NZVN July 2018

JULY 2018

Vol 248

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Inside this issue you will find a reminder to sign up to the MTP Conference, plus the last stories from NAB 2018 ▪

TVLogic monitors and more

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IDX batteries and filters

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Dedo on Dedolight

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Triad-Orbit stands and clamps

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Sanken shotgun microphone

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cmotion camera accessories

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Lasergraphics film scanners

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Blackmagic latest offers

MTP Conference is Nearly Here.

We’re only two and-a-bit weeks away from the third Mediatech Pacific Conference and, to help ensure that no one can complain about their missing out, I’m with David Barnard for a last update.

Ed: David, if somebody hasn’t got their tickets yet, there’s still a chance? From my way of thinking, as well as the speakers, a critical reason to attend is the chance for networking with some pretty serious players in our business?

David: Yes, absolutely. In previous years, one of the recurring bits of feedback that we’ve gotten from everyone who’s been there, is how much they enjoyed the intimate environment. We’re looking at a maximum of around 150 people; you’re spending two days with these people in a very small environment. We’ve got all these talks, but then we’ve got time in between to have a chat, not just to colleagues locally here in New Zealand, but people coming in internationally, people who are coming in to give tech talks ( of which there are many really exciting ones ), sponsors from the various international vendors and other peers who are doing the same things that people here are doing. We really do have some very exciting talks, covering a bit broader scope than we’ve had in years past. We’re going to be having several people talking about eSports, including Duane Mutu who is director of Let’splay.live …

Ed: https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews/issues/2018/02february18 … we did a story on their setup.

David: We’re also going to have Anna Lockwood from Telstra who’s been doing a lot of work in this space and it really is an interesting and growing segment. The amount of money that’s going into this and the amount of viewership that they’re getting is really impressive, and now you’ve got the Olympics talking seriously about finding a way to integrate it into what they do. So, whether or not you’re a gamer, you should pay attention because this is here to stay.

Ed: You mean unlike 3D television?

David: Yeah I never really put my money on 3D television. More like internet delivered television … that’s a better analogy for where we’re at is the early days of OTT. We’re also going to be having a panel discussion on social media, talking about how it can be used in production environments as well as the impact it’s having on the media industry and on society generally. Obviously it’s a topic that’s very much in the news, of the news, and creating the news these days.

Ed: So one’s day is pretty full – you’re listening to some pretty high powered people who have come from overseas and locally and have got intelligent things to say, but then you’ve also got the chance and the breaks before and after to talk with these people one-to-one, or anybody you find in the audience. But then also you’ve got that chance at the panel discussion to have some input there?

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David: Yes, that’s exactly right. The way all the talks will work is that the speakers will say their bit, but we’re actually hooking up with a new application Slido to allow people to submit questions as the talk goes on, and then Gerry Smith, as the event chair, will be able to go through and look at those and highlight different ones.

People will be able to see the questions that have been proposed and vote on the questions that they want to see asked. What sometimes happens is you get a few real extroverted people asking all the questions and taking up the time and maybe some people who aren’t really comfortable standing up and asking a question, but who would have some really good ones to ask – now they can all have a voice and hopefully we should get really interesting Q&A. So audience participation, audience discussion will definitely be part of this, we’ve structured the talk to allow for that time and that’ something that I know was really important to Gerry as well, because he thinks that’s a key part of creating that dynamic. But then we have an opportunity to go out, have a coffee break, have lunch, have drinks after – there’s also an after-party which you will only get an invite to if you’re a registered attendee …

Ed: Or a member of the press?

David: Well I haven’t seen the registration come in from the member of the press just yet!

Ed: I’ll have to talk to my secretary. Now the after party – this is something that’s not just take-in pizza?

David: No, absolutely not. We have two sponsors, Akamai and Telstra who’ve had a longstanding partnership, who came in and wanted to do something a bit special for a sponsorship, so we ended up organising an event after the fact – there will be open bar, there will be food served and, in order to be on the list to attend, you do have to register for the event. So for everybody who has registered, if you haven’t already gotten those details, let me know and we’ll get you the information. But yes, it should be a lot of fun and a great opportunity to continue the networking and the fun after the event.

Ed: So what category of person would you put down as “must attend” and they’d be silly if they didn’t?

David: Well I think anybody who’s interested in where the media industry is headed, and I say that with a broadcasting focus, but video production and multimedia production is increasingly becoming a part of all media and the boundaries are coming down between what is digital, what is video, what is radio. So anyone who is interested in where this business is headed, where the technology is headed, what the issues are that are facing it and how you make a career, how you make a business out of it, should be attending.

Ed: Well who would have thought that NZ Video News would have video clips in it?

David: That’s exactly right and that’s a great example of moving into the future and embracing cross-media.

Ed: … and not being dragged kicking and screaming into it!

Excellent, so it’s something for everybody and you’ve only got about 30 places left I understand?

David: Yes, we were targeting an attendance of 150 and we are just at about 120 right now, so it is filling up and we know we always get a little burst at the end, so my advice is not to wait, go ahead and register today and then you get your invite to the after-party if you register for the event. You should go to www.mediatech2018.co.nz NZVN as the place to get all the information and find the link to sign up.

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TVLogic We’re here with David Colthorpe for Techtel at the TVLogic stand.

Ed: David, TVLogic, this is one of your flagship products because it’s something that you can stand by, you know that it’s going to keep working and you know that you’re selling a Charlie and David at TVLogic. quality product?

David: That’s right. TVLogic has just a fantastic culture about the way they manufacture their products and their approach to support. That I think, is one of the first things that you really notice about them; they’ve got a solid build, they’ve got a solid technology base and they really look after you if you have an issue. Most people know TVLogic for their excellent small monitors. That’s perhaps where they’ve made their biggest impact in the industry, with on camera monitors and so on.

Ed: With the high nits?

David: With the high nits in some cases, but of course TVLogic has a much broader spectrum of products than that, including up to 24inch and other larger sizes.

Ed: Is that up to the reference monitor level, or for colour grading or doesn’t it go to that level?

David: Well it does indeed and that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

Ed: Excellent and to tell us more we have Charlie Shin from TVLogic. Charlie, what are you most happy about in your monitor range that’s new for NAB? Charlie: Well actually, we have introduced the LUM-310R last year which is a 4K HDR reference monitor and we have added 2 more 31 inch 4K monitors with the HDR emulation function. The particulars of the 310R – it’s 2000 nits and we have the 313G and 318G which have respectively 350 nits and 850 nits.

They are not for colour grading but they are made for HDR confidence monitoring with a comparatively low price.

Ed: So when you get up to that high nit level – and it’s just dawned on me at this show that having a high nit level means your dynamic range is greater and therefore you get a much better rendition – that obviously comes at a price?

David: Well I guess another factor in terms of brightness is that there are standards for HDR monitoring …

Ed: You mean SMPTE standards?

David: Well, EBU 3320 is a spec for HDR monitors.

A certain level of brightness is required for a reference monitor that is not mandatory for a nonPage 4

reference monitor, but one that can be used for monitoring of HDR content.

We’ve approached that by using an HDR emulation so that the quality of the HDR signal can be fully monitored in a lower cost product. So we have both the reference grade and the HDR emulation grade monitors.

Charlie: I’d like to add some more information. There is no international standard for talking about the nits, the brightness level of the monitor, but for example EBU which is the European Broadcasting Union, they used to have their own specification recommendation for the broadcast monitors, and now they have upgraded their specification for the HDR. So they have Grade 1 monitor, Grade 2 monitor and Grade 3 monitor and now they have upgraded this specification for Grade 1A HDR, Grade 1AB HDR and Grade 2 HDR monitors. So it’s a little complex in the specification; it’s some high level of technical understanding, but they do provide some reference standards for the brightness level of the HDR monitors.

Ed: Well it makes sense that as the resolution goes up, you’re going to have the need for better and better resolution in your monitoring?

Charlie: Oh yes. Right now, some of the countries started their broadcast based on the UHD resolution, but Japan will have the Tokyo Olympics in 2022 based on the 8K Super High Vision resolution.

Ed: As if we’re all going to see that.

Charlie: And Korea just started UHD terrestrial broadcasting since the PyeongChang Olympic Games.

Ed: Wow, we’re going to see game shows in 4K? Charlie: Oh yes, many of the broadcasters already recorded the Rio Olympics and Pyeongchang Olympic Games in 4K formats. They just broadcast in HD, but they have their own recorded sources in 4K. Ed: Good to get some practice in. Right?

David: We’ve just mentioned the top end reference models, should we now just talk about some of the other models that are new.

Charlie: Here we have the LVM-171S. This is the top graded and replacement of the LVM-175W-3G that we used to have 2-3 years ago. This has a very nice picture quality LCD panel from Panasonic and it shows you very good colours and very accurate colours and dynamic range and contrast ratio, with advanced new features and upgraded boards and resolution.

Ed: I’ve just put my glasses on to look at the resolution and yes, that’s stunning – absolutely sharp, beautiful colour rendition, beautiful clarity.

Charlie: Oh yes and it also gives you the picture by picture functions and all Page 5

the other functions related to HDR. It provides HDR emulation functions as well, although it is not a UHD. So the ITU standard 2100 specifies HD resolution along with the UHD resolution of 4K and 8K; because HDR is applicable to all resolutions, it is not really related to the resolution so maybe in some of the countries, broadcasters are expected to have HDR broadcasting based on 3G and HD resolution, not only UHD. Ed: Now you mentioned that the monitor was Panasonic – is this something that’s the same through your whole range?

Charlie: We have other 17 inch monitors using this same panel.

Ed: Okay, so all of your monitors, the panel itself is made by Panasonic, but the intelligent bit is what you do in behind it, the hardware, software, the controls?

Charlie: We design the driving board and we just select the best displays possible and available in the market. We have a special contract with Panasonic and they also reflect their development based on the feedback from TVLogic.

David: So this LVM-171S is kind of a very handy monitor for scenarios such as in outside broadcast vehicles.

If you’re looking at conversion to 4K and conversion to HDR in your OB truck, this is an ideal monitor to do that for you in the monitoring positions.

Ed: And it also comes in a 24 inch version?

Charlie: Yes this is a 24 inch version of the 171S. Ed: And I don’t need my glasses for this one.

Charlie: This panel also comes from Panasonic. This is a very professionally designed panel only for medical resources and broadcast users. The colour itself from the panel is almost the same with that 17 inch version and also the driving bus is exactly the same with that one. So the only difference is the size.

Ed: Wonderful. And I have to say, TVLogic have been very clever in showing images that are not shot at 25p, so you can actually see proper motion – unlike some other places that I’ve been to at this show.

Charlie: Well actually I shot this with my Nikon D4, 3-4 years ago.

Ed: At what framerate?

Charlie: I think it was 60p.

Ed: That makes sense. Now we’re on to the LEM-550R 55 inch and this is a very thin panel monitor, but not Panasonic.

Charlie: Well the display panel for this LEM-550R comes from LG Display which is the only provider of that big size OLED screen. Sony and others also use this for their TVs and their professional monitors because this is the only one Page 6

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you can get. This is our HDR monitor, the peak luminance goes up to 700 nits and, since this is based on the OLED technology, it shows you very high dynamic range, not only in the highlights, but also the dark colours.

Ed: The black is very black.

Charlie: The overall contrast ratio can go up to 140,000:1.

Ed: So this is something to show your clients the magnificent 4K footage that you’ve shot and for them not to be disappointed – apart from that jitter?

Charlie: Well this comes from the contents and stuff … maybe you can see some judders from some part of the content.

Ed: Oh dear, somebody shooting 24p … no, don’t you be sorry, it’s them that should be sorry.

Charlie: They just mix it with 24p and 30p content but the colour looks very great so I like this content. Anyway, we still have one monitor to finish the development for this one and it will be available at the end of next month.

Ed: And what difference does that have?

Charlie: We have finished everything about the SDR functions but …

Ed: Oh you’re not releasing this just yet, okay – that’s coming in a month or so?

Charlie: We have developed another driving board to run this OLED perfectly. It’s a different board from the other 4K monitors, so the colours will be far much more accurate than the consumer TVs using the same panel, and we also give a variety of functions concerning the SDR and HDR. Ed: It’s very beautiful David – have you got one of these in your home?

David: Well it’s a bit small.

Ed: Okay, now we’re up to the reference monitors, the LUM-310R and the LUM318G, and a comparison?

Charlie: Yes, here is the comparison demonstration between a 2000 nits peak luminance monitor and 850 nits. The content showing now is graded for 1000 nits, so the overall images look very similar except for the dark colours.

The 2000 nits monitor is utilising a local dimming backlight system. We have implemented 2048 LEDs in the back side of the panel and they can be totally dimmed or lit according to the contents. But this one is utilising a global dimming backlight system, so the black level of the LCD is almost similar to the normal LCDs but the midtones and the highlights can be almost similar to the reference monitor.

Ed: Well I’m looking at them and I can’t tell which one’s better than the other, but I guess a trained eye could. I imagine it comes with quite a difference in cost between the two?

Charlie: Oh yes, this reference monitor costs about US$43,000 and this Page 8

one US$16,000 – it’s less than half.

Ed: Okay, so the 318G is the cheaper version.

Charlie: And we have another cheaper version of LUM-313G. The peak lumen -ance can go up to 350 nits so it has a shorter or smaller dynamic range rather than this 2000 nits reference monitor, but we provide all those functions so that you can check the mid-tones and highlights.

For example, you can manipulate the level of the luminance to see all the high full dynamic range now is compressed to 400 nits range and you can set it up for 400 nits here, then the mid-tones and the blacks are maintained the same, but only the highlights are compressed. And if you turn this off, then these highlights are clipped out. So depending on what level of brightness HDR content you want to grade, you can utilise these kinds of functions to get the right brightness level and the right colours.

Ed: So again, it’s a bit of a compromise that, for a cost saving, you just have to do a little bit more of a manual adjustment to see what you want to see.

David: That’s correct. You’re really just setting the monitor to be within the particular brightness range that you’re interested in, in HDR finishing. But obviously it means you can have more positions with more monitors for the same sort of money, and get the job done.

Ed: Now also on the stand, and one would think unrelated to monitors but in fact very related to the people who are using field monitors, is backup storage.

TVLogic have acquired a company called NextoDI and to tell us what this product is we have Charlie again.

Charlie: NextoDI specialises in portable backup storage devices for camera shooters. We support many different types of storage media like SxS and P2, XQD, SD, CFast and such like and we have several different types of the backup storage for professional users. When you are shooting outside, you have to backup the contents of your shoot not only in 1 or The range of backup devices from TVLogic.

2, but it is recommended to Page 9

save in 3 different media, so as to not lose the content that you have been shooting for several days.

Ed: This was never an issue with tape I have to point out at this stage, but in today’s modern technology of cards … well, you can’t be too careful. Now this is not an off-board recorder is it, it’s purely a backup recorder, so you take the card out of your camera or your off-board recorder and you make a safety copy into this device?

Charlie: Yes and this is the fastest backup storage unit in the world. We are utilising what is called XCOPY technology, which is patented. This XCOPY technology is not using CPUs to copy and read and write. You just send the original contents from the card straight to the SSD inside the storage. The result is that it is 2, 3 or sometimes 5 times faster than other reader technology.

So you can save time and go back to work. Some of our products support multiple card reading, so when you’re shooting some of the dramas or soap operas with multiple cameras, you can take out the cards from the 4 or 8 cameras and put them in and you can only push one button and forget and go back to your work without changing the cards.

Ed: So do you need a different reader for different types of cards, because I see you’ve got Panasonic, the P2 … you’ve got a whole number of slots here?

Charlie: Oh yes. Depending on the cards you are using, you can use it for XQD sometimes, or you can use it for say SxS. Ed: Does it do an erase function?

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Charlie: Yes of course.

And we also have a function to copy your contents from the SD camera cards – sometimes you can double copy, right. Sometimes you forget, you copy yesterday and you shoot more today and you copy again. Then sometimes you forget to take one out. But this one automatically compares the contents of the cards …

Ed: It only transfers the new stuff?

Charlie: Yes. Only the new stuff.

Ed: That’s clever.

Charlie: You can choose, if you prefer you can overwrite.

Ed: Okay, so this has an internal storage component?

Charlie: You can choose from SSD or HDD but we recommend you use SSD because it is far faster and safer.

Ed: Now do you have dual slots in there, so you could have 2 SD slots – so as well as making a backup recording to the internal drive, you could make an SD card backup copy at the same time?

Charlie: Oh yes, we also provide this kind of what we call a bridge pallet and you can connect this to the backup storage and you can have 2 copies at the same time.

David: The thing is also, because it’s a modular system, it means that in the future, should you change your camera, you may be shooting on … I dunno …

Ed: P2 heaven forbid.

David: You’re shooting on SxS or this XQD, then you just buy a new slot.

You’re not having to change the whole system.

Ed: So this is going to take that media wrangling job to a new level. No longer do you have to fire up a laptop and use that as a transfer means and put the stuff into the laptop and then back at the ranch put it into the system. This is going to make the time of that safety copy and that transfer so much quicker and so much more secure. Does it have a model number?

David: There are a number of models. The NSB-25 designed for 4K backup, the NVS2801-Plus which is small and light, and the NCB-20, which can handle multiple cards simultaneously. Check them out at www.nextodi.com Ed: Yes, right … so there several models, varying I guess on capacity and the number of slots that each has.

NZVN To find out more about TVLogic products, contact David Colthorpe at Techtel, Phone 0800 832 485 Email info@techtel.co.nz Or visit their website www.techtel.co.nz Page 11

IDX For Panavision, we are at IDX and we have Jun Ishizeki from IDX Systems.

Ed: Now batteries – there’s always development possibilities with batteries?

Jun: Yes, we actually announced these last year but have finally started shipping because of a production delay.

The DUO-C98s, the DUO-C198s are the predecessor of the current line the DUOC95 and the DUO-C190. The information is out there already but the 98s have 96 Watts, it’s high load now; the 198 gives 191 Watts and it’s up to 14 amps current draw. They all have SMBus on there now, so they communicate with cameras like RED and show the percentage and such.

Ed: That high load has become more important with the 4K cameras hasn’t it?

Jun: Yes, some cameras require lighting equipment and everyone just wants “high load, high load” and we try to do our best to make sure that we can please most of our customers by doing that. We’re a very conservative Japanese company, so our numbers are the minimal each product can do.

Ed: Well when I’m looking at News programmes from Japan, to see the backs of the News cameras, I see that they pretty well always have IDX on them, so it must be good?

Jun: We do have reliable, dependable products, so our customers tend to come back to us and we have loyal customers – especially in Japan, Asia and Europe. I like to try a little harder to please the customers in the States, but I think IDX is not known enough, is what it is in the States. I’m not sure about New Zealand …

Ed: It’s pretty well known … and the warranty you offer on these?

Jun: I believe the warranty on these is 2 years for like the capacity percentage so, if it’s not up to par, we guarantee it for 2 years. If there was problem with that we’ll replace it for sure.

Ed: Okay, so those are the batteries for the larger cameras, but I see you also have the smaller ones for the Sony?

Jun: Those are 14.4 Volt BPU series batteries that we just released. They’re the SB-U50s, SB-U98s which today we have Opus 5. What’s good about these is that they have the D-Taps on them, you’ve got the USB on there – the bigger one actually has 2 D-Taps. They both feature the D-Tap Advanced which has the charge pin. This I believe we announced last year as a concept too, but is now shipping. The blue port is the highlight of it. It has a third pin, you can use Page 12

our VL-DT1 D-Tap charger to charge through the D-Tap port if you don’t have a dedicated Sony charger. So if you want to stay portable, you can buy the battery and buy the D-Tap charger and you can charge portable when you’re out travelling.

Ed: Can you charge the battery while the camera’s running?

Jun: That you cannot do. When it’s not in use, when you’re done, when you’re ready to go to sleep, you plug that thing in and when you wake up it’ll be done. These are fairly nicely priced so that’s cheaper than your regular Sony’s with the extra features and such.

Ed: I guess they’re all lithium ion so there’s no way around the flight problems that we suffer in New Zealand – air freight just won’t take them unless they’re with a camera?

Jun: Oh is that right. In the States – and it’s not limited, but under 100 Watt capacity batteries you can carry up to 15 batteries.

Ed: Now this looks like a smart device here?

Jun: It’s actually a power supply – it pretty much has become an industry standard. It’s like the famous IA-60a was but is now replaced by this new IA70a. Obviously 60 to 70 that’s a 10 jump which means a 10 Watt jump, it now has 70 Watts. The adjustable voltage is still available, but it has slightly shifted on the range point. This should follow the camera the same way it used to from the 60a, so it should be the same for most customers who loved to use the IA60a. We just had to change it so it’s more eco-friendly – that was the main purpose of that. We did the same thing with the VL-4Se which is a V-Mount 4 channel simultaneous charger – the same with that. A popular one was the VL4S, same with that, we changed the power supply inside so that’s a little bit more eco-friendly, less power consumption; it charges 4 batteries a little bit quicker than the VL-4S, so that’s the VL-4Se. Ed: Now IDX, being an innovative company, to get over this lithium ion problem, is there any potential development in other chemistry that one could look at for battery technology that wouldn’t take it back to the nickel cadmium days?

Jun: From my knowledge, we don’t create the chemical part of the battery.

We just use the highest quality battery cell that’s available on the market and we package it the way we want to.

The chemistry part we have no control over until these battery cell makers can come up with a new chemistry to have a better version of the lithium ion.

Ed: Well we look forward to that possibility and then we don’t have the air freight problems?

Page 14

Jun: Yes, I agree. You know though, eventually if that comes out, they’re going to regulate that too for you guys, right?

Ed: Oh don’t be like that.

Jun: One more.

Again we might have announced it last year as well, this will maybe ship in the fall, maybe a little earlier. They are the Sony L-Series replacement, called the SLF50 and SL-F70. They’re 48 Watt and 72 Watt, similar to the BPU series they both have USB on there. The difference between those 2 is that this one has an X-Tap instead of a D-Tap … the difference between a D-Tap and an X-Tap is the D-Tap is meant for 12 Volt accessories; the X-Tap is for 7 Volts. There’s a Detent on there so you can plug a D-Tap cable into an X-Tap port, so you don’t have to feed a different amount to your unit.

Ed: So this is the battery for the standard 7.2 Volt handheld cameras?

Jun: Yes. Now I do have one more item which is a drastic difference from our battery products. We have jumped into the lens filter business by releasing the Alpha-I brand ND filter. It comes in 0.3 to 2.1 so that’s 7 stops; it’s a standard 4 x 5.65 inches and we’re targeting customers in the film business who are using big formats. Our test has concluded that we can say that it’s pretty much zero colour shift on them compared to our competitors. So now we’re just trying to get our name out there to compete with the others. We’re priced at a little under our bigger competitors so that we can attract some new customers.

Right now, it’s hard for customers to approve them until they try them, so we do have trial programmes in the States where we loan them out for about 10 days.

That goes with any of our products – we like to let our customers get a hand on them.

Ed: Okay, how are you doing your filters, what’s the substrate?

Jun: That’s confidential.

Ed: Is it a sandwich or …?

Jun: It is a sandwich, but the inner part is confidential.

Ed: So you’ve got to try it to appreciate the difference?

Jun: You should be able to see the difference just by trying it. You don’t have to go to post to see the difference.

Ed: And there’s a website showing this video that you’ve got playing here?

Jun: Yes, it’s on the IDX website … www.idxtek.com/alpha-i-nd-filter/ NZVN To find out more about IDX batteries contact Tim Timlin at Panavision NZ Phone (09) 360 8766 Email tim.timlin@panavision.asia Or visit their website: www.panastore.co.nz Page 15

Dedo on dedolight We’re here in the heart of the Bavarian pavilion with Mr Dedo Weigert from dedolight.

This time, we are not concentrating on the quality of light or the theory of lighting, but we’re going to look more at the products that dedoDedo himself with one of the many training videos playing light offers to the in the background. Follow the links you find further on industry, because for more instruction video clips. as you should know these are some of the highest quality lights available, and it is important to understand that quality of light has become more and more important as the quality of cameras has increased.

Ed: One of the interesting situations we are facing in the industry is with largescale lighting, and ARRI with their Skypanel has been very proactive and very upfront about providing movie sets with their product. Skypanels have been very widely accepted, but looking around the show, there are a number of other manufacturers who are providing large LED light panels that should be compared to ARRI’s Skypanel and, of course, in the dedolight offer there is the Ledrama. This has been around for a while but is always being improved, so we will ask Dedo to tell us a little bit more about the Ledrama and its applications.

Dedo: It depends on what people want to achieve. If they want to have a multi-colour show, which many people these days want, then the Skypanel is one of the many ones that can offer this in a brilliant way. Many manufacturers build panel lights that can do about the same – Kino Flo works in that direction, ARRI does, Lumos does and many others do, and also my new “dedocolor” light is a multicolour light, the first one that we do. Multicolour lights so far have mostly been built with RGBW. This dates back to the days when, originally in television, 3 halogen lamps with red, green and blue filters and one white, allowed you to mix any colour – the 4 chamber lights. Then Element Labs in Texas did the Kelvin TILE and they said “it is not RGBW, you have to add amber to fill the spectrum” – and that sounded good. It was an expensive light, a very heavy light, and the only thing it could not do is push out any light, so that disappeared.

Ed: This is because you are filtering it rather than providing ...

Dedo: No, it was just outdated technology, like many of the other multicolour lights. They have improved since and, if you want to go multicolour, then there is even one step beyond and you can read in CML the comments of Art Adams Page 16

“why he doesn’t want to use Skypanels” ... because RGBW can do a lot of colours, it can give you all colours and you can dial in filters and all kinds of wonderful things. But in my world, we are still talking about images that involve people, and people – even today – come with skin, and RGBW doesn’t give you really good skin tones. Many people don’t care, many people say “we will fix it in post”, but if, in the light, a certain part of the spectrum is missing, if a colour is missing, there is no way on this planet that you can add it in postproduction, but “I have my filters”, yes, but they absorb, they take away, you cannot add.

So that is why in the latest technology we are looking at RGBWW – warm white and cold white in the same mixture. In this mixture you can achieve good skin colours. That’s what we have with our new dedocolor light, all the colours. You can dial in the filter numbers, you can choose effects like flashing blue-red police car, or flames, or light from a television set, and many others. There is still a little element of doubt whether any of the multicolour lights will behave well for the duration. If you buy a light then you cannot only rely on what it does in the specs and what is described in the internet.

Ed: That was a situation in the past, wasn’t it, with one particular coloured LCD in television sets. In the early LCD televisions, I think the blue went earlier than the other colours?

Dedo: In my mind, when you have red, green and blue LEDs, in some technologies the actual light source is blue – suffers less conversion, can survive higher temperatures and can possibly live longer. But the phosphor for red works through a larger change, operates at a lower maximum temperature, may age quicker. David Amphlett from Gecko, who was just here a little while ago, had a very intricate system where he was sensing in each light head each of the colour sources all the time, and regulating the colours.

Ed: Regulating the power to those LEDs ... so it kept balance?

Dedo: Thus, David intended to overcome the aging effect and he built even a space light called the OHM light that took a few seconds to go through all the colours, balance them, and come out with what you wanted. But it cost $12,000 for a space light and that’s one of the reasons why this wonderful invention, the good product, died. So my feeling is that “show” is one business, the red, the green, the blue, the flashing, the strobing, all that is fine, and some lights can do that very well, but there are plenty of Chinese lights that can also do that very, very well, and the red is this red or another red, for most of the shows it doesn’t really make that much of a difference. Some people feel they need to dial a certain filter number, and that’s also fine ...

Ed: Do you want to comment on the type of person who would want to do that?

Dedo: No. It took people 6 million years to learn to walk upright and those days are over now, because everybody walks around and bumps into the next lamp-post because they are so concentrated on their iPhone. So you want to direct the whole show from your iPhone, and it is wonderful that those things can be done, and for some people it is a wonderful conversation piece and helps the social prestige very much. I come from an old-fashioned world, where my God is the screen, the image as the viewer perceives it. And for the light, the light character, the light source, the light fixture, it is all just a tool, but then, importantly, there is an in-between step. If we go to a museum, there we work with the human eye as receptor, and that is why people talk about CRI which Page 17

relates to the human eye. But the world that we see on the screen is seen through a sensor, and for that Alan Roberts and his TLCI is a huge step forward to evaluate colour as the digital camera sees it.

But that is mostly talking about studio cameras with 3 CCDs and a prism, whilst the CMOS cameras all have the beastly attitude to see colours in a different way. It took me 8 years to build LED focusing lights that worked with all of these cameras where we can even match reference light in the resulting image.

Ed: Alright, so how do you do that – how do you do that with your products, but others don’t?

Dedo: Because we shoot actual images and what these images show is what counts to me, and not what is seen in the spec sheets in the internet, and what the leaflets say ... that’s more propaganda. And you have Fox News and fake news, and alternative news, and so on.

Ed: We are in America, you’d better be careful – there are microphones everywhere.

Dedo: They may not renew my visa!

Ed: Yes, but how do you do it – is it smoke and mirrors?

Dedo: We take a clean, reliable reference light, like a clean halogen light, not too old, not with too dirty lenses, and we shoot one side of a human face, lit with such a reference light, and the other side of the face with the LED light, and see if we can achieve a match in skin tones.

At first, for many years there were incredible differences, even with cameras from the very same manufacturer. The Canon 5D Mark II showed colours, very different from the Canon 5D Mark III; and some of the Sony cameras went a completely different way. The Sony pictures were magenta; the Canon pictures were more green, or very much more green.

The ALEXA is relatively forgiving, the RED is forgiving to some extent, but many of the other cameras that people actually use every day, like Sony and Panasonic and many others, the whole gamut, also the photo cameras that can take videos, that’s wonderful, but shouldn’t we be able to make it match? That’s why the trickiest task is to match reference light on human skin. In reality, you don’t always have to do that, but if you can master that one, then you know I have got a reliable colour for skin tone, and we do those tests with Scandinavian skin, with Mexican skin – that’s Fernanda ...

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Ed: That’s her job is it – Miss Skin Tone?

Dedo: No, she’s not allowed to enter the office without bringing her skin. And then there is Ben from Ethiopia, who looks like milk coffee, and Sebastiao from Angola, who looks black as the middle of the night. Because every experienced cameraman knows that lights and sensors, and cameras and film emulsions react differently. You shoot something in Africa, and the different textures and reflections from human skin show different colourisations.

Ed: But my question has to be, how do you do it? I understand that you have a range of LEDs in there and you dial up the colour temperature by adjusting the output to the different bands of LED, but ...

Dedo: There is something very basic and old-fashioned. It is called the Planck Curve or the Black Body Curve, and you start with a dark red glow and then, as it gets hotter and hotter, until you hit 2927 centigrade, which people call 3200 Kelvin. That’s our reference. In reality, it only exists in the books. And then, you go higher up in temperature and add more blue, until you come to 5600K. That is the Planck Curve. In the other axis there is green, and in the opposite direction there is magenta.

Both are killer colours and if somebody says “my LED light is superior because you can dial in more green or less green”, it can turn into a disaster. So I don’t believe in green light, I don’t believe in magenta light, I believe in clean white light.

Ed: Because if you have that clean white light, then you can add things to it that you want to but, as you say, you can’t add it later, you can’t add it in post?

Dedo: With our bicolour lights I want to “ride” the Planck Curve, where we go from 6500K down to 2700K, but then, the curve is a curve, and if the reference points are at the very ends, we may be further into the magenta towards the centre between our two reference points.

Therefore, if we choose the reference points closer to each other, there will be less deviation in the centre. This deviation is something that we have to remember, should remember, it is important – it is called Delta UV. That is the deviation from the Planck Curve, and in my mind going a teeny touch magenta is bearable, going green is forbidden, at least in the sense of light on skin.

Ed: So you do this by just choosing your LEDs well?

Dedo: It took 8 years to find a common language with LED manufacturers, because our most difficult task was to try and combine LED light sources with our high-class optics.

To build LED panel lights is relatively easy, but when you have the task to combine it with high-class optics, you find completely new aspects and problems. For example, when the light travels through the phosphor layer, it will have a shorter way in the centre than toward the edge, and different colours will result. Like the rainbow colours you see on a rain puddle in the woods, quarter Lambda, quarter wave length difference in the light paths. That was just one of the many obstacles that we had in combining high-class optics for perfect colour distribution, light distribution. So it is not just taking our highly developed optics and replanting an LED instead of the halogen lamp or the HMI. It was a hellish task and the way LED manufacturers measure was totally useless for us. They measure in this Ulbricht Sphere, which is a white bowl, and Page 19

everything, every ray of light gets bounced around and only then measured.

For optics, the results are totally meaningless.

Ed: I understand how this works with your DLEDs, where you have got a single LED light source and you have got the option to have a nicely ground glass lens or lens combination, but when you have got a panel light, you can’t do that?

Dedo: With our focusing lights, there are no single LEDs – there are mini-chips called dies, and we have arranged these in a chequerboard pattern, daylight tungsten, daylight tungsten, next row is then tungsten daylight, tungsten daylight, and then we have to see that these patterns never show up in the resulting projected light. For this, we put a micro-lens structure on the non-spherical lens, which helps to mix the rays within the beam, but still leaves a clean beam, and that is a hellish task because we have as a religion the “clean beam concept”: within the beam, everything is perfectly smooth, even identical homogenous, same colour. Outside the beam, nothing.

Ed: So in a poorly constructed single light, you would get colour variation across?

Dedo: And all kinds of other effects, yes. But the main thing is how big is your Delta UV? It used to be binning ...

Ed: Yes, we have talked about binning and choosing bins.

Dedo: And now we are identifying the Delta UV in plus or minus above or below the Planck Curve, and I have my own tolerances and we are going to closer, closer to wind up as close to the Planck Curve, as close to clean white light. Now the next question of course, generally with LEDs, is LM – lumen maintenance. How much time, how many hours does it take until you lose 20% of the output – that’s called LM80. Not many people put that into their catalogues. But even more difficult is colour maintenance.

We run long-term, continuous tests at full power, which means that the phosphor has to endure maximum heat continuously.

After 10-12,000 hours, our tungsten part of the LED goes down about 100 Kelvin, our daylight LED goes up about 150 Kelvin. This means we still remain perfectly on the Planck Curve – we do not add any green or magenta, and that’s the key for me, because many LEDs, as they age, turn more green or magenta.

We remain right on the Planck Curve and, for the bicolour light, the changes only mean that if we start from 2500K all the way up to 6500K, with age we simply increase the range of adjustment.

Ed: But still the Delta UV is minimal?

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Dedo: I can still adjust any colour temperature in between and just opening the door wider within which I can adjust. The key issue is: no green, no magenta.

Ed: Okay, so this is choosing the right LEDs, putting the right phosphor on and constructing it well, but we still come to the optics, so how do you manage the optics for a panel?

Dedo: In the panel light, we have LED pairs daylight tungsten, daylight tungsten pairs and each pair has its own lens. So we have pictures for that ... and that allows for very high light output rather than just putting a milky diffuser over it. But then you need to make it as homogenous as possible, that’s why the Ledrama lights work with 2300 LED pairs.

Ed: Now these are not individual lenses, are they. It is a formed panel that has the bumps of the lenses in it and you align that perfectly with the LEDs? Dedo: Yes. The sheer light output from the Ledrama light, over a distance of 5 meters gives us 720 lux, whilst the ARRI Skypanel gives only half of that figure.

But at the same time, the ARRI Skypanel consumes double the power. We use half the power, double the light output for half the power consumption, which of course, for rich people in New Zealand doesn’t really matter, because you have atomic power plants, you may have hydroelectric plants and electricity comes at no cost. But some people like us are very conscientious about power because we live at the wrong end of the Russian pipeline.

Ed: So where is that light being lost?

Dedo: In the diffuser. Honestly, that has to do with the angle of exit. If you have 120 or 160 degree as the exit angle, there is less light going forward in the centre. But if we have a 45 degree exit, that already composes half the answer, combined with the efficiency of the optics and having a bicolour light, and not mixing in any green, blue, red, – just clean colour. If you need the exiting light to be softer, you can add a diffusor. For the Ledrama, we even have an incredible diffusor that provides transmission way over 90%, but at the same time it is not only a diffusor, it is another piece of optics, imprinted into a plastic that spreads the light and makes it eminently effective for lighting large green screen studios. We can give you some pictures of a green screen studio in which we worked in Vienna, which was originally lit with 4 space lights. Now we use 6 Ledrama lights with passive cooling – no fan – no noise.

Ed: Yes, that’s very even – for 6 lights it is incredibly even.

Dedo: On the Ledrama, again we have passive cooling, no fan, no noise.

Ed: So all the black background, that is solid aluminium ...

Dedo: Only the centre part where the electronics are situated, that is ABS plastic and that can be exchanged. You simply push a button and you clip it out.

Another advantage is that we can build these Ledrama lights with IP65, meaning that you can use it in full rain, and as far as I know, that is not possible with similar Kino Flo or ARRI lights. In some studios in New Zealand, it never rains, and if you believe the song “It Never Rains in Southern California”, then still, in some of the poorer countries like ours it does rain a helluva lot and people don’t want to always wrap up the lights and set them up again and wrap them up and set them up again as rain comes and goes. You can continue to shoot in the Page 21

rain, or come back when the rain is over and just leave the lights running. So this is why those Ledrama lights are also used outside the European Parliament where all the cars drive up and people get out and get interviewed. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t.

Just now, we are also installing 40 of such lights outside the NATO headquarters, also in IP65 version.

Ed: I guess in most studio situations, you don’t need fancy lights because you are setting up for a particular sort of scene and you can adjust the cameras to suit the light because it is going to be constant throughout the shoot, but when you are outside and you are having to adjust the light, the colour temperature according to the time of day, then you need that flexibility. But you have that completely ... you can go from dawn to midday, no problem?

Dedo: Yes. But then, often, when you have a lot of light like with the Ledrama, people think it is aggressive, they tune it down to the level of an ARRI Skypanel and they say “oh, that’s a soft light.” So for that, we have diffusers that you can stick in front and we have a softbox, because soft light is a large area in relation to the distance of the subject; and many DOPs still have not understood that. They think soft light is defined by the kind of filter you put on and it is not. It is the area of light emission. Then we have other optics that spread the light that we can put on there, which allows us to have 6 lights for a huge green screen studio and light it perfectly smoothly, with double the lux values over the space lights, and at the same time only one-eighth of the power consumption, if that is an issue. So lower power consumption, higher light output and the ability to spread with optics that have 95% transmission make it perfectly smooth and even.

Ed: Now you have done some very good videos on this I understand, and we are going to put a link here to your site where you can go for yourselves and see what a Ledrama looks like in the real world. Here is a video link that allows you to see some pictures and a video of such installations.

Unfinished Ledrama video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBEMeNgL7OE But since you just mentioned effects, and this is where we have a new kit called Eflect, and you say it is very hard to describe. I have just seen some pictures of it in operation and it seems like a very cool thing for a lighting person to have in his kit?

Dedo: Well, it comes in different applications and different sizes.

Ed: So really, Chris should have one of these on display in his showroom and people should come in?

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Dedo: Not on display. People need to use it and play with it, otherwise they will never understand what it is, because Eflect also comes with a set of filters.

Looking at these filters you say: “those are the most stupid filters I have ever seen”, until you experience what it does. So it is more for the personal creative experience than the name above the title.

Ed: And again, we have got a link to a website where they can see what it does.

Now, anything new with your reflected light products?

Unfinished EFLECT video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTDseX7jrwg Dedo: The dedolight Lightstream reflected light system is based on parallel light; we have built a very effective light fixture for the dedolight Lightstream system, and it has been chosen over a Mole Beam 6K or an ARRI 18K, because for these particular tasks it suits better for reflected light work, and it does that with a mere 1200 Watt.

Ed: I think we saw that last time. It is the way you reflect the light into the studio and light the studio. But in the smaller area, and talking about optics, the DLED10 you say is your new flagship with super power focus. That sounds very American “super power focus” – what does it really mean?

Dedo: Allow me not to answer that directly, let me backtrack a little bit. Our lights, because of the highly developed optics were recognised 2 times by the Oscar Committee. dedolight can focus better than any other light in our profession.

Let me start with the conventional, small Fresnel light, which focuses 1:3. A large Fresnel light will focus 1:6, the smallest dedolight already focuses 1:25.

Furthermore, you can add a non-spherical, wide-angle adapter, and you go to near 90° spread angle; and, on the other end of the spectrum, you can now add our new parallel beam adapter, which presents something like a little miracle and is the gateway to Lightstream work.

To give an example: our 400W HMI light has tremendous focus capacity, far reach, and in its spot position it features an exit angle of 4°. Now you add the new dedolight parallel beam adapter on the front end, and you have a parallel beam with 4°. So what the hell is the difference? At first you had 4°, now again you have 4°. The difference is that now you have more than double the light output, which sounds like a miracle, and we need to explain where that comes from.

Ed: Crystals?

Dedo: No. These are other miracles that may be easy to explain. In the spot position of a traditional light, as well as our double non-spherical light, the light source is at a far distance from the front lens.

Now we put our light in the flood position, where the light source is right up, close to the front lens, and now we add the new parallel beam optics, and we have double the light output and a clean, homogenous parallel beam. And then you can even add a honeycomb to the front of it, to make it look even less obtrusive; and now you have opened the gateway to the Lightstream reflected light systems. No matter whether this is with the big monster, like the PB70 Lightstream light, or our smallest DLED3 puppet-sized light, it works with our new parallel beam adapters like a miracle.

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With some of our new parallel beam optics we even go four times higher than the light output in spot position.

Ed: That’s effective light output, that’s not a light output measured from the light, it is measured at the object?

Dedo: Yes. Ed: So it’s one thing to measure the light output on the light, but it is actually measuring it on the ...

Dedo: Even for seasoned DOPs not an easy subject. Light is invisible, we only see the reflection of light. Many of the young DOPs don’t ever use light meters anymore, and that’s understandable, but everybody comes and merely asks “how many Watt?” Yes, all of us don’t know any better to define the amount of light.

Ed: And the square law?

Dedo: Again, not easy. In one way, reflecting light has never been a secret, never a patent. But now, the use of reflected light has to be seen in a very differentiated way, we have to think of a mirror-like reflector, but in reality you can’t use a mirror, because it will give you a spotty light.

So we use our No.1 reflector which gives a clean redirection of the parallel beam. But then, more tricky to understand is that the light source is not anymore situated in the light fixture, but way behind the light fixture, when you are using a parallel beam light. Imagine that you have to elongate the outer rays of a 2° exit, and where they meet, way back of the light fixture, that is where your light comes from, at an incredible distance. Three or four times further back, than the distance may be from the light fixture to your object, or to the reflector. Then, imagine you are outside a building, you place the light fixture on the street, and you have the actual light source three floors down below the parking lot, turn the parallel beam into a hard reflector, to redirect the light, let’s say at a 45° angle, and now your active, working light source is way up in the sky, simulating natural light, coming from a far distance. When you direct that with the reflector to the building ...

Ed: Yes, we saw that last year...

Dedo: Then, because of the incredible distance of the working light source, you are easily cheating the square law. Now, your talent / people can move with no noticeable change of intensity.

But then, when you use the other reflectors which have a wider spread angle, you lose that character and that advantage, and then you differentiate and you mix for all the different lighting effects that you can achieve.

Ed: As you are saying, this is not just in your large product, you are bringing this now into smaller lights so that ...

Dedo: The new parallel beam optics that we have calculated and are building is something that nobody else has ever done the same way, and it works very well with our optics. There are different levels like dedolight Lightstream in drama production, but it also has tremendous advantages in TV studios, and even for the smallest team.

Ed: Yes, but it is now bringing this capability to a lighting operator who can set up, as we are seeing on the TV in a studio in a studio situation and provide Page 24

lighting that is quite different. Ultraviolet green screen or lighting a fluorescent responsive green screen with ultraviolet light – this is something very new?

Dedo: Yes, it is very new and you can use it with a single-person team, for example, a green screen 1.5 m high, 2.5 m wide, which can be lit with our 40W ultraviolet light, dimmed down to a mere 30%, and we have dimmed it down even further. Now, you can even have a green-coloured shirt, and it doesn’t put a hole into the person.

Ed: So your talent doesn’t have to dress carefully.

Dedo: And you can take a transparent glass, and it also works without any expensive software. Just normal keying software, the cheapest one, because of the function of the fluorescent dye in the green, and a defined wavelength of ultraviolet that cooperates with that fluorescent dye. Now you put the UV light behind the person at a very short distance. Often, when the green background is close to the person, you get all kinds of detrimental effects. Here you don’t, and that lets you shoot in the smallest space and you get an absolutely clean green key, and if there is any problem, you just turn down the ultraviolet, and you don’t have disturbing effects anymore. But the green is still active.

Ed: So this would be ideal for a little studio that’s like doing streaming – a streaming service?

Dedo: It is also ideal for the big studio.

Ed: Well, how big can you go?

Dedo: As big as you want, you just need to buy more of the green material.

Ed: And the UV light, that’s not a problem?

Dedo: We are now lighting about 4 square meters with a 40 Watt UV light, dimmed down to 30%. If we were to take 10 of these light fixtures and run them at full power, we would already be lighting a major green screen studio.

Temporary Greenscreen UV kit video (still testing): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64D-IQVCOhM Ed: Oh, there is a video, excellent. Yes, there is a very good little video that we will try and provide you a link to if we can, to show you how this works. It is very special.

Unfinished River-of-Light backlighting video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64D-IQVCOhM NZVN

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Triad-Orbit We’re here at Triad-Orbit for Oceania Sales and telling us about the new products we have Steve Danielson.

Ed: Steve, you’re holding in your hand a very smart looking clamp. Now this was made in response to what … what were some of the issues with the previous clamp?

Steve: Well the smaller clamp was called the IO-C which was great for iPad holders and for smaller arms, but it didn’t have the capacity that people were looking for and it didn’t have the ability.

The biggest thing was that people wanted something that would go over a light truss.

Ed: Aaah ... so the jaws open a lot further?

Steve: Yes, and this is something that was not developed by Triad-Orbit; this is a co-branding with 9.Solutions. So basically, we are sharing our IP. So the IP for 9.Solutions is the clamp; Steve from Triad-Orbit. everything here is their Saviour clamp and we looked and we approached them and we decided that …

Ed: Rather than reinvent the wheel?

Steve: We’re going to join IPs together – our patented IP is the IO receiver; theirs is this clamp. So we discussed it and said “let’s not reinvent the wheel, let’s go ahead and co-brand on this one.” So we have the Triad-Orbit and 9.Solutions on this clamp for that purpose. What we have is the nice articulating jaw, so you can get to something square like plywood or you can still get around a lighting truss – when you close it together, they have a great capacity on their clamp to go over multiple fixtures. You have a really small stud, you have a larger – you can open it up wider. It’s a really nice clamp which holds very well.

At the NAMM show, we put this over a lighting truss and we put a monitor on there, so we had about 40 pounds worth of weight coming straight out to our OA joint and then to our VESA mount for the monitor. Held like a rock; when you try to put down pressure on this, it does not slide. They rate theirs as 66 pounds, so that’s a lot more load, you’re not going to put 66 pounds on an IO-C. But then again you don’t want to put that clamp for an iPad holder.

Ed: Yes, that’s an overkill. But you’re still going to keep the IO-C for most applications?

Steve: Absolutely, there is nothing wrong with the IO-C, it works perfectly for the smaller joints, but we wanted something that you could put something really rock solid and very heavy on.

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Ed: And is this item also a co-production?

Steve: Yes, this is part of their Saviour clamp as well. On this part, through Triad-Orbit, we’re calling it the IO for the input output, that’s our patented device here – IOSC which is spring clamp. On this one, this is going to be the IOGC which is the IO grip clamp. This one looks like a jumper cable for a car, but it is a very easy and quick way to add something on the field wherever you need it, without having to spend the time to go ahead and walk that thing down.

Now it’s not going to have the same load capacity but it has some equal and some pretty different uses that we found. If you come over the top of our O2, it makes a perfect camera holder, so now on this you can come off with lights and have the camera come out this way and it’s a quick way to put it on. So in the field, you’re not locking down a clamp or anything and this is actually a very solid device for your camera shoots.

Ed: I would imagine that the other benefit is that, if you clamp that on a vertical pole, it’s not going to fall off; it’s just going to slide down the pole if the weight is too much?

Steve: Yes. But if you have a heavier load, one of the things that you’re going to see is the thickness difference. So the spring clamp is grabbing more surface, so longitudinally, you’re not going to see a shift as quickly as you would with this. This is for quick in the field … actually I’ve seen these used on 9.Solutions.

They use these a lot with Go Pros and I’ve seen it used a lot for golfers. Golfers will just add a ring inch, will put it on anything they find, get their little Go Pro set up, do their golf swing. It’s an interesting concept, I never really thought of it, but you saw that on the 9.Solutions website.

Ed: And you can also use the GC to improve your hand strength?

Steve: Absolutely. This is a tough one, have you tried this?

Ed: I’ll try it later.

Steve: In the future – we’re not showing it now, but there will be another cobranding, a third one which will be what we’re calling IO-Flex. It’s a goose neck and that’s one we’re working on now, it’s just in the final stages of development.

So that’ll probably be a later in the fall release.

Ed: I can’t think whether I’ve seen the mesh before that you’ve got around. Is that something new too?

Steve: No, I think this came out maybe summer or spring of last year …

Ed: Cable control … aaah okay.

Steve: This is just a really quick and beautiful way to dress our cables. It doesn’t lose its shape; it just goes over the stand. We Page 28

http://www.triad-orbit.com/new-products

have 3 different sizes, they come in a pack in each size so you can get a couple of each and have it for the different tiers. Each one of our tiers on our stand – if you have a T3 you have 3 different sizes for tubes; arms are going to be different, so we have different lengths and it’s a very quick and reliable way to do it. Anyone who has ever had a microphone stand and tried to do the plastic clips which would break half the time – those were just terrible, so that’s a very nice way to dress things.

Ed: But the tallest item in the show?

Steve: Yes, and I will allow Ryan to do this one, because this is his baby.

We’re now going to talk with Ryan Kallas who has got the big job with this very nifty boom.

Ed: Now it’s not a boom in the ordinary sense, this is a counterbalanced boom and I imagine you could hang quite a weight on this?

Ryan: Yes, it’s pretty much unlimited because of the locking mechanism we put on here. There’s an historic fact with this stand. The first Starbird was Ryan with the new, improved Starbird. built by George Starbird in the 1940s and the 50s; then EveAnna Manley of Manley Microphones bought the tooling and delivered the Starbird until the early 90s. No one’s ever built a stand quite this large again. There was Atlas SB-36W and Latch Lake has come out with a fairly tall stand. We talked to EveAnna Manley about re-releasing the stand and she said “do you want the toolings?” “No, we’re going to make it new.”

She was kind enough to licence us the name so it’s already got an iconic brand.

Now ground up, this is what I did to make it Triad-Orbit and better. The leg length is exactly the same as it was, but these legs actually tuck underneath this base completely. So you can use it at the size of an SB-36 …

Ed: Or smaller?

Ryan: Yes, smaller exactly. So that’s very functional.

Ed: Depending on what you’ve got hanging on the end of the boom?

Ryan: You wouldn’t want to use it fully extended at that. The other thing we did is to change the counterweight – there used to be a screw on the side and it was fairly permanent. We put this bike seat lock system on there and it completely floats allowing you to put your balance weight closer to the centre of the stand. Also, the back of this counterweight comes off and you can put custom shot bags inside of it for more weight and so that’s part of it.

Page 30

Ed: But you can also move the point of pivot can’t you by the look of it?

Ryan: Exactly, so with this one, you’re moving the point of pivot and that allows you now to move the counterweight farther back so that your centre of gravity is in a better place. Now back to the weight holding … the original Starbird was built much the same way, but it would slip at times and it would wear out over time. We put a spring lock system on it – this is a spring pin, but if I pull this halfway out, I’ve got the pull swivel; but if I turn it another half and let it drop in, it locks into one of 13 hole positions. And then you squeeze the swivel – there’s nothing going to make this come down.

Ed: I imagine that could be problematic for somebody who doesn’t understand basic physics, because you could lock it in a position and not have enough counterweight and the whole thing could tip over?

Ryan: Well that we can engineer around …

Ed: But you can’t engineer for gaffers?

Ryan: Exactly. The targets for this boom are really professionals and they know what it is. It’s an orchestral large format boom. What makes it TriadOrbit are its IO quick in, quick release at the end and it comes with an OA ball joint. So that’s the microphone swivel. The old one used to be an old XY just swivel. So that’s an upgrade – and now the coolest upgrade is this is pretty heavy to lift once you have it loaded. We put pneumatic shafts on the inside and it rises itself.

Ed: Aaah but you have to pull it down first?

Ryan: Yes, it’s real easy. But if someone makes a mistake and says “oh I forgot, it just goes up”.

Ed: That was at least 10 minutes that it held its air pressure so that’s very good.

Ryan: Yes I know. These are truck pneumatic shafts so they’re tested to 10,000 times. It’s not a product that we make, we just put it in there.

Ed: Okay, I guess you can fit anything on the end there, as you say, a camera, a light and quite a heavy light I imagine?

Ryan: Well again, we just can’t engineer around insanity but yes, the boom won’t fall, but the whole stand may fall over if someone tries to get crazy.

Sensible people who use this product are also putting sandbags on the base but this base is already around 6kg heavier than the original.

The wheels are really smooth, they’re locking wheels which the old ones didn’t have.

So it really stays in place. Now all of these parts retrofit backwards to fit Starbirds that have been in the field for 40 years, so you can repair the Starbirds in your It has a l-o-n-g reach. studio.

Page 31

Ed: That is being very nice to your customers and, well, to Starbird’s customers from way back?

Ryan: Yes, but smart enough we put our icon on every part!

Ed: Okay and now another point that I hadn’t thought about with the locking position is that it actually means that the position that the boom goes to is repeatable?

Ryan: Yes exactly.

You Solid and precise construction. can recall a position exactly the same way.

Ed: So rather than use it as a balancing tool to stop the thing tipping over, you’re actually more sensible to use it as a repositioning tool?

Ryan:

Correct.

I just have to add at this point that we’ve gone through a number of tests of angles and trying to make it tip, because, as an ex-physics teacher, I’m very interested in the fulcrum point and the stability of this, and I’m pretty confident that you’d have to be really stupid to get this wrong. It’s a very solid secure device that I can see having many applications. Go and see Nigel at Oceania Sales and get one yourself.

Ed: What were the uses that the original Starbird was put to that you can see the new development being used for too?

Ryan: Well the originals were basically the only real large format stand in RCA, in Capitol. If you start looking at old images, you’ll see a Starbird in almost every one because there was usually an RCA 44, which was a large format ribbon mic and they didn’t have many stands to hold these, so that’s where this started. Now in pretty much any sound stage for film, Starbirds are there and they’ve been there for 30-40 years and they’re breaking down. That’s why we also made the parts retrofit backwards to fix those Starbirds. But the fact that it’s improved so much, our engineers at Warner Bros and at Fox – I mean Fox bought 6 as soon as they saw it. So it’s a necessary stand in that field. Now in large rooms where you can do large drums and you can also back away, let’s say you’re doing a lot of video as well, you can get the mics above and keep the stage clean. So that’s another good function; and in lighting of course …

Ed: Once people see it and have a play with it, they’ll understand how they can NZVN use it and it’s going to be part of everyone’s kit. It’s a great product.

To find out more about Triad-Orbit contact Oceania Audio Sales Limited.

Phone (09) 845 7800 Email nigel@oceania-audio.co.nz Or visit their website: www.oceania-audio-sales.com Page 32

Sanken We’re at the Sanken booth for Sound Techniques with Stephen Buckland.

Ed: And what are we looking at here Stephen?

Stephen: We are looking at the CSM1 which someone apparently decided, should stand for “cute small microphone’ and it’s designed to go on cameras or in areas Peter Hannigan from Sanken with the CS-M1. where there isn’t much headroom on a boom, small rooms and stuff. It’s amazing – even I was impressed yesterday that, for such a small object ( which you’ll see in the photo I hope ), how directional it is and how much rear ejection the microphone holds.

You have to really listen to it to appreciate that, or take my word for it.

Ed: Well you’re going to have one in stock aren’t you?

Stephen: Yes, I should imagine we’d have one in stock at any one time.

Ed: And I can see immediately, having the cord coming out from the side rather than the back makes a big difference?

Stephen: That’s actually the connector.

Ed: Oh well alright, I’m not a soundie. So the one who knows what he’s talking about is Peter Hannigan from Sanken, and Peter, this is quite a small thing you’re holding in your hand, but very powerful I understand?

Peter: Yes sir, only 4 inches here, 2 ounces so when you’ve got it on a boom pole like this – I was booming yesterday, I had a coffee in one hand and boom in the other hand. What’s great about this is, even for how short it is, it still has a pretty long throw to it. It’s a little forgiving once on top of the camera, but it still sounds really great as all Sanken microphones do and they’ve found a way to pack all these electronics just in this one inch section right here and to make that sound just as quality … like the CS-1 is a very similar mic but that’s 7 inches long and they’ve got this down to 4 inches and it sounds just as great as the CS-1.

Ed: Is that a ratio, so for example, if your electronics were in 2 inches, you’d need 8 inches to get the same effect, or is that not relevant?

Peter: Well it doesn’t necessarily correlate like that, but if you look at these … well there’s no camera here, but if you look at these other shotguns, there’s about the same length of this entire shotgun of just electronics, yes. So for them to be able to pack that into just this tiny little space is quite a feat.

Ed: But it doesn’t make the other microphones redundant surely?

Page 33

Peter: No, surely not.

Because with such a small barrel here, it’s not going to have quite as much throw, but it does, for how short it is, get a pretty good reach to it, which is fantastic. It’s small enough to put in your pocket on a stick, so it’s not going to take up much space in your case or rig, or anything like that.

Ed: Now for the uninitiated, I think here’s a very good example.

You’ve got a range of microphones in 2 diameters – what’s the difference, why are there Stephen and Luke at Sound Techniques. different diameters?

Click here and Stephen will tell you more.

Peter: There’s no specific reason for that. We just have a wide variety. These are stereo which is why they’re a little wider and the one at the end is actually a 5 channel surround mic which is why that one’s quite a bit wider there. But as far as the normal standard shotguns, these are all about the same diameter.

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It can be camera mounted to be kept out of shot on even a wide angle lens, On a boom it’ll fit into the smallest of places yet still provide the quality demanded by today’s professionals All at an affordable price.

Unique Sanken lightweight design Shotgun directivity Clear sound Short (103mm) and light (55g) Ideal for boom pole on drama and film shoots Ideal for mounting on cameras with wide angle lens Suitable for ENG applications Standard 19 mm diameter Advanced RFI rejection Wide 70Hz – 20kHz frequency response

To order, or for more information...

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Page 34

Ed: And I see a variety of mounts here – is this something that you guys produce or you’re just showing other manufacturers’ mounts?

Peter: We work with the likes of Rycote and K-Tek and they design mounts for these specific mics, so they have universal ones and then we’ll sell them at a certain price point for each mic.

Ed: What is it about the Sanken microphone range that makes them good products for you to offer to your customers Stephen?

Stephen: They’re very reliable, they have excellent fidelity, they go to a lot of effort to make sure that the microphone is picking up what it’s pointed at and not what’s around. This new model is particularly interesting because if you look at the images around you’ll see that it will fit very conveniently on a camera, whereas the microphones we’ve sold to date for use on-camera have often been so long that they end up being in the edge of frame in a wide angle lens.

Ed: I guess this is particularly important with that DSLR style of camera where you do need it short because you’ve got a very short distance between the mount and the front of the lens?

Stephen: Correct, but they also cover the other use which is in a room with a low ceiling and a person with a boom – it’s very hard, you need a short microphone, but you also want it to be quite directional, and you want it to be light and easy to move because you might be covering several people. But also Sanken gets a lot of its business for designing microphones specifically for NHK, the public corporation broadcaster in Japan and so that in itself, the relationship that they have means that they’re developing product for broadcast and application.

Ed: And it has a flow on effect to anyone else who wants to use it?

Stephen: That’s correct, yes.

Ed: NHK is a pretty good testing site?

NZVN Stephen: Yes. To find out more about Sanken product, contact Sound Techniques.

Ph (09) 366 1750 Email: info@soundtq.co.nz Or visit their website: www.soundtq.co.nz Page 35

cmotion We’re at cmotion with Dennis Boehm, product manager.

Ed: Now this is something totally new to us so I’m just going to let Dennis tell us what cmotion’s all about.

Dennis: cmotion is a manufacturer for lens control systems and focus assist tools. We have different setups that we do, for different applications and price ranges also. So one setup is the cvolution lens control system which offers also a laser rangefinder.

In general, it all works the same – we have a camin – a motor box which talks to motors, in this case we use the LBUS protocol and this talks to like the cforce, cforce mini or cforce plus motors. So the motor box controls the motors and you can have a hand unit with a wireless system where it can control focus, iris and zoom.

Ed: And the laser’s there for focus?

Dennis: The laser can be used for focus, just for distance information, so to get a readout on the hand unit, we have like the cdistance which is a super bright display where you can see the distance in even bright sun, and this is just a reference on the hand unit or on the camera itself. Or you can also turn into autofocus so it’s just transferring the distance that it measures right to the motor and adjusts the focus.

Ed: But how many DOPs like autofocus?

Dennis: No, most of the time, it’s used as a reference so you can pull for feature films, TV and other stuff, and sometimes it’s used in autofocus as well just to hit something, or to keep the image in focus while the set is lit or fine tuned, so the 1.AC can take a short break and relax before the next take.

Ed: However, maybe the DOPs should get used to autofocus because the technology level now means that you should be able to trust the technology more than you can trust your eye looking into a monitor?

Page 36

Dennis: Yes yes. The measuring is precise, it goes up to 150 metre …

Ed: And within what range – so what’s your percentage error?

Dennis: Plus or minus 5.

Ed: 5% or centimetre?

Dennis: 5 centimetre.

Ed: Up to 150 metre?

Dennis: That is really, really precise. The range is all the way through, the close distance matters more than the far distance, but it’s all the way through.

Ed: Wow. Now I see you’ve fitted this to an ARRI and I’m pretty sure ARRI have got their own control system?

Dennis: They have the WCU-4 yes. We were co-developing some gear with ARRI, so the cforce motor for example, is a co-development with ARRI. They have their own hand unit, having like a white RF signal that they’re using. The cvolution which is our prime product, is talking to the ARRI cameras directly as well, so it’s using the same protocol and same RF. Ed: But your one’s better than the ARRI one?

Dennis: Oh no, theirs is just different, there are different people who use it.

Ours is modular, the ARRI one, WCU-4 is not, so it’s a full 3-axis system, but there is no better or …

Ed: They’re a good customer of yours?

Dennis: Yes. Ed: And then?

Dennis: So then we have a new lens control system, it’s called the cPRO system. cPRO is in a different target market, different price range; it’s also a non-modular 3-axis system. The new thing on this one is that you can either talk to a motor box which we really got very, very tiny and small; with this, you can daisy chain 3 more motors – so cforce, cforce mini, cforce plus motors or, on like an EF lens for example, this is the smallest setup that you have. Now you are turning the internal motors of an EF lens, so really you just need that super tiny motor box, extremely lightweight setup.

On the other hand, if you’re on the cine style lens, you can use the motor box built into a motor. So here we’ve built the motor box right into the motor, so you’re talking to the first motor and daisy chain 2 more motors from there.

For the hand unit itself, we followed an ergonomic design, so we tried to open an angle for the hand so you can hold the wrist straight and don’t have to crank it all the time. We have a very ergonomic knob, pre-marked focus rings and iris strips, illuminated axis for focus iris and a zoom indicator as well as a touch Page 37

sensitive display with lens data on there. It’s a touch display so you can navigate through the menu, but as an alternative, if you’re wearing gloves for example, you have the thumb wheel so you can navigate with the thumb wheel through all menus and use also the buttons so you don’t have to use the touch at all if you don’t want to.

Ed: And the accuracy of this unit – also 5 centimetre?

Dennis: This is not on autofocus at the moment, but of course you can use it with the cmotion cfinder III as well.

Ed: But you’ve got a graduated scale there – is that for distance?

Dennis: This is lens mapping, so here you can add the cfinder III because our system works with the LBUS protocol – you just need to plug it in and then it daisy chains to all devices that we have. This is a protocol that we use and you can plug it anywhere in the chain and the data is transferred to all devices and, at the end, it comes to the hand unit.

Ed: Are there particular lenses that you need to use with this?

Dennis: No, it works on any geared lens, so you just calibrate the whole system, it moves from one end-stop to the other, so it knows to spread the range of each axis. Once it’s finished, you teach the lens – say for each mark, you dial in a specific value and teach the lens and at the end, you have a lens file that looks like this and it just maps the lens one by one.

Ed: And you can save those lens files?

Dennis: Exactly. You can save those lens files, you can create the lens files on the hand unit, you can save those lens files on the hand unit or download via USB. There is a huge lens database from ARRI, for example, that you can use, so there are various options to just get lens settings if you don’t want to create them yourself. And for the system updates, you use USB as well.

We have user buttons, illuminated ones – if you want to, you can Page 38

dim everything, you can turn it on and off however you want, and it’s in total 6 user buttons that you can assign to any function, so now I have like the calibrate, the whole system is just one press and it does the whole job itself.

Ed: Every home should have one?

Dennis: To control their TV. The new lens motor is something between the cforce plus and the cforce mini, but with an improved gearing so it became really fast. It’s the same torque like the Heden M21VE. Ed: I see some of them have got the ARRI brand on and some have got cmotion brand on?

Dennis: Yes, that’s because we’re co-developing equipment with ARRI and sharing resources in this field, so in general, it is the same mechanics that we have with ARRI. It’s a different RF module and ours is the cmotion red RF module and ARRI sells their model with a white RF module and also software is different, but in general the mechanics and everything is exactly the same.

Ed: Now we’ve just seen the addition of a monitor on the little hand controller, so what’s special about the positioning of the monitor?

Dennis: We wanted to try to balance the monitor; so in general we can´t take off the weight, but we tried to keep the centre of gravity as low as possible and make it also ergonomic in balance at least. I think it worked out really well, it kind of feels like a glove so it’s nice.

Ed: Well that’s my hand in the picture and yes it was very comfortable to hold and well balanced.

Now, a special product?

Dennis: Yes, here we have a new product which is called ctereo – it’s like a creative auto focus assist, so you can use it in various ways. In general, it measures 250,000 points at the same time, but gives you a readout of just selected areas of points and you can use it in total different ways.

In general, you can have it so that it just measures the closest distance to the camera. Within this field here, you will always see everything in focus which is closest to the camera and when I remove it, you see on the monitor up there, I’m in focus or my hand is in focus.

It just measures within that Verana showing the remote operation. field.

Page 39

Here you see where it’s reading at the moment …

Ed: And ignores anything outside?

Dennis: It ignores anything else yes. You can readjust it, fine-tune it wherever you want and now everything behind there will be in focus, because it’s just not in that field at the moment.

Another setup is just a single setup so I can just pinpoint with my finger on the touchscreen and everything where I’m pointing at will be in focus. Here I’m not in the picture anymore.

It measures by a stereoscopic system, so it calculates the parallax between 2 cameras and calculates the distance of the spaces. Also, it has a wider view than most of the lenses, so it can detect objects before they even show up on screen, so they’re in focus from the beginning to the end.

Ed: Which would be perfect for a tracking shot that came offset and on?

Dennis: Exactly. So it’s always in focus; you can also integrate it – that’s why I’m saying it is a creative autofocus assist, because you can really integrate it with a hand unit and have it half manual, half automatic, or you can have it fully automatic or do just a manual thing and have a readout. Selective readout within the picture on several kind of screens just like this. Just imagine multiple of those, so we have selective readout just as a reference – however you want it. This is totally open, you can assign it to your needs. Another thing is tracking. You can auto-track stuff so now wherever I’m moving it’s going to be in focus. It’s just now tracking my face for example.

Ed: Wow. Dennis: And you can have multiple trackers so you can add 2 or 3 trackers; you can move from one tracker to the other and switch. You can just autoswitch or you can do this with the hand unit and you can do the transition really smooth, really nice and adjust almost everything that you need.

Ed: So in a scene where you’ve got 2 people at different distances, you can just press a button and go backwards and forwards between the 2?

Dennis: Yes. You can add ramps so it does it automatically or you can just do it with the hand unit, so it just moves from A to B within that time, as fast as you want, how you want, but it always hits the focus perfectly.

Ed: And this is the ctereo with a “c” instead of an “s”?

Dennis: Yes because everything is a cmotion product so we’ve started with a “c”.

NZVN Ed: crazy.

To find out more about cmotion, contact Imagezone.

Phone (09) 476 3466 Email: info@imagezone.co.nz Or visit their website: www.imagezone.co.nz Page 40

Lasergraphics For Gencom, we are at Lasergraphics looking at the Director 10K Motion Picture Film Scanning System with David Barnard.

Ed: David, you’ve got the floor …

David: Right, so at Nevion, we were talking about the highest of high tech, which is compressed IP video linking.

Now we’re looking in the opposite direction and we’re looking backwards at film scanners.

The scanners themselves are not backwards, the film obviously is not used as much as it used to be, but the reality is that there are massive libraries of film content still out there and, every year that it sits on the shelf, it’s losing value and not being used to the best value that’s there. I’ve always been very partial to film and very vocal about how film needs to get migrated to digital formats and preserved for future use.

Ed: Especially that nitrate stock?

David: That’s exactly right, if any-body’s still got stuff on nitrate you really have a problem and you need to get that taken care of fast before it goes up in smoke – literally.

Ed: We’ve all seen Inglourious Basterds and know what it can do.

David: Yes, that’s exactly right.

So we’ve recently started working with Lasergraphics and we’ve had a couple of opportunities that we’ve pursued with them. I thought it was worth stopping by just to remind your readers of the importance of getting their content migrated and actually making sure that they’re able to preserve it and to have it for future use. I’ve been really impressed with Lasergraphics; they’ve got 2 base models of which each has many different options, but the Director 10K is the high end one which lives up to its name. It can scan a 35mm negative at up to 10K resolution, which may be overkill for most of the things that people are doing, but it does give you the ability to get every last bit of detail out of the image. If you did have something in 65mm, then it’s another story. The 10K is an option for this. You can actually get it just in 5K, but this is a very high quality scan. It runs at less than real time because it has a very sensitive sprocketless film path that’s designed for handling any sort of very fragile or warped film, and it’s capturing a massive amount of data for each frame that has to be saved out to disk. It uses a true 3 colour LED – you can actually see it flashing in the different colours there, which means that it doesn’t use a Bayer pattern - where you’re actually getting reduced resolution in the Red and Blue colour channels. With this Lasergraphics technology, you are getting full resolution in all 3 colours.

Page 41

Ed: I would say the 10K would be valuable – depending on the frame size or the frame shape of the 35mm you could crop it and still get high resolution?

David: Yes you can crop it, and in fact some of our Archive customers prefer to scan the whole film, sprocket holes and all.

They treat it as a physical document, and want to preserve every detail. Now you only get so much resolution out of the film because, ultimately, your limiting factor is the grain structure of the film itself. There are those who would say that grain structure of 35mm film is equivalent to about a 4K digital image. I actually happen to disagree with that because, with the 4K image, you’re losing your colour resolution, and with many scanners you’re getting down to the noise of the sensor. If you’re over-scanning at double the resolution of the film itself, then you’re getting away from that noise and you’re capturing all the information that’s in there. The other thing is that film grain is not regular; whereas with digital, you’ve got a regular rectangular grid, with film you’ve got a randomised selection of particles, so some grains may be a bit bigger, some grains may be a bit smaller. Again, if you’ve got the higher resolution, you can capture all of that detail and then you can down-sample in the cleanest way possible, which gives you the best image at the end of the day.

Ed: But who do you see buying something like this?

David: The Director is definitely their high end scanner and that would be suited to an archive or a postproduction company that was working with old footage or even if they’ve still got new content that’s been shot on film. There are some big-name movies being shot on film, there are some directors who will only work on film. The last Star Wars movie was shot on film because Rian Johnson wanted to capture some of the look of the original trilogy.

For the broader market, for people who may not have the budget for a full Director 10K, there is the ScanStation. In this case, they’ve got 65mm up here which is pretty cool, but the ScanStation is a high speed scanner; it does have a CMOS sensor, it doesn’t have the 3 light process that the Director has, but it can scan at greater than real time.

The exact speed is limited by the scan resolution, the frame size – a number of factors.

Ed: So can one machine do different film sizes?

David: Yes. In the middle, you’ve got a film gate that can come out and you can replace that whole thing with one that’s designed for a different gauge of film. You could get it with an 8mm, a 16mm and a 35mm gauge. In this case, they’ve also got the 65mm which I believe is new for this show. If all you’re going to do is scan 16mm, all you have to do is buy the 16mm gate. You don’t Page 42

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need everything else. What I really like about this one, aside from the fact that you can scan at high speed, it still has the sprocketless film path, it still is very gentle on the film and you can see there’s magnetic audio on here; it does have a magnetic audio reader which doesn’t work on the Director because it runs slower than real time. Like the Director, it’s got what they call “broken splice detection”. Often, if you’re scanning a reel of film and there’s a splice there in the middle of it and the glue’s started to deteriorate because it’s so old, it breaks. So you have to stop in the middle of your reel, fix your splice and you have to go all the way back and start the reel over again. This system actually remembers where it left off and all you have to do is stop, put the splice back on, start it up again and it will go and find where it left off and carry on from there, which again makes it much more efficient for a workflow.

Ed: So this includes all the hardware to store those images?

David: Yes, there’s a Windows workstation that this thing is connected to and it has some tools for doing basic restoration built-in. You can do dust removal, you can correct framing errors, you can do colour correction – there are a lot of tools built into that. Then if you want to do additional restoration work, there are other tools available on the market.

Ed: So is it a proprietary software codec that’s used to make it digital?

David: No they use standard formats. The film will be scanned at fully uncompressed DPX – I think 12 bits per colour channel. The data transfer from the scanner to the workstation is in a proprietary RAW format, but the workstation then converts it to whatever format you need. The standard would be DPX which has a single still image frame per film frame and collects them together in a directory along with metadata about it – and that’s very standard in the film postproduction and the restoration industry.

Ed: So who could afford one of these?

David: It’s remarkably affordable. I wouldn’t want to give specifics, but it is going to be more expensive than something like a Blackmagic Cintel, but it’s also really designed for working with preservation material, not just scanning dailies for newly shot material. So yes, you might be able to get a couple of those for the cost of one of these, but this will be much, much more flexible, versatile, there’s a lot of things that the Cintel scanner can’t do.

Now the film scanner does the scanning and then it makes the datastream and you’ve got to store that somewhere and to tell us about that we have Paul Getchel.

Ed: Now Paul, you’ve sort of gone the Avid way and it’s been specified or suggested very strongly that XStor is the storage medium for Lasergraphics scans.

Paul: For cool people.

Ed: Oh, for cool people, right. So why is it necessary to have specified storage?

Paul: It’s not.

Ed: Okay, but it’s a nice thing because …?

Paul: It’s a nice thing because it’s like seats for your car that come from the factory versus going out and getting some aftermarket ones and you don’t know how well they fit, how well they perform – all that. So the real issue with the storage is that we actually certify the storage for a given number of uncompressed 4K DPX or 2K DPX streams. For instance, if you’re an archive Page 44

facility, they’ll just scan and then they’ll eventually move what they scanned off to long-term storage. There won’t be any postproduction involved, or very little postproduction involved.

Whereas, with a service bureau or a restoration place where you have colour grading, restoration, post processing, whether it’s for some kind of release or streaming or whatever, that requires a lot more because, if you want any appreciable efficient workflow, you’ll have multiple concurrent users accessing the files at the same time. So we have installations where they’re ingesting with a scanner at 4K DPX where each frame of the film is 50 megabytes and you’ve got 24 of those per second, so if you want to view it and edit it in real time, that’s over 10 gigabits of data transfer.

We have one installation, the National Archive of Finland, and they have an amazing operation. The government has thrown tens of millions of dollars at this and we just installed a system where they have a scanner for 4K Paul Getchel from XStor. colour ingest; they have 4 Da Vinci Resolve colour grading stations, they have 3 Phoenix restoration stations and then they have a bevy of other access to the storage. And we can run all of them concurrently at 4K DPX so there’s no slowdown in their workflow, and anyone who accesses the storage experiences no issues whatsoever, there’s no stuttering, there’s no slow framerate, there’s none of that … everyone can operate at the full real time framerate.

Ed: And once you’ve got what you want on the XStor, then you’ve consolidated it and you can take it off to deep archive?

Paul: Yes. Most people without XStor are forced into a workflow where you’ll ingest to the storage and then they’ll have to transfer what they just ingested to a local workstation to work on it, and then transfer it back … that’s actually the way most places do it and it’s incredibly inefficient.

We make it so everyone can work from the one central management storage and most applications are smart, so like Resolve – you can actually work on the same files at the same time in Resolve because it’s all metadata based, it doesn’t actually affect the DPX files for instance. So it allows concurrent access to those files without having to do any copying or shuffling, which also gets messy when you’re tracking your assets and that type of thing, because somebody can copy one thing, change it, copy it back, and they just overwrite some change that some other workstation made. You eliminate those risks entirely when you do a consolidated unified storage system that sits in the middle.

Page 45

Ed: It seems like the way to go David?

David: Yes definitely. I was actually distracted because I was looking at a banner which shows a petabyte for $US169,000.

Paul: And that’s a petabyte of VMax which is our second level system which is a higher performance, and a petabyte will give you somewhere in the neighbourhood of 6-8 concurrent 4K or 15-30 concurrent 2K DPX streams that you can work on simultaneously. So with no slow down and no hiccups or anything like that.

David: It might be US dollars, but it’s still pretty impressive for the kind of performance and the capacity that you’re getting from these systems.

Since the time of this interview, Gencom has delivered and installed two Lasergraphics Scanners for the National Archives of Australia, in Sydney. NAA purchased a Scanstation 5K to enable fast throughput at very high quality for the bulk of their material; and the Director 10K to squeeze out the best possible image quality from very challenging sources, at a slower pace. Both scanners were successfully installed at the end of June, and have greatly improved the NAA’s digitisation capability.

NZVN To find out more about Lasergraphics, contact Gencom Technology Ph: (Auck) (09) 913 7500; (Wgtn) (04) 939 7100; Email: info@gencom.com; Or visit their website: www.gencom.com

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Page 46

Blackmagic We’re at Blackmagic and we’re going to talk with Dan May from Blackmagic Design.

Ed: Dan, you’re holding what looks like a very fine DSLR, but I guess it’s more than that?

Dan: Yes, it’s our new pocket cinema camera 4K. We had a really popular pocket cinema camera that we’d sold for years which is a great small form factor HD cinema camera.

This is kind of the intellectual successor to that camera; it’s obviously a bit bigger but it has a lot of similarities to the last camera, using the same MFT style lens, the same 13 stops of dynamic range, recording ProRes as well as RAW format, so a great cinema camera, but we’ve obviously moved to Ultra HD and 4K. We’ve also gone ahead and added a bunch of new hardware features on here that have been asked for, like the ability to take a still photo and be able to store that off Dan with the latest somewhere; being able to have a mini Blackmagic pocket camera.

XLR audio input so we can go ahead and do a phantom powered mic on there; and new features that we’ve never had on cameras like a USBC output so we could just record to a hard drive. So everything before was recorded internally but this will let you go ahead and send that right out, send it as data and record to whether it be a small Flash drive that’s powered over USB, or it could be a large multi-terabyte system that you just want to let this thing record all day to.

Ed: It’s not that the internal recording is limited and that gives you a higher recording level, or is it?

Dan: Certainly it will let you have a much larger capacity should you want to.

Ed: Yes, but not resolution?

Dan: But not necessarily resolution, because we also have our dual recording slots here, so with CFAST cards, we can go ahead and record 60 frames of 4K on there. We also still include the SD card slot in case someone just wants to have some 1080 or some compressed RAW recorded as well, because it’s obviously much more cost-effective than anything else. We’ve basically got 3 options for recording. Now they don’t all record at the same time, it’s one at a time, but it’s nice to be able to have those options and flexibilities for customers to choose from. I did mention that it goes up to 60 frames in Ultra HD now so that does give you some high framerate capabilities.

Ed: And 50 for us in PAL countries?

Page 47

Dan: Yes 50 for PAL countries and it will do the 120-less than for the window to HD mode on there as well. We’ve got this big 5 inch touchscreen that’s very responsive on the back, but a big bright screen which is going to be important for when we’re trying to do focus on Ultra HD; some new things that we’ve done like being able to kinda go to the right vector and then actually move where our focus is going to be around on here. We’ve got this new wheel – we’ve never had a wheel before, so right now I’m just adjusting the exposure a little bit, but if I go and change my ISO now, I can bounce between what my ISOs are. You’ll notice it has a much wider ISO range than any of our cameras had before, so it should certainly be our best low-light camera that we’ve ever had. We’ve got new function buttons that can be programmed, so we have 10 loadable LUTs that you can use your LUTs and if you wanted to pull those up there you can.

Ed: What about focus assist, because something with 4K, you really want to have help with the focus?

Dan: Yes absolutely. We still have our zebras on here as well as our focus peaking where it will do the outline of whatever you got on focus there. And like I said, it’s still very similar to the pocket cinema camera that we had before, but it has a lot of new content – URSA Mini, URSA Mini Pro functionality, it’s all the OS from the URSA Mini Pro in here, so it’s a tremendous camera that we’ve gone ahead and produced. Obviously lots of user feedback that we’ve listened to, coming in at US$1295 and it comes with Da Vinci Resolve 15, so again tremendous Blackmagic value all in a small form factor.

Ed: Yes – and the outputs, the codecs?

Dan: It records to RAW, RAW 3:1 compression, RAW 4:1 compression and then we do several ProRes flavours – ProRes HQ 4.2.2, ProRes LT and ProRes Proxy.

Ed: Okay, so a very easy selection as to the record resolution that you want to pick, all on the setup screen?

Dan: Correct. We want to make this as easy to use as possible – obviously we’re trying to empower more people to come into our industry and use, but also someone who’s a professional and has been working with these tools for a long time, they know all the nomen -clatures, they are very used to it.

It’s funny because now the Blackmagic cameras look like cameras as opposed to when we started when they were our own kind of creation.

Ed: So this is going The new “slim” URSA Broadcast camera in studio configuration. to replace the little Page 48

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cinema camera, but that had a form factor that made it easy to put in your pocket and carry around?

Dan: This is one of the things we actually did struggle with because obviously this is larger than the original pocket camera, but ultimately, we felt it still had that same kind of “it’s easier to get out with this”, because it does have that DSLR look to it, it does have that “am I shooting photo or video” which was one of the great things about that pocket camera, right … you could always make the small camera be bigger, but you can’t make a big camera be smaller. So we did stick with the “pocket” name for the camera, even though you have to have a big cargo pants pocket perhaps to fit this in there, but we really felt that this was the successor to that product.

Ed: Is it going to replace the studio camera as well?

Dan: No I don’t think so.

This camera really only has the HDMI out in HD for monitoring purposes, so it’s not really for live production, there are no inputs to be able to do CCU control or talkback, it doesn’t have any SDI out to run long range … it’s truly just the HDMI out for monitoring purposes. So really it is a cinema camera to go out and footage to do creative work.

Ed: Now we’re at a large camera which is looking very smart, it’s looking like a real broadcast camera and it’s got the Blackmagic logo on it … so?

Dan: This is our new URSA broadcast which we announced earlier this year.

It’s kind of an upgrade from our original URSA Mini which we turned into our URSA Mini Pro when we added things like ND filters and dual recording slots, but what we really wanted to do on this camera is that we wanted to give it the real capabilities with the B4 lens mount, tying it in with the 4K sensor, and in doing so we were able to bring some of this cost down to a low US$3500 price point for just the body.

Page 50

Ed: And it’s a smaller viewfinder too?

Dan: It is a smaller viewfinder because we did know that we were going to do things like either I’m going to put the EDF on because I’m going to use it as a run and gun camera, or I’m going to add things like our studio viewfinder so I can have that true handheld capability of using a studio based camera. In addition to what we’re looking at here, with the B4 lens mount to have that great par focal capability, is we’re all looking at that studio viewfinder as well as our SMPTE fibre converter here. So we have our camera end and we have our studio end and each of those are US$3000, but obviously what we get here is the ability to have our SMPTE fibre, which is creating power for the camera as well as carrying all of our talkback and tally back and forth as long as we could possibly go over the SMPTE fibre, but it gives you all the broadcast controls that you’ve become accustomed to with all of your intercom, all of your XLR capabilities on here as well. Then going back to the box to convert that out to your standard SDI conversions, having your monitor capabilities to make sure you’ve got actual video coming through back to the truck or wherever you’ve got these things sending.

So when you put this all together, you’re now looking at a truly fully broadcast quality camera all for roughly the cost of US$1300-1400 so tremendously powerful and a typical kind of Blackmagic price point.

Ed: Okay, but if you don’t have the SMPTE fibre in the back, what are the output options then, apart from internal recording which I see there are 2 large slots there?

Dan: Yes, we have actually 2 CFAST card slots on there as well as the 2 SD slots on there, so similar to the pocket camera, we want to give people the options of what they’re recording. But if you’re not using the actual SMPTE, here we have our 12 gig SDI and that can go ahead and just be run out to an SDI switcher or recorder to do that and of course our SDI feedback and that’s how we get all of our talkback and tally programme back into the camera as well.

Ed: And what about HDMI? Dan: We don’t do any HDMI on this camera. We sell plenty of little mini converters for people to get those over to any kind of HDMI monitors that folks would be happy to have.

Ed: And CAT 6?

Dan: No CAT 6 on this. We do have our Teranex over IP so if we wanted to do any type of IP we have Teranex boxes that can do that.

Page 51

Ed: Right, so rather than put everything on the camera, keep the camera basic and then you can configure it how you want by just adding a little box?

Dan: Yes definitely one of Blackmagic’s kind of secrets is that we try to make everything a bit à la carte, so that way I’m not buying a switcher that needs a million of things which I only use 40% of right … we try to make it who is the widest group this is supplied to, what makes the most amount of sense, and then we can add on the bits that people want to add on as they go.

Ed: Okay, now is the chipset in this the same as with the pocket?

Dan: No, this is a different sensor chip, this is a different sensor that we have in here – it’s a two-thirds sensor if I’m not mistaken, and the other one is a fourthird size sensor that we have on the pocket camera but it’s 18.96mm, roughly 19 by 10, so it’s more of a cinema letterbox style. The broadcast camera has a more video style sensor as opposed to a cinema sensor.

Ed: Okay, what else on the broadcast products?

Dan: I think that’s kind of the big ones on the broadcast – they do tie in really well with our ATEM live production switchers, but so far people who have been testing these and using these in the field have been really happy with them, so we’re really pleased to have these out to folks.

Ed: So anyone who’s used a standard Sony / Panasonic sort of breed of broadcast camera, could hop on to this straightaway?

Dan: And be very familiar with all the control and the look and the feel of how the camera operates.

Ed: Now, what else have we got?

Dan: Do you want to talk about some of our little mini converters – these are kind of the glue products of Blackmagic Design. You know lots of people buy lots of these, stick them everywhere and do tons of great work with all these. So the 4 that we’ve come out with are we’ve got these little micro converters, little US$69 converters, and this is our bidirectional SDI -HDMI so you can basically have them going both directions – SDI to HDMI, or HDMI to SDI – really simple glue product, people just put these everywhere. We have a Multiview for HD; we have actually created a larger Multiview for Ultra HD, but we’ve never really gotten around to just making a cost-effective HD version of that product, so now we have Multiview for HD, for a low US$185.

We’ve got our mini converter for optical fibre 12G, again just making a really small form factor, bidirectional. Now Page 52

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this is US$155, it doesn’t come with the SFP, so there are no actual 12 gig SFPs shipping yet, there are some that are prototyped out there, but you can buy the 3 gig or the 6 gig SFP if you’re just going to do HD or Ultra HD at 30 frames per second. And lastly we have our up-down-cross converter. Of course we have our wonderful Teranex boxes which do all the crazy up-down-cross conversion across Ultra HD to HD, but some people just need a very simple but effective HD up-down-cross converter for 720 to 1080 SD to HD. This is a really effective box for that and you’ll be able to get it for US$155 as well. Again, nice glue products to fit into the product line.

Ed: Now of course one of the products that Blackmagic’s name has become synonymous with is Resolve – there are not many people around not using Resolve for colour correction and you continue to add to it?

Dan: It’s been a long process for us. One of the challenges that we have with Resolve is trying to continue to add to that without having that software bloat where suddenly it just becomes too bloated to be able to work, or too slow or it becomes too difficult, too overwhelming to people. We’ve spent years building up an architecture to be able to go between these different pages, to be able to add things like editing, like our Fairlight audio when we made our Fairlight acquisition out of the whole new Fairlight audio page; and this year, we’ve added our Fusion effects studio page directly into Resolve as well. Now we have an application that can edit, colour grade, in Fairlight audio and visual effects and deliver and we’ve lowered all that price to US$295 last year, so it’s an incredibly powerful software, being baited as Resolve 15 yesterday at NAB 2018 and, like you said, people continue to use it … whether they’re using it for just one of those functions, or whether there’s an individual operator who’s saying “look I’ve got your camera, I want to do all of those functions” that’s the real challenge for us to also make it something that a high end post facility wants to use across the board, and something that an individual owner / operator can use all of the tools as well.

Ed: Unlike some other big operators, you haven’t taken any of the features out of your software in the latest release?

Dan: No, we want to make sure we keep adding to that all the time. We have 100 new features across all of our editing and colour grading, not just adding into the Fairlight audio and the effects, so we definitely want to keep improving and moving forward and not moving backwards.

NZVN See Gencom or Protel for your Blackmagic product. www.gencom.co.nz www.protel.co.nz Page 53

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