is not a problem at all; whilst on the LED, if you go beyond 85 centigrade, the LED will shorten its lifetime, it will lose output, it will lose colour, so the limit is 100 degree. So you need a lot more cooling. This is where, for a measly 40 Watt LED, you’d need a traditional cooling surface that’s bigger than an A4 letter, but weighs 3 or 4 kilos. If you don’t have that, you can use it only a very short time, or you put a fan in it. That fan is a possibility – yes, there are fans that are quite quiet, but there are manufacturers who are very courageous – they put a fan in a light that you stick as an on-board light right beside the microphone. Maybe that works, I don’t know.

Dedo with two of the new LED lights.

Ed: It might work when it’s new, but after a little while …

Dedo: This is our fear, that after a while … so if you equip your entire studio that have all fans in them, maybe it’s fine, but we don’t know that yet. So most professionals are shy when they hear the word “fan”.

Now there are fans and fans. In our big ballast there’s a fan, but in normal operation, that fan sleeps. Only when you put direct sunlight on the ballast, the ballast heats up and the fan says “let me try and help you a little bit”, turning very lazily, slowly.

Ed:

So is the fan on the ballast, not on the light?

Dedo: The fan is on the ballast. You can extend the cable and put it 15 metre away and then the noise is away from the microphone. But the lights are always much closer to the microphone in a studio situation and I don’t know. Passive cooling makes a low wattage LED light incredibly big and heavy, which may be acceptable in a studio, it may be even impressive – “look at my big light.” There’s not so much light coming out of it, but okay. What about colour temperature meters? Forget it, they don’t work with LEDs. Spectrum analysis … looks very scientific and then you get the RA values and now we have to learn new things.

Ed:

“RA” stands for?

Dedo: The average R rendition index of R1 through R8. But the most important one is R9, and that’s where they all fall down; and R13 is skin tone, and that’s what we live off and that’s not in the RA. So you have to go through the whole list of Rs all the way through R15, to evaluate. And then what do you know?

Still very little, because the spectral distribution looks relatively good; it just has one valley and otherwise no sharp peaks like a fluorescent would have, like an HMI would have. So you think it’s more acceptable, but that valley is a big problem, and if you try to filter the colour

Page 14

defects of a white phosphor LED you can cut peaks, but no filter can fill a valley.

Ed: And you’re going to tell me the valley is at the skin tone, the R13?

Dedo: No, but there’s problems. You do camera tests, but for this you need to have a reference light and then you can have long discussions about what is a reference light? Maybe a reference light should be the one that we shoot with, halogen or Kino Flo, because daylight – which day? Monday, Tuesday, noontime, at which elevation, which level of pollution? So daylight is a variable.

Ed: I imagine daylight in Las Vegas is quite different to daylight in Munich?

Dedo: So then you try to get by with it, with white balance, but then Sony have three, when you go to the S-Log function it doesn’t have white balance anymore.

It only has presets. So the only real advice is, like I read in here – the key word is DON’T mix. When you don’t mix, white balance can save your arse. Then there are other approaches when you mix different colour LEDs, but how to integrate them, how to diffuse them, and that is not such an easy thing when you work with optical systems like we do. On the multi-panel lights that’s possible.

Then comes the next question “what does this compare with?”

People don’t know, because they’re always asked for “what wattage?” But we don’t light with Watts, we light with light. So the question is “how much light do you get for how little wattage?” Wattage is only what we pay for; light is what we work with.

And then there are other aspects still in there that may be hard to define the character of the light. When you go to a home and it’s lit with energy saving lamps, my feeling is that it’s freezing the soul. It’s a terrible character of light. When I do an interview lighting setup with halogen light or with HMI light, that’s one thing, and I repeat the same setup with an LED system and I have a feeling people feel different. There’s a lot in the psychology of the colour spectrum and the colour characteristics and some people are sensitive to it, others are not. To some extent, we are all sensitive – the colour of our environment and the colour of the light is very important for our wellbeing.

Ed: I guess the extreme of that, that I’ve seen is a scene lit by a sodium lamp.

I know one of our supermarket chains in New Zealand had sodium lamps and it just gave such an unnatural yellow colouring to everything, including people’s skin tones; it was just unpleasant.

Dedo: Yes – and most LED lights that are on the market with white phosphor LEDs – there’s remote phosphor which can be a lot better; there’s the multicolour, but the white phosphor LEDs – many of those have a colour quality that no serious butcher would use to light his meat.

Ed: I think I’ve heard you use that one before, but it is a good one.

Dedo: Yes, I keep using it. All we do in our profession is we light meat … and the butcher wouldn’t use it because he wants to sell his meat. We sell people’s faces – hopefully even the emotions that are behind those faces, and that’s more important to some people than the lies about how to save the planet. I’m not against saving the planet …

Ed:

But you’ve got to be honest in what you sell?

Dedo: A lot of the LED fixture manufacturers make claims that are shameless lies.

Ed: I think Chris McKenzie hit it on the head when he answered my question in the April issue about problems with LED lights, or the problem that I had, was that because it’s still in the experimental stage, really the best advice is that you purchase your LED lights from a reputable manufacturer?

Dedo: Ed:

Even the reputable manufacturers …

Well in other words, it’s the ones he represents?

Dedo: Even those, when they are honest, will say “it’s not perfect; we’re still on the way, it’s an emerging technology.” I wrote 20 pages and you need to read them fast, because whatever I wrote three weeks ago may not be valid anymore in another 3 or 6 months, because things are developing so fast. So we can give you the link where you can download that and if you want to put that in your paper and people want to download it, fine. It’s all I know at the moment, but already …

Ed:

But next week you’ll know some more?

Dedo: As we send it out, now we’re experimenting … for example, I was surprised with a 1000 Watt LED with water cooling, and how to manage that and how to convince people, that’s a long road. But it’s amazing and where we are now, is that we have an entire row of focusing LEDs with Dedolight double aspheric optics and, for example, our 40 Watt that we have here, has more light, better focusing range, better light distribution, better light character, better light quality than some of the ones that use 110 Watt. So people always ask for Watt you know.

Ed:

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Well that’s what they know.

Dedo: Yes, it’s understandable that they do, but that’s why we need to point out that it’s possible ( and that’s the step in saving the planet ), to have higher light output, but for less wattage, in a smaller package – and we’ve got an entire range.

Ed: So they need to know not just the Watt, but the lumen per Watt and also the character of that light?

Dedo: Lumens per Watt describes usually the light source and what comes out of the instrument, there we can fine tune it with our double aspheric optics to get more light, better light distribution, higher control, higher focusing range, and all the light shaping accessories. Some of the LED lights, like there’s a new remote phosphor light with just a surface, you can’t use light shaping tools on it. What business are we in? Are we in the business of exposure? The cameras are so beautiful … I always shudder to say 100,000 ASA. So for exposure, we don’t really need light any more. But when we’re talking about transporting emotions, then we talk about where the lights are set, how they’re being used, how they can be controlled and the finesse of light control makes it necessary that you’re not talking about a multi-LED panel.

Maybe in that direction that can be soft lights, but as accents, as key lights, as kickers, you need the higher degree of control, and there are some advantages. LEDs you can dim with no colour change. Wonderful. So, in a way, we may be moving into the direction of daylight studios.

In the past, that really was a wish that couldn’t be fulfilled, because you want to go all the way to zero in dimming. Now that becomes possible, because the camera chips really are made for 5000 Kelvin, so that

goes one step in higher efficiency and possibly better colour rendition, but then at the same, they have to say that the white phosphor daylight LEDs are never as good as the white phosphor tungsten LEDs. So there’s a trade-off; where’s your preference, where’s your balance.

Ed:

And, as you say, you don’t mix …?

Dedo: Don’t mix. People take a halogen light, which halogen light? The studio halogen light in reality is 2900. The 3200 was something that photographers worked with, with Photoflood lamps and this was important for them when they were shooting reverse lit film. But the reality in a TV studio is 3000 or below and 200 Kelvin or 400 Kelvin in the tungsten range is a huge step, but in daylight, it makes a very small step.

So which halogen light do you take as your comparison, as your standard that you want to reach? And still there will be differences. If you mix one kind as key and fill light and another kind as back light and accent light, or background light, then maybe you can get away with a certain mix, but otherwise, if on the same face, key and fill light are of different colour, then “I’ll fix it in postproduction” has no validity any more. So we’ll have the 40 Watt that we have here now; we have prototypes of the 90 Watt – really wonderful; we have a 200 Watt focusing light and the 20 Watt I only can show you a printout of a prototype, and that will be very cute.

That will be the dream of many of the travelling teams, where they have a little attaché case or something like you have here and say “this is my lighting kit – 3, 4, 5 lights” and with 20 Watt you can run it off a little Sony battery.

Watch this space! Ed. NZVN

Page 18

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AFFORDABLE SLOW MOTION WITH SONY On a recent evening in Auckland, there was a well attended Sony Show of the NEX-FS700. There were a few spare seats which was rather unfortunate, because shows like this don’t come along all the time and, even if you might not be interested in a particular camera, a show gives one a chance to see what a particular camera does, so you know perhaps that your one does what you want or it gives you some other options.

There’s also networking. It gives you a chance to meet up with other people in our industry, to hear what they’re doing and how they’re using a camera, and you always learn something.

So, I do encourage people to come along to shows for product knowledge or just for the chance to “mix and mingle”.

On with the show.

The FS700 put on a very good performance.

It was introduced by Nick Buchner from Sony in Australia who started by talking about the digital cinema timeline. This has been going on for quite some time – there was that chemical film stuff that people used – and Sony started in the television area with the HDW F900 in the year 2000. It was all quite expensive for a while and then the SLR craze hit with Canon’s 5D and it sort of grew from there.

The 5D was popular because, to get into this large sensor market in 35mm, one had to buy a rather expensive television or movie camera, and the DSLRs from Canon and others gave this option to a more budget conscious independent film person. Of course, by now, we all know the limitations of a DSLR for motion capture and it was only time before Sony and others came out with video options to cover this large sensor cinematographic area of the market.

Here I must stress that there’s still those two areas where we’re involved – one is the video person, the person who is used to 50 fields a second interlaced

television work, with very little depth of field, so everything is in focus all the time. The other area is cinematographic, where you do have short depth of field; you do have “frames” rather than “fields” so you have quite a different look to the production. The DSLRs, for all their limitations, gave a budget option for this cinematographic look.

When Sony came out with the NEX-FS100, it was extremely popular as a DSLR replacement while the F3 provided support at the medium end. The FS100 has a form factor that allows for extensive accessorisation. It allowed the addition of various handles, extra screens, off-board recording, matte boxes, rails – all sorts of clamps and bits and pieces that would make this more of a cinematographic camera that sat on the tripod like a Christmas tree.

Nick did go into the limitations of a DSLR which nicely introduced the NEX FS700. To my mind, Sony has taken the FS100 design and added some serious features. The major addition that everyone was very impressed by, was the super slow motion. This is up to eight times slower speed for full HD at 50Hz. It’s even more on page 23

Page 20

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slower at 60Hz giving 240fps. The slow speed comes in a number of steps so you don’t have to go that super slow, you can go half speed and quarter speed, etc. It also has the neutral density filters on-board, rather than having to use a matte box and slide extra neutral densities in. It has a 4K ready sensor, so it’s not exactly the same sensor as in the FS100 or the F3 which have HD spec sensors. It’s not yet producing a 4K image but, as Nick says, with a firmware upgrade it is possible, and it has the output for a 4K signal. Again, the value in 4K is something that you can either look upon as a future-proof thing, or as giving you more headroom for cropping your picture to provide an HD size image.

There are certainly lots of other features in there that have improved over the FS100, but of course it comes at a higher price. So the FS100 will continue; the FS700 is additional to that. The F3 will continue … a lot of these cameras have particular niches. If you don’t necessarily need slow motion, then probably the FS100 is certainly going to be a cheaper option for you, but still give you that cinematographic look at better ergonomics than would a DSLR. Now to support Sony in promoting the FS700, the Sony dealers from New Zealand were there and they brought their own demo models kitted out in all sorts of bits and pieces that they supply themselves. There were lens kits and matte box kits and support kits – all sorts of things, all the bits and pieces that one can get to turn your 700 into something that you could use in a variety of ways. The evening gave one a chance to talk with the dealers about the types of accessories that they can provide, to make the camera one that you’d want to use yourself.

After Nick came Tim Pierce, a Queenstown adventure cameraman. Tim is a user of an FS700, he’s bought one himself.

He calls himself a “director / cinematographer” and you’ll find his contact details at the end of this story. It’s certainly worth going to have a look at what Tim’s done if you weren’t there on the night.

As part of his presentation, he showed us various clips using the FS700 in the snow around Queenstown and it was very, very impressive material.

Certainly Tim knows what he’s doing when using a camera like this.

His history is in the DSLR area – as he says, he’s a lone cameraman, he doesn’t have a crew, he goes out on a snowboard and he chases round after snowboarders or skiers, either using a camera stabilisation rig or a Manfrotto tripod, and he sets himself up and takes the shots out in the snow. So he’s always wanted a camera that he can manage himself and that’s why he started out with DSLRs, but when the FS700 came out, that prompted Tim to purchase one because, for him, it covered the areas of being of the right form factor, that he could add on the things that he wanted, but it was also at the right price and it gave that slow motion capability. It was a slow motion capability that he could handle himself. The on-board AVCHD codec recorded onto SD cards he found was able to be used quite simply into his Final Cut Pro editing system, so at one level, he was still able to do everything himself; at a higher level he could connect up a nanoFlash to the back of this camera and record to that and give clients the higher resolution that they asked for. Just a bit more tricky in handling all that extra equipment attached onto the camera. One of the key items that assisted him in this, was that he was using the SWIT

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batteries and the SWIT battery that he chose has a tap so not only does it power the camera, but it has a tap for powering the nanoFlash or another accessory that you might want to use. So he had just the one battery, less weight, he could still carry it around on his snowboard.

Tim says that he was very impressed with this camera out on the snow.

He told us that he produced independently, so it was important to him to have a camera that’s nice and small, and yet the customers or clients still look at it and say it’s a big enough size for it to be a professional camera.

Tim went on to talk about the lenses that he used and it certainly was a variety. When he was on his tripod he could use the very long lenses, but his favourite was a nice wide short lens as this enabled him to handhold and still get very smooth shots because, with the wide lens and slow motion, very little hand movement is detected in the shots. He went on to say that, for some clients, the AVCHD codec on-board at 28 meg per second was perfectly adequate, but again for others, there was a necessity to have an off-board recording solution and the camera allowed that.

the positive side is that you do get to see the slow motion shot that you’ve just taken being recorded, so you can check that it’s worked.

I guess, in summary, Tim said that the package of camera, the lenses and the codecs that it can record to, allows him to be a lone operator for shooting and easy handling of the footage when he’s back in the studio.

He showed us in the footage how easy it was to handhold out the side of a helicopter, because again with the slow motion, who needs a gyro? You’ve got enough give in the slow motion effect to not actually see any movement from being handheld. He finished off by saying that, combined with his DSLRs, the FS700 provided an excellent package for the independent filmmaker.

You can see Tim’s work at www.timpierceblog.com and try out the NEX FS-700 at your local Sony dealer. NZVN

Tim explained the ergonomics of the camera – that he’d worked on DSLRs a lot and when he picked up the FS700 for the first time, he was pleasantly surprised with the ease of holding it. The movable handle was important, that he can adjust it to a particular angle and he said he used his mainly in an upright position and tucked into his chest.

Because he’s on a snowboard, he can look into the viewfinder and by having it nice and tight and tucked into him, he’s got a lot more stability. He really liked the touchscreen of the LCD that enabled him to make some camera adjustments still with his gloves on, and he found the buttons well thought out and well placed. One button that he used a lot was the slow motion button and this is assignable to two settings. He, himself, set his to half speed at 50 frames a second on the first push of the button and the second push at 200 frames a second or eighth speed. He also found the expanded focus on the camera a very handy feature. Tim did mention a few points about the camera that he would prefer it didn’t have or did better, but was very quick to say that for the price and the size of it, it certainly did more than it didn’t do.

One point that he was bemoaning occasionally was the fact that you can record 12 seconds of footage at 200 frames a second, so you’ve got that super slo-mo for 12 seconds of recording, but then it takes about 38 seconds while it records that cached material to the SD card. He said this can be annoying if suddenly something else you want to record comes past and your camera’s doing this transfer, but

Page 24

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A Tale of Fibre and Bandwidth During a recent visit to Wellington, I called in at the offices of Protel. Glenn Miers had arranged for me to meet perhaps one of Protel Wellington’s most important clients, Richard Naylor.

Ed: I understand Richard’s been a customer of Protel for many years?

Glenn: That’s right Grant.

Richard has been coming to Protel for over ten years.

Ed: And you’ve been able to provide him with much of what he’s needed technology-wise over the years?

Glenn: Yes definitely, in terms of cameras and products at the end of each chain that Richard puts together to provide his customers with what they need.

Ed: he?

And he’s also helped you on occasion too, hasn’t

Glenn: He has indeed. We’ve engaged his services to help us with some of the aspects of integrating products for our customers.

chance you could shake the system and find some?” and we knew who else was using them and we’d ring each other and say “what have you got coming up?”

We’d sometimes see each other on the motorway and ring and say “Are you off for tapes?” knowing that Tim only had one box and we might both be looking for a box. For us, we’ve always worked on the basis of “don’t compete with people who have already got a good business, try and complement what they do.”

Ed: Well, what actually do you do – what is the speciality that you provide to our industry in New Zealand?

Richard: Webcasting – we take an event and stream it live on the internet. We also do “on demand” hosting.

Typically we webcast an event, do it live and record it, edit it and put it up online. We do some hosting for people who have videos. They ring us up and say “can you host this?”

Sometimes we do transfers for broadcasters or production companies who will sort of say “look, we’ve got this footage, we need it in Cairo

Ed: So that exemplifies “having a relationship” with your customer?

Glenn: Grant.

It certainly does

Ed: Now Richard, I understand that you started out in this business spreading fibre throughout Wellington. Is that correct?

Richard: Yes … when Glenn says I was an early customer, they’d been here for some time and I used to come here to get the key for the PABX room upstairs to work on the fibres … and also they’ve got a toilet here. When you work round the city …

Ed: Ah-ha, so that’s the customer comfort that Protel provides, excellent.

Glenn with Richard.

Richard: Yes, I’ve now discovered that Tim makes excellent coffee, so I’ve got another reason to visit.

Ed: But, apart from the toilet and the coffee, Protel has other uses?

Richard: Oh yes, they’ve been very good. They’re a company that has depth and that’s what I tend to look for – people who actually understand what we’re doing.

We try and work with local providers, local suppliers, because they have a bigger picture of the industry than we can see.

Ed: And that’s it, because you’re in an industry where, if things go wrong, you need a replacement bit real quick and having Protel here on site, you can get that?

Richard: Yes, like with tapes. After the Fukushima tsunami, tapes were hard to get hold of. We would just keep talking to Glenn or to Tim and say “hey, look, we are going to need some tapes in a few weeks, any

overnight, can you help?” and it’s because we have some reasonable internet capacity and if not, we know how to get it.

Ed: Now Glenn’s privately ( and with utter respect, Glenn adds ) described you as a “boffin” because you’re able to put things together and, when you came in today, you had a PVC tube and a computery thing on a bit of Formica, so I sense there is a boffin lurking there.

Obviously, you’ve been in this business for a number of years and you would have started before the “all-inone” boxes came out.

You would have started delivering over the internet before there was the box where you just plugged your camera in and sent it out.

You’ve been building a few things yourself, I understand?

Richard: I started off as a cadet in a Power Board and my first job was to build a ripple control plant, injecting audio frequencies into 33 kilovolt substations.

Page 28

So, I have an engineering background. I’ll ask you a question – when did you first go on the internet?

Ed: Ummmm … probably 10 years ago; well probably about 2000 I would say.

Richard:

Okay, so how does 1989 strike you?

Ed: Yeah, I don’t know if I can remember that far back.

Richard: I was running fibre round Wellington in 1988 for a private fibre network, not Telecom. My first webcast was October 1994 – 16 viewers in 12 countries.

Ed: But in those days, you must have had a day job, something that was funding you to be able to dabble in this area, because I imagine at that time, there wasn’t a lot of cash flow from web-based working?

Richard: Yes, I had a day job … I was IT manager for Wellington City Council.

Ed: And so from that you’ve obviously left the Council and you’re now doing your own thing fulltime, but it was that taste of the internet that really …?

Ed:

No, I just don’t listen to the radio.

Richard: Anyway, Council discovered what we’d been doing and so Fran said, “Well you’d better write a strategy for this.” So I wrote what’s known as the “InfoCity Strategy.” There were about six initiatives that came out of it, one of which is CityLink, the fiber optic network company.

When you look at the Wellington economy, there’s no manufacturing, so there’s no point in trying to lure manufacturers into Wellington. But if you look at the city – insurance companies, banks and government, all organisations that communicate and process information.

Ed:

So service industries?

Richard: Yes … and you’d say “well, what is it that inhibits them?” and one of the inhibitors was the cost of bandwidth linking their businesses. So we did all sorts of things to encourage that to change. One of the other things we did which always makes me laugh is we have what I call Saturn – Saturn Cable TV. You don’t have it in Auckland. Have you ever wondered why they came to Wellington?

Ed: Probably because of your fibre network …

Richard: No, we changed the district plan to allow overhead reticulation and so they built their network. The first time round cost them $450 million.

What did it cost the city to invest, to do that? Three lines in the district plan. So extremely cheap … and you say “well what’s the benefit of that?” Now if you look at your telephone bill and my telephone bill, mine’s $8 a month less than yours, because we’ve got competition here in Wellington. And you say “well, so what?” Well $8 a month is $100 a year, put that across 100,000 homes and suddenly its $10 million. It’s been like that since 2000. So that’s $120 million, it’s got a 7:1 multiplier in the economy, so suddenly you’re talking $960 million that’s been put into the Wellington economy just over Saturn’s cheaper phone calls.

Behind the scenes at the Reserve Bank.

Richard: Oh no, it got worse than that! We got the attention of Karl Rossiter who was then at TVNZ and there was a project out of the States called First Cities.

First Cities was a consortium of about 60 companies – Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Apple, Cisco … and they were looking at newer technologies and moving to what we would describe today as an online world. But there was a degree of fear and trepidation about how they were going to do it and how would you test this, because market failure, as you know, can be spectacular. So we put up a case to them whereby we said “come down to New Zealand and have a play and do your trial down here” and we put up New Zealand as a test bed case. Unfortunately, Bill Clinton got elected and the consortium said “federal funding” and rushed to Washington to get their hands on federal funding. So we lost; but Fran Wilde, who was then mayor and she … do you remember Jim Higgins who used to do a show on National Radio about computers in the morning?

What, not that old eh?

And what did it cost the Council? district plan.

Three lines in the

Ed: But now your focus is going out and doing events at locations all round New Zealand?

Richard: We had the CityLink network running and we were running about 3% of capacity. So I thought “well, I’ve got bandwidth there” – and when I say “we” there was me and three installers. So what do we do to show what bandwidth can do? Oh we’d better make some data traffic. Well what’s good, what generates traffic and uses bandwidth?

Ed: Yes, what chews up a huge chunk of bandwidth – television.

Richard: We had done some work with TVNZ including a webcast of a New Year’s Eve show out of Avalon. They sent Allan Honey round to make sure I complied with the rights and didn’t stream the programme before I should. We were sitting there and Allan said “well, how are you going to switch?” and I

Page 30

said “I’ve got this switch” and you know, Allan’s thinking “vision mixer” – no, this is just a switch from Dick Smiths sellotaped to a piece of cardboard. It only needed to be “on” and “off”, there was no “B” you know. And Allan said “it doesn’t have any frame sync.”

What is this “frame sync” you talk of?

It doesn’t matter, it just rolls once and there it is. You’ve got to remember that most people were dialling into the internet with 14.4k or 28k modems. If you got a picture that moved, they thought this was rocket science. I forget how much of an audience we got – probably less than 20, but …

Ed:

It proved the technology could work?

Richard: Yes, and TVNZ were like “wow, we didn’t know you could do this.” So we had a lot of fun.

Ed: But nowadays, what you’re doing is all serious and it’s all very commercial?

Richard: I started doing video again just before 2000. We did The Lord of the Rings webcasts when they did the premieres and then people asked “could you do this for us?” and so then I had to charge them.

At one stage, I sold all the non-production stuff to CityLink and they built a content delivery network around it. Then in 2007 I decided it was time for me to move, so I said “catch you later” and went out and we’ve been doing production fulltime ever since.

Ed:

And that’s under the name of R2?

Richard:

Yes, under the name of R2.

Ed: So the question comes up, these days there are so many companies providing boxes that you plug a camera or two in and you get the streaming out, the NewTek TriCaster comes to mind, but you don’t go that way, you build everything yourself. Is this because you can do it better or because you just can?

Ed:

But you do record stuff, don’t you?

Richard: Multiple recorders. As someone said to me the other day, there are only two types of hard drive – those that have failed and those that are about to!

Ed:

Aaaah – I know where you’re coming from.

Richard: The event we did yesterday, there were three hard disc recorders running, plus one of the computers was recording. Plus each cameraman was doing an ISO record, so yes, we have multiple recorders Ed: Now I understand you do get boxes and bits and pieces from Protel – the cards and the other hardware – but one of the major items you get are the new Sony remote control cameras?

Richard:

Yes, we’ve used robots for a long time.

We started with the small D70s which are lovely little cameras, but one of the challenges for people involved with internet video is that the demand for quality has gone up. We replaced the single chip cameras with 3 chip SD cameras and, in the last year, we’ve got more HD than SD. Certain events we say “look, you need to bring in an OB truck and a crew and we’ll just be behind them”, so often you’ll find an OB truck somewhere and we’ll be parked downstream of them and we’ll just be taking a feed from them and we’ll do the presentation around it.

Sometimes we’ll provide broadband so the crew can get their email; sometimes we provide broadband linking, where we bring the remote cameras in over broadband; sometimes we provide phones so they can talk to people, etc.

We typically record everything.

We’ve got these Datavideo HDR-55 recorders and we’ve just tried one of the Blackmagic HyperDecks and some of the other stuff, so we’re trying different things.

Richard: Our boxes do more than encoding. They also act as Videoconference units and do great Skype with SDI in and out.

Ed: And the biggest challenge must be the network in New Zealand just doesn’t have the bandwidth that you’d really like?

A lot of the boxes you buy will say “plug into Livestream”. Now “Livestream” didn’t used to work in New Zealand because its ingest point is in Virginia. It’s 28 hops away and unreliable. So I’ll do a traceroute to find out where traffic is going, and all through a webcast we will be monitoring the internet.

Richard: It doesn’t really bother us because we’ve got five satellite links.

Ed:

There are things that a lot of people don’t understand about Internet architectures, like “internet exchanges”.

You’ve probably never heard the expression; or “Anycast routing” which is used to do traffic routing across the entire internet. So we look at a content delivery network and we compare how Akamai do it with, say, how Live Stream does it, or EdgeCast or Datacast or any of those providers, and we’ll be digging into their networks to see how they work and whether they can really deliver.

Ed: Tell me, when you’re doing these major jobs, do you have any backup – do you just have one go at it or how do you recover if something goes wrong?

Richard: one shot.

When it’s live, you only get

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So you really are providing your own network? more on page 35

Richard: Yes, I’ll land it in Australia rather than land it in New Zealand, so it doesn’t bother me at all. In the last year, I’ve done webcasts out of Beijing, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Colombo, Amman and Jordan and somewhere in Korea I can’t remember – all from my house in Tawa.

Ed: Alright, so then what are you looking forward to – what’s the technology leap or infrastructure improvement that is going to make your job easier, better or your customers happier?

Richard: Money! The trouble is everyone thinks it’s the internet, so it’s free, so we get lots of people who don’t want to pay a lot. It’s boom or bust for us. We’ll get a period of time when we really don’t know how we’re going to get it done and other times we just don’t see work for six weeks and then things get really tight.

So that’s the hard bit, but it’s becoming more acceptable in New Zealand to do webcasting and, if you have a world event, like a world championship, it’s pretty mandatory now that you’re going to webcast it.

There’s two things about the internet that you need to understand. One is that people are watching because they want to watch, whereas people are watching TV because they don’t know what else to do. The TV people are there to sell you the advertising. So the programmes are the bits between the advertising and if you get bored, you channel surf.

On the internet, you’re there because you’re interested in what’s going on and you don’t want any ads; you just don’t want to be interrupted. You don’t want to pay, but you don’t want any ads, so it’s a very difficult process to make a living out of this. The other thing about the internet is that we can turn up channels whenever we want, because they’re not based on frequencies. They’re just based on names.

So we can do an event – and we did three last year – where we do multiple streams… so we’re talking to people, like a string quartet. We’re saying “okay, we’ve webcast a string quartet and there’s four people playing, but if you’re a bit kinky, we’ll give you a webpage where you can see each player individually and if you really like to see the cello player, well you can just watch the camera on him.”

Ed: So all of this is sounding as though the small company, or the person who goes out and buys a box and decides he will go into webcasting using the

standard telcos’ systems, might be biting off more than they can chew?

Richard: Everyone who has ever done webcasting gets the “big bill”. When we all started, we just had a server and we put video in it and it would work. Then eventually you do an event and you have a lot of viewers and of course each viewer is a stream of data and the ISPs – they charge you for data, so suddenly you get this big bill and it blows you out of the water.

Now I’ve been really lucky, I’ve managed to duck that.

I came close last year, I budgeted a couple of grand for a 4 day job and we went through a couple of grand’s worth of data in the first 8 hours, so I didn’t make any money. I have to continually look at my network. Just in the last month, I’ve changed yet another CDN. So, doing a job, we’ll have multiple CDNs carrying the traffic and we’ve budgeted carefully how we’re going to use them.

Ed: It sounds as though, at the moment, this is still emerging technology. Do you see this all being solved in 5, 10 years’ time and maybe then everything will be stable enough so you can just have a little box and plug it in and it will work anywhere, anytime?

Richard: We’ve still got a way to go – for example, if you buy a connected TV from LG or Samsung or Sony, they won’t have the same content. They’ve all got their own little walled garden with the content in it and so, for people who produce content, like the TV people, they’ll have big transcoding systems. A company like TVNZ may be producing 20 or 30 different versions of that one video clip and so they have render walls sitting there transcoding like crazy. Until we get that settling down a bit … and that’s where people like Vimeo and YouTube then start to become the honeypot where people move to. Then the standards are changing … the streaming standards. So yes, we’ve still got a way to go.

Ed:

And you’ll keep working at it?

Richard: eating!

Yes – I’ve got no choice; I want to keep

Ed: So for all those reading this article, don’t forget to call on Protel to assist you with your streaming hardware.

Protel can provide NewTek TriCaster products, Digital Rapids Streaming and encoding hardware and software, Sony and Datavideo remote controlled cameras, etc.

NZVN

Page 35

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