NZ Video News November 2011

NOVEMBER 2011

We are in Mt Albert at the offices of Hedley-Wakefield Media Ltd with Ian Hedley-Wakefield and James Greet – the two directors, owners, producers and coffee makers of this company.

Vol 175

Trade-up from your DSLR

It’s a very flash name for a company and we’re here for a special reason.

I put out a challenge to Chris from DVT to find me somebody who was using an FS100 properly. He went through a few names and eventually came up with these guys, so we’re here to put them to the test and to really find out “are they using their Sony FS100 properly?”

Ed: Ian, I see there’s a movie camera there on the shelf, but it doesn’t appear to be moving?

Ian: No, it’s purely a prop now. I was gifted that quite a few years ago before I was even into film but decided that it was too expensive to produce Super 8 film and it’s stayed on the shelf from that point on.

Ed: Probably a good decision. But you have been to a movie school?

Ian: I graduated last year at Unitec Film School.

James: Much the same path for me, but I didn’t finish my last year – I did the two out of three and then decided “this isn’t for me” – writing down, getting marks and dealing with administrators. So I decided to just go out and wait for Ian to finish and make some money for a year.

Ed: Aaaah yes, I used to have pupils like you. But anyway, Ian, you’ve actually got a diploma on the wall, but what was the main thing you learnt out of the Unitec course?

Ian and James and cameras.

Ian: For me, I guess it took me probably 2½ out of the 3 years to find my feet and then from that point on, it very much clicked into place when I realised I could do it. It gave me the confidence to know that I could do it.

Ed: Because you actually came into this from animation I believe?

Ian: Yes animation was a hobby of mine … mucking round making little films which didn’t really have much of a narrative structure, it was more Benny Hill-esque and they just kind of rambled on and weren’t very good at all.

Ed: Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. We remember early versions of Windows and look what happened to Bill.

Ian: Yes … over the three years it was a case of just honing those skills and realising that you can do it. Not going out and suddenly thinking you can win an Oscar or something like that, but just knowing you can make a

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that a little $2,500 stills camera could beat the ENG cameras that they had, with price tags of $60,000 and up.

Ed: Now when you say “beat” in what way do you mean?

Ian: I was looking at it from a storytelling point of view, wanting to be able to control what the audience looks at through depth of field, selective focus and things like that.

When you’re dealing with something with a half inch or two-thirds inch sensor, you don’t have that luxury. A lot of people rely on “crank it out to the far end of the zoom” and then go a mile and a half back and that wasn’t really for me. I wanted to go with something that had as close to 35mm cinema film, not 5D “I’m a photo camera” … that’s a completely different kettle of fish. So we went with the 7D. Ed: But there must have been some good points about the ENG cameras that you were using that you couldn’t replicate with the 7D?

Woody overviews the death of film.

film. It’s that building up of confidence and having the safety net of being able to make a big mistake and not ruin your career.

Ian: If I was shooting a documentary, I’d use a 502 any day. That’s what it’s designed for; it’s a news gathering camera and it suits that role perfectly.

Ed: And I understand you had some robust discussions with your lecturers over choices of camera?

James: Also having to crash course the soundies in sync sound at Film School. None of them had done it before, so the ones that were working on Ian’s film had to learn it. more on page 6

Ian: Yes. I was the “rebel kid” I guess you could say.

I wanted to use these 7Ds and they didn’t really believe

Page 2

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Ed:

Because …?

James: They just weren’t taught sync sound.

Everything was plugged straight into the cameras up until that point. I mean the clapper boards were little more than just for “look”.

Ed: Because with the 7D, for those people who haven’t used a stills camera to take movies, what’s the problem?

James: Well there’s not exactly an XLR jack on the side of what is essentially a photography camera. As far as their little inbuilt “microphone” goes, you may as well turn it off, in which case you need an external sound recorder and none of the sound students had used one before.

Ed: No other issues with it, no other editing issues with the format?

Ian: That was a very, very steep learning curve for us.

One of the main issues was our lead actor – we made the mistake of putting him in a patterned shirt; I got halfway through scene one …

Ed:

... and learned what the word “moire” means?

Ian: I’d heard of it but I’d never seen it happen, so yes, early in scene one, we decided he was going to put a jacket on. That solved that problem, but it was a bit of a headache at first. Although one thing we did notice – once we wrapped it out, because we were editing in Avid, that was what Unitec was using and we’re very happy with it – once we rewrapped it into a DNX codec, it was very, very happy and it worked really well. That actually reduced a lot of the issues. We did a lot of problem solving in preproduction, probably about five weeks of proving and disproving and saying why it doesn’t do this and it does do that … things like the 8bit banding on light falloff and things like that. A lot of that

Page 6

was solved once you went to a 10bit DNxHD. It was a bit of a headache.

Ed: In your student days, you could make your films with the 7D because time was not an issue?

Ian: Yes. We had the luxury and not so much the luxury of tutors pushing us along, making sure we did it right. A lot of people dive headfirst into it and go “oh look, depth of field” and that’s where it stops, and that’s where the mistakes are made.

Ed: Well now we’ve got over that, it does sound as though Ian and James know what they’re talking about, so obviously you sort of had a little epiphany and decided “well, I like depth of field, but there’s got to be a better way” and that way you chose was?

Ian: With a bit of research, we came across the FS100. To us, it’s the next generation on from DSLRs. Sony never did make a DSLR that did high definition video and we always used to whine about it and say “I wonder why that is?” because we both shot Sony before.

James: We both had Alpha DSLRs – I had the 550 and Ian had the 200. We were forced to go and get the 7D and we were kind of like “oh I don’t really want to go to Canon, I quite like Sony” so, yes, we got to go back to Sony.

Ed: Because Sony make video cameras?

James: Now they do, yes.

Ed: I detect a certain “35mm” bias here readers, but anyway we’ll move on.

James: Yes, so we were watching a video and I can’t remember exactly what trade show it was at, but the guy who designed it said “Sony’s made this as the DSLR killer.”

Ed: So you decided this was going to do everything for you?

Ian: Not really.

Ed: Oh, so there’s something else you would have preferred, but this fitted the budget?

Ian: Yeah – the F65 was a little bit out of our range. I mean, it’s nice to dream about having an Alexa and things like that, but there’s a reality that you just can’t afford it when you’re starting out.

Ed: So, bangs for your bucks, you looked at it and decided FS100, talked to Chris at DVT and there it is sitting on the shelf? What have you done with it so far?

Ian: We took it out for the initial “let’s go have a play” and shot some visual stuff; went for a walk round Pt Chev, a little bit of “okay, this is some stuff, how’s it handling, pans?” We found that we don’t have rolling shutter issues so much, it is still there very minimally, but a lot of the problems were fixed, so that was nice to see.

Ed:

as backup. It’s convenient … I think in the short film we’re at the moment pre-producing, we will go back to sync sound as well, or dual system should I say … have that as well, because that does seem to give a nicer quality of sound. I did notice that in the short film that we did at the end of last year.

Ed: So have you actually used the 7D since you got the FS100?

Ian: As a backup camera, yes. We used it on a wedding the other weekend. But one thing, coming back to it now, you realise the 7D is really, really unergonomically designed for shooting video. It’s just the way you hold it, as opposed to holding the FS100. Both of them are very blocky cameras, but being a stills camera trying to shoot video ( and I shake anyway – I shake really badly ) …

Ed: It’s the drugs.

Ian: The coffee. It’s something that’s much more favourable on tripod. I mean, you can handhold it, but it’s not as easy to handhold as the FS100. And being both trained in directing, we’re not camera students, so for us it has been a steep learning curve, but both of them are very user-friendly cameras. A lot of people complain about the abundance of buttons on them – “it’s a box with buttons” – but it’s not too hard to get around, it’s not that confusing. So comparing the two … it’s not really fair to compare them as two identical cameras, because they’re not. One is a photo camera; one is a video camera.

Ed: And you had a bit of difficulty explaining this to some of your friends who are still diehard DSLR fans?

Ian: I think the thing with the DSLR is that it’s a great camera going in and coming out of film school. At that point, it’s perfect, because you have the luxury of “hey, I can deal with these problems, because it’s a project I’m driving forward doing these things.” You can work around those problems; you have the time and the luxury of doing that. If you’re working for a client, it’s not something you really want to be dealing with – the extra headaches of the problems the 7Ds and the DSLRs put forward. And then there’s the perception of people when they look at you with a stills camera and go “that’s not a real camera” and you give up trying to explain that, well, it is a real camera. But it’s that thing when you turn up with a video camera, people go “oh, okay, so he’s doing this” … they sort of wonder why you’re here to take photos when they want a video.

Ed: Okay, so you’ve obviously looked at weddings as a “bread and butter” thing, something to pay the hire purchase, but you’ve got bigger things planned?

Ian: Yes we’re currently pre-producing a short film, somewhere up to about 20 minutes in length. So that’s hoping to go forward over the summer, when everyone

So problems comparing this to the 7D?

Ian: Yes. This is all coming from a 7D moving up to FS100 point of view, so things like you don’t have so many issues with the rolling shutter; it is still there being a CMOS sensor, but not having to worry about if I’m shooting on carpet – if there’s carpet in the room, it’s not going to go crazy. And it’s just simple things like that.

So a lot of the problems were fixed and ironed out. It’s just something you don’t have to worry about any more.

Ed:

And I see it’s got a microphone on it?

Ian: Yes that’s helpful. Usually we do have another one plugged in but use the “on-board” Page 8

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empties out of Auckland, to give us a bit more space and freedom to move.

Ian: The microphone cable only reaches one of the two ports.

Ed:

Ed: But I guess the good thing is that you must have invested in a bit of glass to go with your 7D and you can still use that?

Does it involve girls on beaches?

Ian: No it involves old men.

Ed: Oh, that’s not my genre. But you’ve also got some other commercial-type work planned. I guess you must have looked at the camera and thought now this particular format, this way of shooting, is going to be ideal for … and there are genres there. As you’ve said, there’s the short film type, but how do you see this working in the commercial world?

Ian: Because it’s a very diverse camera, it’s something you can use to fulfil a number of roles. It is a large sensor camera, so you do have the depth of field, without the DSLR issues, but the way we approach most things is from the angle “I’m doing this commercial job, I’m treating it like I’m making a film for myself anyway.”

So if you’re going to be doing something where you need to be able to have the larger depth of field, then you have the versatility of what you can do with your lenses of course – there’s options there – and I think just going back to the 7D, it was something that we decided when we got it, like we’re not really going to put a zoom lens on this.

We’re trying to stick as much to prime lenses though it's a personal thing for us.

Ed: When you’re a purist you want primes. Now is there anything you think Sony could have done better with the camera?

Ian: There’s always a wish list.

Ed:

What would you wish for? More buttons?

Ian: No, there’s enough buttons, it’s fine.

James: I could show you the pieces that our handhold mount is now in. It would have been nice if even just the time developing that was spent on anything else. I don’t know, it’s not really a handicam, it didn’t need a handle like that.

Ed:

Maybe they expected you to put it on a tripod?

James: I don’t know that this camera would have been directed at anyone that didn’t have a tripod … I don’t know … I see no reason for having a handicam grip on it anyway. Other than that, other things they could have done better – I don’t actually know. I think it’s pretty much exactly spot on for the price it’s at.

Maybe a longer cable on the microphone but that’s getting pretty picky.

“Missed it by that much.”

Ian: Yes, initially we invested in some Canon glass to maximise the features of the 7D, but also gradually built up a stock of the old M42 mount Pentax lenses which are really nice and they have a really nice look to them. The only issue with those – most of them are only stopped down to F16 and when you’re dealing with what the equivalent on the 7D is to the FS, which is ISO500, you have some exposure issues. So it’s a case of using NDs most of the time if you’re going to be outside; it’s not so much if you’re in a particularly controlled environment.

James: Even for shooting a wedding, like we were on Saturday, definitely a few NDs. Ed: So all in all you’re happy with your purchase?

Ian: Very, very happy, yes, it’s a great camera.

Ed: And Chris has been good to you?

Ian: He’s been really, really great; he’s been a really good contact and …

James: DVT in general.

Ian: Yes, just turn up and they’re really helpful. We went to the Aftermath event and that was really informative. Just a really good resource. I’m happy to deal with them all of the time, they’re great people.

Ed:

Page 10

Well I wouldn’t settle for less.

NZVN

Loudness in Europe – united or not?

I went to a panel discussion on loudness sponsored by DK Technologies.

The lead speaker was Karsten Hansen, the CEO of DK, and he was joined by three other panellists from the UK.  Raja Sehgal who is the sound director at Grand Central Studios, a major facility in London, and someone who has been mixing cinema and commercials for many years;  John Bolton, operations director of IMD which is an electronic delivery company similar to Dubsat in New Zealand where they take commercials from production houses and then send them in bulk to broadcasters around the UK; and  Barney Connell, operations manager of Channel 4 television in London.

I could actually start with the end result here and that was that for loudness measurement, to get it right, you have to do it subjectively. This was clearly explained by Raja, the sound engineer, who has their main studio set up at a particular level and that level doesn’t change.

When they’re working in there, they mix to what they appreciate to be the best sound for their TV commercials. Now, of course, this wasn’t always the case and this is why, over ten years ago, they all got together – the broadcasters, the production companies and interested parties – to sort out what they should be doing. They eventually agreed to a set of standards.

Even though these aren’t “official standards”, they have adopted them and basically it seems as though they’ve set the peak level at -20LUFS and they have reintroduced dynamic range into the sound mix.

Note: a LUFS is not the same as a dB. LUFS stands for Loudness Unit Full Scale.

The Loudness Unit is a

measure invented by ITU within BS1770/1771 and is not the same as dB but the industry seems to be accepting of talking about loudness units in dB based on the LUFS scale. You need to look up what the technical difference is, but it is the loudness measure as opposed to a peak meter reading.

The main problem they seem to have in the UK now, is commercials coming from other parts of Europe where there is high compression, especially at certain frequencies within the sound mix. The EBU formed a group of professionals to come up with a set of recommendations around the ITU-1770 standard. That group was called PLOUD and that was chaired by Florian Camerer. So at IBC last year they announced R128.

Between then and now they’ve announced further enhancements to R128 and some of those enhancements ITU have accepted back into 1770. So we now have a 1770-2. The other interesting part was from Karsten; because DK make loudness meters, they know all the tricks to fool them, to make the loudness meter show a particular loudness, whereas in fact the sound that is coming out is appreciably (in other words, not measurable but subjectively) louder. One of the points he talked about was complicated, but basically, there’s a big difference between analogue audio and digital. In some ways, if you set up your analogue audio in a particular way, when it’s transcoded to digital or vice versa, you can have an appreciable change in the loudness of that signal. One of the ways of doing this is by changing the stereo phases. Another is by having a period of quiet within the short commercial which means that the loud parts, when you average over the whole commercial, the total loudness is less.

Karsten pointed out there were actually three parts to loudness. There was the total loudness measure, which

Page 13

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Digital Rapids An October overflow for Protel brings us to Digital Rapids and we have John Carson.

Ed: Now Digital Rapids delivery, not a huge number of changes since NAB, but continuous developments. Some companies charge their customers for software upgrades, others do it for free – what’s your arrangement?

John: It depends on the version of software that’s released. Major releases are usually chargeable; maintenance releases are free within the version that you have.

Ed: That’s good to know.

John: There’s like major and minor releases, so it just depends on the release.

Ed: And the big news at this IBC is Kayak?

John: Correct – Kayak running with Digital Rapids Transcode Manager 2.0.

Kayak is essentially a new framework where you have components that you can use to build dynamic graphs for essentially generating workflows.

John Carson, a software engineer from Digital Rapids.

Kayak is the framework that’s starting with Transcode Manager and will eventually be put actually processing the data in the Cloud. Well they’ve in place in all of our products actually – the way we’ll got sometimes very sensitive material ( maybe it’s an develop all the products going forward will be with using Kayak underneath as the engine. unreleased movie ) where they want to transcode the downstream formats, well they have a reluctance to Ed: What sort of facility would be using the Kayak actually send that out “into the wild” as it were for that product? transcoding. For situations like that, you can still use John: It’s actually just complementary to all of our the concept of a Cloud and we kind of refer to that as products, so anybody who uses our existing products, it an “on premises Cloud”. will fit in within the same products. It’s sort of like an So that’s a situation where they have their own systems that are being pooled together in a Cloud and what we’re allowing them to use is dynamic licensing to

underlying infrastructure to how we process things.

Ed: Almost like Windows?

John: Yes.

Ed: Any other little developments?

John: MediaMesh … we’re going to be releasing a new version soon. We just rewrote the play-out engine and we wrote a new web submitter which is the web portal for submitting files into the MediaMesh. So that’s new.

Since NAB I think we released a new version of the Stream software – 3.6 I think was released since NAB. So that adds support for some of the newer hardwares that we released, and a couple of new codecs.

For what’s happing in “the cloud”, we have Darren Gallipeau from Digital Rapids Canada.

Ed: I guess you’re from the Montreal end of Canada?

Darren: No, it’s actually just my surname, I’m from Toronto proper.

In fact my mother’s from New Zealand! All my relatives are New Zealanders and Aussies.

Ed: Oh my goodness, there you go. Now the big question for me is Cloud Computing and I see “Digital Rapids Hybrid on Premises – Cloud Computing” and my question is about the safety of the Cloud. My fears are groundless when it comes to Digital Rapids?

Darren: Well I’m not going to go so far as to say they’re groundless – they’re a little bit different when you’re talking about Cloud transcoding, so we’re actually talking about processing data within the Cloud.

Just slightly different than the traditional use which is simply storage in the Cloud. The storage in the Cloud idea – it’s fairly good, because you can talk about redundancy with very little impact.

But there’s a concern when you’re talking about very sensitive studio content in the Cloud. So say somebody like Sony Pictures is looking to do Cloud transcoding – meaning Page 16

Darren Gallipeau from Digital Rapids Canada.

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facilitate the use of those individual systems that make up that Cloud for transcoding tasks. Then you’re not facing the security risk by sending out that content, but you’re also not facing the high upload penalty. So you’re talking about content at the studio level that’s incredibly high quality and those are incredibly large files. They can be into terabytes for a feature film, and that kind of upload is very expensive and very time consuming. So it’s much more feasible to just send it out locally in your intranet and then use an on premises Cloud to perform it.

Ed: And that is a case of you’re using the computer power that’s available at the time, which could come and go depending on which computer was being used for what purpose?

Darren: Well that’s largely true, yes.

You’re basically using the available resources at the time – and that’s the biggest value add that I think most of the studio and postproduction houses see with the option of actual remote Cloud transcoding. Because what they generally do is they provision a set of their own equipment, they invest in it so they have a large capital expenditure; let’s say they purchase 100 machines, 100 servers that are processing their content, but they see a spike in their need. Well it’s expensive to go and provision another 100 machines or 50 machines or 10 machines, because you have to go through the installation and the support and the rack and the physical space, where they might only need it for a week or two. So that’s where the option of the Cloud in a flexible and dynamic way is very appealing. That’s what we’re offering – the ability to actually say “I have my pool of local resources that I’m going to be transcoding”, but scale it dynamically into the Cloud.

So whenever you need the additional resources, we can provide you licences in the Cloud and allow you to use Cloud resources for your computing.

Ed: So it looks as though the sort of product that you’re supplying is not something that comes in a box, it’s something that really does need some dealer backup and support?

Darren: It definitely can … we do sell it as hardware, so that’s an offering that we have, but we also sell it as pure software. So pure software is actually the more commonly used productisation for transcode manager and, of course, when we talk about Cloud transcoding, it’s absolutely software based and even at that point almost a service offering.

Ed:

it’s a framework that all of our systems are going to be based off in the future – that includes our live encoding, our transcoding, but we’re going to be offering Kayak as a framework as a product. By that I mean we’re going to offer it to OEM customers and partners to develop their own applications with. So the Kayak framework, when you see the term “powered by Kayak” it’s really a transcode manager that’s using Kayak to perform this functionality. Then we’re going to be taking streams, so the streams e-encoders and we’re going to be “consuming” as it were the Kayak framework to achieve the things that it can do – still to the same ends, that we’re looking to actually transform or encode and ingest and stream out content, but what Kayak allows us is a flexibility that before was impossible mid-stream.

Ed: Wow. So in terms of providing a framework, just explain that a little bit more?

Darren: Sure. So the Kayak framework, as it’s powering all of our products, has the option of being used for third party purposes and there’s basically two different ways that we’re offering that. At the customer level and at a basic level, we’re going to allow users to create individual components for use within the Kayak framework. So it’s an SDK that we’re going to be offering people that allows them to develop those components within the Kayak framework, and then they can use those newly created components alongside our existing repository of components. The other option is that they can take the entire framework, use their own particular components or a collection of our components, and then wrap a White Label, as it were, application around it.

So maybe it’s a particularly dedicated use or maybe it’s actually directly competitive with our application, but we’re happy to do that because, for us, we’re still getting a licence sale out of it, and that’s really sort of the model that we’re going with here.

Ed: That’s a very flexible way of working?

Darren: It is, it is – partly it was driven from our own needs within our product space …

Ed: Also I guess the fact that you can’t think of every situation where a user might want to use your product?

Darren: Well, absolutely. There’s other sorts of situations too, where we don’t necessarily see a justification in the market for a particular component development within our own cell, but let’s say our third party partner says well I’ve got this particularly compelling component that I can use, and I want to then develop that component so that you can sell it and use it, so they can sell the component, but then we make a sale out of it because it might meet their customer needs. So it will meet it in both different ways. In fact, selling our technology to competitors is nothing new. We do our own card development and we sell – and continue to sell – to competitive customers.

And by that I mean they produce turnkey systems and solutions that sometimes peripherally and sometimes directly compete with our core product line, but we’re still making the product sale in the form of our card, so we’re happy to do that.

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Does that all come under the Kayak name?

Darren: Kayak itself is actually a framework, so we’re promoting the framework fairly heavily because Page 18

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Behind the Scenes at Dedolight On my way home from IBC, I paused in Munich for a very brief stop at the beerfest and a longer visit at the head office of Dedo Weigert Film GmbH. Dedo himself was present and the first question I asked was ...

Ed: Dedo, where is your first light?

Dedo: I have no idea – somewhere around.

But there’s not one “first light” and there’s not one idea.

We could fill a museum with all the lights that didn’t work.

Ed: Aaaaa, but there were plenty that did work, luckily for us. Did you begin your design career with a light?

Dedo: I’m a cameraDedo with his latest marvel of design and engineering. man and I’ve had this dolly that could do curve and crab without squeaking unfortunate affliction to play with technical things. In wheels. I didn’t patent any of this, but the dolly was so 1961, I built teleprompters; in 1966 at Photokina, I complicated that nobody’s been able to copy it ever showed the first European made fluid head.

The since! original Miller head was before this but I built the big one for the NPR camera with silicon fluid which would The unfortunate thing with the dolly was that I got too work in cold weather.

I showed it to my friend many orders and I had no experience in manufacturing.

Wendelin Sachtler and he liked the idea, because before The Last Picture Show by Bogdanovich was shot on that that he’d been building gyro heads. There were other dolly, the BBC had some, they were in France, they ideas that were added to it by a Munich engineer called were all over and we had a hard time making them.

Thoma, but we had the first one. We also built the first Ed: But at that point your passion was still the frequency controlled zoom drive ( which in those days nobody had ); I built a very complex small lightweight camerawork?

Dedo: Yes, yes, yes – and the company was there and we had a camera rental operation.

Ed: And you’ve continued that, because downstairs, I see you have product from other companies, such as Century lenses and others that you’re selling in your shop here?

Dedo: The rental was the one business that we had apart from film production. I produced films mainly for American television and I had contracts where I kept all the non-US rights and that kind of financed the company. Then ARRI started to become quite aggressive in rental so Sachtler sold his rental business and so did we.

ARRI was renting a 352C with 3 Cook lenses and a tripod and a changing bag for 35 Marks and giving 50% discount.

Ed: Somebody learnt to corner the market early?

A dolly built for two by the look of it.

Dedo: Yes. So then we went into importing equipment. A long time before it became famous, we offered O’Connor heads, Rycote windscreens and later on, the Aaton cameras.

One of the specialties for us was high speed film – 16, 35, 70mm. I spent a long time in all more on page 24

Page 21

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cameras, where several University optic departments had said “it’s physically impossible” and six weeks later we delivered them. We built a one-eyed 3D system for the University of Heidelberg; we built the first high speed video fluoroscope for early recognition of cancer cells for the University of Ulm; we built a high speed video recording and data recording system, where we developed all the data recording to take 8 channels of data and put them into the video signal of the high speed video.

The Germans decided that they had to study “what is a high speed train.” Now, the Japanese had had high speed trains forever; the French had built high speed trains, but the Germans had to find out “vot is a high speed train?” so we built the system for them. This consisted of several high speed video cameras, for example, looking at the pantograph through a zoom lens that went three times around the corner, like a double periscope.

It’s Dedo, but what’s he just said to the bride?

these factories to learn how to repair the cameras and for some years, we were the most important high speed house on the Continent.

Ed: What sort of speeds are we talking here?

Dedo: We’re talking about 16mm intermittent movement up to 500 frames, continuous movement up to 10,000 frames; 35mm claw driven cameras – 12 claws, 4 register pins, 360 frames per second and each time the film stops, it’s held flat by a vacuum; perfect image stability, perfect image quality, unbelievable.

And, of course, one of the parts that we had no experience in was selling such cameras to the military – 70mm cameras, 35 continuous movement prism cameras up to 2000 or 3000 frames.

Ed: What date are we talking here … roughly?

Dedo: That’s the mid-70s. We introduced the first high speed video in 1981, which was an industrial system for motion analysis and we became the most successful sales organisation, pretty much worldwide.

This was from a Japanese company called NAC and then one day they told us “sorry, we sold our business to Kodak and you are no longer needed.” So then we started with another company called Red Lake and again we built those sales very successfully, until one day they told us “we have merged with Kodak, you are no longer needed.” So now we’re with Vision Research, the Phantom cameras, so that’s still a domain.

Occasionally, we still rent high speed film cameras, but the days of selling such cameras are over. Some fifty 70mm high speed claw driven cameras that must have cost $300,000-400,000 were sold about a year and a half ago by the American Air Force – 50 pieces and they went at $48 each.

Ed: Did you have many research engineers working directly with you on those developments?

Dedo: With the high speed cameras, we were selling equipment that was made by others and we were servicing it and we were training the technicians to accompany the cameras for shoots – mainly TV commercials.

Ed: But you were also developing things, as you say, along the way – other products?

Dedo: At the same time, we had a proper Research and Development department.

We built highly specialised optics for the 70mm high speed

Ed: Oh, so you could see the way it bounced on the electrical pickup wire?

Dedo: In rain and snow and ice and so on, how it would behave. Another subject was microchip bonding, where you have to shoot in high speed one square millimetre, from a large distance of 45cm away, and so we built distance microscopes with which you could, from this distance, photograph one square millimetre.

You might think one millimetre is nothing, but to keep it in focus from beginning to end of this one square millimetre is not so easy.

So we built three different lenses, different magnifications and with it, since the movement was extremely fast and the high speed video wasn’t fast enough, we had to couple it with a flash system which was flashing with a flash duration of one-four hundred thousandth of a second – and let it flash 400 times per second. And that was pretty cute. That was called the Dedostrobe.

Ed:

So really, that’s your first light?

Dedo: sandbox.

Ed:

No, that was just a kid playing in the

Oh, okay.

Dedo: And we had with us an optical engineer who was in his mid-80s. He was a projection specialist who had been with Osram and, together with an American partner, the guy to develop the short arc xenon with Dr Kugler at Osram and Fred de Hubry our guy, he had great experience in projection systems.

With them together, we designed all kinds of strange objects and all these Research and Development contracts were nice, they were well paid, but they walked out of the door and they didn’t leave anything behind.

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Page 24

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Ed: Did you have anybody at this stage telling you “you need to focus more on the business side of this, rather than just the engineering perfection”?

Dedo: Nobody has successfully been able to tell me that until today!

Ed: Oh, so I’m the lucky first?

Dedo: I’m an obsessed cameraman and today still, all my dreams and nightmares are about images and how to make them best and, to some extent, I felt that the company, as it was growing, was destroying my job, so I felt like I was a victim, until I learned to accept that role. Shooting films in over 40 countries and feature films, commercials and art films made my life so incredibly rich that it allows me to sit behind a desk and shuffle paper. If somebody would have told me that in the beginning, I would have jumped off the tower and ended it right there – and I still feel like that every day, but I can survive it and, in the meantime, we have a wonderful team. So with this wonderful Research and Development team, one day we said “why

can you please tell us who is going to buy them?” And I had no idea, but obviously I should answer the question, so I pulled out a name that I had heard of, Haskell Wexler, who is one of the greatest stars ever in cinematography.

I took the lights to Hollywood and I went to Doug Pentek who was running Hollywood Rental and he said “well who should use these?” and I said “Haskell Wexler.” He said “has Haskell seen them?” and I said “well, no” and he said “okay kid, jump in the car.” So we threw the kit in the car, we drove to where Wexler was shooting. He stopped for over an hour to look at the lights and then he said “can I have a kit?” and he had an office together with Vilmos Zsigmond and I dropped the kit there and they never opened it. It took another five years until I got an enthusiastic letter from Haskell Wexler which said “I’ve discovered Dedolights!”

Ed: Does that tell you something about Hollywood directors?

Dedo:

Not

really,

no.

Others immediately.

took

to

it

It is typical that a top star cinematographer will never have lights.

Why should he? Lights come from rental houses; lights come from Warner Bros or Paramount or Universal set lighting and they don’t have their own lights – but they all have Dedolights, from Alan Darveaux to Vilmos Zsigmond to Haskell Wexler to John Alonzo, Steven Poster, Julio Macat and so on.

So, when we look at the Kodak poster of “da-da-dada-dum”, I can say “he, he, he, he has his own Dedolights.”

You can’t build sets like this.

don’t we build something that we can keep?” So we built the Dedolight which originally, yes, we tried low voltage, it was a 6 Volt marine lamp that we ran at 22 Volt. It worked wonderfully.

Ed: For a while?

Dedo: Not so bad, not so bad … and then eventually came this double lens system, which then developed into the double aspheric system.

Ed: So some of that lens technology that you started to put into the Dedolight was what you’d developed for your high speed cameras – or was it totally different?

Dedo: No, totally different. While travelling round the world, I had worked with Lowel light and I admired Ross Lowel immensely for his ingenious ideas. We had the only light where I could feel that it was developed by a working cameraman. But I wanted to kind of augment that with a small light that I could hide, that would have a very long reach and high output, just to work in conjunction with all the other light sources – originally as a mobile light.

When we built the first 400 Dedolights, Fred and others got scared and they built a big pyramid of those and said “Dedo, can we show you how many 400 lights is –

Ed: So they basically take the standard rental lights to light the scene, but then use the Dedolights to just add that sparkle?

Dedo: Maybe the reason is that this is the only equipment that’s so small that their wives allow them to keep them in the garage, because it doesn’t take much space. John Alonzo who shot Frankie and Johnny, Chinatown – many top, top films – he was also teaching at AFI and the students were complaining bitterly … they said “he’s teaching us lighting; we wish he would once make a session that is not about Dedolight.” Yes, he was addicted to it and used them where no sane person would use them and he made it work.

Ed: So you went from there – you had the standard light that we know and then you decided, well, you can do better in other areas too?

Dedo: Then we started building larger lights. With the little lights, our spiel, our trick, our approach is to use low voltage lamps, because they give us double the light output to start with, and a good optical system.

That’s what we do – we build optical systems that work best with a point light source. The low voltage lamp was smaller than the high voltage lamps and, in addition, it happens to give double the light output – 40 lumen per Watt, whilst the standard halogen gives 20 lumen per Watt. Secondly, it costs a quarter in relation to the light output; and the third aspect is that it lives

Page 26

longer – double or triple as long; and the fourth aspect is, if you knock it and kick it, it doesn’t die … whereas the high voltage lamps, if they get a knock or vibration, they die.

So for mobile lighting, that’s a serious advantage; that makes the system the most economical system. But then, when building larger lights, we had to use the same lamps as everybody else, HMI lamps, halogen lamps, and then we had to add more. So what we added was two added motions for the focusing. All studio lights ( that’s what we relate to ), all Fresnel lights, have been built exactly the same since early 1900, no change. There’s a front lens which is a spherical lens, part of a circle, and a reflector and a lamp; and the reflector and the lamp move – end of story.

Even the Chinese copies of ARRI lights use these very same lenses from the same factory, because Schott does it best. We were the first ones to add a second lens, so a small Fresnel light will focus 1:3; a big Fresnel light focuses 1:6. We start focusing 1:25, which means further reach, higher intensity, better efficiency in spot. You can place the lights further away, hide them in the set and beat the square law – when you move closer to the light, it gets hot; when the light is much further away, you can move 3 feet and it doesn’t change so much.

Ed: Exactly, so at a great distance you’ve got the right intensity, but you don’t have the heat that’s reached at that point and …?

Dedo: There’s less heat because it’s a more efficient system, but our lights themselves do get hot.

Ed: But also the air in between would act as a greater insulator for the heat rather than the light?

But what is more than that is the character of light is something that very few professionals ever see.

I took this low voltage light to England and one of my great heroes is Duncan Brown who said “what’s this” and I said “can I show you?” and he took the light as if he’d grown up with it and he explained the light to me.

He explained it 2 or 3 times and I had built the darn thing! But he showed me what was so beautiful about the character of this light, and it took a while until I could see that and I’d been living with it for a long time.

So there are not many people who can feel light and understand the character of light and there are many aspects to it … it could be the colour spectrum; it could be the light distribution, but there’s a little bit more to it sometimes. To control light and shadow with higher precision than anybody else – that’s another part that we excel in and that’s something that the optical system blenders themselves do.

Ed: But then you’ve also got the requirement for cost; you’ve also got the people who want to use these lights saying “oh yes, but they cost so much” so that must be a battle now?

Dedo: On the low voltage lights, to buy, they are let’s say, 15% more expensive than an equivalent light in blue and silver, but the lamp costs one-quarter. The lamp lives three times as long and the lamp doesn’t get destroyed by shock, knock, vibration. So by the time you’ve changed the lamp 9 times, you’ve already saved enough to invite your girlfriend for dinner. By the time you’ve changed the lamp 49 times, you’ve saved more money than you need to buy another light head from us. So nobody should tell us that we’re expensive. It’s the most economical system on earth if you want to use

Dedo: Yes, but the main subject, the main part of the religion that we adhere to, is the control of the light. So first the character of the light and that is very difficult to describe.

Ed: In summary, I’m seeing that you want to keep the same bulbs, you want to keep the same light source in this development, because that’s what people are used to, that’s what available, but …?

Dedo: In higher wattage, there isn’t anything else available. Yes we built a higher wattage, low voltage system, that they used for all the special effects work on Harry Potter, but that’s not only the light output – the amount of light – it’s the character of light, and that’s harder to describe than the character of people, because the character of people shows itself and light is invisible.

Ed: But surely, you want as even a light as possible, because, once you’ve got it even, then you can distort it to whatever effect you want, but if it’s distorted to start with, it’s very hard to get it even?

Dedo: Yes – so it’s light distribution with no hot spots and no rings …

Ed: And then you can play with it?

Dedo: And a very defined beam … outside the beam we have nothing whereas all the Fresnel lights have a lot of stray light outside. So that is one part that can be described; it can be shown in the light distribution curves.

Yes, it’s a jibarm.

Page 27

it. If you just want to buy it and never use it, put it on the shelf, then go buy the colour that you like best – blue and silver or black and yellow or whatever.

Ed: But it must be an aspect now that you have to think about, because in those early days, you were making very specialist equipment. Then the lights were for very specialist purposes and in some ways, the money wasn’t actually that important, because it was for that top end. Nowadays, Dedolight is to a much wider audience of users …?

Dedo: The low voltage lights are at home with the smallest video teams because they’re the most economical system on earth.

It is smaller – the

package, it is lighter. The equivalent ARRI kit is 35 kilo; ours is 14, so the back of a cameraman is a consumable item and we also take care of that; that’s a very practical aspect if you don’t want to spend your money with the chiropractors.

And it offers much more versatility – we can do background projections which nobody else can do, and it’s all in this small kit.

It allows you creative lighting from a handbag and, at the same time, because of the low cost of the lamps, the re-lamping cost to run it, the operational cost, is lower than any other light source.

Ed: But now we’ve moved into LED as exemplified by the latest offering which we’ve just seen at IBC, that more on page 31

Page 28

manufacturers to develop LEDs to what we need, and to some extent experimenting and trying how to use their LEDs to the best advantage. But there are still some limitations.

The Munich showroom.

looks like it’s ushering in a totally new line for Dedolight?

Dedo: LED is one of three “hype” words – 3D, DSLR and LED, yes. We’re busy in all three aspects.

We have the wonderful 3D system; we have a lot of DSLR rigs and, of course, we are very intensely involved in the research of LEDs. We work with four different

The white phosphor LED today has a relatively bad colour rendition. In the old days we’d learnt the colour rendition index should be above 90. The sun is 100, halogen is 98, a Kino Flo lamp is 92, an HMI is around 92 – we have a metal halide discharge lamp that is a tungsten lamp, also 92 – and most of the famous LEDs are in the 70s. That’s a light quality that no serious butcher would use to light his meat, because people should buy his meat, it should look attractive; and we are supposed to be professionals, we light meat all day, and the skin tone is very sensitive. So yes, we can cheat and get by with white balance, but not quite right, and we can use a lot of filters and with filters, you can cut peaks in the colour spectrum, but you can never fill a hole in the colour spectrum. So now we have to learn that there is not one CRI value any more – there’s R1, R2, R3, R4 – all the way to R14 and with every white phosphor LED you have a very great deficiency in the R9 value, which is a red value.

You can overcome that only if you mix, for example, various colours of LED – red, green, blue and white, like everybody in the theatres and TV studios with the four

Page 31

The progression of the Dedolight.

chamber lights, halogen lamps and filters, and you can mix any colour. But with LED you need one extra colour; you need amber. So red, green, blue, white and amber – you mix that and you can get ( if you’re lucky ) pretty clean colour rendition.

Ed: Okay and having said all that, you’ve come out with a brand new LED light source?

Dedo: The first one that we saw was from Element Labs in the USA. They built something called the Kelvin TILE which was mixing all these colours and in those days, produced the cleanest colour rendition that we could dream of. But it was heavy, expensive and the one shortcoming was it put out no light, true. So today, we have systems that are much cleaner in colour and, without the diffuser, put out 10 times the light and cost less. So this shows the incredible development of LEDs. Ed: So you’ve developed past the white phosphor?

Dedo: It’s not us. This is the people that we work with and, of course, we too … like, for example, for the museum lights which is Raffael’s specialty, Osram came up with a new LED. They have many LEDs, but they came up with an LED called PrevaLED and that is an array of a lot of mint white LEDs mixed with red LED. There’s a little reflector around it and a window on the reflector and a sensor behind it that watches out for the red. Each one of those things has its own programme, because they still come out different, so its own programme balances the red to the rest and that gives us clean colour rendition. But if you put it in an optical system, it looks like Oktoberfest, because they have a lot of red dots all over.

So “yes”, LEDs live long but will they be used for a long time in the professional world? For street lighting and architectural lighting, easy. Put them in automotive applications, perfect. But when you buy a laptop today, are you going to go first to your solicitor and say “I want to change my last will, I want this laptop to be used by my grandson.” You know after 3 years your neighbours laugh about you because they say “what do you want with that old thing, it doesn’t run the new software, throw it away.” The same thing is happening to LEDs every day now.

Ed: So are you making your lights a little bit futureproof?

Dedo: No, the future is what we can offer today, but what future is behind today’s future? God knows … and the intensity at which research is done in LEDs is absolutely incredible and the claims what LED can do are absolutely wonderful. Cree says “we have an LED that puts out 231 lumen per Watt” but in reality, they put out 40-60, which is less than any fluorescent lamp.

A Philips fluorescent lamp in an office can put out up to 110 lumen per Watt when it goes hellishly green. A Kino Flo, which is more balanced colour, puts out 80 lumen per Watt and also lives a few thousand hours. A metal halide lamp, the ones that we are using, are 6,000-12,000 hours … that’s in a museum four years.

One big American television channel had several studios equipped with a famous brand of LED panel lights and as far as we heard, they just kicked them out, because the consistency of light output was not there with the first generations of LED. It is supposed to get better, but how many people have done tests over 50,000 hours; and the consistency of colour rendition also goes down the Jordan with use and if you have sensor systems that watch out for the different colours to mix them right, how long will the sensor be consistent? So there’s a lot of “ifs” in there, but at the same time the developments are very exciting and, yes, the colour of the Osram PrevaLED is absolutely astonishing and clean and we can stand fully behind it. But it still has some shortcomings – just as an example, Osram, before the end of this month, will come up with a new generation; and the next generation is for the end of the year. If we can offer something that really has value, maybe a museum can keep it for 5, 6, 7, 8 years and that’s not bad. One of the most famous brands that we also help to build has a colour rendition index of around 74. The ones that we sell now have 84 and put out 35% more light and use half the wattage. People say, “well then I take the one with the higher wattage.” Why? “Because it must be stronger.” No, ours is half the wattage and 35% more light, so it shows a real drastic development in LED technology and God knows what we’ll have next year.

Page 32

Ed: So you’ve taken the best LED that you could find for your new lights and then you’ve built a new case?

Dedo: We need to do that next month and next month and next month.

Ed: Yes, but you’ve built a different casing around it, so this new light – does it have a name?

Dedo: It’s called a Dedolight 4.0. Why do we have this silly point in there? Because I’m expecting that we’ll have 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 as the LEDs change.

The wattage may be changing, the light output may be changing, the colour quality may be changing.

Ed: But it is a radical change in design for a Dedolight isn’t it? You’ve gone from two lenses down to a single lens?

Dedo: Not on all of them. On some of them we still have multi lenses.

Time to take a look.

We’re just going into the demonstration room and we’re having a look at the Dedolight 4.0 and Dedo is saying that the best comparisons are really to your own light, so in here, we have other Dedolights which we’re comparing to as well as some from the competition in blue and silver.

Dedo: This is this light in flood and it gives us a very clean, even light. Right now, this is a 40 Watt LED and now I’ll compare it with a 150 Watt light from a famous competitor. That’s the 150 Watt light, yes … so … and you see ours.

Ed:

Well yours is brighter.

Dedo: Yes, okay the daylight looks brighter because it’s higher colour temperature, so here we have … is that in flood?

Dedo takes a light meter reading on the wall at this point.

Dedo: So the competition is 160 Lux and now we do the same with our light. We cover a wider field more evenly and we have more illumination.

Ed:

That’s about 220-230.

Dedo: Yes, but if we go to light the same area that the other light was lighting then we are double the light output over … This one spot here, look at it, that’s 400 in spot, whereas the ARRI light …

Ed:

Ed: When looking at these lights, we really are limited to a single colour, though you say you are developing a bi-colour light?

Dedo:

Well a variable colour light, yes.

Ed: But within that, there are going to be two chips, so you have one or the other, or you can mix the two?

Dedo: They are chip arrays of many tiny, tiny microscopic chips and some of those are more reddish, some of those are more bluish and then you drive them all – you address each one of them – through the electronics.

Ed: But in the case of the normal tungsten type lamp, where you can change the bulb to give you a different colour, it’s not such a simple matter in an LED? Dedo: You can’t take a halogen light and put a daylight lamp in there. It doesn’t work. We’re the only ones that have a discharge lamp, an HMI daylight lamp, that we can replace with a tungsten discharge lamp, with 80 lumen per Watt – very high light output.

You can have a light that can change colour because it has both chips, but my feeling is that for mobile use, the bi-colour, being able to go from tungsten to daylight, which we’ll have on the little light, will be very useful. So you can cover a daylight situation or a tungsten situation and adjust the colour to whatever you need or feel like; whilst in a studio I think either you have daylight or you have tungsten.

Ed: You decide on how you set up your studio which one you’re going to have?

Dedo: And you’re not going to change colour.

There are lights that are meant to give you changeable colours as effect lights, the moving lights, the Varilight, the Clay Paky, Martin – all of those can give you all the colours, yes.

Ed: Because as we’ve seen, if you rely on a filter in front of that light, you’re cutting down the intensity quite considerably and, I guess, adding distortion?

Dedo: When you split the chip array into having so and so many blue elements and so and so many red

... it’s not very “spot”?

Dedo: And spot ours …

now

you

Ed: And we have a real spot.

There’s a great difference in the design of this new light isn’t there?

As you say, there’s one major lens but there still is actually a second lens in there?

Dedo: Yes, yes – and depending on which versions we’re going to build, it will be different again. Now this is a bigger one.

Ed: This is a larger studio style LED light that looks very “filmy” in the way it opens up.

Dedo: That’s the electronics here.

Little and big but both LED. Page 34

elements, you can’t drive all of them at the same time, so you’re again losing some output. Or you can rely that the total heat will always be only with half the chips in daylight, or half the chips in tungsten, so you can get away with a lower capacity cooling system, because you use this half or that half, or you mix both of them to a limit.

Ed: There’s still a lot of work to do?

Dedo: Yes, but some people say that I have a tendency to try and get these things developed to the very end and I think in this case, the daylight version we should be ready to sell in about six weeks and I’ve ordered the first 10,000 parts sets, so I trust that they will sell. Meanwhile, we’ll develop the next and the next and the next generations.

Ed: Right, we’re just having a look at the insides of – what’s this light here?

Dedo: This is a 400 or a 575 Watt daylight fixture, which features two aspherical lenses which are relation computed and they have to work in every position of this, which is not easy because there’s two added movements. In the traditional Fresnel, you would have a reflector and a lamp, like we have here, that don’t change their distance, but together they travel against the front lens; whilst here, when we go to spot, we come to a certain point when that part continues to travel; whilst when we go to flood, again there is an added movement. So this is what we call a “zoom focus” – it’s three movements in one and that allows us to have tighter, more defined spot, wider flood, with an enhanced output, because when you go wider the lit area should get darker, and it doesn’t. It just shows

the higher efficiency that we gain as we go to the front and approach this further.

Ed:

And only possible with precision engineering?

Dedo: When we started this wonderful old man was drawing rays and we can show you that, yes. He would take a drawing machine and he would draw a ray and when it hit the glass, he would calculate the diffractive index of the glass and then say “now it continues at such and such an angle.” When it exits the glass, he calculates again and he draws that part and then it enters the next piece of glass and he calculates again. So he could draw like 30 rays in a day.

What Chin can show you is that today, we can calculate a million rays in about three minutes. This doesn’t design lights, but it helps to kind of proof-run a light without building it. When you learn how to deal with this software, it’s learning how to adapt it to the different light sources. This is endless years of practical experiments and going back to the computer, practical measurements, back to the computer, until you learn to better define the light source. If you can’t do that, all the results will be wrong.

So this is what he’s done over years and one day I went to him and I said “Chin, you’re a genius” and he said “no, I’m not a genius, I just work a lot.”

So a lot of what we do is a lot of dedication and detail work and if you do that long enough, you can go deeper into the matter than others may have the patience or enthusiasm or motivation, ever to do. more on page 38

Page 35

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this is an F1.6 lens and if you say “I want such a lens with no distortion, no halation, perfect contrast rendition, high resolution”, then an optical designer will say “with the new software I have, that’s easy, I can do that, give me half a year.”

But then you say but such a lens, for example for an ARRI camera, costs $15,000 and nobody’s going to spend that money to put it on the front of a light head, so this has to be like a $500 lens.

This means you cannot use glass types; you cannot use aspherical elements; and designer usually would just window and jump out.

Ed:

A close view of precision engineering.

Ed: There is an expression inspiration; 90% perspiration.”

that

goes

“10%

Dedo: Yes and with Chin together, we’ve designed lenses for our projection systems that other people would have thought impossible. This is for projection of a Hasselblad format image as a high transmission lens –

expensive too many then the open the

But Chin’s still here?

Dedo: He’s done it and a lot of these things are really remarkable masterpieces that take things a little bit far.

It’s not only the weight that’s impressive, it’s the optical performance which is pretty stunning. Nobody else has ever done anything like it. Not many people need it; it would be crazy for other people to do it. We’re the only ones who are crazy enough to do things that nobody needs!

Next month we shall meet Dr Depu Chin and see how NZVN he can draw two million beams in a ray diagram.

Page 38

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Pixel Power A late entry for Gencom’s IBC report sees us at Pixel Power with Mike O’Connell.

Ed: Mike, a bit of a similar story here to Broadcast Pix – you’ve got a product that is a TV station in a box, that really does everything, but there is a competitor out there that is a low-cost option. Again, you’ve got the quality?

Mike: Yes, that’s right. Two years ago, we took our graphics engine and we added master control functionality to it; well now we’ve added a video server as well and we have a product called “ChannelMaster”.

ChannelMaster is a channel in the box; it’s got our high end graphics that we’re renowned for and we’ve built up over the last 25 years, and we’ve added an automation solution to it as well, called “Gallium” and that will control ChannelMaster to give you a total integrated play-out solution.

Ed: So bits and solution; whole lot

for years you’ve been building the individual pieces that go into a broadcast channel now you’ve added the final parts and put the in a box?

Mike: That’s correct. For the last dozen years, most of Pixel Power’s business came from branding downstream of a master control switcher or a router output or a server output.

Now we’ve added the simple functionality of a master control room or a play-out facility, by adding master control switching capability.

At the next level, we’ve taken it so we’ve got the video server capability and as I said the automation as well.

But one of the differentials between us and our major competitors out there, such as Miranda iTX or Snell ICE, is that we are a hardware solution, so we have a true hardware master control switcher, we have true hardware codecs inside for the MPEG signal; we also have our hardware control panels, so the operators have a hardware panel that they can integrate live programmes or remote feeds into the channel in the box solution.

Ed: And being all in one box, it means it is much more cost-effective?

Mike: It is, this is a lot more cost-effective than going out buying a stand alone video server solution from the many providers out there, a master control switcher, a character generator, and an automation system. All of those add up to a lot more money than what a ChannelMaster Gallium solution does. The other big differential that we have with ChannelMaster is that we’ve designed it so any automation system can control it.

For the broadcasters out there now who have channels on air with an automation system, they can actually add a ChannelMaster chassis and use their existing automation to drive it. You don’t have to go with our automation solution, unlike the other vendors out there.I If you like the iTX solution, you’re locked-in to their automation and their channel play-out ; the same with the ICE solution. With us, you can pick – you can use the automation system you’ve currently got, or use ours, or go and buy a new third party solution if you like.

Ed: I imagine this product can have a number of channels in it, is that correct?

Mike: That’s correct. We have a 3 rack unit box which houses the master control, the CG and the video server in one box. We have an option to have two channels in that box, both of those channels are two separate master control switchers, separate video servers , and two separate 2D CGs inside that one box. We see the main use for that as N + 1 channels or redundancy channels.

These can be redundancy channels for existing infrastructure, or they can be redundancy channels for a ChannelMaster system with the fullblown 3D graphics.

Ed: So I guess in New Zealand, the market is pretty small, but with the digital spectrum becoming available and things being shuffled around, I imagine this is a good time for somebody to set up a small TV station or a number of channels?

Mike: Yes, and this solution would be a very costeffective way to do that. The other area we see it being quite common in is disaster recovery – not just in New Zealand, but worldwide. We have many customers talking to us about solutions for disaster recover.

Ed:

Does it run off batteries?

Mike: (Laughs) A good UPS system, yes.

Ed:

Or Mike on a bicycle pedalling hard?

Mike: (Jokingly) Yes – we’ve got good solar cells as well.

Ed:

And in terms of power consumption?

Mike: There’s more than power consumption too as far as savings in this “green” world; we’ve got small rack space footprint, the air conditioning savings, all of these are things that broadcasters are currently looking at, and solutions like ChannelMaster help them to be “green”.

Ed: Now in terms of development, you say that this has been developed from the stand alone product so I guess there’s been a fair bit of sort of sharing of the technology?

Mike: That’s correct.

The circuit boards and the intellectual property we’ve been working on for the last 25 yearsin our CGs have moved to our master control switcher, BrandMaster and now to ChannelMaster, our channel in the box. These same circuit boards we’ve also used in our ChannelMaster, with the addition of

Page 41

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replacing a couple of them with a newer circuit board that does both the old and the new functionality.

Ed: And in terms of operating it all, I see that on the screen it looks like Windows 7, so what part does the Windows operating system have in the whole functionality of this product?

Mike: Windows 7 is the operating system host, but on top of the circuit boards we have in there, we run our own operating system, which has taken care of all the management of the data and the signals. Windows 7 is not managing that or the graphics whatsoever.

Ed: And in the very unlikely case of Windows 7 crashing?

Mike: We have relay bypass functionality and watchdog functionality; if you lose power your input signal will appear automatically on your output connector going to your router or your TX chain; and likewise, if the operating system fails, our watchdog bypass will do the same functionality.

Ed: And does it call you on your cell phone to tell you “quick, get down to the station”?

Mike: Well our Gallium server can actually send you an email or give you a call on the cell phone as well.

Coming soon ...

Ed:

And do they use your voice Mike?

Mike: No – we’ll have a more elegant native homeland voice!

NZVN

Page 43

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www.panavision.co.nz Sales Tim (09) 3608766

Support 318 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn, Auckland

Service tim.timlin@panavision.asia