NZVN May 2013

MAY 2013

Vol 191

NAB 2013 - “Where content comes to life” - Part One It’s not often that I can state an overall theme to the annual NAB show, but this year it was obvious. In 2011 and 2012, it was stereo ( 3D ) video for everything, but we all knew that this was never going to fly. In 2013 it was 4K and, even better, 4K high frame rate. Cameras, editing, monitors, glue - every manufacturer had something that was “4K now” or “coming soon” or wished that they did! However, just like with 3D, don’t rush in just yet unless you have an immediate use. My advice is that this is a technology that our industry will embrace, so keep 4K in your plans. Broadcasters still have standard def in many of their workflows and most public releases are still SD, but HD is the new standard. 4K may be a future standard but, shot currently, gives anyone using it that much more latitude for reframing, camera moves in post, effect manipulation and more.

There were many other cool technologies not related to 4K and you will find them in these pages and in our June issue.

Do your research, go to local demos and visit your dealers to see and touch for yourselves - you’ll be better off if you do.

Now, on with the stories!

Ed.

Sony at NAB2013 We are at the Sony stand with Nick Buchner.

Ed: Nick, 4K – this is what NAB2013 has been all about. In the last couple of years, there was a lot of 3D stereo but, having looked around I think I’ve seen one 3D rig in the whole show; it’s now 4K and anybody who’s not in 4K is going to miss the boat. Well Sony’s up at the bow, catching the wave?

Nick: Certainly 4K is a key theme for Sony at this show.

Our overall NAB2013 theme is “Beyond Definition” which has a lot of different connotations, but 4K is certainly a major component of that. In the Digital Cinematography area we’re showcasing our flagship F65 4K camera with its very latest software V3.0, due out in July, which continues to add more requested user features and more flexibility to the camera. We’re also showing our PMW-F55 and PMW-F5 which we launched at the end of last year and started shipping just 6-8 weeks ago. We’re very pleased to have just heard that somewhere close to 2,000 of these cameras will have been delivered worldwide by the end of April which is not bad in such a short period. We also heard that Panavision here in the United States has bought fifty F55 cameras already, with a view to quite a larger number than that.

That’s interesting because Panavision haven’t actually purchased many cameras from anyone in a while, and that shows a great commitment I believe and well-placed faith in this great new camera.

Ed: Looking around, I would say that the F55 is sort of in that “sweet spot” for many people. They’d love an F65, but it’s just not quite that it has the workflow that the F55 has and there are other cheaper options, simpler options, but in terms of what they can shoot today, what they can do with that 4K signal, and that’s not using it as 4K, that doing the crop and the pan and scan or whatever, making good use of that 4K sensor, is where they want to go.

Nick: Well I think a couple of key points here – for starters, if you’re looking at F55 versus F65, I mean the F55 is a very versatile camera and what we’re hearing is that it appeals at all levels, from episodic television drama production or lower budget motion picture production, right through to documentary production, even television current affairs. So the camera can be configured in many ways – from shoulder-mounted style such as we’re showing here with radio microphone receivers attached etc, that would allow current affairs programmes for example, who are talking to us very seriously about this camera, to shoot with the look they want, but of course the camera can be built up into a full studio type configuration, with all the accessories needed for drama production etc. The F65 of course is really primarily there as a motion picture and television drama tool, also for high-end commercials. The other really interesting thing about the F65 is that the first big Hollywood blockbusters to have been shot on the camera are being released right now. Last weekend here in the United States, Evil Dead was released.

Nick and docile friend. Note the camera on Fido’s back.

That’s the film that was shot in New Zealand last year on two F65s rented from Imagezone in Auckland. I’m told it topped the weekend box office takings … I haven’t seen the picture but I’ve seen some clips and it looks amazing. Oblivion which is the next blockbuster movie starring Tom Cruise opens in New Zealand very shortly – probably by the time you’re reading this. This was also shot on the F65, by Claudio Miranda ASC who was the Best Cinematography Oscar winner this year for Life of Pi. He spoke at Sony’s NAB press conference where he said some very sensible things, probably the most important of which is that he’s not beholden to any camera – he picks the best camera for the job. Life of Pi was shot on the ALEXA and he was very happy – he should be, he won an Oscar for it!

But after extensive evaluation of a lot of camera systems, he and the director chose F65 for Oblivion. Some of that film was shot in Iceland and talking with him here on the stand yesterday, he mentioned about the textures and the colours in the lava and in the landscape and the grey sky, where he was very impressed by the F65’s ability to capture those nuances, with its extremely wide colour gamut and excellent dynamic range.

So even though Oblivion is actually being released in the cinemas in 2K rather than 4K – the producers made

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

NAB 2013 We were there, for you.

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determine how the F55 compares to it.

There are some examples being screened in this theatre here of material shot on an F55.

It’s only early days, but it certainly has masses of promise and is already being used in the US to shoot several television series in production at Sony Studios and elsewhere. Various projects have also already commenced on the F55 in Australia. So it’s very early days, but the acceptance initially has been great and I think it can only grow from here.

Ed: With 4K being the buzz here, a key part of that is 4K RAW. When you’re looking at that top end of recording, people want to know about RAW and I guess the question comes that in many cameras you’ve got to have an off-board recorder. There is no camera that has slots or has its own internal recording system to record this really high level of uncompressed material. How does Sony manage this?

Nick: Well for starters, shooting RAW We really can’t have enough pics of the beautiful F65. gives the postproduction team the most possible information to work with.

You mentioned this decision due to cost and time taken to output in 4K, uncompressed; RAW is not always uncompressed.

In partly due to the heavy VFX workload – regardless the case of our F series models, RAW is lightly Claudio was very pleased that the camera delivered compressed at about 3.6 to 1. With the F65, the SR-R4 exactly what he needed to create some stunning recorder docks on the back of the camera and to all visuals. He was telling me that his next major picture intents and purposes should stay there. which is for Disney, he’s certainly very seriously looking So technically it’s an external recorder but it’s docked at the F65 as well. The third major picture shot on the and it’s very much part of the camera, so that allows F65 that’s shortly for release is After Earth – the Will you to record 16-bit RAW in two different flavours – Smith film directed by M. Night Shyamalan. It will be RAW and RAW Lite. It also allows you to record in HD, released in 4K and I think it’s due to hit New Zealand using our SStP ( or HDCAM-SR ) codec. cinemas in June or July – I’ve seen some clips and trailers and again, it will be a great showcase for the As I said, RAW is desirable to a lot of people because it camera. So this is a longwinded way of saying that I gives that absolute highest image quality and flexibility think from an F65 point of view … in post. Now if we move to talking about the F55 and the F5, neither of these will ostensibly record RAW on Ed: It’s nailed the cinema market? board; you require the dockable AXS-R5 RAW recorder.

Nick: I wouldn’t be quite so brash as to say that….

But if you’ve seen the recorder, it’s a very small neat Ed: Well I’m happy to say that because that’s what unit that integrates straight onto the back of the I’ve heard from the real journalists here. camera without any cables or additional power supplies or anything. It’s about the size of a battery, so it fits Nick: It’s undoubtedly the highest performance digital onto the camera and then you fit the battery on the camera out there, delivering fantastic images for a variety of major projects. In Australia, we’ve got a major television drama series called A Place to Call Home that was shot on the F65, that’s just about to start airing. I think there will be a knock-on effect here too – these major releases will get people taking another look at the F65 as well as looking at the F55.

The F65 remains our flagship model with several unique advantages but the F55 shares its very wide colour gamut. I think overall it’s a really exciting time.

Ed: It’s obvious that the exposure range is just really, really up there and that’s what the filmmakers are after and I remember Claudio saying about the lava in Iceland that he could actually see little bits of colour in that lava that he’s never seen before, and it was real, it wasn’t artificial colour produced by anything?

Nick: He was capturing reality; he was reproducing what he could see.

Given the F65 is the highest resolution digital cinematography camera out there with an unmatched sensor, you would expect it to!

Ed: But I would say that, in a good pair of hands, the F55 is going to very closely approach anything that the F65 could do?

Nick: The F65 remains our leading-edge technology for motion pictures but it will be up to the market to Page 4

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back of the RAW recorder. So that unit will enable both the F5 and the F55 to record 2K and 4K RAW. Ed: Why wouldn’t you use the same one as you’ve got on the F65?

Nick: Well, a couple of reasons, (a) the SR-R4 is larger physically and (b) with the F65 in RAW, consider the amount of information that is coming out of that 20 megapixel 8K sensor, it’s massive! The camera can shoot at 120 frames per second in full RGB 4K. As a result, there’s a very large amount of data and so the interface between the camera and the docked recorder is in fact an optical link, to handle the volume of data to be transferred.

Ed: It sounds like a money question here Nick?

Nick: Basically yes. In the case of the F5 and F55, you don’t need such a high level recorder, not such a physically large recorder, so they are different.

Ed: Now what I’ve also seen is that high frame rate is so important.

When you have material shot at 24p or 25p and it’s not handled right, you get problems.

But there is a roadmap for the F5 and F55 for that – for high frame rates?

over the world.

They’ll have to then juggle the priorities to try to suit the majority.

Ed: And that’s really the good thing about this level of camera these days – it’s not just a fixed package that you buy, and if something changes you’ve got to update the camera.

This is a firmware update in many situations?

Nick: Most of the time it’s firmware.

Occasionally hardware updates are necessary which then require a visit to the workshop, but yes, these are firmware updates we’re talking about and they’re free. Whilst it may be disappointing that they’re coming a little later in the year, they are not going to cost owners anything, they will come free and they should be downloadable by the user and easily applied to the camera.

Just backtracking on a point … when we were talking about RAW, I should also point out that RAW recording of course is not the only way to work in 4K on the F55, because the F55 ( and this is one of the things that

Nick: There absolutely is.

The F65 shoots at up to 120 frames per second now, but in the case of the F55 and F5 there is a clear plan … at this stage we will be introducing fixed high frame rates in September this year in V1.3, with the addition of slow and quick control over those in V1.4 in December, meaning adjustable frame rates. Not ramping in shot, but the ability to select 178fps or 115fps or whatever precise frame rate is needed. I know there’s a lot of people out there that would like it to be earlier than that; we have spoken very robustly with the development team, in fact I’ve just come from a F55 in studio configuration. If I charged for this paper, I might afford one, hmmm! meeting with them, and differentiates it from the F5 ) is also capable of onthere will certainly will be some efforts made to see if board recording to the SxS card in 4K – not RAW – but the schedule can be brought forward even incrementally using the new XAVC codec. So for those interested in possibly for certain frame rates. The unfortunate reality working in 4K, not necessarily in RAW for whatever is, whilst customers would probably like the cameras to reason, there is the option to go 4K XAVC. Now just on do everything straight away, they simply don’t. This is RAW – here at NAB we’re showcasing our vendor not just a Sony thing, our competitors in this area also partners with onset daily management, nonlinear add features step by step. I totally appreciate that editing and colour grading systems and how they people may be a little disappointed that certain features handle RAW. You can see there’s a robust level of aren’t there right now, but they will be there later in the support not only for XAVC but also our RAW file. year. The development team have to prioritise what they’re doing and it comes down to weight of numbers.

One of the points that Claudio Miranda and his DIT Alex A feature that is really in demand for episodic television Carr made at the Sony press conference is that when drama production is the HDCAM-SR ( or SStP ) codec, something is new, people are naturally maybe a little which can record at 220 or 440 megabits per second. afraid of it. They don’t understand it, they haven’t used There is a huge push from Hollywood to implement it, they’ve been using a particular workflow and all of a SStP on these cameras and it’s scheduled for V1.2 in sudden along comes something new, but their point was July at the moment. Consequently, that has been given “it was really easy to work with” so I think my message a priority over some other things.

I know every is don’t be afraid of something new. customer has their own priorities, but we’ve had There is a lot of data coming out of these cameras; meetings between our customers and the development these RAW files can be quite large, the F65 produces a team here at NAB and they’ve listened and taken on lot of data but if you want to shoot at 120 frames per board that feedback, as they do with customers from all Page 6

second at that kind of resolution, you’ve got to expect that. Plan for it and it’s manageable.

Ed: But the thing is – and I like to get this across – that at the moment, people don’t need that in most cases. They don’t need 4K files at the end of it; they can work with compressed files because it’s in post that these things can be manipulated to produce a better picture in the current climate?

Nick: I think the key point I like to push is “4K in is not always about 4K out”. Take the F65 for example, which is being used solidly in Australia for shooting TV drama. Generally they’re not shooting RAW and they’re not shooting 4K; they’re shooting HD using SStP and yet the camera still delivers wonderful pictures. They may choose to use 4K RAW for certain shots where there needs to be some effects work done or some stabilisation or potential reframing but of course the final product will be HD. The same with the F55 and the F5 as things develop. I was talking to a commercial director from LA here yesterday, he shoots in 4K but of course his ads are finished in HD. Why does he do that? Because it gives him the ability to stabilise the picture if there’s any unstable shots, a wobble or whatever, and also to reframe.

A 4K canvas gives you the ability to essentially zoom into a quarter of that frame and still pull out usable HD content. So the ability to reframe, whether it’s because an actor didn’t do the right thing or a boom dropped into shot or they caught a light or whatever – that’s important to him as a commercial director, but he’s certainly not producing 4K. So there’s other reasons to work with 4K cameras and take advantage of the extra resolution available.

Ed: It’s what people have been able to do with still photography for quite a while and now it’s really available in the television area?

Nick: Well yes, the principle of cropping a print in a darkroom is not a whole lot different to cropping a 4K image down to HD or 2K. Ed: Okay, just showing the commitment to the F55, we’ve already got Panavision making whole lots of rails and bits and pieces and putting their lenses on it, but there’s already an underwater housing?

Nick: Already Gates have got an underwater housing that fits the F5 and F55.

Aside from Panavision’s efforts, other companies have already come up with adaption kits for the cameras – people like Solid Camera, MovCam and others, so it’s just a great demonstration of the expectation for these cameras.

Underwater housing for F5 or F55.

Ed: And of course all the other accessory makers just with rails and the handholding things, they’re all here.

And what’s this Prime Awards Finalist – Sony NEXFS700?

Nick: Yes, the FS700 is a finalist in the Studio Daily Prime Awards here at NAB. Ed: What about other applications for the F55?

Nick: Of course digital cinematography’s one thing, but we’re at the dawn of a need for 4K solutions for live broadcasting.

So whilst we’re a little way off live broadcasting in 4K in Australia and New Zealand yet, we are showing a system camera adapter kit for the F55 that allows the camera to be connected by SMPTE fibre back to a van with full control, return video, tally, intercom facilities etc.

There is a 4K OB van currently being built by us in London for Telegenic which will be used to provide 4K coverage of the FIFA World Cup in Brazil next year.

This is a great example of how we can take that fantastic camera as a base, provide a live 4K output and, through this adapter kit, basically turn it into a system camera, because I think it will be a little time before we see dedicated 4K system cameras, given that we are at the start of that journey.

Page 7

Nick continues the Sony story in June.

Steadicam for A2Z Steadicam is distributed by Tiffen through A2Z and here is Brett Smith with the latest.

Ed: They seem to be getting smaller and smaller Brett?

Brett: The application for Steadicam has moved, not just with the size of cameras, but with the types of markets where Steadicam’s used. It started as feature film, 35mm, it was high end, it was expensive, it was the only kid in town. Things change … it’s not just that we have competition, but we have GoPro right up to 3D. You still need the full featured $65,000 rigs, but you’ve also got a lot of guys doing street work with GoPro, but still looking for a professional image and there’s still no way you can get a stabilised shot without compromise unless you use a stabiliser.

Brett and man in full Steadicam kit.

We’d like to think Steadicam does the best of the stabilisers compared to electronic and any other way you do it, it still offers you the best … like doing incamera filters. You can edit whatever later, as long as you get the shot the right way.

Drift, iPod – all those small camera-phone, smartphone, multi-application, all get more adjustment on our stabilisers and more precision control of the counterweight than any other type of simple system.

So Newton’s principles, Steadicam’s quality and thinking and patents applied to a compact system.

Ed: It’s basic physics. Your Steadicam is operating on putting the centre of balance of the camera actually below the camera itself, which means that your camera stays in one position above it?

Brett: Correct. There’s lots of Newtonian laws that are in a place like mass acceleration, force, action / reaction – all of those.

Ed: Not to forget inertia?

Brett: Inertia of course. Inertia, momentum and mass. The two areas of stabilisation are handheld and vest and arm.

Now there’s quite a difference in what that means.

Both of them operate with a gimbal, as in a rotational gimbal where there is a single point where you are contacting, and the gimbal and the camera plate are independent. In a handheld item that grip – the grip goes straight to the gimbal; in an arm and vest system, you use what we call an iso-elastic spring arm which separates any movement in your body from the Steadicam stabiliser sled. There’s an application for both – small cameras, small loads, tend to just use a handheld system. The latest system, the Curve that we’ve brought out, is not much bigger than a GoPro on a mount, and the idea of it is it has a gimbal but it also has a lock-off so that it can be used as a hand mount, because a lot of people just want something to hold onto the GoPro body. It doesn’t actually have a natural grip like a DSLR camera. So it’s either a firm grip or you quickly release and in a split second it becomes a gimbal stabilised handheld Steadicam.

Beautiful smooth shots. That, at the moment, is designed just for the GoPro, and that’s called the Curve.

The Smoothie and the Merlin are two handheld devices that have been around for quite a while for iPhone, GoPro, Page 8

we’re trying to subtly influence camera operators, producers and directors into realising that there’s a little more to Steadicam, where it’s used, how it’s used and when it’s used than people imagined 20 years ago. It’s like an upgrade in terms of thinking, and we’ve been successful in the workshops in Malaysia and Australia and now we’re bringing a high end workshop – so it is for television, feature film, commercial operators, as well as the wedding guys.

The application, the techniques, the setups are all the same; the skills are now based a little less on feature film training, because a lot of these guys won’t work on feature films. Most of them will work still maybe single camera for television commercials, but now multi camera reality television Dancing with the Stars, sport sideline … they’re all multi camera headset. Our training in New Zealand with Rebecca Wilson-Jennings is going to now focus on making this much more suitable for the real world of where Steadicam is used, and that’s in television, it’s in wedding, it’s in corporate, it’s in where a flexible mount is required, or a versatile mount.

Ed: Can I get some teasers by going on the website and seeing a little bit more about the content of these workshops?

Brett: Yes you can, at <flysteadicam.com> or <steadicamworkshops.com> there’s plenty of information about what’s in the workshop and we’ve got some good video clips and You Tube clips around and some Facebook groups at the workshops in Australia and Malaysia, which have shown what the guys got out of it and what they’re doing since. And this is what we’re trying to do – it’s this circle of connecting training directly back to employability.

Ed: Because it’s a very sophisticated tool isn’t it? It’s not just something you can clip on your body and put a camera on it and off you go, there’s a lot of setting up and I guess a lot of skill in operating one correctly, not only to get the good shot, but also to avoid ending up in a brace in a hospital bed somewhere?

Ed: And the big ones – there’s obviously a lot of attention with the upcoming seminars for Steadicam operators in New Zealand and Asia-Pacific?

Brett: They are the two aspects that training addresses … one of them is anyone can do a 90% shot on the Steadicam and that is put on a vest, plumb it up, get someone to set it up for you and go running. And you are going to pull off a shot that’s better than a shaky handheld.

But no director will ever use it because the horizon will drift. The training brings you into just those aspects of technique and posture to operate at that professional level; of course you can’t beat experience, but it sets you on the path as to what techniques with your feet, twist turning and how you’re doing switches and things round corners and through doorways that we teach that you take with you to pull off professional shots – and also to help your back last for a lifetime, because a lot of our operators in their 40s, 50s and 60s, once they learn posture ( which we teach on day one of the course ) they realise it’s not the weight of the rig they’re holding, it’s really their posture that is the biggest limiting factor.

Brett: Yes, but it’s not just camera operators who aren’t quite familiar with new techniques in the features of new Steadicam stabilisers, it’s also producers and directors who aren’t quite sure what beyond staircases and running a Steadicam shot’s used for. And you know, like I do, that education is something you can’t ram down someone’s throat.

Some people are employed because everyone assumes they know it, so

Often some of the younger or the smaller guys when they start the workshop, they grab the 10 kilogram capacity zephyr; by day three, you can’t get the 25 kilogram Ultra2 out of their hands. Now this thing is three times the size … it’s sometimes bigger than the guys who operate it. Day one they don’t think they’ve got the strength to operate it; day three they realise it’s posture, balance and position of your rig. And so those

Ed: So on the Smoothie, you seem to have got two red knobs here – are they the drag?

Brett: No. That’s actually forward and aft balance. 90% of your balance is based in the mount, so for a GoPro Hero, we have a mount that fits it, so when you put it on it’s plug and play, except for about 5% adjustment. That just makes sure once you’ve gone fore and aft, side by side with those two red knobs, that you have the perfect centre of gravity between your camera and your counterweight at the base. So it’s a fine control, fine tune.

Ed: So if you don’t tune it properly, everything’s on an angle?

Brett: You just can’t compensate. The body can’t kind of do a 45 degree …

Page 10

glean.

You can be told, but at our workshop in Wellington, you get the three instructors we’ve got that have all done gold workshops with Garett to grab you, twist your body round, tell you what you’re doing wrong and right and drum it into you over three days, you’re going to come back knowing whether it’s for you or what it’s about.

And so that’s how important the training has become for us. It’s getting people to realise it isn’t as complex

as it looks once you understand what it’s there to do and how your body helps you rather than fights against it. We watch guys fight with Steadicam all the time and it’s painful to see. You watch a guy that’s natural, and it becomes one with him.

That sounds a bit Zen, but that’s how it looks.

Ed:

Well that’s how you are Brett.

Brett:

A Zen kind of guy.

NZVN

SWIT for A2Z We are with David Epstein at SWIT. Ed:

David, SWIT batteries and more?

David: SWIT have released some new products.

The first is a 9 inch monitor with a great resolution and it looks wonderful. We’ve got a 1280 x 800 resolution screen with inputs of HDMI and HD-SDI with waveform monitor, vectorscope and frankly the warmest pictures we’ve seen. The next new product, the S-4901/4902 Wireless transmission system, is for transmitting HD images from ENG cameras to field monitors. Presently getting signals from A to B has always been tricky. One method is the good traditional cable.

SWIT this year have developed a wireless HD transmission system. This is a V-Lock system which simply plugs onto the back of the V-lock plate of the camera and sends a signal across the David interviews himself. “I get less abuse this way” he says. airwaves to a receiver which can just be plugged onto the back of a monitor. It’s an uncompressed 3G HD-SDI signal that gets sent and Ed: We’re actually seeing it at the moment, because it has less than one millisecond latency. It’s very quick, Alain is acting up in front of the camera and waving his lightweight, and compact and has a very lower power hands around and I don’t notice any delay? draw.

David: Yes the proof of the pudding is in the testing and this looks good …

certainly

Ed: Are you calling Alain a pudding?

David: No sir, I’m not.

Another couple of new products that have come into the marketplace are a new line of splittable batteries. Airline regulations are getting stricter and stricter and so SWIT has decided to add to their range. They have added an additional two splittable batteries. One is called the S-8132 and the other is the S-8192.

Both these are good for airline regulation and they are 184 Watts and 126 Watts, so that’s new to the range.

Alain waving to the camera - in sync!

Page 11

Another new battery that’s in the range is a rather clever battery for the very popular Sony EX1 and EX3 and the newer PMW-100 and 200 cameras.

will power the camera without a cable ( because the original SWIT batteries used to have a Powerpole plug that you had to plug into the DC input of the EX1 and EX3. and that is no longer the case.) This new battery simply plugs onto the camera, it powers the camera, it gives you DC of 12 Volt out as well as USB out.

Ed:

So you can power that SWIT light on the front?

David: Absolutely.

And it remaining power in the viewfinder.

also

displays

the

Another product we’d like to announce is a new EFP System which is a cost effective solution to build up a field studio with ENG cameras, transmission cables and camera controllers. We can turn say any Panasonic or Sony camera into a studio camera chain.

We take the SDI or HDMI signal out of the camera and we can run it through fibre or coaxial cable from the camera to the base station, so SWIT have developed a base station with remote control panels.

This particular battery not only gives you 12 Volts out, it also gives you USB signal out, which means you can charge your iPhone or GO-PRO, etc through your USB port.

This means while you’re on shoot, if you’re running a bit low on power on your USB chargeable products, you can power any USB device with that battery.

Another feature on those batteries is the fact that it has the Anton Bauer PowerTap, so you’ve got a battery that

Miller for A2Z We are at Miller with Paul Maroni and David Epstein from A2Z.

You can get up to 16 channels, so you can have 16 cameras as well as intercom audio, so really a full studio upgrade in both portable and rack mounted systems. Another feature of this system is that the monitor on top of the camera will display a picture in picture. With this system we can return video back from the base station from your mixing desk and send a signal back to the monitor on the camera for a picture in picture display, so you can see what’s on air. In summary, it’s a universally compatible camera controlNZVN ler triple broadcast EFP system for ENG cameras.

Paul: Yes, that means they’re minus above ground spreader and so a lightweight portable rig perfect for travel.

Ed: Paul, you’re a familiar face, but a different badge and now you know all about Miller, you’re Australian, so no holds barred. Watcha got?

Paul: Nice to see you too. What we have here is the Miller SOLO Tripod System – SOLO tripod, three legs, no spreader and an automatic leg locking system here with three positions.

Ed:

But this has been around for a long time Paul?

Paul: Correct it has, and that’s why I was describing it, because you know all about it and they’re extremely popular.

Ed:

I know, I know.

Paul: We currently have a rotary locking system where, with about half a turn, it unlocks and then the leg drops, okay. Now with this new Rapid Lock system, we’re using a multithread technology, which means that with a quarter of a turn it will actually do the same travel as if you were doing half a turn. So it’s twice as quick. So with a single hand I could just move 30% and totally extend the tripod leg. Now that’s really important.

Ed:

That’s a simple little thing, but very sensible.

Paul: Quarter, quarter, quarter, it is locked. So less wrist action, speedier deployment and speed of packing up, altogether, single hand, quarter turn, pack it up, take it home ready for the next shot.

Ed: I know these have been very popular with people as a second tripod, because they want to go travelling.

They can use these legs and their head, put them in a flight bag and they’re on the plane?

Page 12

Paul says “Wow, the SOLO can support a payload of one David.”

Ed:

And it’s very tall?

Paul: Very tall, also it gets down low, like a HiHat so you can actually shoot right on the ground with the SOLO tripods, without having to have an additional Hi-Hat in your travel case. Just one lightweight carbon fibre rig, which you can mount on your back if required and away you go.

Ed: But I’m sure you’ve got backpacks that these will clip onto?

Paul:

We do.

Ed: Now I would have thought that this would be something that you would buy in addition to your standard tripod and I’m sure that happens, but David you’re telling me that people buy this as their only tripod?

David: It’s a mixture of the two really. A lot of guys find that the ease of use and the lightweight characteristics of the tripod make it wonderful just to use in an everyday environment.

Ed: And it’s perfectly stable, even with a medium sized camera?

David: I’ve swung underneath these, it will actually hold my full body weight if I hang underneath this, so it’s a very, very strong locking system.

Ed: Now Paul, Miller’s also famous for heads and there is a particularly large head – 150mm which obviously wouldn’t fit on a SOLO so you need a decent sort of set of legs on it, but what’s this one?

Paul: This a Skyline 70, recently released and I think first started shipping last September, payload from 4½ kilos, right up to 38.5 kg’s …

Ed:

Paul: cameras.

Ed:

The quick release plate in action.

What’s 38 kilos these days?

It’s more than what you need for most

I think so, but anyway …?

Paul: So it can handle pretty heavy loads, as well as having the ability to go down to 4½ kilos which is a best in class for this head ( or even as a system ), especially for the price. At the back, we’ve got all rear mounted controls, illuminated, rotary selectable buttons for counterbalance 8 positions, pan tilt drag 8 positions of each, locking knob at the front here.

Ed: It’s good that they’re all at the back – I know that this is an issue with heads that you’re not quite sure which knob turns what and they’re all in different places and you’ve got to remember where they are. But these are all here at the back facing you and it’s even got a label?

Paul: This is something that we learnt from our Arrow system, where all of our customers loved the fact that all of the controls were at the rear of the head.

Similar to a camera – you look at all your controls on a camera, all the buttons that you need to access with intercom, etc are on the back. A similar sort of thing with your head. You can interchange anything on the run, it’s there and it’s illuminated.

With the Skyline system, one thing that was recognised with a payload of 38 kilos, was that some people may want to put this onto a flat base tripod, like the old heavy duty Ronford-Baker Mitchell Mount type tripods.

So what we’ve done is we’ve developed this flat base adapter. It directly adapts to the base of the Skyline 70; three screws retain it in place, extremely solid.

What you see here is a standard Mitchell flat base and the head itself adapts directly to it.

Ed: But it’s a Mitchell in name only, it’s actually made

by Miller?

Paul: Well we’re making the adapter, the base itself was developed by Mitchell and it’s been used by many other manufacturers. It’s just like an industry standard for the film industry for the tripods – O’Connor heads and things like that attached through a Mitchell system.

Ed: Okay, so the actual base, the legs and the spreader and all that bit down the bottom, is RonfordBaker and you do this because that’s what the film industry wants?

Paul: The film industry loves their Ronford-Baker sticks with rotary knobs to lock them off.

Ed: And the redesigned plate?

Paul: Well here is a bit of a sneak preview of our prototype design of the direct attachment of the ARRI Bridge Plate.

On most heads, you have to use a wedge or an adapter plate, to adapt the ARRI Bridge Plate to your tripod head, so we’ve developed a side loading system, with a dual click design; single click you can actually drop the plate directly in and slide it to position and balance it and second click locks it off very securely – and selfadjusting.

So this is the basis for our new cine style head. It’s being previewed here at NAB, getting some good customer feedback.

Ed: So this sort of plate is an industry standard, it’s not just for an ARRI camera?

Paul: Correct. The ARRI Bridge Plate would then mount to rails and to everything else ARRI so you could actually put a Sony F65 on top, an F55, your ARRI ALEXA, etc, etc on top of this. Other manufacturers manufacture the same plate – Element Technica and Chrosziel actually have one as well, so we’re making a head that will adapt to this industry standard plate. NZVN

Page 14

Panasonic for A2Z For A2Z, David, Alain and I visited the Panasonic stand.

Ed: David, we’re at the Panasonic stand for A2Z because you’re big sellers of Panasonic, along with other brands?

David: Absolutely and we’ve got two new cameras and some new technologies in the P2 card world. The first is Panasonic’s new 4K camera that is currently housed in a Perspex Box and is the size of a small hand held camera. Panasonic are showing that their 4K camera is in development and we will be watching its progress with interest.

The second new camera in development is very similar in size to the popular HPX250 camera. There is no model number for this yet, however Panasonic are developing an AVC Ultra Handheld Camcorder.

It will be the first of the handhelds with two Micro P2 slots as well as two full sized P2 card slots …

Ed:

Simultaneous recording?

David: You can do simultaneous recording on one lot or the other, so you can do Micro P2 by 2 or P2 by 2 – you can’t do one of each unfortunately. That would be really cool, but we can’t, we can do one or the other.

So we’ve got simultaneous recording on this one now as we have on the larger cameras – it will be the first handheld that will feature proxies on it. We’ve never had proxies on a handheld camera before, so this will be the first and it will have the wireless networking feature and the wireless proxy upgrades and updates and all that sort of thing that the larger ones have also.

Ed: That seems to be something that’s become more and more important, having that WiFi capability, especially now with 4G, there’s a lot of 4G in Australia too?

David: It’s a feature that we’ve had for a few years now, but it’s still very much underutilised. The people who use it absolutely love it, they wouldn’t live without

it. Many people still think it’s a bit of a gimmick, but it can be a very practical powerful tool.

Ed: And up until now, it’s been that you have to have a third party machine connected to your camera to enable you to distribute via the WiFi? David: Correct. I mean the idea with this is the WiFi needs something easy to connect up to – the iPad, iPod, almost anything. If it’s not easy, it’s not going to be used.

Ed: On the recording streams, if you’ve got two micro P2 cards, are you able to record two different codecs, in other words AVC-ULTRA on one and on the other one a lower res proxy?

David: Yes the whole purpose of proxies is that they are recorded simultaneously with the Hi-Res image. I know on the larger cameras, like the 5000 and the 600 yes you can record two different codecs on a card. I would assume you can on the handheld, but really that’s all the details we’ve got released at the moment. As far as I’m aware, we’re probably targeting that for early next year, so the details should come out in the following months.

Page 15

Ed: It’s an early release and that’s why anyone interested can come in and talk to you at A2Z isn’t it David?

David: That’s the one. Now, there’s also a new card technology which we need to discuss and Alain is going to talk about that now.

Alain: Okay, the new Micro P2 cards are simply an SD sized P2 card.

So in terms of the stream compatibility and I guess the data integrity, they’re exactly the same as a full sized P2 card, except they’re faster. They’re enabled for the AVC-Intra 200 codec, so they’re 200 megabits recording versus the full Alain checking out the Panasonic 4K camera. sized cards at 100 megabit. They’ve also got a faster offload at 2 gigabits a second versus 1.2 on they can easily be lost. That’s the only downside that the larger ones. So they will cope with the higher bit some of our clients have cited with the Micro cards. rate stream and they’re also 1.7 times faster to offload.

Ed: But it’s a moving target I guess?

Ed: Now I guess having two large P2 slots in a Alain: Oh absolutely. I mean there’s a lot of camera, especially a small size camera, is something pluses there – they’re cheap, they’re faster, they’ve got you would want to move away from, especially knowing the little QR code on them for identification … there’s so that the Micro will take the place? many good things about them, but like everything there Alain: Being that P2’s been going for nine odd years now, there’s obviously a well established user base. There is a network client in Australia with over 2,000 cards, so if we were to pitch to them an ENG camcorder without that full sized card, Panasonic would be in a lot of trouble. The Micro card does in the future give us the capability to produce a very small true handheld camera, a P2 camera with P2 format that just takes the Micro card, but really our intention going forward is not to drop the full sized card. The other reason we won’t do that is because with ENG customers there’s a lot of card exchange from journos to soundies – the cards are going back and forth. The little Micro cards are very, very small; if they go in a jeans pocket,

are always some downsides for some users.

Ed: Now Alain, there’s a new Panasonic codec that’s out?

Alain: Yes there’s actually quite a few new Panasonic codecs that are out, but one that’s quite important to us is called AVC-LongG 25. What this means is that you can record 10 bit 4:2:2 material at a much lower data rate of 25 megabits per second and maintain quality. This will then allow you to in fact quadruple the space you get on a 32 and 64 gig card, and on the 64 gig micro P2 card you’re going to get approximately 340 minutes of broadcast quality NZVN material. Nice.

Steve Wozniak presents for Fusion-io One of my highlights of this year’s show was a press briefing by Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. He is now a

chief scientist at Fusion-io who make a very neat application acceleration card.

The card has been integrated with the HP Z workstations to allow sustained performance in multithreaded applications.

The Fusion-ioFX card enables artists to work on 2, 4 and 5K content interactively, in full resolution.

As part of the press goodiebag ( yes, there are perks!)

I got a copy of Steve’s book “iWoz – computer geek to cult icon ISBN 978-0-39333043-4.

It is an easy read – though in a very egotistical style – of a fascinating story.

My “book of the month.”

Ed Page 16

Atomos for Protel We are at Atomos with Steve Wise, for Protel with Glenn Miers.

Ed: Steve, this is a company that has been producing off-board recorders for quite some years now and every six months or so we get a new iteration, some new improvement. Obviously, you are meeting the market and this NAB is no exception, there’s been a big improvement to the Samurai I understand?

Steve: Yes – well it’s actually a new product altogether. We have two new products and a product modification for a specific reason which I’ll explain. The first one is the Samurai Blade introduction. Samurai Blade is a new Samurai with a new screen and full sized BNC connectors.

Feedback from our Samurai users was that they loved the product, but they didn’t like the mini BNCs and they wanted a better screen.

Ed: So does that mean the box is now a bigger physical size?

Steve: It’s slightly deeper and it’s slightly longer, yes. So the form factor is to fit a Super IPS 1280x720 screen.

Because we have a better screen, we can do more with it. So, for example, with this we’ll have waveform monitor and we’ll have vectorscope and luma RGB parade. Also, I think now you can adjust the contrast in the gamma. So these are all features that were requested from existing users.

Alongside that, we’ve kind of reorganised the pricing.

Originally, ( this is US dollars now ), prior to the show, Samurai in its existing version was US$1595 and Ninja2 was US$995. What we’ve done, we’ve introduced Samurai Blade at US$1295 and then we’ve reduced the

Steve, my preference, Glenn.

price of Samurai to US$995 and reduced the price of the Ninja to US$695. I’ll explain a little bit more about the Ninja in a second … so that’s really realigning the field recorders. We’ve also got the Ronin, introduced at IBC in Europe last year, which is kind of a rack mountable Samurai for studio and live production and that’s US$1995, so that’s really catering for a different more broadcast/studio oriented market, so that’s full sized BNCs and balanced XLR. Ed: I guess you have to be price sensitive because, not only do you have competition from other manufacturers of off-board recorders, but also now the camera manufacturers are coming out with better on-board recording capabilities?

How many can you fit on one camera?

Page 18

Steve: Yes, true … not necessarily with the manufacturers we work with.

One of the key elements I think with Atomos is that we work very closely with the Japanese camera manufacturers who are impressed with our knowledge and not so interested in putting recorders in their cameras.

I don’t know whether you know our CEO Jeremy, he’s fluent in Japanese and part of his remit is that every quarter, he goes to Japan and visits Panasonic, Sony, JVC, Canon and Nikon, rattling cages. We also have competition from the more traditional field recorders, so people like Convergent Design introducing

new things, so we have to be on the ball. I think also with the new pricing, it does now go on to another product introduction that we have, which is another two Connect products. So we have essentially two product lines – one is field recorders or portable recorders; the other one is converter products. So at the back end of last year we started shipping Connect. Connect is a battery powered HDMI to HD-SDI converter, or vice versa – there’s two products so there’s Connect H2S and Connect S2H. Ed: Why can’t you have one product that goes both ways?

Steve:

That’s a good question ...

Glenn: I would imagine it’s a factor of pricing.

Providing conversion in both directions would make for a more expensive product perhaps?

Ed: Quite possibly why there are really no small converters that go both ways.

Steve: Part of the response to the introduction of the Connect battery units was “yes, great, really like it.” It’s kind of an innovative product because you can carry it around. It’s not just a converter, we have a test pattern generator, an audio tester and 3:2 pull down built in, so it’s more than a converter. But the feedback as well from that is well this is great but a lot of these converters get put in a facility and we want to rack mount it. So we introduced a product called Connect-AC and that is exactly the same in terms of functionality, so you still get the test pattern generator and the audio test tone, etc but this is a form factor with AC built-in. Just plug in a figure-8 power cord and you’re good to go. We also produce a rack mount kit where you can put four of these units in it.

So now we have four Connect products, two Connect and two ConnectAC and we’ve also modified the pricing on those – all are now US$295.

So going back to the harmonising of the product, I think it makes a lot more sense when you started a Ninja with US$695, a Samurai with US$995 and a Samurai Blade with US$1295 and it’s now much clearer how the modularity works; if you want to change a Ninja to give it SDI input or output, you can put a Connect on the back of it, and that’s US$295. What we were finding before was people were thinking well hang on a minute, if I bought that and then I bought … they were trying to figure out kind of what the best deal was.

Ed:

Well, people are inclined to do that.

Steve: Which was fine, I mean it wasn’t really something we kind of thought about to be honest, but I think now it’s very transparent; you know it’s going in increments of roughly just under US$300 and it’s not hiding anything. I’ll give you an example of a customer who came onto the booth yesterday and he had a Sony F3. He said “well, what do I buy?” Our answer was that he bought a Ninja with HDMI, so he can take his 24 megabit camcorder, uprate it to 50 megabit 422 using a Ninja. And then he said he was thinking of buying a Canon 5D Mark III when that came out. So his F3 is an SDI camera and the Canon is an HDMI camera, so which does he buy. So he buys the Ninja at US$695 which he can use with his Canon 5D Mark III and then he adds a Connect to take SDI input which he can use

with his F3. So rather than buying a Samurai, he’s now got something for the same price that does both jobs, and he can resurrect his F3 and turn it into a 50 megabit broadcast compliant recorder.

Ed: Okay, now in terms of – especially for the Canon – there’s some new product for the Canon 5D is it?

Steve: Yes, for the Canon 5D Mark III. It’s not really a new product; we’re repackaging the Ninja-2 for that market.

Generally, companies like Sony and Panasonic who will do the gamut - they’ll do video camcorders as well as cameras and DSLRs, they do a whole range … so particularly with people like Canon, they will service the whole camera range. Then you get people like Nikon who don’t have any video cameras coming out but have a whole raft of DSLRs that all have clean output. Up until now Canon 5D’s and their other DSLRs never have clean output. What you see on the viewfinder is what comes out the HDMI. It means that’s what you record is not what people want. So we already have to say to people, no you can’t use a Canon

5D. I think that with the introduction of Nikon producing so many DSLRs with clean output, Canon now have deigned to introduce a firmware update for the Canon 5D Mark III which gives a clean output ( available now at time of writing.)

What we’ve done is we’ve modified the package of the Ninja-2. It’s the same recording unit, there’s no carry case in this, you can have this as an option; it will be coming as more of a retail box. We will be putting in a single charger instead of a dual charger and putting battery shims in for Canon and Nikon as well. So it’s really more tailored for the DSLR market and particularly for the Canon – and a new price point, so it’s US$695, that’s very squarely targeted at the Canon 5D Mark III. And there are certain benefits you get from Canon; Nikon are not so used to working in a video world, so they don’t have timecode and start/stop trigger over HDMI, but Canon do. So on the 5D Mark III with the update and with a Ninja-2, you’ll get clean video output and you’ll get timecode start/stop trigger and timecode.

Ed: That really is great news for all those DSLR users out there. And of course the entire Atomos range is available from Protel at their Auckland and Wellington NZVN offices.

Page 19

HPRC Cases for Protel We are at HPRC with Davide Bertossi and Glenn from Protel.

Ed:

Davide, you sound Italian?

Davide: Ed:

I am Italian and the brand is Italian.

Then it must be good, it’s certainly stylish.

Davide: Well more than stylish, we believe that we do great quality products.

We started making aluminium cases. We then decided to convert to resin cases. We first developed a compound which is 1520% lighter than every other brand for hard cases, and from that compound, we then decided to create a line based on the best selling size of competitors and at the same time introducing new unique sizes and dimensions. We didn’t want to be followers, or do what the other guys do, so we try to be unique. Trying to be unique means of course our designs and with innovative features. We have very smooth latches, recessed into the case, because this is the part where, in case of impact, there’s more likelihood of damage.

Ed: I see they’re covered, so your latches are actually protected by ridges either side of it?

Davide: Correct, all the parts which are protecting the latches are high enough for any, let’s say, misuse of the case …

Ed:

In other words airline baggage handlers?

Davide: Yes, I guess it is a worldwide problem! So they are safe, they meet the IATA certification, so it means that you can ship with every forwarder or every carrier without any problem. We’ve been the first to use rubber on the handle for comfort, and for the wheeled cases right here we use aluminium instead of plastic because …

Ed:

This is for the handle?

Davide: Yes … and it also means they are lighter and more resilient than plastic and they perform better at extreme conditions.

Plastic handles have performance changes at very high or low temperatures, so may be damaged more easily.

Ed: I guess on the handle you’re putting a lot more stress than you are on the case itself?

Davide: Yes, correct. So all the trolleys we make are made with aluminium handles. Also, each case has large convenient wheels for good rolling.

Davide - Italian through and through.

Glenn: They are proper nylon bush bearing wheels … a lot of the other designs tend to have a plasticised wheel inside them.

Ed: ( I wheel it across the show carpet ) I must say, yes I agree, those are very good trolley wheels.

Davide: Having larger wheels is also smoother whether the ground is pavement or …

Ed: You could even go over a Belgian cobblestone road with those?

Davide: Yes, easily, you are right. So from this, we are now introducing some more attractive colours, because we have cases in red, yellow, blue; we even have some in purple! Customers are asking to have the cases match their luggage more closely.

Ed: They like matching luggage … it matches the colour of my girlfriend’s eyes.

Davide: Sure.

The different colour means customers have something which is easy to keep an eye on, because there is very heavy and expensive gear inside, so they know exactly if somebody is running off with it! Moving on from this, we have made some shoulder cases, the HPRC 4050, 4100, and 2530. These are the only hard, waterproof rated shoulder cases available in the market. They are very comfortable, light, you can stand on them, so I mean to about 200kg. Like other cases they can float in the water, you can submerge them in water, and the inside is still protected …

Ed:

Protected catches.

But it’s not designed as a life preserver?

Davide: Um, no. We have a pressure adjustment valve which automatically allows for changes in pressure from the inside to the outside. The valve allows air to pass through, but nothing like water, dust, Page 20

Professional Audio & Video Solutions | www.protel.co.nz

HPRC cases combine an ergonomic and light design with the maximum hardiness for best performance while keeping the weight of the case lower than any other competitor. To assure maximum performance, the cases are processed through severe tests of fall, impact, watertightness and resistance to UV rays. HPRC cases can be used for all sorts of applications and different areas providing total protection to the equipment within against dust, water, impacts and corrosion from chemical agents.

2100

2200

2300

2400

0500

2500 2700

5400

3500

4300 2600

6500

6300

All stock shown here is available in our Showrooms.

Visit us to see how this transportation and protection technology can protect your essential equipment.

AUCKLAND 3 City Road PO Box 6049 Auckland 1010 New Zealand

WELLINGTON Tel +64 9 379 8288 Fax +64 9 379 0290 Freephone 0800 PROTEL

15 Walter Street PO Box 6049 (Auckland) Wellington 6011 New Zealand

Tel +64 4 801 9494 Fax +64 4 384 2112 Freephone 0800 PROTEL

humidity, so everything inside is I would say “safe as In The Safe.” So nothing can get inside. Moving on from the shoulder case, we have the hard backpack, the HPRC 3500, which is another great seller for us, which has helped to make for good HPRC brand awareness.

The part that sits against your back has been made by a motorbike suit maker because we needed to make something that was protected enough for the user’s backbone. So in case of falling, this part helps the impact the hard case may have in the back. So it is certified and it’s very well performing. And even this case can be immersed in water.

Ed: I’m just going to test how heavy this is … and no, that’s not particularly heavy. It’s certainly a bit heavier than a soft backpack, but I would say only 20% heavier, so very good.

Davide: Basically traditional backpack.

it’s

15-20%

heavier

than

a

cubes, so you have the foam which grabs all around the items you carry on.

But there’s the other option specifically designed for tripods and lighting stands for example.

Ed: So if you had it empty, you could pack your clothes around it?

Glenn: You could – you could just use your underpants Grant.

Ed:

You’ll keep!

Davide: This has a specifically designed interior for the 6400W. It has two padded parts at the head end and the feet end, and some straps to fix the tripod or the lighting stand. So once this is closed, everything is safe. You have four latches.

Ed: That’s good having four latches – it’s not going to pop open at the wrong moment.

Ed: And it’s of a size that airlines will take on board?

Davide: You can carry it on easily, sure. The largest case we make that you can carry on in the cabin, which will fit in the overhead compartment, is the HPRC 2550W. It is one of our best sellers for this reason. Again, it comes in red, blue, yellow and orange.

Ed: Well I must say that that’s a particularly good idea for a camera, because one doesn’t want to put one’s camera in the hold and having it in a soft bag in an overhead locker, one would worry about that. You really can’t hold it in your lap, so a solid case like this with trolley wheels and extender handle, you’d put more than your camera in that and it will fit in the overhead locker?

Davide: Yes correct.

The weight itself is not much more than for the same size soft bags.

Ed: A soft bag that’s got some sort of protection in it, as opposed to a real soft bag?

They are a lovely red inside.

Davide: So you don’t have to pay more for the extra luggage, yes.

Ed:

And you’ve got some tripod cases there too?

Davide: We have three types of cases, sized from 90cm to 125cm. The best seller is in between, the HPRC 6400W, it is 110cm internal length and this is one of the other unique items we have.

It’s a very protective case, long enough with wheels and handles on both sides. There’s a main central handle and it’s properly positioned to allow you to move your hand for balance.

Ed: Well you can’t see it, we’ll take a photo, it’s a long handle, so you can shift where you hold it to compensate for where the mass is inside. So you’re right at the centre of gravity of it.

Davide: Correct. Again, this is one of the best selling products for us, especially in the broadcast and video markets.

Glenn: straps?

Has that got the foam core in it or the

Davide: You can have both. We can supply it with “pick and pluck” foam. You just mark down the shape of the items you carry on, and just remove easily the

Glenn: Yes, exactly … we’ve sold several of these already and the customers are loving them, because there’s nothing else in our market that does this as well as the HPRC cases.

Ed: And really you can’t go past the design, the colour scheme, the red and black?

Glenn: Ed:

It’s the Ferrari of cases.

Are you allowed to say that?

Davide: We call them the Ferrari of cases, because we are allowed to use that.

Ed:

Because you’re Italian?

Davide: No, because we supply them and they’ve been good enough to allow us.

Ed:

And now the insides Glenn – very versatile?

Glenn: Yes, exactly Grant. You’ve got a number of different options with these cases. You can buy the cases empty. You can get them with the pick and pluck foam that I think most people are familiar with, but the other thing as well is these divider systems that you can get for them, called Soft Deck. There is a soft frame around the edges, and then you have divider units that can be split up and cut to suit what you want to hold.

So for example, carrying things like lenses, camera

Page 22

bodies, accessories, whether it would be audio, video, and even if it’s out of our industry altogether. These sorts of cases go into government, police, medical and other industries as well. All types of customers are going to this sort of product line because they’re not just carrying broadcast type technologies, they’re carrying all kinds of things.

They are really that versatile.

Ed: There’s a nice little pocket there that you could slip a tablet or a laptop in?

Glenn: Yes, laptop, tablet, whatever you want in the lid pocket.

Ed:

All you need is your imagination?

Glenn: You do. In fact one of the other options I should mention is the cordura bags that fit inside some

of the cases. The idea is that the cordura soft bag holds all your gear, and it goes inside the HPRC hard case.

The case is then protected when travelling. When you get to your location, you take out the cordura bag and only carry that around.

So you’ve got a soft bag to carry all your gear around in, rather than taking the entire case. And then when you’re ready to travel again, you put it back inside the hard case, close it all up and off you go again.

It is just another option that nobody else does as well as HPRC. Ed: And the entire range of HRPC is available at Protel, Glenn?

Glenn: Yes Grant, we have cases on hand in both our Auckland and Wellington branches.

NZVN

AJA for Protel We are at AJA with Tony Cacciarelli, Product Marketing Manager, AJA and Glenn Miers from Protel.

Ed: Now Tony, the Ki Pro Quad Solid State Recorder has had some additions to it to enable it to talk to the Sony F55?

Tony: Correct. When we initially talked about the Ki Pro Quad last year at NAB, it was in conjunction with the Canon C500 camera and being able to take the RAW data from that camera.

But we had always designed into it the ability to do baseband 4K video as well.

So in addition to RAW inputs, we can take any 4K video signal.

The F55 camera from Sony was the first camera to come out with that baseband video output – a full 4K signal coming out of the camera that we can run right into the Ki Pro Quad and record as 4K ProRes files. That’s a really efficient format for being able to work with 4K; we’re down to data rates and storage sizes that are much more manageable than an uncompressed file size. So really our benefit is getting into that ProRes format, and that’s what the Ki Pro Quad is all about, really enabling a more manageable 4K workflow.

Ed: And it’s not limited to that is it? You can still, with the Ki Pro Quad, have a range of formats recorded?

Tony: Absolutely, yes, I mean it works with HD just as well, so you can use it as an HD recorder and then as you progress into the 4K world, that same device will work with you and it can do any flavour of ProRes from proxy all the way up to 444. So we increased the quality level; previous Ki Pro models had 422 capabilities and this is the first one to really incorporate 444, so that extra level of quality on the ProRes files.

Ed: Now are you able to record to the SxS cards in the camera at the same time?

Tony: Yes, you can record to the SxS cards or any on board storage system on any camera that we support. We’re basically just taking a video feed off of that and recording that separately as our compressed 4K ProRes files.

The nice thing is that we read metadata that’s transmitted between the SDI connections, so if you start recording on your camera, we can sense that start-stop trigger and automatically

Glenn and Tony.

start a recording on the Ki Pro Quad. You don’t have two devices that you have to manage all the time.

Ed: Now in “brick” product, which AJA is famous for, again some more developments? I guess it’s probably best to start with a new app that anybody can download from the iTunes store I believe?

Tony: Yes, we have a new app. It’s an IOS based app called Mini-Matrix and what we’ve done is taken our entire mini converter line, which is pretty broad now – we’ve been in business 20 years and we’ve been building a lot of converters over those 20 years …

Ed: Are you still building the first one?

Tony: I don’t believe we’re still building the first one, we’ve actually moved on to a Mark 2 version of that one, but we’ve incorporated the functionality of the first ones into our existing products. We still have full coverage of everything we used to do; it’s just in newer products. But the Mini-Matrix app is really designed to help people navigate that large product line and find exactly the mini converter that does what they need, whether it’s analogue to digital, SD to HD – and it’s a really intuitive app, you can just search through, find exactly what you need, you can filter based on what inputs and outputs you want.

It’s a real handy app that we wanted to get out there for people to make it easier for them to find our

Page 23

products and figure out which one they needed and avoid any confusion.

Ed: And one of the new ones I find is ROI? Tony: Yes ROI – it stands for Region Of Interest, not return on investment, although there will be some of that involved with it I think as well! Region of Interest or ROI is one of our mini converters that we’ve come out with to solve a problem of getting computer signals into the video world. Typically that’s done with scan-line converters and they were fairly large boxes or kind of clunky interfaces; we wanted to come up with something that was a higher quality in a more elegant interface. So the ROI has a DVI input, it will accept HDMI or DVI – it’s just a minor converter to do that – it takes that in and then passes it straight through. So you can still have your DVI monitor connected; one of the frustrating things with some devices is they’re a dead end device. When you plug in that DVI, suddenly you can’t see what’s on that monitor any more. So we’ve done the pass through and it’s a clean pass through, we don’t touch that information at all, so that your computer can still talk to a full DVI monitor and then we can just extract out the information that we need to make the SDI signal. So it’s a really nice DVI to SDI converter, very high quality, but the key feature on it is really the Region of Interest scaling capabilities.

The whole device is controlled through an application that runs either on your Mac or Windows system.

Tony: Yes another of our new mini converters that we announced at the show here, and it’s shipping today, is the Hi5-4K. This is a mini converter that, after we went to CES this past year, we saw an explosion of 4K monitors coming out in the consumer brands. They’re actually called Ultra HD resolution, which is not the full 4K pixel resolution, they’re slightly smaller. It’s basically four HD signals rather than the four 2K signals which make up a 4K. So we saw all these monitors and the price on them is relatively cheap and they’re coming down already, so what we wanted to do is have a way of bridging the gap between the professional world and these new consumer monitors.

In a typical professional environment, we’re working with four SDI signals, that’s how we do our 4K picture, we move it around.

These new monitors have a single HDMI connection, so we needed to be able to get from these four SDI into this single HDMI and the Hi5-4K does exactly that. It basically is able to take those four SDI signals, convert them into the HDMI 1.4a spec and feed it up to these new monitors. So it’s a way of being able to get a more affordable 4K monitoring solution, either on set or in an edit bay, without having to jump into the professional line of monitors which are considerably more expensive. So it was just a way of being able to kind of connect those two worlds up.

Ed: Now Glenn, at this point we should mention that a very big part of Protel’s business is finding solutions for your customers who might purchase some new products but then find they need something else in their workflow to make it work better for them?

Typically you run it right on the system that you’re converting the DVI for, but it can be run on a separate system if need be. What that application allows you to do is completely configure the device and you can select any region of your screen and have that scaled and output as a full HD signal right out the SDI. So it’s a really high quality scaling algorithm that we use; you get a great looking picture if you need to extract out a piece of web video or for an interactive piece showing someone working on a computer, it’s really easy to get that screen out and into the video world.

Ed: So if you’ve got a favourite You Tube cat video, you can record it?

Tony: Yes, some of the You Tube cat videos are the biggest hits, you’d be able to extract out, but yes, we are gearing it towards some of those sorts of things where people need to extract video off of a site or any particular portion of the screen.

Ed:

And there is a new Hi5 mini-converter?

Page 24

Glenn: Yes that’s right Grant. It’s very much a case of finding those glue products that actually stitch together customers’ camera products and their output products, and actually making that work for them.

Ed: And you like the reliability of the AJA product?

Glenn: Oh for sure, yes definitely. AJA are very well regarded as the leader in these kind of glue products and you know that they are just going to work and carry on working.

Ed: And partner support – AJA’s very proactive in terms of talking with other vendors and providing solutions for them?

Tony: Yes definitely. Our partner relationships have been fantastic this year. We’ve had long-term relationships with companies like Adobe and Avid, who are announcing our support for their next generation of products. As they’re moving forward, we’re moving forward with them, adding functionality, adding support. On the Adobe side, we’re now supported under SpeedGrade, which is the colour grading software that they have, so all the AJA hardware is fully supported in the next versions of SpeedGrade. On the Avid side, we have Pro Tools 11 integration with our hardware, so now people working on Pro Tools audio workstations can use AJA hardware to monitor their video and have a really nice clean video signal that’s going to time well with what they’re doing. There won’t be any funny delays or anything in that system. That’s something that people have been asking for, for a long time, and we were really glad to be able to work with Avid to make that happen. On some bigger newer news, we have a partnership with Quantel that we

announced here at the show.

Quantel’s been a longstanding impressive company within the video industry. Their new Pablo Rio software is using our AJA Corvid Ultra as the 4K I/O solution. Corvid Ultra is a unique product for us; it’s actually part of our OEM line, which is really designed to work with our development partners. It’s not necessarily a consumer product …

Ed: So they won’t find it branded AJA? Tony: They will see an AJA branded box and they have the option of purchasing the Corvid Ultra directly from us or Quantel’s offering a bundled solution that’s an HP computer system, their software and our Corvid Ultra as the IO solution. So it’s a partnership, it’s not a rebranding or anything like that. It’s not a pure OEM relationship, in that they’re rebranding our product, but we’ve worked with them to get that incorporated. They needed a 4K IO solution, Corvid Ultra is a powerhouse of a box – it’s capable of quite a bit of processing and handling huge amounts of data.

They’re actually showing some 8K workflows on the Quantel stand here …

Ed: They say they can go up to 9.4, if anyone wants to build 9.4K? Tony: If you’re interested in 9.4K, they’re the people to talk to. But it is an interesting relationship, it’s a great relationship for us, we’re really excited by it and it’s just another case of AJA hardware helping to really bring products to market, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

Glenn: And remember, Grant, the entire AJA product line is available from Protel, including Acquire, Edit, and Convert products.

NZVN

A Very Cool Helicopter I couldn’t resist a story on helicopters ( just to get away from 4K ) so I stopped at DJI Innovations and spoke with Lon Breedlove.

Ed: Lon, this caught my eye because there are lots of little white helicopters here and quite a tall cage which I guess they fly in?

Lon: It’s a 25 foot tall flying tube. We’re really excited to bring that to NAB because they wouldn’t let us just fly out in the open of course for safety reasons. ( Later they ignored the rules as the photo shows. ) Ed: We’ve seen helicopters before, but these look as though they’re mass produced?

Lon: Uh-huh. These quad copters are called the DJI Phantom and they’re one of our newest machines.

They’re really easy to use and easy to learn – very good for a beginner. The cool thing is that you can carry a GoPro. The new one’s very, very high resolution, so it’s cool to get that kind of image from the sky which you never could before – at least for this price.

Ed:

So what is the price?

Lon: US$679.

Ed:

Wow, so what does it run on?

Lon: It comes with a small Lithium battery that gives you about a 10-15 minute flight time.

Ed:

And it carries the weight of one GoPro?

Lon: Uh-huh, roughly the weight of one GoPro. As you can see, sometimes it will carry the weight with the GoPro and the plastic, waterproof housing.

Page 25

based on a GPS system … it communicates with up to 20 satellites at a time. It will position itself based on those satellites.

If you just let go of the sticks with the remote control it will hover and if the wind is blowing it will fight that, just to stay in that position with the GPS. Ed: So how do you control the GPS functionality?

Lon: As you can see on the top right of that remote control, there’s a little metal switch that will activate the GPS. When you first plug the battery in and turn on the Phantom, it will send the signal out and it will take a couple of minutes to get all the positioning.

Ed: So it knows where it is in space.

Does it record that metadata anywhere?

Ed:

Just in case it drops in the water?

Lon: That’s correct.

Ed: That one down there looks different – it’s already got a camera fitted?

Lon: This is our new prototype called the DJI Vision.

It’s our own integrated camera with a gimbal system.

It’s similar to a GoPro; this is a prototype so we’re not fully finished with it, but it’s going to be stable and you’re going to have control of the gimbal from your remote.

Ed:

So you can actually pan and tilt?

Lon: Absolutely. It’s going to be two axes pan and tilt, and it’s very nice for First Person View where you wear goggles and you can see your downlink through the goggles and you can fly that way. It’s very exciting for that.

Ed:

And what is it US$699?

Lon: I can’t answer that. A cool feature with the GPS is when you turn that on it sets a home position, it marks that spot where you turn the Phantom on. So if for some reason you lose reception, lose signal with your controller, or your controller breaks or dies, the Phantom will lift itself 60 feet and then return to that home position and land itself, which is pretty impressive technology for what seems to be a hobby quad copter.

We’ve taken a lot of the functionality and the technology in our big system and included it with our DJI Phantom.

Ed: So that’s it, this is pretty well the lower end of the market. You also have a quite sophisticated looking machine up there?

Lon: That is right, that’s called the S800.

It’s a hexacopter – it has six rotors and we have gimbals for multiple DSLR cameras such as the Sony and the X5 NZVN and 7 and the Panasonic GH2 and GH3.

Lon: This one doesn’t have a price yet.

Ed: But the cameraless Phantom is US$679 and this includes the controller as well?

Lon: Yes, the controller and the body and the GoPro mount.

Ed: It looks as though it’s got an iPhone there as a screen?

Lon: We have a prototype of our mobile app which is great for the Phantom Vision, because it will give you a downlink and that’s so you can see what your camera is seeing. You’ll be able to start, stop, record and do some other functions with that app.

Ed: But for the standard Phantom, you just have to keep the whole thing in sight?

Lon: That’s true.

Ed:

Does it have a range?

Lon: The range is about 1000 feet, so it’s pretty impressive. You can get very high or pretty far away from here. Obviously you don’t always want to fly far, depending on the weather and your experience. It’s Page 26

Blackmagic for DVT I’m with Stuart Barnaby and Chris Barr. It’s Thursday, the show closes very shortly and I think everybody who is left here is on this one stand.

Ed:

Where are we Stuart?

Stuart: course.

Blackmagic

of

Ed: And your wingman has got a broken wing I see?

Stuart: Yes, he’s recovering well. He’s just bemused by all of the experiences that he’s had here in Vegas.

Ed: So you’ve visited a few medical clinics, Chris?

Chris: nice …

Ed:

Yeah, one in particular.

Chris ( note injured left wing ) and Stuart.

They were quite

So the last fall you self-medicated?

Chris:

Yes, Nurofen.

Ed: Alright, with your available time, did you find anything interesting at the show?

Chris: Yes, Blackmagic’s offerings from the 4K side opens up the ability for 4K production to be quite cost effective for Indie filmmakers.

Their cameras obviously tie into their vision switching as well and their back end HyperDeck studio recording and so forth. It’s great.

Ed: Stuart, you’ve brought me over to DaVinci Colour Correction US$995?

Stuart: Yes, one of the big announcements at the show is version 10 of DaVinci Resolve. It’s got a whole bunch of new features in it, but one of the key new features added into version 10 is it’s got a much better editing interface. So you still do your edit in either Media Composer or Premiere and bring it into Resolve, but inside Resolve you’ve now got all the usual editing tools on the timeline like Slip and Slide tools, trimming tools, that sort of stuff, so that you can more easily manipulate the sequence once you’ve got it in Resolve.

Ed: Wow. Now this isn’t the same one that they’re bundling with their camera is it?

Stuart: Yes it is. So they have a free version of Resolve called Resolve Lite that is free, you can go and download it and use it. If you want to do more things like noise reduction or get multiple GPU acceleration and if you’re setting up a more fully blown Resolve system, then you need to buy the US$1,000 version, and if you want the full Resolve panel, then you need to but the US$30,000 panel.

Ed: Why do they need to bundle the Lite version with the camera?

Stuart: It’s just the way they package it up to make the camera look that much more attractive. Also the fact that the camera shoots RAW, so you need to post process that afterwards so that you can edit it.

This is a Blackmagic RAW file which you can then bring into DaVinci Resolve and grade back to a REC 709 type look, etc.

Ed:

And right next to it – UltraStudio 4K which is?

Stuart: One of the big things that Blackmagic are doing here at the show is releasing a wide range of 4K products.

The UltraStudio 4K is a Thunderbolt IO solution; it will work on Windows or Mac and gives you SD HD and now 4K video IO, all in a 1U 19 inch rack mount box, with a little LCD screen on the front for confidence, which is awesome – and all that for US$1300, so very, very good.

Ed: We’ve had an UltraStudio before, but this is the 4K version?

Stuart: Ed:

Correct, yes.

Any improvements in the HyperDeck Shuttle?

Stuart: Well the HyperDeck Shuttle and HyperDeck Studio remain the same, but there’s our new HyperDeck Studio Pro which again is 4K. So that allows you to record and playback 4K images. It will also do SD HD as well, but also 4K now in record and playback in a 1U 19 inch rack mount form factor.

Ed:

It looks identical to the ordinary Studio?

Stuart: Yes it does, it’s just got 4K capability and some extra features like some better audio IO and that sort of thing.

Ed: for?

And in the mini bricks which they’re very famous

Stuart: Yes, the mini converters continuing the 4K theme. They’ve got an SDI to HDMI 4K converter, so you can come in 6 gig HD-SDI in one side of the unit and you’ll get 6 gig HDMI output on the other side … this is particularly important for having connectivity from your edit suite or from a range of 4K cameras, into the new consumer 4K TVs that are becoming available now as well, such as the Sony 55 inch television that’s US$5,000 or the 65 inch television that’s US$7,000. So 4K TVs have gone from NZ$35,000 before Christmas to US$5,000 after Christmas – a dramatic change and I’m sure that will just continue to trend moving forward as well.

Ed: But this shows something about Blackmagic – that they’re right up there; as other people release product, they’ve got the glue to make it work?

Page 27

Stuart: Absolutely, and they’re also the first people here at the show with a full 4K switcher. So we’ve got a vision mixer solution here called the ATM Production Studio 4K, which gives you six 4K inputs and allows you to do full live mixing in 4K. So you know, add a combination of the HyperDeck Studio Pros to that; add a combination of the new Blackmagic 4K camera, you know, the Sony 4K cameras, all that sort of stuff, you can now literally do a 4K live switch and record it all on HyperDeck Studio, no problem.

Ed:

Now, an important part of colour grading?

Stuart: … is having a good range of scopes to be able to use, whether it’s a vectorscope or a waveform monitor, or histogram so that you can technically make sure that what you’re grading in the image isn’t crushing the blacks or clipping the whites, all those sorts of aspects, and here at the show Blackmagic have introduced the SmartScope Duo where they’ve basically taken their UltraScope product and built it into two 7 inch displays in a rack mount unit and you can call up individually on either of those two monitors whatever scope you want. So you could have the live input feed if you want to, so you can use it as a video display, or you can call up the waveform monitor vectorscope displays on it as well.

So really, really cool and everything all built into a US$1,000 package. It’s great.

Ed: Now I see there, on the converter shelf, that Blackmagic are now offering openGear versions of their converters?

Stuart: Yes, we’ve been doing that for the last couple of years.

Ed: Oh, well I’ve never noticed and you’ve never told me before Stuart?

Stuart: I’m sorry Grant I will try and keep you more fully informed in future.

Ed: I just find openGear to be a particularly great concept. It’s a good sort of friendly sharing type way of doing things?

Stuart: It’s certainly the broadcast end of the market for Blackmagic, so if you were setting up an OB truck or you were in a TV studio where you needed to do basically what the mini converters do, but rather than have a whole bunch of cigarette packet sized gadgets with your own power supplies, you can set them up in a 19 inch rack mount chassis. So for certain applications they’re good.

As well as the scopes, they’ve also got the new 1U rack mount audio monitor, which is a nice LCD viewfinder or meter showing you audio levels, so again, a really good addition to have into the edit suite. It’s got some really high quality speakers in it as well, and again great for OB trucks if you want confidence monitoring, if you want to make sure your audio levels are going and to be able to turn the volume up and actually hear what you’ve got – it’s a great little unit.

Ed: Now in the camera unit Stuart, last year we never would have thought Blackmagic would be doing

Autodesk for DVT At the new improved Autodesk booth, we talk with Stuart from DVT and Rob O’Neill from Autodesk.

Stuart: Obviously, we’re doing a lot of work since the release of Smoke in December last year and currently we’re doing a lot of work with customers in New Zealand who are looking at multi-Smoke workflows. Traditionally, these workflows have been

cameras, but they have and they’re shipping and they’ve even done something more?

Stuart: Absolutely.

So last year they took the show by storm when they announced they were doing a Blackmagic cinema camera, and that’s been extremely successful for them. It took them a wee while to ship it, but when they finally got there it was great. And of course now at the show they’ve announced the production 4K camera as well to go with that, so that’s a pretty exciting addition. Again, you get the package with DaVinci Resolve with the camera as well, so you get an end to end solution for shooting 4K RAW on the camera and then being able to get that through into DaVinci Resolve to do a grade. Then also at this show they’ve introduced a pocket cinema camera for US$1,000. That‘s a very small form factor camera, allowing you to take really good quality video imagery with you on the go, so it’s fantastic.

Ed:

So is this a serious competitor to the GoPro?

Stuart: Potentially … I mean it’s a very small form factor; it’s not quite the same thing, but I certainly NZVN think it will find its application.

high end finishing systems that have typically worked alone, where somebody gets the final edit and they’ll bring it into Smoke and then they’ll do the grading, they’ll do the visual effects, the motion graphics, 3D capability and all that sort of stuff in one product; but now of course we’ve got many customers looking at multiple Smokes, systems working concurrently at the same time on the same projects with the same media, so it’s been really fascinating to see how much the

Page 28

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community, particularly in Zealand, has embraced workflow with Smoke.

New that

Ed: Have they made any nice additions here at NAB? Stuart: No, this version was obviously launched in December, so it’s still the current version.

They haven’t announced any updates to it yet, which would be a little bit too soon, but Rob O’Neill from Autodesk has been helping us out a lot with training and presentations and certainly with multiple Smoke workflows as well.

Ed: Rob, I understand from the press presentation that Autodesk is wanting to continue this democratisation of its product – opening up Smoke especially to a wider audience, a wider user group?

Rob: That’s right Grant.

We’ve got a world domination plan, like everyone else!

We want more bums on seats basically and Smoke is the answer for that. Flame’s certainly established; that won’t change, it’s still going to be regarded as an elitist product, so Smoke is the opportunity for us to get more people trained up on the Smoke platform.

A very high percentage of the tools that are in Smoke are also in Flame so that’s our training ground for a new generation of Flame artists as well. So we are thinking about the future; it’s not just about getting more people in there; it’s about keeping our products firmly where they are in the marketplace and probably in a much stronger position in the future.

Ed:

And what about in the Maya and 3ds Max?

Rob: Well Autodesk have the Entertainment Creation Suite which is a combination of a range of products like

Rob at new Autodesk stand.

Maya, MotionBuilder, 3ds Max, Softimage, Mudbox – so those products have obviously got great integration with what is typically more an NAB type focus here with Smoke and Flame. So you can basically create 3D models in those products and bring them across into Smoke or Flame; or you can render out of those products multiple passes for different layers, alpha channels and things like that and bring that across into Smoke and Flame as well.

So you’ve got great integration with that.

Ed: Okay, so in the process of democratising ( and I like using that American word ) this product, a big move into online training, not just for the Maya type product, but also for the Smoke?

Rob: Yes, we’ve had a Smoke learning channel on You Tube for a couple of years now and it’s all been recently updated to show all the features in the latest version.

Just to make it more accessible to people who don’t have high speed Internet access, we’ve made it available as a Podcast on iTunes that can be downloaded. In fact, that’s my preference, so I just keep it on my laptop and if something just evaporates out of my head ( which happens often these days ) I can just jump into iTunes and refresh the memory and there we go. So it’s not just online, but it’s downloadable and you can have it on your iPod if you want to.

Ed:

But not on DVD?

Rob: No. I think DVDs are passé these days aren’t they?

Stuart: Yes, very much so – just like audio tape!

Ed: We stop the interview right NZVN there.

Page 30

Marshall Electronics for Quinto We are at Marshall Electronics with Robert Foster and Peter Fullerton from Quinto Communications.

Ed: Robert, you’ve been busy since IBC? Robert: Yes, we are a very busy company, and yes we’ve been working on a number of new products for the NAB show, the first one being our wireless camera top monitors in a 7” and 9” size.

Our customers now have choices between two different transmitters. We have a stick transmitter that plugs into the HDMI output of the camera, or we have a portable one that you can put on top of your camera in the hot shoe mount.

As far as receivers are concerned, we built them into the battery mount that you can put on the back of the monitor. So you have a choice between V-mount or Anton Bauer, or you can use a portable receiver that you can put on like a belt clip to do the receiving. The wireless system will go 100 feet, it does not need to be line of sight, it will be available third quarter of this year and price points should be announced right after NAB. Ed:

And there should be no degradation of the signal?

Robert:

No degradation whatsoever.

Ed: Now is it possible to take a record feed off the monitor, so you could actually record what is being transmitted?

Robert: The monitor still houses its outputs and yes, you can output the signal out.

Ed:

Is it HDMI through?

Robert: Ed:

Robert with a very nice monitor.

of using a wired system, wireless is a lot more convenient, especially when you’re out in the field.

Ed:

And I guess for the cinecam operator?

Robert: Ed:

Yes, even more.

Okay and also in the monitor field?

Robert: We have our IMD line of monitors that we’ve upgraded to all except up to a 3G SDI signal.

That would include our dual 10.4, 666.5, 17 inch, 18.5 and 20 inch. We also added some feature sets in there as well. You can now see your audio channels on screen; you can view up to 16 channels if you like, and we have also added close captioning as well.

Ed:

Is this an upgrade for current models too?

Robert: Well basically, it is a firmware upgrade – the customer can do an upgrade to his monitor.

HDMI or HD-SDI.

Wow. So the particular value in this?

Ed:

Robert: Well if you’re on production and you have a producer who wants to look at his camera feed, instead

Oh okay, so the inputs are staying the same?

Robert:

Yes. Ed: Tell me the value in having a 3G signal?

Robert: With 3G, the monitor will accept up to a 1080p 60 signal which is where a lot of production is going nowadays.

Peter: Before the highest quality you could do was 1080i. Now you can go up to 1080p. The value of having a 3G capable monitor is future proofing, so that in the future when you have to deal with a 1080p signal, you will be able to do that easily.

Ed: And a new monitor in the series, 2K/4K 10 bits monitor. Now what’s this “slash” business?

Robert: Well first of all, this is a 27 inch monitor, the resolution of the panel is 2560x1440, it’s a 10 bit panel and it can accept a 2K signal all the way up to a 4K signal. You’ve got dual 3G SDI inputs on the back of the monitor and it allows you in a production environment to view your 4K signal on production, so

It’s a very small transmitter.

Page 31

you can make sure all your quadrant’s lined up and you’ve got the correct picture.

Ed: You’re not getting that full 4K resolution?

Robert: No. Ed: But obviously at a price point?

Robert: Yes, you will see a 4K resolution monitor in postproduction, but on site when you’re doing your filming, you just want to make sure that your picture is correct, everything is lined up and the resolution is still high enough that you get a good quality signal, but you know at the list price of US$8300 it’s very affordable.

Ed: There’s no true 4K monitors around for that price?

Robert: No, not at all, a lot higher.

Ed: Robert, just tell us again a little bit about Marshall Monitors and why one would get a Marshall as opposed to Brand X? Robert: Well this division of Marshall Electronics has been around for 15 years.

We’ve got the largest assortment of rack mountable LCD monitors and

PAG Batteries for Quinto It is with immense pleasure that I am back at PAG with Nigel Gardiner.

Ed: Nigel, PAG continues. It looks a beautiful product line-up as ever, and what really impresses me is the range of cameras that you’ve got here, from your RED, your Canon, you’ve even got a Blackmagic camera along with the Sony and everything. The picture is telling me that this is a battery system that can work for pretty well any camera and you have the plates to prove it?

Nigel: Yes I think we’re moving from the big ENG cameras to, as you say, the DSLRs and the Canons and Blackmagic and this type of thing. The biggest problem is, to fully rate these cameras working the way that the cameramen want them to work, you’ve got to have accessories …

standard LCD monitors in the industry. We’ve built up our brand name over the years to be a good quality name; we’re known in every major state in the US; we’ve got distribution set up everywhere in the world and we’ve become a name that’s been trusted throughout the industry.

Ed: And it’s something … I mean I look at this monitor here and I can look at it from pretty much any angle and it’s still clear?

Robert: Yes, it’s got at least 170 degree viewing angles, so you could almost stand parallel with this monitor and still see the same picture as if you were standing right in front of it.

Peter: Yes and even in a bright environment like this it is still very easy to look at.

This is not the most ideal environment for looking at monitors, there’s all sorts of lighting going on. It’s a great looking monitor.

Ed:

words

Ed: No, think.

power

centre centre

NZVN

Ed: That’s coming off the PAG mount, it’s not actually connected to the battery, it’s connected to the clip which goes on the back?

Nigel: That’s right, the clip is the power hub. The V-mount bracket attaches to the rails which also doubles up as the matte box holder and then comes out of the back of the camera and from there you’ve got your power for all your accessories to your DSLR or your Blackmagic or C300 – whatever you want.

a

Nigel: A power centre – that’s fantastic, I’ll have to …

Ed: Or centre of power?

Nigel: Or power, yes …

Yes, yes they are.

Nigel: Power centre … and the power centre has a power hub which will give you four D-Tap connections plus a USB. I think we’ve talked about this, but it’s now fully in production and available, and these power taps, then can power the other products that you need to make your DSLR or your other camera into a fully functioning video camera.

Ed: You can’t have a DSLR without accessories Nigel, really it’s like pavlova without cream?

Nigel: I know, I know … the problems with these cameras are that you need lights, you need viewfinders, you need monitors and you end up with the camera battery, your monitor battery, the viewfinder … and you end up with a whole string of batteries all going to run out at different times.

What we can offer is one battery which will fit all.

Ed: In other power centre?

As is the rest of the range?

Peter:

of I

Page 32

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COMMUNICATIONS (NZ) LTD.

camera. So we have to devise ways of making a single battery into a modular form so that you can actually add them together and give you a much bigger battery.

Ed: You’ve developed this rather smart looking little box?

Nigel: Yes, the little box is what we call the Power Tower … I’m not sure whether it’s the Power Tower or Tower of Power, as we said earlier. But this will take up to four batteries, giving you virtually a 400 Watt hour battery, which would run an F65 for probably something like three hours. It has two outputs, so you can actually run two devices from it, plus it has a built-in charger and therefore you can charge it without having to take the batteries out of situ.

Obviously for transportation you do have to take the batteries out, but then that’s fine, because each battery is under the 100 Watt hour.

PAG Power Centre at left.

Ed: And this little system of plates, battery, power hub acts as a counterbalance on your rails?

Nigel: Yes, you know by the time you put a decent sized lens on the front of the camera you need a bit of back power, back weight just, as you say, to balance it and then you get a nice compact unit for doing all your video or your filming, whatever you want to do.

Ed: And of course it would fit perfectly well on a standard shoulder mount camera with the power hub just clipping onto the back of the battery?

Ed: And I guess what’s important is that, by stacking these batteries this way, you’re not making a series like you do in a torch, you’re actually connecting these in parallel?

Nigel: Yes, these are fully independently connected if you like, because the principle of the PAG linking system is that the batteries hang on a positive and negative rail and they communicate with each other with the two communication contacts. So that what we’re doing is keeping the batteries independent, but they are talking to each other so that they are controlled from the master battery, which is the first battery in the line.

Nigel: Yes and again because even on a standard shoulder mount camera you may now want a bigger monitor, you may want a bigger light, you’ve got these power taps which will give you the power for these accessories, together with the ability to have a USB so you can charge and add another accessory. Again it seems to be a lot of the video accessories are using USBs to power, to charge the internal batteries of these accessories.

Ed: Now we’re looking at a particular size battery here on these smaller cameras. What’s this one?

Nigel: These are the L96, the two versions of the linking battery. The time one, 96T and the just five light LED indicator which is the 96E. Ed: So this is pretty well your base level battery, your every man’s battery?

Nigel: Yes. We don’t see that we’re going to develop any more batteries. We will be developing accessories and the ability to join batteries together and get variations of outputs through combinations of these two batteries.

Ed: So you’re sort of taking battery technology to the modular level – make one battery then just like you connect cells in a torch, you’re connecting your batteries?

Nigel: Yes. The problem is transportation.

Everybody wants a bigger battery, but because of the restrictions of lithium ion battery and transportation, one has to keep them down to under 100 Watt hours.

And yet, if we look at the bigger cameras like the F65 or the ARRIs, a single battery is not suitable to run the

PAG Power Tower for those heavy duty applications.

Page 34

Ed: So unlike cheaper systems where, if you connect batteries in parallel, you’re going to get some of the batteries driving the weaker one, this doesn’t happen?

Nigel: We make the batteries totally independent because when you’re charging together, maybe in usage it’s not so much of a problem, but when you’re charging and you’ve got an empty battery and a full battery, you cannot have any transfer of current between the two batteries. It must be totally isolated and that is done because of the extra two contacts which is the communication which keeps them totally separate.

Ed: And all of this is really under the PAG mantra of high technology?

Nigel: Yes it’s high technology and paramount safety. You can read about the laptop problems, you can discuss the 787 problems – all of this is saying that lithium ion is a dangerous product. It’s not if you do the right things. But unfortunately the right things are very expensive – the testing, the isolation, as we’ve talked about before, each battery is totally isolated, inside the circuitry is totally protected.

These are virtually 100% safe. We get very frustrated because we know that we’re into competition with other

Sennheiser for Syntec We are now at Sennheiser – first of all though talking about Neumann and, to tell us about what’s new at Neumann, we have Jeff Touzeau, president.

Ed:

Not the president though?

Jeff: President of Hummingbird Media, the PR firm that represents Sennheiser in the US. Ed:

batteries which are not, and that makes us a little bit sad because it makes us expensive where we’re competing with product which is not made to the same specification.

Ed:

You haven’t had a phone call from Boeing yet?

Nigel: The frustration is … the strange thing is that we could solve the situation. We believe we have the technology to do this, but obviously we’re a little minnow. We would love them to call us because we have the answer.

Their answer is to put it in a box and seal it and hope that the problem goes away.

Ed:

So what have Airbus done?

Nigel: Well Airbus traditionally has used nicad but the new A350 was going to have lithium ion. However, under the circumstances, they’ve changed back to nicads because in their opinion it’s a safer product. I think we would possibly disagree because you could still use lithium ion as long as you had the controls in the battery, which seem to be not present at the time.

Ed:

For Boeing?

Nigel:

For Boeing but not for PAG customers.

Jeff: You do and Neumann’s actually in a unique position because if you think about all the studios and postproduction environments around the world, a lot of them have Neumann microphones, so Neumann is now handling the input stage as well as the output stage and with their knowledge of diaphragms and transducers and all that, they’ve really got the technology to make

I’d love to get a badge that said “President”.

Jeff: You can thank my secretary for that. It’s nothing that I did.

Ed:

NZVN

Right, so Neumann?

Jeff: This year Neumann is announcing a new studio monitor called the KH 310. The KH 310 is a three way studio monitor.

It’s loosely based on the Klein & Hummel three way monitor, but the entire loudspeaker has been redesigned with brand new drivers and lots more that’s new too.

Specifically, the dispersion now is 2.5 times greater than the Klein & Hummel model, so that sweet spot when you’re listening in a monitoring environment is much, much larger, so you don’t have to sort of poke your head around looking for that sweet spot. That’s a lot better and that’s really due to the design of the loudspeaker. The drivers themselves are also much more powerful and they give seven decibels greater output which is a significant amount. And then also the bass extends all the way down to 34 Hertz, so you don’t really need a subwoofer … a subwoofer can always help, but when it goes down that low, you know you’re pretty much set. So for a three way monitor, it’s really great and the suggested retail price for a pair is NZD$7,600, including GST which is great value for a Neumann quality product.

Ed: Well that’s it, you look around this show and you see other areas of audio, especially the collection of the audio, the processing of the audio – everything is improving to match the vision improvements with 4K, so your sound recording is getting better, so you need to listen to what you record?

Page 35

Jeff with Neumann audio monitor.

Ed: Because that’s it, the Lyre really has become a Rycote symbol. You could almost put it in your logo?

Simon: It’s one of the reasons that some people have come towards us in the last year to be honest.

A lot of the reason that we’ve worked with these people is so that we don’t stand still; so we go onto the next thing, and that’s the bit that we can’t really talk about at this stage …

Ed: Oh alright, but what you have got here are some small developments.

Just tell us about this windscreen kit?

Simon: Well we’ve got a new kit which focuses mainly on ORTF for using either the Sennheiser 8050 or 8040 or the Schoeps CCMs. It’s a kit that allows you to get the ORTF spacing inside a stereo windshield; it’s been very popular.

Ed:

What’s an “ORTF spacing?”

Simon: ORTF spacing is a stereo mic technique, so you’ve got two cardioid or hyper-cardioid capsules spaced 170mm apart and at 110 degrees.

So it’s a very specific stereo setup.

Sennheiser at the moment don’t have a side fire figure of 8 in the 8000 series, and without that you can’t do MS, so it’s either XY or ORTF. Ed: And I see another stereo microphone package up there that has two microphones, but they’re one on top of the other. How do you get stereo out of that?

Simon:

That’s an MS ( mid – side ) pair.

Simon with lots of Rycote product.

That’s quite a recent thing for us, where we’ve started using the Lyres instead of silicon bands.

It was one of the last things to come across to Lyres, but most Schoeps, Sennheiser – those sort of companies – they are doing figure of 8, so you can actually do an MS setup with their shotgun mic.

Ed: So it’s to do with the microphone pattern, rather than the actual positioning of the microphone?

Simon:

Yes.

You’ve got a shotgun underneath providing the middle signal and then you’ve got the two side signals coming in from the figure of 8 Obviously if you were looking at the patterns from above, you’ll see the 8 shape going left and right and the shotgun going straight out in front for the middle.

Ed: I’m sure people who know what he’s talking about will understand that.

A stereo pair well supported.

Page 38

For the rest of us, go and see your Rycote dealer. NZVN

Nagra for Sound Techniques We are now at Nagra with Stephen Buckland and John Owens from Nagra.

Ed: Stephen, people have known Nagra for many, many years and every time they visited Sound Techniques they would see a Nagra, but not necessarily in action. Well no, actually it was in action?

Stephen: Yes we have an old Nagra which was destroyed by the Bomb Squad at Sydney Airport … we use it as a doorstop. It’s interesting these days, you’re getting older Grant, because a lot of people come in and say oh that’s nice and they wouldn’t have a clue what it was, what it did, and where it fits into the history of portable audio recording.

Ed: But now there’s been a raising from the dead and Nagra is back in at Sound Techniques?

Stephen: Yes, we’ve been selling and promoting Nagra I guess for about 4 or 5 years, but Nagra itself is actually a brand which operates under the auspices of Audio Technology Switzerland. This is a business which has split off from the larger Nagra conglomerate to focus entirely on audio recording, being the thing which we in New Zealand principally know Nagra for.

Ed: Perhaps we should speak to the horse himself and it’s John Owens, Sales Manager for … well we should call you Audio Technology Switzerland, shouldn’t we.

Or should we call you Nagra?

John: Whatever.

Ed: As long as we don’t call you Lucy?

John: Absolutely, yes … or Doris.

But Audio Technology Switzerland we set up about a year ago to branch off from the Kudelski Group because the audio division was really quite separate in the way it works.

Also, our customer base and the whole business model of the audio group was nothing to do with the multinational corporate structure of the Kudelski Group as a whole, which is a huge international corporation.

So we spun off the company, setting up Audio Technology Switzerland, however the brand remains the same, the engineers remain the same and all the people who are involved in Audio Technology Switzerland are all directly from the original Nagra people. So we’re all the same – from the outside, it shouldn’t really make much difference. We’ve been trading now for coming on to a year and a half. It’s been an interesting start up, but we’re here and we’ve got some nice new products now as well, so we’re ready to really hit the market.

Ed: And that’s it, with such a powerful brand and the people behind it, you’re able to re-launch yourselves as purely an audio company with a product that really crosses boundaries. It is something that could be used in television, radio or just general audio work?

John: I assume you’re talking about the Nagra 7, which is our latest creation. It’s very difficult to build any one recorder that’s going to satisfy all the different markets, because …

Ed: Sound people are tricky to deal with?

John: Very much ( smiles.) The problem is that the different industries require different performances from recorders and if you’re going to make a recorder that actually suits all the different applications, it is going to cost the price of a space shuttle, because it ends up with an awful lot of features that the majority of people are never going to use. So you’re putting a lot of development work into something that, in many situations, is not actually to be used. What we’ve tried to do with the Nagra 7 was to go back to basics where

John with the new Nagra 7.

our goal initially was to have the highest possible quality two channel recorder available, because nobody builds one nowadays.

Ed: They’re all multichannels and, as a video person, it has always puzzled me why you need multichannels in every situation? You don’t.

John: Well exactly, in every situation you don’t but it’s the reality TV thing, where they just stick radio mics on everybody and they want to record everybody 24 hours a day and then let postproduction deal with it.

That’s how it works and so everybody wants these multichannel recorders. But if you take a different part of the audio industry, like the music industry for example, they’re quite happy with just two channels. If you go to broadcast, radio journalism, or the sort of interview work we’re doing now, you’re quite happy with only one channel – I mean mono would be fine in many applications. You’re not going to buy an 8-track or 12-track recorder and then go into a radio broadcaster and try and sell it as a journalist recorder, because it’s not designed for that application.

So coming back to the Nagra 7, our main goal was to first of all build an extremely high quality, reliable, two channel recorder, which we’ve accomplished.

Now obviously with our last two channel recorder which was the LB, one of the criticisms that people would say to us was well why doesn’t it have timecode? A lot of people said well it would be perfect to use as a little two channel timecode recorder for sounds effects gathering, or for documentary work, that sort of thing. So we thought well what we’ll do is on the Nagra 7 we’ve got the basis of a high quality recorder, and then we’ll have an optional timecode board that we can put in. So we’ve actually put two slots in the machine where you can internally insert boards to give you different applications. The basic board options that we offer, one would be timecode obviously including iXML metadata

Page 39

and that sort of thing which would then adapt this two channel machine to the film-TV industry. The second board we offer is a WiFi and 3G which means that once you’ve got the WiFi it will allow you to send audio over the Internet through WiFi or 3G; of course, the film industry is not interested in 3G but, in other applications, it is. The other board we’re offering is a broadcast board if you like, which will incorporate MPEG compression, an audio editor, so with that option on board, you have the editor and the compression which is what broadcasters want, plus the 3G or WiFi allowing them to send the audio back from the field in a reporter situation, for example back to the studio. Now of course, nobody in the film industry is going to want that; and then we’ve also got the ISDN option. ISDN is a dated technology, but unfortunately still very popular in certain countries around the world, typically in France – we’ve sold probably over 1,000 ISDN RSC machines which were very popular and still in use. Radio France

“yes well it will do that if you want to buy the extra board that goes with it.”

Ed: And I guess for some people just the basic package, two channel, simple recording without the timecode would work?

Stephen: Indeed it would and the thing that’s always impressive about Nagra, I think anyone who compares it with other devices and you know, I could be partisan here, will say that their audio recording quality, there is a difference between it and other manufacturers and people who want that recording quality, whether it’s in a handheld version or in a more elaborate machine, they appreciate that the recording quality is higher.

Ed: So the particular uses?

Stephen: High quality sound effects recording, music recording, situations filming where you do only want to record a stereo high quality sound in soundtrack documentaries …

Ed: So in terms of the cost, it’s very comparable to a standard small multichannel recorder from other manufacturers?

Stephen: Yes comparable. You know, if you want to actually record sound at the highest possible quality, then you need to buy the recorder that specifically does that; if you want a sound mixer-recorder that does a variety of different things, then you’ve perhaps got to look elsewhere.

Ed: John, one of the features of this is a quite intuitive touchscreen?

Not a production model - you don’t get to see the internals.

and all the other broadcasters are looking to replace these machines and they want an ISDN machine, because there isn’t a reliable audio over IP system that works yet. Therefore, they are happy to continue with ISDN and so this Nagra 7 has the option of either the timecode board or the ISDN board. So with these two slots you can make up a combination – you wouldn’t be able to have timecode and ISDN, but there again you’re never going to want timecode and ISDN in the same box.

Ed:

Does anybody ever ask you for user bits?

John: User bits will be used in the timecode, but I mean generally speaking that’s only used as date and nowadays with modern digital technology every recording is date and time stamped anyway, so it’s less important user bits nowadays. That was in the early days of timecode in the 80s and stuff like that.

Ed: I was technology?

just

mentioning

another

outdated

John: Well you say outdated technology, but you know people still use it.

Ed:

Yes, people still use tape?

John:

Some people yes – not to mention who!

Ed: That Stephen?

sounds

like

a

very

versatile

machine

Stephen: Yes, it’s interesting because Nagra, or Audio Technology Switzerland is paying greater attention to what users are asking for and I think that’s progressive as far as sound recording goes, whereas a lot of manufacturers in the past designed something that they think will work then users come along and say “well, actually, it would be really good if …” To me it’s a significant advance introducing capability to answer

John: Yes, the touchscreen’s an interesting approach. It’s the first time we’ve ever done it on a recorder. Now obviously everybody nowadays is used to iPhones and iPads … well most people with the exception of Grant are pretty familiar with these touchscreens now and I think people are not scared off by them as they would have been some years ago.

Ed: They leave fingerprints I find?

John: Well yes, but that’s the way it goes. The fact that people are not scared off by it nowadays, led us to take that direction, and the interesting part as far as the manufacturer is concerned, is that you can then do away with lots of things on a recorder … previously you had to have switches for monitoring and switches for this, that and the other, and switches today are the sole source of failure in a piece of equipment. They’re the weakest link in the chain, so the more you can do away with them, obviously you’re increasing the reliability of the recorder; and secondly, because this is touchscreen, it means everything is in software, which again makes the machine far more flexible because by simply changing the software, you can change its appearance, you can change what it does, the way it works. When you’ve got hard switches ( as we’ve had on all our previous recorders ) if you want to change something, it’s very difficult. You want to add a feature or add a switch, you can’t because the physical button is not there to do it. Whereas if you’ve got it in software, and you need to add a switch, well you just add a switch and it’s on the screen. You can then design the screen in as many ways as you want it to be, even user configurable. So you could have, you know, various areas of the screen that are dedicated to, for example, levels and then another part that’s dedicated to menu selection – that sort of thing. And you can really adapt the machine to suit the particular needs without having to drill holes in it as you would do in previous recorders. So it’s a great step forward for us.

Nonetheless, we have of course maintained the traditional Nagra rotary switch, which everybody laughs

Page 40

about, but the great thing about that is you can tell exactly what the machine’s doing without looking at it.

You can have it hanging round your waist or off your shoulder, you can put your hand down in pitch darkness and put the machine into record or play back or whatever you want to do without looking at it.

That’s something that practically no other recorder will allow you to do.

It is a great advantage and you know, we’ve maintained that because people look at it and go “oh, that’s a Nagra.”

Lectronics for Sound Techniques We are at Lectrosonics with Karl Winkler and Stephen Buckland.

Ed: Well, are we starting with radio microphones, because the topic of the year is spectrum?

Karl: Definitely, and wireless microphones are what we’re best known for, particularly for film and television production, but also for touring, installations, houses of worship …

Ed: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s all about bandwidth Karl?

Karl: It is all about bandwidth and all countries are going through this now. The idea that the spectrum is increasingly more valuable and there’s a desire on the part of a number of different parties to use this spectrum. So in the United States particularly, we’re seeing groups like Google and Microsoft wanting access to it for content distribution, but of course content creation requires it to make the product that’s going to

Ed: So I guess it’s worth people coming into Sound Techniques to have a look at a Nagra on display and talk to Stephen about the other Nagra products in the range?

Stephen: That’s correct Grant. I think we just need to wait for the Nagra 7 to come out of the blocks.

Ed:

Well you’ll have pictures?

Stephen: We’ll have pictures – we’ve also got the previous model so that will give people an idea of what it’s like and yes, we will get one as soon as they NZVN become available. be distributed, so you have NFL and Disney and the Broadway Coalition all fighting to keep it.

Ed: All we’ve Buckland.

got

in

New

Zealand

is

Stephen

Karl: Well that’s enough isn’t it?

Ed: Well, yes, it is.

Karl: Absolutely. So it remains to be seen exactly how it will balance out. It has not been finalised and it probably won’t be for a while – years probably.

Ed: Stephen?

Stephen: It’s interesting to hear that Karl, because people are always asking me “what’s the deal, has it settled down?” Even at this show, I’ve had people from other territories asking me “oh, but in New Zealand, what are you doing there?” I say, well, we don’t know, we’re following what everybody else is up to, and it’s a bit like a dog chasing its tail.

Ed: So the burning question is, why would you buy a wireless microphone now?

Stephen: Well because things have settled down to a degree and for the foreseeable future we know, particularly in New Zealand, what spectrum is going to be available, but of course because we operate under a general user licence, we have to work around what other people are doing and as soon as clear space is identified in the UHF spectrum, other paying organisations, such as Karl was just talking about – Google and such – may well buy the rights at licence to use that and radio mics won’t be able to be operated in that area.

Ed: But that still doesn’t answer the question “why would you buy a radio mic now?”

Stephen: You buy one because you need to use it, because you’re a content creator and it’s the best way … well if you want to operate wirelessly, it’s the only way you can do it.

Ed:

But it might not be useable in a year’s time?

Stephen: It will still be useable in a year’s time – I’d be saying maybe five years would be when you might have to rethink your plan, and there are a lot of people about to be affected by the end of this year in New Zealand, but they’ve had ample warning, they’ve had 35 years’ warning that if they are operating in the 700 to 800MHz band it is going to be untenable.

Ed: So are you bringing in a range of corded microphones?

Stephen: Well we microphones, yes.

always

have

sold

corded

Ed: Alright Karl, what have you got for us in the radio mic area from Lectrosonics?

Karl with potato gun video behind.

Karl: Well the latest product’s our SRB dual channel slot mount receiver. It’s a modular system; it was designed for slot mount ENG use, but it’s expanded to Page 41

be used for field production, carts, bags, pretty much anything that someone might want to do with a wireless, because it’s small and it’s lightweight and it’s two channels. It’s the second most popular product that we make. The B version, the most recent version, is an upgrade, because we discovered that, what’s happening with these units is, people are using them for all these different things and so we increased the sensitivity by 7dB, we reduced the internal noise, so it’s a much superior radio to the original design. It was really intended for ENG use only, but because of its size and utility, it’s been adopted for all these other uses.

So that’s the SRB – better range, better resistance to interference and we think it’s a real winner now.

Ed: And you can still drop it in the bath?

Karl: Well I don’t know about that. As long as it’s sealed up in your camera, it is splash proof – you know if it’s mounted in your camera, it has a seal. In true waterproof products we have the WM transmitter and that’s a belt pack style transmitter …

Ed: That’s “W” for “water” is it?

Karl: That’s right, W for water, and that is truly sealed, it can be dunked and those are out there being used on shows like Deadliest Catch and Ice Road Truckers where they’re in the absolute harshest environments imaginable, and those keep the audio going.

Ed: I always wondered watching the Deadliest Catch how they got on with microphones, and now I know the answer.

Karl: They’re using Lectrosonics. In fact the guy was here yesterday in the booth.

Ed: Did he bring a crab with him?

Karl: He’s missing some of his toes I think!

Ed: Okay, now just to see the durability of a Lectrosonics SMV – small transmitter … there’s a link that we’ll put in here and you can go and have a look at a nice little video about a transmitter being projected from a big potato gun. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=cLaqwPD8Q4I NZVN

Page 42

Canon Cameras We’re with Chuck Westfall from Canon PR and we’re going to first of all look at EOS lenses.

Chuck: On our stand, we’re showing a range of cameras that use all of our different lenses. We have the EOS-1D C which is an SLR type camera that actually shoots 4K Motion JPEG direct into a CF card in the camera, and on this camera right now we’re showing one of our cinema primes. We actually have five cinema primes out on the market currently and we’re developing a number 6 prime coming. We also have four EF cinema zooms.

Where these lenses really differ from the SLR lenses is primarily in the fact that they are barrelled for cinema use, so they have a much larger physical size; they also have an 11 blade mechanical diaphragm, totally stepless, and on the focusing ring, it is also totally stepless. It has about a 300 degree pitch on it so, for a focus puller, it’s a much easier proposition to be able to repeat the focus setting and go slowly from one to another as you might do for a cinema recording.

Ed: There are other people out there making far more expensive cinema lenses, but from what I hear, if you try the Canon lens you might find that in fact it does the job?

Ed: Is the construction of a cinema lens that much different from an SLR or a traditional video lens which I know Canon has been producing for a long time?

Chuck: Well from the optical formula standpoint they are very similar, but from the mechanical standpoint, they’re totally different. They’re far more robust on the cinema lenses because they’re made to hold an alignment permanently. A true cinema lens is designed for the demands of the cinema business where you are going to be putting these lenses on and off cameras all day long and you really don’t want to have a situation where the lens is too lightweight.

Ed: I guess even the slightest movement when you’re dealing with a 4K size file, you’re going to see it?

Chuck: Yes that’s an issue. One of the other issues that we’re always concerned about for cinema is a feature called “breathing” – in other words, as you ramp focus from far to near or vice versa, if you have a disproportionate change in the size of the image, that can happen with an SLR designed lens. But with the cinema lenses we’ve actually been able to alter the optical formula as far as how we focus the lens, just to get rid of that issue.

Ed: Do you need any different formula in the glass or in the coating?

Chuck: The coatings for sure and one of the things that we did was that for all nine of our cinema lenses that are currently available, we made sure that the match on the coatings is as precise as possible, so that anybody using those lenses as a set is going to be very pleased with the fact that they’re so consistent.

Page 43

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Chuck: Yes, that’s our heritage. We’re really very strong in optics; we really pride ourselves on that and actually we even have a demo here at the show to clearly demonstrate ( pardon the pun ) how sharp these lenses are. We have a 14½ to 60 zoom lens on a projector in one of our rooms to be able to actually show the resolution from centre to corner, and it exceeds 80 lines of actual optical resolution at all points.

sensor. So with the two greens, what we’re able to do is to really increase the clarity of the image quite a lot.

We get rid of aliasing and moire completely and as a result the sharpness of the image is very close to a thousand TV lines.

Ed: Do you think that’s one of the major reasons people are adopting the C300 and the C500 … to me they’re a funny looking camera, they don’t have the shape of a video camera or a cinema camera, but because they understand that the lenses are the major part of cinema production, hey there’s the lens solution and that camera fits them?

Chuck: Well debayering basically is a technique that has come around because of the fact that you don’t really have a 3 chip system; you’re doing a single chip capture and you need, in a regular digital camera, to be able to interpolate your different colour channels based on incomplete information. Your detail is not the issue, it’s not that so much as it is the fact that the colour information is not 100%. So with the case of the C300, that is not an issue, we’re able to completely bypass that by the way we derive the colour information off that sensor.

Chuck: Well that’s definitely one of the contributing factors, but in my opinion I think one of the other factors that a lot of people are looking at, is the idea that our sensors are so good. The Super 35 sensor that

Ed: You mentioned debayering and that’s one of the words I’ve heard more and more now with 4K, that any debayering of the signal is actually not so good at this level?

Ed: Okay. We had a demo recently in New Zealand with the 1D C and the C500 and saw two movies both very, very good; showed the value of the size certainly of the 1D C and it was just mind blowing.

So I guess they’re different horses for different courses … how do you present these to the customer to say “hey, this is the one you might need, or this one, or buy both”?

Chuck: Well in this case, it’s actually very clear for us to do that because with the EOS-1D C, if 4K is the issue that you have, it’s kind of unique in the fact that it is the only SLR camera out there currently that can actually do 4K recorded directly into the camera. But it is limited in the respect that it is basically an 8 bit 422 signal at the fixed frame rate of 24 frames per second.

we put into the C300 and the way that we’re actually deriving full HD out of that sensor is unique in the industry and it creates a very beautiful colour, a very soft type of noise that doesn’t really offend when you’re looking at it visually, even when you’re at a high ISO – all the way up to ISO 20,000 these images are very usable. So people like the lens, but they like the low light and then they demand a lot of the videocentric features that a camera like the C300 has to offer – whether it’s the XLR inputs or whether it’s the zebras, the peaking, the waveform monitor, the vectorscope and a lot of the other things that are kind of aids to a videographer to get their job done.

Ed: I understand there’s something special about the way you handle green?

Chuck: Yes. What we do is that, for every four photo sites on the image sensor, we’re outputting only one onto the file.

So we’re going from an eight megapixel CMOS down to a two megapixel HD output.

What we do is we take two greens, one red and one blue and we actually extract the colour individually from all of them … we never do any debayering off of that

Now we will have a firmware update in the very near future that will give us 25 frames per second, which will be nicer for some of the other areas of the world, like the European market …

Ed:

And New Zealand.

Chuck: Okay, so then I’m sure you will appreciate it … but still that’s a fixed frame rate and it’s compressed, so all your colour is baked in.

Now we have another camera, the EOS C500 and with that one, basically it is the same image sensor as the C300 but instead of using it to create a full HD only, what we’re doing is we’re actually allowing 4K and 2K, plus Quad HD and full HD and in that case it’s RAW video. So when it comes out it’s basically 10 bit 444 RAW and it can be very, very high quality colour and at the same time the frame rates can go anywhere that you want from one frame per second all the way up 120 depending on how you set the camera.

Ed: But you are relying on third parties to make the recording system for that?

Chuck: Yes we are and we actually have worked very tightly with about a half a dozen of them. Even now, out on the market, there are several solutions that

Page 45

customers can buy, specifically the Gemini 4:4:4 from Convergent Design; also Codex has got a couple of pieces that are very useful and they’re considered to be more or less, I would say, the high end of that market.

And then there’s also the AJA Ki Pro Quad on the way.

Ed: Do you give them stars – sort of Canon star ratings – depending on how good you think they are for your camera?

Chuck: Not really. Our issue with it is primarily the versatility that they offer, because each of those devices has its own strengths.

Ed: The on-board recording for the 1D C is, from what I saw on the movie, an incredibly valuable tool to use in certain situations.

If you’re not on-board recording, is there another option?

Chuck: Well unfortunately the only option that you’re going to have is to do HDMI out if you want to do external and at that point now you’re at full HD rather than 4K. The other thing I wanted to mention about the 1D C is that it is a very capable full HD camera.

Unlike virtually all the other SLRs that are out there, there is no time limit on the individual clip. You know usually, there’s a 30 minute limit on an SLR. But no time limit on the 1D C except the capacity of the memory card. You get about 32 minutes of 4K video on a 128GB UDMA 7 CF card with the 1D C. You also have

ability to do either a full sensor width on your HD or a Super 35 crop which is like a digital punch in and with that digital punch in, we can put a wider range of lenses that were designed for the Super 35 sensor, even though it’s a 24x36 image sensor on the camera. So it’s a very versatile camera.

Also the HDMI recording; when the HDMI is connected, we can still see the LCD live on the back of the camera – that’s something that’s rare in SLRs. So the small form factor, the ruggedness, how well it’s sealed against dust and moisture … these are the kind of things that make the 1D C an optimum choice for a lot of location work.

Ed: So you’re unlimited in your clip size when you’re using the HDMI out, but obviously with the internal card, you’ve got a limit on that, to the card size?

Chuck: Right, and as you’re recording 4K, you are consuming a lot of data, so …

Ed: Yes, about four minutes I understand?

Chuck: So definitely you need to be looking at your high capacity cards. Usually the people who are doing this 4K in the camera are looking more at like the 128 gigabyte cards as opposed to the 64s or even smaller.

Ed: And I believe it’s a very good still camera as well?

Chuck: Exactly, that’s another thing that’s very valuable about it is the fact that here, in one device, you’ve got 18 megapixel still capability RAW or JPEG or both, up to 12 frames a second with full continuous auto focus.

Ed: And I’ve also heard it said that you could actually use this in cinema mode and then just grab one of those frames and you’ve got a fantastic still image?

Chuck: Yes and that’s just one of several different things that are happening, but we actually have a demo area here where we’re demonstrating that specific thing that you mentioned and we’re finding that a lot of people are very excited about it because, instead of being locked into like the individual moment that they were trying to capture in an individual exposure, now they can look at 24 exposures in the course of a second and pick the optimum one.

Ed: My last question regards the ergonomics of the design. Coming from a video background myself, I look at these cameras and I see there’s definitely a DSLR heritage there. For somebody who has come through that

Page 46

DSLR regime, great, but to somebody who is used to a shoulder mount camera or a traditional video camera, it’s a difficult arrangement shall we say. What was the reasoning behind the way you went, especially with the 300 and the 500?

Chuck: Well in the case of those cameras, what we were really trying to do was to make them as small as possible and yet as rugged as possible and as flexible in terms of how you set them up.

We recognised that in the case of a lot of Hollywood productions, it’s really a rig based operation, so having a kind of a small compact body is actually a benefit to them.

But at the same time, the design is flexible enough that you can actually put together a shoulder mount rig – you know the right kind of a viewing setup that is comfortable for the camera operator, then you can essentially have your shoulder mount with controls for your focus zoom and iris right on the handles that you’re holding in front.

So effectively you can have like an ENG style approach – the only thing that is missing is a servo zoom lens that is specifically designed for that camera. Now the good news there is that, here at the show, we’ve announced that we’re actually in development for that. So of course we’ve been in that market for many, many years on the two-thirds inch format for broadcast television, but the news at NAB is that we’re now expanding into the Super 35 range with that design as well.

Ed: Okay – the very last question. I know for years Canon, with the XL1 and then into the high definition side of it, looked after that prosumer end of the video market. Is there continued development at that end?

Chuck: Absolutely yes, in fact here at the NAB show we just announced two new camcorders that are exactly in that range – the XA-20 and XA-25, price points in US dollars of US$2199 and US$2699 respectively. The cameras are identical to each other, except that the XA-25 has the HD-SDI port. Now these are cameras that have effectively approximately onethird inch chip size, so a very small and lightweight camera can be built around that, but they have a 20x optical zoom, they have electronic and optical image stabilisation, they can record to AVCHD and MP4 simultaneously and they have built-in WiFi now, so that you can transmit your clips to FTP or control the camera remotely with your iPad. The handle that you’re seeing on top here has the XLR inputs and it also has all the audio controls on the other side and a lot of the camera controls on top. This is a removable handle so that you can go even smaller and lighter than what you’re seeing here on the stand, by removing that handle and just holding the grip of the camera on the side. You also have your regular lever style zoom as well as a focusing and zooming ring on the front. This camera can use the touchscreen to operate most of your major controls, but there is also a joystick. It is an OLED fold out screen with 1.23 million dots, very bright and very sharp.

Image stabilisation on this camera is really a strong point. One of the things that we put in is a new feature that we’re calling Dynamic IS. In the older generation

The new XA-25 video camera.

of this which was the XA-10, we had just a straight onethird inch chip that was 1920x1080.

Here we’ve gone slightly larger at one over 2.84 and the reason why we did that is because, rather than to restrict yourself to just 1920x1080 and that’s it, now you have the ability electronically to derive your 1920x1080 from more pixel area.

So in other words, you have electronic stabilisation on top of the optical stabilisation that’s in the lens and especially when you’re walking around with either a shoulder mount or you’re using the handle and you’re hand carrying it, these are the times when you’re going to get a lot of movement from the camera operator.

With the Dynamic IS, the electronic stabilisation is so powerful as to basically minimise that effect that, on top of the optical stabilisation, it creates a very high quality look.

So we’re really happy to have that. Now you can choose Dynamic IS and just set it if you want, or you can have what’s called Intelligent IS where you let the camera decide what IS to pick because there’s also others; there’s Hybrid IS for when you’re working with Macro; there is what we call Powered IS when you’re at the long end of the telephoto range; and then we also have various other different forms like for example if the camera’s on a tripod. It knows that it’s on a tripod and it shuts everything down so that you’re not having any artificial stabilisation that doesn’t need to be there.

That area has been very well thought out and very well equipped.

There’s a total of six different individual modes that can be selected including the Intelligent Mode that basically is the camera’s automatic decision as to which one is most appropriate for the conditions.

Ed:

Page 47

Fantastic.

NZVN

Manfrotto Tripods for Panavision We are on the Manfrotto stand to talk to Wayne Schulman about tripods and heads.

Ed: Wayne, the 500 has been proven the most popular of the Manfrotto range?

Wayne: The 500 head is just introduced today. It is the smallest of the Bridging Technology series. It has a weight capacity of 11 pounds, as compared to the 502 which will handle up to 13; the 504 is 16.5; and the 509 which will handle 25 pounds. It’s the completion of the series.

It’s taken three years to get all three heads out.

We’re introducing it with a set of legs and a bag at a price point in the US of $350. The technology that’s in this head for panning and tilting is actual fluid cartridges and ball bearings.

So it’s the same professional fluid movement that you’re going to get with the more expensive heads, just less of the feature set.

Ed: I see you’ve got a DSLR on this one, but it will certainly take a small video camera?

Wayne: Absolutely, anything up to the 11 pound weight is where it belongs. The way we position the tripods that we have on display at NAB, is we have a Canon DSLR on the 500; we’re running a C100 Cinema camera on the 502; a C300 on the 504; and a C500 on the 509. So representative of other camera weights that are out there, you can see how you could migrate up the range of the four heads as your weight load changes.

of the tripod, rather than through use of a spreader.

Again, this is a more photo centric type of tripod.

If you want to go to a more standard video tripod with your standard half fall, you go with the MVK500AM or the MVK500C. Ed: But if you want that really portable tripod for carrying on a plane for example, or in a backpack, this is very light, very compact – it comes down to a small form factor, and it does everything as long as you’re a little bit careful?

Wayne: Exactly.

All the 500 tripods are going to compact down so that you can have a lightweight head that can handle up to 11 pounds, that can fit in a backpack or a suitcase.

Ed: And I see on the 500 there’s no spreader – I guess it’s not necessary?

Wayne: Actually we do make the 500 head with four different tripod combinations. We make it with the 755 series which has the top locks, both in aluminium that you’re looking at now and in a carbon fibre version.

We also make it in a single leg carbon fibre version which is the 535 tripod; and we have a set of sticks with a spreader, which would be the MVK500AM. So it’s four different tripod kits with the one head.

Ed:

Ed: Fantastic.

Now SYMPLA – I know you’re not going to tell me too much about it, but there are some developments coming along with the SYMPLA?

And the big long pole down the middle?

Wayne: On the 755, this will allow you to use it for video with the fluid motions that are on the head, but also it gives you the capability of balancing it with your spirit level and using the centre column as you would a photo tripod. So if you’re out in the field and you’re shooting video, this will work great for you; if you want to move it to a photo application with the DSLR, you have the centre column that you can go a little bit higher to snap your photo and get some different angles.

Ed: Great. Now you talk about the top lock. Can you just explain that a little bit more?

Wayne: On the tripods, the 755 series, rather than having a spreader, we have the ability to lock your leg at different angles depending upon how you position the top lock on it. So you can angle it out at your standard position; you can then angle it out at a second position; and then for a low mode you go into your third angle of operation. And the lock is taking place up at the neck Page 48

Top lock action - note the riser pole too.

Wayne: Yes, we’re hoping that before September we will have some additions to the line.

The major one of those is a smaller offset bracket so that the rails are closer together.

We’re also going to have a new

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Tim (09) 3608766 tim.timlin@panavision.asia 318 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn, Auckland

your rig, you can get the non-scratching rails … and a few other options that we’re not sure when or if. But the main introductions are the shorter offset bracket, the padding for the shoulder and the new Quick Release plate.

Ed: It sounds as though the SYMPLA line is a line that Manfrotto’s really going to spend some time on and obviously you’re getting user feedback and this is providing you with ideas for improvements?

Wayne: Exactly. What we’re finding out is people like the idea of being able to take one rig out of one box and configure it for whatever type of camera or shooting they’re using it for. So that element about it was very well received.

plate, which will have your standard Quick Release so that you can transfer your DSLR from the SYMPLA rig onto a photo tripod much easier, rather than the video type of plate. We are also coming out with a pad for the shoulder piece, so that you could add a little bit more cushioning.

We realise that, although our shoulder brace is form fitted, it’s a little bit hard. We’re coming out with a new set of rails that will not scratch like these do, so if you’re really into the aesthetics of

Manfrotto Lights for Panavision For Panavision, we have Dave Beck from Manfrotto Lighting.

Ed: Dave, LED lighting. I mean every man and his dog’s doing LED lighting so what makes you think you can do it better, or are you just repackaging somebody else’s light?

The things that weren’t so well received were the fact that you can’t shorten the distance between the rails, like you can with the rig that’s not a one shot out of the box solution; and also that you can’t change the shoulder pad so that you could have a more comfortable padding. So those are the two main elements that we’re addressing. The other one is being able to go from our RC2 plate which is the small square Quick Release, directly onto the plate that’s on the rails, rather than having an adapter on the current plate.

So that’s the third major improvement that we will get to market sooner than the other ones that we’re contemplating.

NZVN Ed: Well, watch this space.

current distributions. We will now fill that gap and start to fill that market.

Ed: So this is at a more affordable price point?

Dave: There are going to be advantages to the Manfrotto product.

some

price

Ed: But still has all the good features, all the features we need?

Dave: Well we do work closely with Litepanels who are also in the Vitec group.

We have now introduced the 1x1’s. Ours are potentially the smallest and lightest 1x1’s on an already flooded market. The nice thing is that ours don’t look like a Chinese copy; that’s because they’re not.

Intellectual technology comes from Litepanels across our group.

We use similar technology LEDs; we are using the same tolerances as they have with Litepanels. They are manufactured at a different manufacturer for us; they are a cut down version of the basic Litepanels product, so very similar to the Litepanels LS, there’s no DMX on these units, it is a mechanical dimmer. We do three versions – we do the spot which is 30 degree; the flood which is 50 degree; and we do a 30 degree bi-colour as well which is the first time we’ve launched the bi-colour at the same time, strangely, as Litepanels are launching their bi-colour at this show.

Ed: But there’s still the question, if Litepanels is part of your group, why are you putting them out under Manfrotto?

Dave: These are a Manfrotto product, they’re designed in a different market sector. We’re going for independent filmmakers and photographers; we cover the BNI market; my colleagues at Litepanels cover the broadcast and cinema markets. There’s a huge amount of customers that Litepanels do not cover with their Page 50

Dave with the 1x1.

Dave: Yes. As I say we use the same tolerances, so consistency from unit to unit, doesn’t vary. We have no shift on the green and magenta spike that you’ll find on the majority of the competition out there at the moment and of course we have that very high attention to detail and great skin tones that you could only expect with the Litepanels and Manfrotto product.

Ed: And of course they nicely fit on Manfrotto light stands?

specification to that one, with better engineering technology. Very close to completion; sadly I’ve only got a machined front lens on this one – there’s a brand new unit that we’ve specified using surface mounted technology. These 12 LEDs here giving out exactly the same power as the 140. Each one of these, when it’s fully machined, will have Fresnels on each of those, giving me a beautiful 60 degree spread of light, no hot spots, a very clean beam angle, just from 12 LEDs. Very little power drawer, 12 LEDs giving me the same as the 140 that we’ve got on there. Off and on switch on the side, dimmer dial as you’d expect, little features on the back there … we’ve started to put in more special electronics in this one, so we’ve got a boost button on here which when you need that little bit more light for a long shoot, will give me 50% light on top of what the maximum power is. Now that will give that as long as the batteries will allow me to, so if I’ve got fresh cells in there, it will give me probably up to 30 minutes of high power. If you’re putting it on the mains, it will do it (a) for the length of time it can do; or (b) when the heat gets too much it will cut out and drop back again, because we do overrun the LEDs a little bit if necessary. The minimum you’ll get out of it is 30 minutes, mainly because of that DSLR cut-off.

Dave: Absolutely, on the opposite side of the gondola, we have the on-camera units and four traditional looking units. We have the 48 LED daylight; we’ve got a 96 LED daylight, AA batteries with optional mains attachment; we’ve got a wide-angled 50 degree 140 LED unit, giving us a similar sort of output to the 96 but over a bigger angle, that will also take D-Tap; and we’ve got a bi-colour version as well, similar

Ed: So has that got internal batteries?

Dave: It’s working on AAs on all of these – six double As. We’ve come away from what the NL series offered us – the NL series gave us either external batteries or AAA batteries.

We’ve gone for the professional market, now the filmmakers will get easily available AA batteries; or we can go optional mains if we want to.

Ed: So the panel itself is all plastic, but the bracket is metal?

Dave: Yes, we keep the metal yoke just for the suspension. The unit also has the screw at the bottom so you could put it on a ball head if you wanted to and put it on an ordinary stand. Any ball head attachment would work; we can just undo the yoke and make it quite lightweight. It is a portable travel kit, we will be looking at kit options.

Ed:

Mains or battery power?

Dave: These are all mains operation as you will buy them, but also we do have battery adapters for both V-Lock and for Anton Bauer, so we’ll cover the world as far as battery powers are concerned.

Ed: Now I’m pleased to say that Dave has assured me that these lights will not suffer from flickering when dimmed using a CMOS camera, because …?

Dave: Because on this particular unit and all our series of units, what we use to dim is an amperage based driver, not a voltage based driver.

Don’t forget a lot of the Chinese ones are made for the same kind of price as a McDonalds Happy Meal and they do cut out (a) on the price of the LEDs; and (b) on the driver that’s the engine management system.

Now if I drop the voltage to change the brightness, what’s going to happen is that the actual flickering of the LED ( and they obviously do flicker, but at a very, very high rate ) – that reduces. So as you turn that voltage down, it flickers at a different rate and that’s when you’ll pick up the beam angles from the shutter angles on the units.

On these we change the amperage; we pay a little more for the drivers, a “little more” being a considerable amount more, about the same with the LEDs, and obviously that ramps up my price a bit more, but it does mean that by changing the amperage, that voltage is consistent, that flicker is always at a consistent rate.

You won’t get that change.

Ed: That’s what one would expect from Manfrotto?

New 12 LED unit at left most of pic.

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Dave: Well you know with a lot of help from Litepanels, thank you very NZVN much.

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Shure Microphones for Now Sound We are at the Shure desk for Now Sound and we have Christopher Lyons.

Ed: Radio microphones, let’s start there because that’s the topic de jour, topic for the year even. Shure do make some fantastic radio microphones and you have a policy there in terms of frequency?

Christopher: Right.

We make several different frequency ranges in all of our products, both because international frequency ranges are often different even within one country; what works in one city can differ from another city or regulations may change, so we want to make sure we have different products in different frequency ranges.

And then as far as in the States, the high 600 Megahertz range is probably going to be subject to auction sometime in the next one or two years. We don’t know exactly what that frequency range will be …

Ed:

Join the club!

Christopher: Yes, exactly, so we’ll see what road and what path that takes and on what timetable, but that’s still in development.

Ed: Okay, so at the moment if one was to buy a little UR5 which is a very nice little portable diversity receiver and I guess transmitter to go with it, if they bought it now, what’s the future there?

Christopher: Well the good news is that all the UR components tune a pretty wide frequency range – I think it’s about 60 Megahertz, which in the States is 10 TV channels. So even if there’s some change in the TV channels that are available, you’ve still got the ability to retune a little lower, a little higher. If you find that you’re in a completely different frequency range than you need to be in, then that would be something that would have to be exchanged through your distributor or upgraded or retrofitted somehow.

Ed: Because it isn’t just a simple case reprogramming something inside the machine is it?

of

Christopher: No, the last I heard was somebody estimated for one of our rack mounted receivers, it was around 900 parts have to be changed, which essentially means the entire guts of it have to come out and be replaced. From a cost standpoint, it’s just cheaper to replace the whole thing at that point.

When that happened in the 700 Megahertz, Shure instituted a rebate programme in the States, so that people who had refreshed their products weren’t hit quite so hard, but we’ll see if the cards hold that same thing again.

Ed:

Okay, so the UR5 itself?

Christopher: The UR5 itself – a portable diversity system, fits on the camera, all metal construction. I

think it’s available in 5 or 6 different frequency ranges from down in the 470 range all the way up to 698, so you can adapt to lots of different local conditions.

Works with all of the UR1 body packs, UR2 handhelds and so forth; there’s also a plug on transmitter for it now ... if you want to do News style with an omnidirectional handheld for a reporter, that’s an option as well. And for people who are looking for something a bit less expensive than the UR system, there’s a similar type of system called the FP wireless which is quite a bit less expensive, not quite as many features as the UR system, not as wide of a tuning bandwidth, but still gives you great audio quality in a very compact solution for a DSLR. Ed: …?

But not necessarily just a DSLR – you could use it

Christopher: Exactly, yes, it would work on a standalone video camera or any other type of camera or video solution too.

Ed: But this doesn’t have Canon inputs, it looks like it’s just a phono input?

Christopher: The FP5 and the UR5 both come with two coiled cables. One goes to a 3.5 mm stereo jack which is what most of the DSLRs use; the other goes to a standard XLR, so you could run it into a bag mixer if you’re doing portable audio in a bigger production pack like that.

Ed:

So you can use both?

Christopher: Oh yes, absolutely, and it comes with both of those right out of the box.

Ed: And you’re showing this here with a camera mounted shotgun?

Christopher: Right, we’ve got a brand new product called the VP83 lenshopper camera mount microphone for people who aren’t using a wireless system who want a dedicated on-camera mic solution. This is a mini shotgun mic with a coiled cable output that runs into the camera. It gives you adjustable audio level and so

Page 53

Ed: Or say something about the director that you don’t want him to hear?

Christopher: Exactly. Put the mic up in the air and that way you’ve killed your audio. It’s a silent switch, there’s no clicking or popping or anything.

So the BRH441 is a single earpiece; the BRH440 is two earpieces. Other than that they’re exactly the same thing.

If you like more of a lightweight on the ear type, that’s the BR31 – same type of microphone, same mute system, just a lighter weight headband and a lighter weight earphone for somebody who doesn’t want quite the bulk.

Ed: And then a standard headphones?

UR5 ( left ) and VP83 ( right ) on the DSLR.

forth; runs on an AA battery. Then there’s a separate version called the VP83F that has a built-in Flash memory audio recorder, so that you’re not only feeding audio to the camera, you’re recording it as a Wave file on the mic itself. You can then pull out that little micro SD card and dump that audio file directly into your editing software and you’ve got an even higher quality audio file than you can have on your camera. It’s fully shock mounted, all metal construction, has a foam windscreen for outdoor use, very compact, has a builtin headphone jack so you can monitor while you’re shooting …

Ed:

Is it triggered by the DSLR?

Christopher: No it isn’t. There’s a record”, you just push the button to start the mic and then you go ahead and start your camera; and usually you would start the mic first, then maybe have someone do a clap or something like that, so that you’ll easily be able to synchronise.

“one button recording on recording on recording on

series

of

Christopher: Exactly. We’ve been selling our SRH headphones for a few years now for monitoring, editing, studio proofing, all sorts of things, as well as recreational listening.

Two of them are open back headphones which we don’t have at this show, that let in a little bit of the outside sound, but more for production work you want the 440s or the 840s or the 940s which are closed back headphones and give you some isolation.

Ed: And really the value in having a set of headphones like this is the frequency response that you’re getting?

Christopher: Right, great frequency response, sounds natural, sounds flat and not only that but also comfort you know – light weight, doesn’t hurt your ears.

A lot of the people who work with editing video and audio are wearing these things for six hours at a time, so you know light weight and comfort is really NZVN important too.

Ed: And at the other end, once you’ve recorded your sound, you need to listen to it or you need to check that everything’s okay?

Christopher: BRH are the new headsets here. There’s two BRH’s and one BR and they vary slightly. The BRH are full coverage headphones, designed for a camera operator, stage technician, producer, director and so forth; heavy duty comfortable headband, swivelling earpieces and also a clever gooseneck mic that’s on a swivel arrangement so that you can wear it on both sides if you’re a left or rightie, but also when you raise up the boom, it mutes the mic audio automatically. So if you need to take a drink of coffee or go off mic for a bit, just raise it up like that …

Page 54

Avid for Atomise At Avid, we have Richard Kelly from Atomise.

Ed: Richard, from amongst your stable of related products, we’re going to concentrate on Avid because they’ve made some pretty big announcements?

Richard: Yes, it’s been a massive show for Avid and I’m not the only one who thinks that. If you’ve been round the Avid stand, the only stand that’s busy on the upper floor here is the Avid stand and it’s been packed out the door, it’s been really good.

The announcement of Avid Media Composer 7.0, Interplay 3.0 and Pro Tools 11 has really caught people’s attention.

Ed: Well I know one big positive for many people is that the price of Media Composer has come down?

Yes, it’s my fault - I get him to grin like that.

Richard: Absolutely, at US$999 just why wouldn’t you. We haven’t confirmed the New Zealand price yet, but you know there’s going to be a tiny bit of freight in there …

Ed: Probably NZ$1,299 +GST by the time this comes to print?

Richard: It could very well be. Do you realise we’re in a 35 year record right now for the NZ / US dollar exchange rate?

Ed:

Oh I’ve been shopping.

Richard: So yes that’s the first thing, that’s the grabber, but there’s a whole lot more under the skin that is actually more important than the price of Media Composer. There’s some feature sets here that the man standing in front of me is going to be quite keen on, because he’s made some negative comments about that in the past!

Ed: Moi? What, about Avid being a little bit behind the times. Have I said that; have I published that?

Richard:

You have.

Ed: Well come on, prove me wrong Richard. Tell me all about the 4K workflow that Avid have in their Media Composer?

Richard: Oh Grant’s already done his homework.

Okay, so yes, we’ve got a high res workflow in Media Composer 7 called FlexFrame …

Ed:

High res?

Richard: Outside of the video raster. So yes, 4K is here and it’s very accessible now, especially with Sony XAVC cameras, people are using it and they want to work with the large rasters. The way that it works in Media Composer is all real time via the GPU and I do mean real time; you can pan and scan that image and pull right in on the detail that you want for your HD delivery. Let’s be honest, 99% of people who are using that 4K camera are going to deliver at HD, so you’re after using that to tell the story, to get your message

across as best as well, and Avid’s got a really nice real time methodology for doing it in.

The high res capability brings in some really great workflows and following straight on from that is the AMA Media’s announcement – AMA Media is now fully managed, so that means you’ve got all the great things …

Ed:

Sorry, what’s “AMA?”

Richard: Avid Media Access – it allows you to dynamically ingest and play material without doing any conversion whatsoever. So you get your 4K XAVC media, you point at it in the system and it plays straight away using FlexFrame, no conversion; same with RED, same with AVCHD, same with pretty much everything.

Ed:

So it’s not putting an MXF wrap around it?

Richard: Not putting an MXF wrap around it, it just plays. Now with AMA, the challenge for it was that it was unmanaged. We didn’t have the nice abilities that we had with Avid DNxHD media which was all managed, doesn’t put any extra overhead for the actual management side onto the computer. We’ve now got that advantage with AMA media in Media Composer itself.

Ed: Am I right in thinking that the MXF wrapper was basically metadata around that image?

Richard: No, the metadata’s inside the wrapper.

MXF is an industry standard wrapper and then inside that wrapper you can put anything. For example, we can put QuickTime in there or Avid DNxHD. Ed: …?

So now you’ve taken that wrapper off, or you’re

Richard: No, the MXF is still there, but what we’ve done is we’ve broadened out the workflow to include non-MXF media in the same way that Avid has always excelled at managing large amounts of media – it’s the leading product at managing large amounts of media …

Ed: Yes, good point, there’s nobody else doing it that way.

Page 55

Richard: We’ve now brought that to all media that goes into Media Composer.

Ed: So is that a good thing … I mean surely, having that MXF wrapper helps stabilise the whole process?

Richard: Absolutely it is a good thing because it gives you massive flexibility, especially for News workflows, TVCs, short form stuff. It gives you a lot more management level and of course where this dovetails in is there’s some other announcements that we’re going to get to shortly.

Ed: But if you didn’t want to have that MXF wrapper, now you have that option?

Richard: You do have that option. Personally, I’m still going to be suggesting people do do a transcode and run an Avid DNxHD because it works so much more smoothly, you’ve got a lot more streams of real time and we’ve got performance guarantees that we can put in place with it; whereas dealing with RED out of the real time, you know it’s always going to be a challenge for your computer.

Ed:

I didn’t say that.

Richard: So the other things we’ve got here is we now have a Thunderbolt adapter for Mojo DX. That’s obviously a very key announcement for many Apple users. Thunderbolt’s not just an Apple thing anymore it’s everywhere and so now we can plug our hardware into Thunderbolt. The Mojo DX is extremely popular in the marketplace, bang for the buck on them is incredibly good and every time you press that button, it works. We’ve got some third party products out there as well but, to my mind, for reliability, the Avid hardware is still the way to go.

The next thing we’ve got in there is some workflow automation built right into Media Composer. In Media Composer 7, we have watch folders that you can set a profile on. So let’s say you’re putting in QuickTime movies recorded on a Nanoflash and you want to bring those into Media Composer. Now you can create a watch folder and what’s happened is the video engine in Media Composer has been effectively broken out of Media Composer and now works as a background process. You can have a watch folder set up on a third party storage, on a USB thumb drive, on your local hard drive, anything you like, drop content into there, it performs whatever task you want it to – let’s say it’s a transcode to DNX36 – and away it goes.

transcodes, consolidate in the background.

In file based workflows, a lot of time can get chewed up with those two things.

Now, it all happens in the background, you keep working. It’s going to be a great timesaver for everything.

The other thing we’ve got there concerns audio. We now have clip based audio gain straight out of Pro Tools and we have a master audio loudness control in there.

Loudness control is a really key thing for any broadcaster now. We’ve now got it built into Media Composer 7, which is going to be quite important for people who are possibly doing a full audio process.

Ed: So that’s not on the clip, that’s on the master channel?

Richard:

That’s on the master channel.

Ed: Now Richard, cached audio waveforms, tell me more?

Richard: One of the little bugbears that Avid editors have had over the years …

Ed:

What they’ve had one?

Richard:

This is it, there’s nothing else …

Ed: There’s nothing else that’s ever caused them any problems?

Richard: Audio waveform – so audio waveform is really important for when you’re editing to the audio, when you’re working with speech, with dialogue, seeing where things are happening.

So in a large project that waveform was dynamic, so it would redraw every time. That would take quite a bit of time; let’s say you zoom in on the timeline, it redraws.

The bigger the timeline the longer it takes.

Ed:

That’s the problem, now the solution?

Richard: What we have now is cached audio waveforms, just like we have in Pro Tools. So when you open the sequence for the first time, it caches the waveform; whenever you open that sequence from then

We can even go further in that Media Composer now supports LUTs (Look Up Table for colour) so we can now drop in some media from your RED, the profile is set to apply a look up table that may be real time, it may be baked in depending on what you choose, and that flows right through to your Avid media all automated on your workstation while you continue working.

So the other things – we’ve talked about background video processing off watch folders, so that background video processing is broader than that. Now when you’re working in the video editor, and for the initial releases it’s only partially there, but what we can do is make any Page 56

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on, it’s straightaway opened with the waveform in place. It’s a massive timesaver.

Interplay 3 is the next big set of announcements.

Interplay PAM is a Production Asset Management system, a production database that is made up of building blocks of products that you can add in to manage and automate your workflow. It allows you to completely control access, availability, user control and versioning of all of your production media assets. So let’s say you only have rights to a piece of media for a certain period of time, it flags that; it allows you to fully report and manage what is actually being used where.

It’s not just a big bucket you pour media into; it actually allows you to see how it’s being used, why it’s being used. For example, if you’re using stock footage that you’re paying for, it shows you how much it’s going to cost you to use it.

Ed: And this is a very powerful tool – I just have to tell Richard at this point that, on my way to Las Vegas, I stopped off in Oakland and did an interview at KTVU where they showed me their Interplay at work. KTVU is the No 1 local station in the Bay area of San Francisco and you will read about that in a future issue.

Richard: Ed:

I will enjoy reading that one.

So it’s out there Richard?

Richard: It is out there, it’s very, very popular and it’s going to be out there even more.

Ed:

Is it popular in New Zealand?

Richard: We’ve got some really key people using it – TVNZ are using it, TV3 are using it, but with the announcement at this show, we’re going to see it out there in a lot more workplaces. One of the really important announcements is again pricing related. We now have some bundles from Avid that include Interplay Sphere licensing, Interplay Central licensing and we’ll come back to what those are shortly; Isis storage, 16 terabytes with three Media Composer licences, some professional services time from Avid getting your workflow all set up – for under US$50,000.

So for what you used to spend on your storage alone, or actually going back, for what you used to spend on your editing setup alone, you’ve now got a complete turnkey solution. The next step up is say you need some more Media Composers. Bundle Interplay with Sphere, with Central with 32 terabytes of storage with 10 Media Composer licences for US$89,000. That’s a game changer.

Ed: But how many large facilities are there out there that would need that number of machines that are using anything else, that would sort of change en masse?

Richard: From the comments I’ve had from customers at this show, quite a few. This is something that takes people from just looking at setting up a relatively basic or maybe a third party storage solution, to saying “well, we can get a completely performance guaranteed single vendor totally supported solution for less than what we’ve been spending on stuff historically.”

Ed: So they might already have some Media Composers, but not all the other bits and pieces that go with it, and in fact the latest version of Media Composer comes with this, it’s still a much more cost effective option?

Richard: That’s right. Where this works really well for existing facilities is, say you’re using Premiere, say

you’re using Final Cut, you’re getting a packaged solution that supports both Premiere and Final Cut and a whole pile of other applications in terms of storage and with Interplay. And you’re getting Media Composer on top of it, all at a bundled price, with bundled resources, with bundled support, to bring it in and make it work in the way you want.

Ed: So people can still use their Premiere suites and their Final Cut suites with this system?

Richard: Absolutely. You keep working just the way that you keep working now. We’re just giving you some more tools and some more flexibility with those products.

Ed: on?

But you also have the Media Composers to learn

Richard: You also have the Media Composers … look I’m not going to say that one tool is the only tool to use. That’s like saying the only thing you use is a hammer.

Ed:

It’s like saying Grant’s wrong!

Richard: That just never happens, surely. This now gives anybody in a small to medium sized facility an opportunity to go into the toolset that has been historically only available to the very big facilities and the very big broadcasters.

Ed:

Great, that’s really playing friendly.

Richard: It is really playing friendly. While we’re talking about playing friendly, the other thing that is a really big announcement on the Media Composer side is Symphony. Symphony is now no longer a separate product; it is a plug in to Media Composer, so for you Symphony owners out there, when you upgrade to Media Composer 7, what you’re going to get is a Media Composer with Symphony option. Where that becomes beautiful is, you may not need Symphony’s features on all your Media Composers. You might only have one licence out of your three Media Composers that have that feature set. You can move that licence based on dongle or on software activated licence around in your own facility and it just starts working.

Ed:

Well that is playing nicely.

Richard: It is playing nicely isn’t it? So it gives you bang for your buck, it’s a huge feature. It’s a US$500 option, so it’s not expensive, but it brings you all the goodness that Symphony has – universal conform, secondary colour correction – it’s a really nice bit of kit and it’s something that’s really being embraced in the marketplace.

Ed: Now one of the other announcements at the press conference was about Sphere and I’m still a little bit unsure as to who would be interested in this, apart from major broadcasters?

Richard: We’ve got Sphere as part of the Interplay PAM product line, so it’s an “add on” product. You purchase your own HP DL380 server to the spec that Avid give us and apply the software that comes in licensed with Interplay and what it allows you to do is real time stream and manage proxies going out to remote systems. Say you’re in film that’s got a VFX house or producer offshore or a producer offsite. The number one that Sphere does is allows you to have remote access back to base for all of your media and all of your metadata, just like your onsite in your facility.

No limitations – straight into Media Composer. What that means is, say you’re away doing a pickup shoot for

Page 58

a show, you want to see how that works in with your main show, you do your cut, everything that relates back to what you’ve done previously streams down over as little as a 4G Internet connection in proxy down to your workstation; it’s cached at your workstation so it’s not a continuous stream, it just caches as you go and allows you to edit with all the goodness you’ve got back at base; it allows you to introduce the new media that you’ve captured or shot, or the VFX that’s been turned over and then you can decide to send back to base the new media at high res or proxy or both in a managed queue environment.

So for ENG, it’s obviously an amazing thing, that’s where it came from, but for post houses with remote working or remote installations or maybe even just a director or an editor that’s away on a business trip and wants to keep working. You’ve got no dumbing down of the tools it just works like you’re in house.

Ed: So you don’t need a third party provider to send files one way or the other, it’s all done within Interplay?

Richard: It’s all done within Interplay, it’s all managed securely, it’s all proper – you know, the whole Pepsi, Coke scenario, one can’t see what the other one’s doing, you’ve only got access to what you’ve got access to – it’s a beautiful solution for working.

Ed: Now Richard, I sort of remember that we talked about Sphere before, so what’s new with it?

Richard: The big news is that Sphere is now shipping with Interplay 3. While it is out there in installations its whole implementation straight into Media Composer is much tighter. Along side Sphere we also have a new release for Interplay Central. Interplay Central is the unified Interplay client used through a web browser – depending on how you set it up and it’s HTML5, so it’s very dynamic in the way that the web interface works.

It can be a lightweight editor through to a review and approval tool, through to a logging tool, through to an access into the database to select shots. That’s all part of the production bundle we talked about.

Want to store a lot of data?

So what it means now is let’s say we use the same scenario, you’ve got a VFX show happening on the other side of the planet, you want to work in with them, you’re sitting there on your iPad, on your laptop, on your iPhone, you’ve got access back to all of the media in your house facility and all that is dynamically streamed to you.

Composer but it is slaved directly to Pro Tools to handle the play out. That’s got a little bit more heavy lifting, because it’s not got Pro Tools on the same workstation.

But what it means is for the traditional audio post where you’ve handed over a QuickTime, we can now move away from that. We can give you high res files really straightforward, so you can exactly feed and make sure your lip sync is right.

Ed: It sounds as though you could never get away from work Richard?

Ed: Because on a simpler level, the Media Composer video engine is now within Pro Tools?

Richard: If you can never get away from work that is a real issue. But it does mean that, if you want to work sitting on the beach, you can work sitting on the beach.

Richard: That’s right. We’ve had a lot of the Pro Tools audio features come into Media Composer; we’re seeing it going back the other way. The other really cool one, and I’m not a Pro Tools guy, but the other feature that really grabbed me was the faster than real time bounce.

Ed: Oh silly man to make that decision. Now on all these announcements, it seems as though Avid’s moving towards having Media Composer as the hub of what it does and a lot of that is being shared amongst Avid products as you talked about with Symphony and Interplay, but also it’s now within Pro Tools?

Richard: That’s right.

Some of the really big announcements in Pro Tools 11 is the native support of Avid DNxHD in Pro Tools itself. So no more handing over a low res QuickTime, no more handing over a proxy, if you’re on the Interplay and ISIS system, you can directly play the sequence that your editorial team hands over to you. No conversions. Video satellite is still an available product – working on a large feature or a complex show, you may still wish to use video satellite which has the same capabilities as a Media

Say you’re working on your Pro Tools session up to today, if that was a 2 hour session and you were rendering it to do a hand over, that would take you 2 hours to do.

That was the reality of reverb and all those lovely audio effects being applied in real time to your sequence.

What we have now is faster than real time bounce. Not just faster – up to 150 times faster. So that means your 2 hour hand over has gone from taking 2 hours down to as little as 48 seconds. That means you’ve just got your workstation back.

Ed: Yes, it’s not that you could go and have a cup of coffee for 2 hours, it means that you can keep working?

Page 59

Richard: You can keep working. So again we’re looking at this whole round trip of really tightly integrated products that just bring the whole production workflow together easier in a more managed environment. What we’re seeing here are tools that, up till now, have been available only to the very high end of the industry; they are now available to anybody that was just considering a shared storage solution. That’s the price point of entry and it gives you so much more than just shared storage.

we know that Interplay works really well, so now you’ve got a much broader range of people who can actually consider having these tools. Once you’ve seen how much time and money bringing these tools to a facility can save you, I think it is the only solution that anybody who is working with more than 2 or 3 suites is really NZVN going to take seriously.

Ed: I would say, in summary, that Avid is now offering more of a combination of tools that a facility would look at Rather than buying a whole different number of vendors and trying to get them to work together, Avid is becoming now more of an overall solution?

Richard: That’s right, and Avid’s always been really good for that, but there has been a price point to entry let’s be honest. We’ve had those tools for a long time; what we’re seeing now is an integrated solution, one company to support it and we know they do support really well; one company to make sure it works all together – we know that Pro Tools, Media Composer work really well,

Ensemble Designs for Gencom We are at Ensemble Designs with Cindy Zuelsdorf.

Ed: Cindy, Ensemble is famous for routers and one in particular?

Cindy: Yes, we have two really fine and interesting product introductions here at NAB. One is our new BrightEye Compact Router, BrightEye NXT 430 is the model number.

Ed:

motion real time video on that screen so you can look at your sources before you do a take. People are coming here to the booth and saying, “Wow, that’s a game changer.

I’ve not seen that before, that’s amazing.”

There are those model numbers again.

Cindy: I know, I just did that for you Grant, because I know you love those model numbers. Don’t tell me you’re going to ask me about the focus group?

Ed: No, no, we’re past focus groups, but what about flower names or something … you could have called it Rosie?

Cindy: I’m going to call you next time and invite you to the focus group.

Ed: Hey, I’ll be there, as long as there’s some of that Ensemble cooking going on.

Cindy: Well there is. Last week we had 45 people in for training and all of our staff did cooking, and took shifts cooking and everybody loved it. Just check with Nicki, Ray and all the other people from Gencom and around the world who were there.

Ed:

So every new router you get a free cookbook?

Cindy: We first did that cookbook as a fundraiser for SMPTE and then it was so popular we kept printing it. We’ve had two additional printings.

Ed: A very worthwhile addition to your purchase. Anyway, tell us about the router?

router

Cindy: The new BrightEye Compact Router is different in a couple of fabulous ways. There is a very high resolution screen on the front of the router that shows you all the sources in the router and you get full Page 60

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( Small Format Pluggable ) cages which is a sort of technology I’m sure you’ve seen.

Ed: No, Nicki hasn’t shown me any cages.

Cindy: You know it’s a really nice little cage that’s about the size of a stick of gum and you can plug this little package into it and get, for example, two fibre optic LC connectors on it. We had a customer this morning come in and say, “You mean, I can use this as a fibre clean switch?” We had him at that – all the other capabilities …

Ed:

His credit card came out?

Cindy: It did, he was in. him at “fibre clean switch.”

Ed: So they don’t have to have an extra monitor plugged in to view it?

Cindy: Correct, they can just throw it in a suitcase, go to the ball field switch a football game or some other event and they can see all the sources right there on the front of the router.

Ed: So this is a router-switcher as opposed to a production switcher?

Cindy: Ed:

That’s true.

What’s the difference?

Cindy: A production switcher is a vision mixer that would have effects such as wipes and other effects built into it, some keying right, whereas a routing switcher really is just switching between different sources.

Ed:

In other words cutting?

Cindy: Yes “cuts only.”

However, we’ve had people come in saying that they are going to use this as a production switcher and use it on a helicopter – just shoot between the different POV cameras and even add a little station branding coming in and another input and sign it back that way.

Ed: That’s the BBC way of doing effects – when you want an effect, you cut?

Cindy: Good to know, I’m going to have to sign up for that BBC training. Do you think they’d take me?

Ed: Who wouldn’t? Okay, so you press a switch and it flicks between the inputs. Do you get a flash of black at the time?

Cindy: Ed:

Never a flash of black.

A flash of what Cindy?

Cindy: A flash of creative brilliance of course! No flashes at all; we don’t have any flashes because there are built-in clean switches in this routing switcher and so you can bring your wild feeds and asynchronous sources in. That’s what makes it so usable out in the field. You can assign those clean switches to any of the outputs and being that there are 15 ports on this router and you get to decide how many inputs and outputs you want, you can assign those clean switches to the outputs you want.

Ed: Oh that’s clever. and 14 outputs?

So you could have one input

Cindy: There are two fixed inputs so you could have 13 inputs and two outputs and really any configuration in between like that. There are two SFP

We had

Ed: You just say the right words, Cindy. No wonder you’re so popular.

“Fibre clean switch”, eh?

So really, we’ve seen a picture of it and this fits one of the two form factors that you have at Ensemble. You either have the little BrightEye boxes all of the same size, or you have a 3 rack unit and you slot your cards into that and that’s that, so very neat for large facilities, small facilities and on the move?

Cindy: Correct, the BrightEye packages are super handy for mobile applications and for production facilities that just want to have these small packages easy to take with them in a fly pack or you can install them in a facility. And then the Avenue system that you were talking about, the modular system, there’s a 3U frame that holds 10 cards or a 1U frame that holds 3 cards, and those are great because you get to leverage the control system and really use that for monitoring, alarms and control across the board, for all the different modules from logo inserters to keyers, sync pulse generators and everything you need for signal processing.

Ed: And this gives me a link to the story that I’ve mentioned before about the tour of KTVU station, where they showed me the Ensemble racks they had. From the outside, it just looks like a purple box with a logo on it, but what’s inside could be a whole range of things, and also doing a whole range of jobs?

Cindy: That’s so true, Grant. We have customers who have just a couple of those Avenue frames which might mean they’ve got 20 different products or modules in there and then we’ve got other customers who have 100 frames and in each frame you’ve got 10 different products doing all the signal processing needed from up and down conversion to audio delay – you know when you watch TV and the lips aren’t matching up with the sound. So we take care of audio delay and adjustment. Audio adjustments are made with respect to video, audio embedding and disembedding, and audio loudness control as well, your logos, your branding, your routing – all of those things.

Ed: And this is something that you don’t just need as a broadcaster, a larger production facility would also have use for a product like this?

Cindy: Yes. There are so many other types of customer – post houses, production facilities that also need this signal processing and use it every day for bringing their camera feeds in or doing whatever signal processing they need in their production facility.

Page 62

Ed: Okay, just going back a little bit where I talk about the two different sizes, Cindy something about web browsing?

set it up on the fly, put their clocks in, put the different borders in, setup the tally themselves.

Cindy: Yes, the new BrightEye NXT compact router, it’s the first in our new generation of BrightEye and we’ve built a web browser into the unit. That means that folks at production houses can just enter the IP address of the BrightEye and they can control everything remotely, and that puts a lot of power in the hands of folks in production houses and broadcast facilities where they can sit at home at 3.00am and check out their signals and do a little QC or even switching right there.

Cindy: They make their own template, one director could put his favourite setup on USB and bring it with him to his next show while another director could have his setups … you can setup the templates very easily and they’re quite portable.

Ed: Or they could just be in another part of the building?

Cindy: They could be in another part of the building, they could be the station engineer, or even the client, as long as you give them access to it, they could be sitting at the back of the room and looking at the shots.

Ed:

But that’s not all, wait there’s more?

Cindy: The second introduction here at NAB is our Avenue Multiviewer. We had customers come in and say, “We love your Avenue system, you’ve got everything I need for signal processing except where’s the multiviewer?” So we got that focus group together, like Grant loves. and said hey, what can we do to make this better or different, what needs do you have? Two things came up – one was, hey can you make it easier to set up? Over and over again we heard about the setup of multiviewers and the request to please make it easier. So we did that – you can click and drag the sources into the screen, set it up super easily. I’ve been having a great time demoing this at the show, I really just hand the mouse over to the user and they

Ed:

So they make their own template?

Ed: And what does it run on – what’s the screen that you use for that?

Cindy: The Avenue Multiviewer is a module that fits in the Avenue system and then the output is SDI and 1080p and so you can take that directly to any monitor that would take SDI in, or we’ll bundle it with an SDI to HDMI converter, so that you can use it with your HDMI monitors.

Ed:

Sounds simple.

Cindy: The second thing that came up over and over again had to do with image quality and, depending on the multiviewer, what we heard is that people really want that scaling to look good. Because we already do the Mitto scan converters, scalers and up and down converters, we’re experts at scaling. We have amazing algorithms to make sure that the pictures look great and the filtering is perfect. No matter how many times a source appears on the multiviewer screen, it looks amazing.

There’s never any latency between an appearance of a source, whether it’s at the top or bottom of the screen and that was super important to people as well.

Ed: Now I was just about to take the photos when I spotted this wonderful little router. It’s got coloured buttons all over it Cindy. You didn’t mention that in the interview?

Cindy: Thank you for that Grant. Of course our sources are red and our destinations are green, so you can choose your source by pressing one of the source buttons here – that blue take button – to take it to air.

Ed: Well that’s simple isn’t it? that! I could become switcher.

Even I could follow

Cindy: You could become a production switcher operator, awesome.

Ed: go.

Just put a few coloured lights on me and away I

Cindy:

Check with Renate on that, yeah.

Ed: And there’s more. Above the nice little sharp screen there is a little line with a caption telling you what your input is in red and, at the bottom, what your output is in green. And you can change the names on it to suit whatever you like. And the take button is blue.

And on the righthand side there’s an “up, down and okay”, so I guess that’s programming something?

Cindy: Yes it is. With the “I” information button here, you can get some information about your signal, so if you’re 1080i 50 it’s going to pop up on the screen and tell you 1080i 50; audio presence, it will show you all four groups, and the gear button here lets you time the output with respect to the reference, back to that clean switch ability there.

If you don’t have a reference, it can lock to its own internal TCXO so you still get a clean switch no matter what.

Ed: Well I’m sure the people who know routers will know what that means, but I was lost at the coloured buttons! So I’d be able to switch it but I wouldn’t know NZVN why.

Page 63

Lowel Lighting for PLS We are at Tiffen with Brett Smith from Australia and we’re going to talk about Lowel lights.

Ed: Brett, Lowel’s been around a long time, Tiffen’s been looking after Lowel for quite some time and now PLS is looking after Lowel in New Zealand. Is this a good thing for you Brett?

Brett: Yes it is. In the past, PLS and the team there have had good success with our studio fluorescent lighting, our tungsten lighting kits, and as we’ve moved into the LED world, we may not have been first, but we wanted to make sure that when it came to studio – and studios like TVNZ in Auckland with our fluorescent lights – that there was a transition to LED that didn’t compromise either the light quality or the light management. LED came ahead of its time in that it was a light source before it became a manageable light source, or a light source that could nicely integrate in a hybrid studio of tungsten and LED. So our objective, when we came out with the prime series, was to ensure that we could integrate with a hybrid tungsten studio and someone could leave fluorescents or tungsten in there or HMI and we would have a light that could balance to the existing lighting.

Ed: That’s really important, because if you set yourself up in a big studio with traditional lighting, you throw in some LEDs there, you want to make sure that everything’s going to work together?

Brett: Yes, and a lot of people wanted to just swap out the very power hungry broad lights first, but keep their Fresnels, so in other words there was a traditional phase to more economical power usage and that started with the soft lights – rather than go through every light in the studio, focus, full, spots and soft, they would start in one area. For example, the ABC in Australia, they started with their soft lights and so we came in with the prime 200 and 400 and were able to integrate into those studios and make it better power consumption-wise as well as cost-effectively.

LED are not as expensive as people say.

The comparisons now are close enough to get your return on investment in a realisable time … not in the 11-12 years that our competitors worked out. Well now its closer to 2-3 and the price points are changing. You always have to be aware that the colour quality, the CRI number is always above 91 so you’re getting something that is akin to the spectrum response of a tungsten or a daylight.

Ed: You’ve got on the stand here the Lowel Rifa-lite which was, I understand, the first light that Mr Lowel produced. Now, that’s a soft light, you’ve got LED soft lights, you’re selling both?

Brett: We are and the biggest challenge with the LED compared to the Rifa is that the Rifa is a single source, so you’ve never had a problem with multiple shadows. The Rifa has just done a wonderful job of doing a beautiful soft wrap, but still gives some character on a face without multiple harsh shadows off the nose.

Ed: it?

Oh, that’s what you get with your LED panels is

Brett: Well that’s what you actually used to get.

We’ve got a diffusion panel on the primes where you would struggle to find a multiple shadow. If you go to a cheap LED and you stand there and put one hand in front of another and look at the shadow, you will get

Brett with just some of the Lowel range.

multiple shadows.

It’s like having a hundred suns coming to the earth. You are going to see multiple shadows … so we had to overcome that as well as improve the light quality. When I mention light quality, shadow is as much light quality as it is a high CRI or having a good spectral response. Everyone is worried about green like they used to in the early days of fluorescent green spikes, which you find difficult to filter out without losing all your light output. LED had to get to a high CRI before people would accept it; and the multiple shadow was another one. If you barn door a bad LED, you will barn door multiple shadows. All these things that people assumed were eliminated when LED came out, the problems just began … brilliant light source, lousy control.

Ed: So with the Lowel Rifa, that’s been around a long time, it’s obviously worked, people like the look and with lighting it’s all about look, so you give people that choice, you don’t take away something that works and replace it with something that might work better for some people, but you keep what’s tried and true?

Brett: Yes. But you tell someone we can give you a light source that is one-tenth or one-twentieth of the power with the same light output, and of course the next question is “oh yeah, but is it the same light quality?” … and initially the answer was “how could it be, you can’t get something for nothing.” But more and more, when you modify the LEDs and how you drive them, is how you control them, the types of grids and diffusion you use, you can replicate the single light source at a tenth or a twentieth of the power – and

Page 64

that’s what’s happening now. It’s interesting, even in studios you would never think of daisy chaining power from fixture to fixture. You can output 10 prime 400s on a circuit that you put one soft light in the past.

There are amazing economies of scale and power savings, heat savings in the studio and, as I say, that’s why we showed these first. We’re proud of the fact we can then come in the studio and at least half of the lighting will be resolved with a tungsten balance without actually having to rip everything out and do it in one go.

Ed: Are you doing this across the range where you’re introducing LED lights? I see there’s some small oncamera lights here?

Brett: Yes we are. We’ve got the Blender which again PLS has had good success with, and that’s the Blender that’s self-explanatory … it blends between daylight and tungsten. What it’s very popular for is, if

you’re working in mixed lighting when you’re doing vox pops, you’re doing reality, you’re doing anything where you can’t control the lighting around you, fluorescents above, maybe one soft light in front, the Blender can match between colour temperatures so when you do do your white balance on your camera, you’re actually balancing to the real light situation, without having to make it all daylight, all tungsten. Or if you want a warm feature on one side of the face, you just give it a tweak towards the tungsten colour temperature, you know down to maybe the 3000’s and you can get a nice little soft, so it’s a very good creative light. Comes with a bunch of diffusion panels for a bit of effect and it sits in a kit, as you can see, but the readers … well if we get a good photo, it’s about …

Ed:

They’re always good photos Brett.

Brett: Of course, that goes without saying doesn’t it … so that’s about 45cm by 20, and that takes three lights with stands, with power. That is a three light kit that will do any 1, 2 or 3 person interview situation.

Okay, you put a Rifa in, you might get a better flood, but this kit will cover most interview situations.

Ed: Sometimes it’s not about having the perfect quality light, it’s about getting there, getting set up, doing the shot without causing too much strife to the talent and getting in the way of people. So you get in, do your job, get out?

Brett: Yes, or the desire to leave it in the truck because it’s too heavy. So in other words you wing it, you use reflectors which we always recommend. Using natural light is great, but you don’t want to leave your supplementary light away, because it’s too heavy or it consumes too much power or it’s too hot in a low ceiling room, and that’s what the Blender kit offers.

For studios, we’re integrating LED into the soft sources.

We’ve now got the prime 800 and that will work off higher grids. That’ll be a direct replacement for the old Strand soft lights for cycs, for green screen, for general interview sets for a full light.

Ed: One thing I want to add to the Blender light kit description is that it looks as though you’ve got three different lights in there, but in fact you’ve just got the same lights but all with different front panels? So you can interchange all the panels?

Brett: Yes. You’ve got a stipple insert; you’ve got a large square diffuser like a star diffuser; and a very fine frost and you can go clear.

Ed:

So you get three of each in each kit?

Brett: You do, yes. You can of course gel them to do your normal type of colour correction, but you get three, so there’s nine slots in there to take all the different diffusion plastics.

And there’s quite a difference in the look of the light … you know, the stipple gives you that kind of “gappy” Hollywood look where you do get a mottled effect; the frost is really Page 65

just that – very softening for close-ups for skin tones and face; and effects for products you can use the little grid filter. So it’s a typical Lowel, everything in a kit, your stands, your supplies, you just plug and play.

That’s the whole idea.

Ed: And these are all mains powered or can you power them with batteries?

Brett: Battery and mains, yes … 7 to 18 Volts so you can run off any type of Gold Mount, D-Tap. We’ve got D-Tap adapters as well as XLR4, cigarette lighter, mains or a power sled, so it’s impossible not to find the right power for it.

Ed:

And I’m sure they’re dimmable?

Brett: They are indeed dimmable and blendable.

dimmable.

They’re

Ed: And what sort of system do you use for the dimming?

Brett: It’s LED electronics, which means it’s not DMX control, it’s pure rotary control on the back. We’ve tested it for rolling and we’ve also tested it for flickering in slow motion. I believe it’s flicker-free up to 1000 frames per second.

It’s called a Pulse Width Modulation System, so there’s no rolling with a CMOS sensor. Basically, there’s a buffer in there that allows the light to maintain its NZVN constant output.

Checkers Cable Protectors for PLS I’m with Steve Gottlieb from Checkers in the USA and we’re here for PLS to talk about what these guys do.

Now Checkers is a new name to us, we haven’t seen them before, but they have a very interesting booth here. There’s no walls, everything’s laid out on the floor, almost like a Lego racetrack.

Ed:

What’s it all about Steve?

Steve: We are a manufacturer of urethane cable protectors. We make a variety of cable protectors to accommodate all numbers of cables as well as different sized cables and/or hoses.

We have the most recognised cable protector system in the entertainment market. What is most common is our Yellow Jacket, five channel cable protector. It is made of a urethane cast construction. The base is one unit, the lid is a separate piece, attached together with a fibreglass rod.

We also are the manufacturer of the Checkers Guard Dog product, which is a comparable five channel product, a little less weight than the Yellow Jacket products. We also make ADA compatible ramps that allow wheelchairs to easily cross in the event of needing to have some wheelchair access.

Ed: I guess you could also take food carts across there too couldn’t you, which would be more common on a set?

Steve: Yes, catering carts are very popular using that wheelchair accessed system as well. Basically what it does is rather than having the cable protector act as a speed bump, it is a more gradual rise and fall from the apex of the cable protector.

Ed: And a lot safer than putting a bit of tape over the cable?

Steve: Absolutely. Also, we’ve seen our product last for sometimes almost 20 years. So certainly the urethane gives it high durability, it’s less susceptible to tearing.

Ed:

Have you had the urethane for 20 years?

Steve: We’ve been doing urethane since day one.

You’ll sometimes see rubber moulded products in the marketplace, those products will not withstand the loads that our product withstands, and they also tear quite easily. We also have some lighter duty products too ( we call them our Fastlane series ) that are used where you don’t have vehicle traffic; it’s a simple drop over type product, with an open bottom. Used real common in place of gaffer tape.

Steve on guard for you.

Ed: It looks as though they would sort of withstand a small vehicle, but not a truck?

Steve: Well they are not vehicle rated, but yes, they could withstand a light vehicle.

Ed:

And they come in a range of colours?

Steve: We make them in yellow, orange and black.

Most of our cable protectors are offered in those same colours as well.

Ed: And a very simple but clever looking connector system?

Steve: What is most common with our Yellow Jackets, as well as the Guard Dogs, is we utilise what is

Page 66

called the Dogbone connector.

Basically each male connector looks like half of a dog bone, and that is the most common connector in the entertainment market.

Steve: Yes that’s correct – we refer to it as a lay-in system, with the hinged lid and that is most common.

It’s also easier for the installers to lay the cable in, as opposed to the drop over which requires the cable to be in a straight line.

Ed: So it looks as though there’s a number of different sizes for different applications – there’s a drop over type one where I guess you lay your cable and then just place the pieces over and link them all together, and the other one where you actually have a lid where you put the cables into a trough that’s within the system itself?

With the split bottom it allows you to run small cables through, and just set down in office type environments or for thresholds or behind podiums for speaking engagements.

Ed: And over here on the bench it looks like some very small simple extruded material?

Steve: That’s exactly right. Sometimes we find that customers are looking for a less costly alternative, and this is a rubber duct that we offer.

Ed: And they have a different clip or “pin and socket” type connector?

Steve: Correct, in case you need to link them for an extended link, it does utilise what’s almost like a dowel that acts as a pin and sleeve.

Now this is one type of product – we’ve also got some other low profile products that aren’t as beefy as the standard Yellow Jacket or Guard Dog. It doesn’t rise up quite as high or isn’t quite as physically heavy.

Ed:

And therefore doesn’t carry such thick cables?

Steve: Absolutely.

You’re limited in those products, the low profile products, to three-quarters of NZVN an inch in the outside diameter cable.

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ARRI Lights for PLS We are at ARRI and we have Stefan Sedlmeier, managing director.

Ed: But Stefan I’m sure it’s managing director Australia?

Stefan: Correct. I have been in Sydney now for 6½ years, last year we became citizens. I came over with my wife and two boys who turned 10 and 12 years this year.

Ed: Are they enjoying the sun and the surf?

Stefan: They love it.

They both go to an Australian school now and I’ve just heard that we will stay at least 2 more years, maybe 3 more years, so we Stefan will keep going in Australia.

We look after Australia and New Zealand, we are based in Sydney, we are a relatively small team of five people, we look after sales and service for all ARRI product, which is camera, postproduction and also lighting. We do a spare parts, warranty repair, consultancy in Sydney and we work with local dealers, so we deal with Professional Lighting Services in Auckland, New Zealand and we process all the sales, we ship direct, they pick it up from the factory, we help them with marketing, with information, schematics, spare parts – whatever we can do.

Ed: And that’s it … the actual workflow for the New Zealander is that they deal with Chris McKenzie at Professional Lighting Services and the rest of it they don’t need to know about, because Chris looks after everything?

Stefan: Yes, we appointed PLS as a distributor for New Zealand and they have the service guys. Plus it’s good because we get a wider audience now, so a broader foundation for lighting sales in New Zealand which is important, and we processed some orders, deliveries with them.

Ed: And I guess it’s also important that you know the product is being sold into the right places, that whoever is buying the ARRI product is being given the right information to say this is going to work in the situation I want to put it in?

Stefan: This is correct, and you need the expertise to really get the right advice to the end customer. As the lights get more complex now, the Casters, LED lights, they’re even more sophisticated than in the past.

Lights get more powerful and they need the right guys to handle that.

Ed: Because I guess you’ve got to follow the camera technology … the cameras are developing this huge dynamic range, this huge range of exposure possibilities, so lighting becomes even more important.

It’s not just about throwing a whole lot of light on it; it’s about getting the right light, the right colour and the right distribution of it?

is spotted by the Hollywood scout!

Stefan: Correct, and you mentioned an important point – this is colour. We still manufacture tungsten lights, HMI, now also LED lights, powerful lights. In the tungsten range, we start with the 125 and it goes up to 18,000 Watts. In HMI, we start with the 150 and the biggest one I think is the 12K tungsten, the T12. LED we have the L7 now which is a complete series of LED, because now there’s the L7-C which is controllable with variable colour fill-ins and it can do anything from daylight tungsten – you can choose filters by remote via DMX to a tungsten base, a daylight base, dimmable, calibratable. Then we have the L7-T for tungsten, so this is really a replacement for a traditional tungsten.

Nowadays, one new model at NAB, this is the tuneable tungsten, which has a more narrow tuneable colour balance, but the same light output like the L7-T. So it’s the same power like the L7-T, but you can balance it between I think it’s 2800-3800, so a little bit around the tungsten SweetSpot of 3200. Then we have the smaller LED lights like the Caster series, low cast and broadcast, any kind of accessories for them and the range is complete. The hottest light on the booth is the new HMI, the M90 which is a 9 kiloWatt HMI so to bridge the gap between the M40 and ARRIMAX. The ARRIMAX is an 18K/12K, the M40 is a 4K/2.5K and we didn’t have an open phase ARRIMAX reflector style light in between. Now we have the M90/60 which is a 9K/6K HMI with a brand new globe, co-developed with Osram.

It comes with a 9K/6K universal ballast which is also available flicker free, so this will be the most powerful light which is also available in the flicker free version.

So the M90/60 which is a 9K/6K HMI is the new globe from Osram here in the booth and is also now starting to be available.

Ed: Now what I was very impressed by at IBC was the reflector that you’d developed for this very large HMI. That’s really showing high technology?

Stefan: Correct.

It started with the ARRIMAX technology – we have like an open face light that’s just a safety glass in front, but no Fresnel lens. The lens is

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ARRIâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latest offerings, the L7 LED Fresnel and the M90 9KW HMI, are available now at Professional Lighting Services

Phone (09) 3024100

Email: info@kelpls.co.nz

Website: www.kelpls.co.nz

replacement or an addition or a completion to fluoros and tungsten, but not necessarily in the daylight market.

This might change in the future, but we do high power HMIs up to 18 kiloWatts with the ARRIMAX. This is really a different beast compared to an L7, which is comparable to a 1000 Watt tungsten.

Ed: Now Stefan, I’ve just seen a clip from the movie Oblivion with Tom Cruise where they lit the couple talking with a single candle and shot with the F65 and it looks beautiful. So I mean one candle compared to this sort of 9 kiloWatt monster … where would you actually use such an amount of light?

the reflector. Basically, you move the lamp or you move the reflector. In our case, we move the lamp when we change focus, and the same principle is adopted for the M18 which is a 1.8K HMI. This is the smallest one. The ARRIMAX was launched years ago and we had the M40 and now we have the M90.

Ed: And I guess what’s important is that it’s a very even flood. You’re not going to have hot spots in there?

Stefan: Correct. The light distribution is perfect and you measure this on a plain white wall. It’s a very nice curve like the Glockenkurve – the Bell Curve I think you call it – there is no drop off in the centre which some of the competitors have; it’s really an even light distribution.

What I should also say in terms of efficiency, the 9K HMI of the M90 is as bright like the former 12K Fresnel HMI. Now what’s important is the form factor. If you look at the size of the ballast and the housing of the light, it’s more like the form factor of a 6K with the light output of a 12K, by using a 9K globe with the open phase reflector technology, with the ARRIMAX design.

Ed: And you’re reducing a lot of weight and you’re reducing a bit of expense there in making a Fresnel?

Stefan: Correct, the bulbs are slightly cheaper because it’s a 9K globe compared to a 12K. It is less power consuming, less heat and less weight.

Ed:

All in all, a better proposition?

Stefan: Yes, I think it’s a good light and it’s a light of 2013, so current design, current technology, reliable electronic ballasts.

Ed: But it’s still HMI, obviously there’s life in the technology yet?

Stefan: Yes. Don’t forget that HMI is very efficient, has a very good and constant colour temperature; it’s very reliable proven technology and it would be quite difficult to manufacture the same efficiency and light output with LEDs today, yes. There was an idea in the past, that we manufacture an L7-D – D for daylight.

This was in the past in the pipeline, but first it is quite difficult; second there is no demand, because we have high output lights which are open face HMIs. The LED technology is more used in studios, so there’s more a

Stefan: Usually you use HMI daylight when you need constant lighting conditions on sets, especially when there’s lots of compositing in post happening – like Yogi Bear which was shot in New Zealand, or The Hobbit where we had lots of ARRIMAX on location, but such light is usually far away from stage up on a cherry picker, on a crane, with a remote head so you can pan and tilt and zoom, wired MX with remote control, so there’s no operator up there.

Ed: So it’s acting like a number of suns I guess?

Stefan: Exactly, but it’s not changing over the daytime; it’s constant lighting conditions and they can focus on the scene, they don’t always have to relight.

They also learn this when they visit locations that are basically blocked to sunlight, and have constant lighting, they have constant lighting conditions all day, with daylight HMI. Ed: So it’s not for intimate scene lighting?

Stefan: Yes it can be … we have smaller ones, smaller HMI lighting sets, also LED lighting, but we also have battery powered HMIs. It depends what you want to use, daylight or tungsten or LED. We have the full range in terms of technology, Wattage and colour temperature and we are only listening to the market demand.

We only build lights because there is a demand; the customers tell us we would use such light, or we need a light like the M90 to bridge the gap between an ARRIMAX and the M40; or we would need for the US market especially, a small 1.8K HMI which is the strongest light you can power off a 20 amp power plug in the US. This is why it’s 1.8K, this was the reason behind it, because you can run it off a normal plug in the US, 115 Volts for 20 amps. This is why it became 1800 Watts. Of course it works in the US, and in Australia and New Zealand we have 240-250 there, we don’t have a problem with current limitation, but it’s also a beautiful light, the M18. So quite good lighting NZVN sets which are available.

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