NZVN June2018

JUNE 2018

Vol 247

has sounded and so this is the last issue of NZVN to go out in paper form but don’t despair for, with the continued support of our advertisers, we can still bring you industry news and offers on-line and every page in COLOUR. Sadly, the “advertising income versus cost” equation for paper has reached a non-sustainable level so continuing on-line is our only option. Going "on-line only" will allow improvements that we could not offer with paper such as hyperlinks to articles, websites and even video clips. Initially, we are not planning big changes in the format other than going to a larger font and one column ( like this ) because we want to get feedback on how YOU would like us to present industry news and offers in a way that suits your interests.

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When we started NZVN in February 1996, it was in response to a desert of information available to the video production industry in New Zealand. There were overseas mags and some suppliers sent out brochures but there was little chance of comparing product offers. NZVN grew rapidly to become the "only game in town" if you wanted to know what was the hottest new gear available locally. Then came the internet with the opportunity to visit the world for products, but that brought its own problems – who to trust?

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NAB 2018 Part Two. Page 2

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Nevion We are with Olivier Suard from Nevion based in Oslo, Norway, and David Barnard as my “Paspartout”.

Ed: Right David, why are we at Nevion?

David: Nevion is a vendor that we’ve worked with for a very long time. Our relationship goes back to the days before they acquired a company called T-VIPS which has always made very high quality, low latency JPEG 2000 video codecs – encoders and decoders – among other things, and we’ve sold those over the years to customers like Kordia, who use them for contribution linking, and to Park Road Post who use them for remote colour grading sessions.

So the colourist can be in Wellington, the director can be in Los Angeles and they can communicate and collaborate in real time using these video links. What I think is interesting about these guys today – especially for NZVN readers – is how the IP infrastructure that they are developing and is really at the forefront in terms of the transition to IP video contribution and distribution, is actually enabling a lot of applications that are of interest to video content producers. Things like more complicated remote colour grading … we actually had a talk the other day from Gary Thompson at Lucasfilm who’s doing this to bring together, not just one director and one colourist, but actually an entire team collaborating around the world.

Additionally, and something that may be of more immediate relevance in New Zealand, is remote production; the ability to have one studio that is controlling productions at multiple venues or in studios either within the same building within the same city, or even across the country or internationally.

It all comes down to having the infrastructure to take those IP signals, to manage them, to switch and route them in an intelligent way, to monitor the signal quality, to make intelligent decisions about how to fail over if something goes wrong. And Nevion’s Virtuoso and VideoIPath platforms are really at the forefront of that.

Olivier and David.

and longer distance transport wide area networks. Until the last 2 years or so, these were actually different technologies. The long distance transport was typically provided by service providers. It was IP based because service providers, telcos, moved to IP at the turn of the century and that’s what their network is built on. From a broadcaster’s point of view, they didn’t really care too much, they just carried on as IP as long as they could put SDI in at one end and get the same signal out at the other end. Of course, they wanted guarantees that it would get there, but they didn’t really care how that would happen. So T-VIPS, which is now part of Nevion, built a whole business out of how do we transport over this long distance over IP these baseband, these SDI signals.

Ed: Because that was going by satellite and all sorts of ways?

Olivier: Okay, just to build on what you said, the background to Nevion is we are a company that’s grown out of mergers. Over the years, we’ve had a number of companies like T-VIPS who specialise in long distance transport over IP using JPEG, but we also had other companies like Network L818, which dates back to 20 years ago, that was specialising in routing and signal processing within facilities.

Olivier: It used to be over satellite but there are 2 issues. I should have mentioned that our speciality is actually what we call real time transport. In other words, you could call it live, but quite often in production, the production is done live, the actual transmission is not live. You might produce a live concert in real time, but you actually broadcast it a few hours later. So that’s why I make the slight distinction between live and real time. Real time would encompass live, but live would not encompass real time. So the point is that, when it comes to transport, our biggest enemy is latency because we are dealing with people who need to share the production assets – the video, the audio – and make decisions on those events at the right time. That means we cannot tolerate delays. Of course there are delays but when we talk about streaming, when we talk about internet viewing, yes, you’re kind of viewing it live, but you’re really viewing it with a delay of 10 seconds. That would be totally unacceptable in a live production environment. We are talking a few frames – usually less than 5 – so we’re talking milliseconds.

So the company as it stands now is actually a combination of both – what we would call – local area network knowledge, things that you’d find in facilities,

The problems with satellite are (a) it’s expensive and (b) clearly the delay is a real problem because it’s usually 1½ second up, 1½ second down, and if you’re

Ed: So this is something that, 5 years ago, probably no-one would have thought “well what’s the point talking IP in our industry” but now and into the future it’s the way to go, so it makes sense.

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doing a round trip you have that effect where the question is asked and you stand stupidly waiting for the answer sort of thing.

Ed: Our broadcasters take note please.

Olivier: The move to IP was helpful in reducing that delay, or rather moving to a terrestrial base solution made sense because of that, particularly as the telcos have started building serious carrier grade networks, which took out the randomness of IP, the best effort side of IP and turned it into a guaranteed performance.

So that happened – we’ve been doing contribution, as it was mostly known, for about 10-15 years or so – it’s been around quite a while – but as we said, the broadcasters weren’t really touching it. They were just giving a feed in SDI and getting a feed at the other end.

What’s radically changed in the last 2 years is that IP is now coming into the facilities and we at Nevion have been trumpeting this for about 5 years. I’d like to say we’re visionary, but actually it didn’t take Einstein to see that the rest of the industry in the world had moved to IP and it was only a matter of time that this pocket of resistance of SDI based bandwidth would eventually fall to IP. Ed:

Well that’s broadcast engineers for you isn’t it?

Olivier: I think the interesting thing is that there was a lot of scepticism. We have a guy who’s a technical guy and really at the forefront of everything, and he stood up – I think 10 years ago – and said “IP will never happen”. And he knows his stuff, and now he’s the biggest advocate of IP. So there was scepticism because I think every industry believes they’re unique, but there are specific aspects to broadcasting which are quite unique, which is the fact that, in real time production, we are dealing both in low latency which telcos are used to – they do banking transactions where every millisecond gain can be millions in money. If you can gain that extra edge over your competitors and make that transaction quicker – so they know about latency. They also know about volume. They’re transporting a big volume of data, you know people are exchanging large files, but what’s quite unique about broadcasting is that combination of volume and very low latency.

Ed: And also, I would imagine, that along that chain when you’re adding things to it, you’ve got to bring that data into a form that can be manipulated. As you say, you can colour grade it, you can do things to it, you could perhaps put captions on it and then send it back.

So there’s going to be some delay in that?

Olivier: Yes, so every processing that you add in that chain actually delays things. You talk about JPEG 2000 – I mean compression in general is a slightly different subject, but compression is always a compromise between how much you can compress and how quickly you can compress.

That’s the reason why JPEG 2000, which is quite an old standard, is still very much used, because it can be done quickly; whereas newer standards like H264, H265 compress a factor more but take a lot longer, so you

increase the latency. So you save on bandwidth but you lose the latency. Where I’m heading with this, is now we’ve got IP coming into the facilities, we’ve got the middle bit that’s IP and for the first time in broadcasting we have a unique technology linking all the networks. That’s making it much, much easier for locations, remote productions, event halls or separate studios to be considered to be seen as just extensions of the main facility.

Ed: So you’re not having to do switching to the SDI at any stage?

Olivier: Exactly. There’s still SDI involved because I always say, the real point of moving to IP is in the network. Quite honestly, getting an IP camera versus the SDI version, don’t buy an IP camera if your SDI one is already working pretty damn well. If you’re buying a new camera because you want 4K, 8K, HDR or whatever, then consider IP because that’s where it’s going, but as a broadcaster, you’re in a business right, you’re looking to create compelling content under pressure from the industry, you’re having to do more and more of this with less and less in terms of people, cost and all that sort of thing …

Ed: So really the wise decision is to spend your money on the networking?

Olivier: You would say that wouldn’t you – you could argue that to me as somebody who’s selling stuff about the network.

Ed: But it makes sense because that’s where you’re speeding things up and, as you say, reducing the latency and errors I guess because you’re transporting pure data. It’s got to be better?

Olivier: Exactly. So it makes sense to invest over time when you’re renewing stuff for business reasons, because you need more cameras, because you’re moving to different formats, but the benefit to IP is really in investing in the network. So what we’re seeing is that people again are not moving their studios to IP because it’s the coolest thing ever. There needs to be a business reason for that, and one of the triggers we’re seeing is a new studio being built – if you’re building it from scratch, why rewire it with SDI? One of our customers in Norway, TV2, did exactly that. They had outgrown their building and they wanted to move to another building and they thought we’re not going to recable it with all these big SDI cables, we’re going to

Page 4

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lay a few tiny little fibres and they took a risk quite early because they did this project last year when standards weren’t defined – they were at the bleeding edge of things.

But they had decided for business reasons they had to move location. So that’s often the trigger for that.

Ed: And then you just use products to do some conversions?

glue

Olivier: Exactly, so we do that.

That’s one of the drivers for IP obviously, but not every broadcaster is either building new studios or moving studios.

So the way they are dipping into IP more and more is via remote production. To simplify it grossly, there are essentially 2 scenarios – there are the big events, the Olympics or the Summer Games as we’re supposed to refer to them …

Ed:

Oh, do you mean the Commonwealth Games?

Ed:

Olivier: Yes something like that, as well. So the big events where the broadcasters have paid a lot of money for the rights and then you’re looking to do it as cost effectively as possible. Some of the big broadcasters would send 200 staff to do it, and if they can reduce it to 150, that’s a colossal saving. So you need the cameras and what they call the talent, the reporters and that sort of thing. It’s taking these big, big events and trying to reduce the cost.

Another example is a Danish production company who normally produce a lot of shows like Big Brother, was approached by one of their partners thinking of covering horse racing. Now Denmark is a small country, horse racing is really a minority sport even in Denmark. So we’re talking about a very small audience, so then what you’re getting into, the economics of that is can I bring down the cost to a level where I can actually do it. If I can’t bring down the cost, there is no coverage. So whereas the Olympics was a case of well, we’re going to do it whatever, but can we bring down the cost; this is about viability.

They chose IP remote production for the same reason, because they thought well this is a good way to reduce the cost and they’ve done this. They are now in sites where they do horse racing in Denmark – the furthest I think he said was 500 kilometres, and they’re producing everything centrally from Copenhagen. On site, they have one reporter, one commentator and one cameraman.

They also use fixed cameras of course, but the cameraman is the only technical staff on site. He’s the guy who goes out with a suitcase of equipment, plonks it there, plugs in the cable ( it’s all colour coded by the way – I mean I don’t know anything about cameramen, but clearly they wanted to make it simple for them ) … now these guys are not normally the guys who have to set up the whole production.

Ed:

So these are all PTZ cameras?

Olivier: Well not all of them, obviously the cameraman has …

Ed:

Oh he’s allowed to operate one camera?

Olivier:

He’s allowed to play with a camera.

David: But that IP rig enables you to actually have PTZ cameras that would be remotely controlled from the control room?

Olivier: Yes. So the interesting thing is that there are only 2 production staff to produce this show. If they couldn’t reduce the cost to that level, they couldn’t do the coverage. So they’ve opened up new revenue streams and they’ve proved that they can do broadcast professional quality production, not Mom and Pop handheld camera YouTube type thing, but actually broadcast quality productions at a fraction of the cost of a normal production. In their case, it’s opened up masses of opportunities – they’ve been approached by small soccer football teams that say hey could you produce coverage because you know, mostly for us.

Ed: I guess if it became as popular as bikini mud wrestling, then you could up the scale and have a few more cameramen who would be willing to go and actually operate cameras on site?

Olivier: I’m not sure if horse racing is attracting that much interest for the cameramen to go there …

Ed: Well we don’t know about Danish proclivities do we – do you know any Danes who are interested in horses David?

David: I do not, no. I know no Danes who are interested in horses or otherwise.

Ed: So in a nutshell, having that IP infrastructure means that it broadens your possibilities, keeps the cost down and gives you the opportunity to have productions that otherwise you couldn’t do?

Olivier:

They’re not brain surgeons.

Olivier: Your quote! So these guys go on site with these 2 suitcases which they put in the back of a car, not even a van, and they hand carry it on site, plug in the colour coded cables and then the rest is controlled back from Copenhagen centrally. And in Copenhagen there’s a host, a guest usually, and one producer.

Page 6

Exactly.

NZVN

To find out more about Nevion, contact Gencom Technology Ph:

(Auck) (09) 913 7500 (Wgtn) (04) 939 7100

Email: info@gencom.com Or visit their website: www.gencom.com

Clear-Com We are now at Clear-Com for Gencom talking to Nicki Fisher. If you remember the February issue covering Agent-IC at Māori Television, this to me was a product from Clear-Com that was quite remarkable in that it didn’t replace anything, it just added to the Clear-Com family and allowed a lot more flexibility with the stan -dard equipment that one needs when you’re in that outside broadcast situation, or you need that communication. It just added a lot more flexibility. Now ClearCom has just gone another step and improved their wireless packs and Nicki’s going to tell us what that’s all about.

Nicki: FreeSpeak II is one of our midrange wireless products. We introduced FreeSpeak II a couple of years ago now, but we’ve added specific enhancements to the FreeSpeak II system at the show. For Clear-Com, we’ve got the widest range of wireless solutions available on the market. FreeSpeak is multi-range it operates in a nonlicence region of 1.9 DECT, or at 2.4 which also is the frequency for WiFi as well.

Ed: And they’re both in the one pack, you don’t have to buy one or the other?

Nicki: Well in terms of the base station, you definitely don’t, but the transceivers and the beltpacks are either 1.9 or 2.4. So you’ve got the standard base and then if you go into a particular venue, you may decide that 2.4 is optimal for that venue in terms of radio coverage, or 1.9 is more suitable – depending on what else is in the particular facility, whether it’s a theatre or a sporting arena, there may be other DECT systems or other 2.4 systems running at the same time.

There are many competitors in the wireless market that offer different systems, but the real advantages of the Clear-Com system is that we address, like I said, the widest range of frequencies, particularly internationally because 2.4 and 1.9 address frequency requirements throughout the world.

There may be some slight variations in some specific regions, but for the majority, having a 1.9 and 2.4 system addresses most of those requirements. As you can see, beltpacks are really portable, lightweight, durable. You can throw them around which we do regularly. ( Nicki throws the pack on the hard floor. Well dressed man scoops it up and returns it. ) Ed: And you’ve got a man to pick it up for you, fantastic. Does he follow you everywhere?

Nicki: He does actually – he’s my boss! So in terms of runtime, you’ve got a lithium battery in there with round about 18 hours of runtime or you’ve got 9 hours with three AA’s. You can either stick those in a charger and charge overnight, or in the same charger, put the whole beltpack in when someone’s finished with it, and you’ll get that running, like I said, for up to 18 hours. Five channels of communication, but basically, you can have up to 90 beltpacks on a large system or you can have 25 beltpacks on the standalone system.

In terms of enhancements at the show, we’ve introduced what I would consider high quality trans-

Nicki and Ann.

mitted audio for areas where there are MultiCams. So we talked earlier about putting these into theatres and places like that, or very large stadiums, sporting arenas. In some cases, you can get types of multipath at the fringe in those areas and we want to ensure that you get exceptional coverage, so we’ve put some additional features into the latest versions of the firmware which will improve audio in those multipath regions.

We’ve put some diagnostics in as well, so that you can actually get a good understanding of where to best place your transceivers, the usage of those transceivers in a roaming system, the usage of the users, the beltpacks, across a period of time, and really optimise your system as you’re going along with the diagnostics.

Ed: I like the idea of being able to pick where you put your transceivers – so how does that come up, some sort of graphical display that says “that’s a good spot” or “no, move it a bit more to the right.” How does it show it?

Nicki: Just in terms of the actual coverage itself, you want to make sure there’s no dropouts so we typically do an RF walk in a survey mode to check that those transceivers are in the optimal position.

Ed: Oh so it doesn’t actually show you a grid or a map or say “put it 20 metre left of the Porta-loo”?

Nicki:

No it doesn’t – yet.

At this point, Ann Williams the local person for ClearCom in New Zealand and a good friend of David Barnard is going to say something.

Ann: I was going to say that it also just depends on the physical space around you.

Are you in a sealed building, are you in concrete, are you in a tent or open field – so that really determines antenna placement as well.

Ed:

So maybe the map will be next year’s offer?

Nicki: The diagnostics actually show you what sort of usage you’ve got and the beltpack to transceiver handovers that are happening, but in terms of actually looking at the environment you’re in, that’s the most important thing to do first and do a walk test. At the end of the day, these are all 7 kHz audio and you want to optimise that 7kHz audio and to make sure you don’t get any dropouts.

Page 7

Ed: Right, so that’s that.

Again, Agent-IC, something we looked at with Māori Television, works very well with these new enhancements?

Nicki: At the show, we’ve actually introduced a mobile client app for the iWatch as well. So we have the iPhone, the iPad and now, with connectivity to the iPhone, you’ve got the iWatch, so you can press “respond to call an intercom” call on your watch – you get a buzz like a haptic interface which vibrates so that you know when you’ve got a call.

Ed:

So you can actually talk to your watch?

Nicki: Yes – you can respond to a call that’s coming in to you.

Ed: This is getting more like Get Smart every day!

Nicki: Absolutely, that’s why we called it Agent-IC. That’s Clear-Com. Ed:

So we’re still talking Agent-IC?

Nicki: We’re still talking Agent-IC – as well as having support for the iPhone, we’ve also got support for Android systems, so whether that’s the watch, the phone or the tablet, we can provide support right across the range now.

Ed: To me, that really makes the difference between you and the competition, having this Agent-IC which totally broadens the base of users in the system and just gives them so much more information, it’s pretty major?

Nicki: It’s pretty powerful, particularly for some of the younger users who are coming into the business – they do like to have that technology available at their fingertips versus a traditional method as well. Also, people are so used to carrying round their phones with them, that having the intercom available on your phone rather than on a panel is a nice addition in terms of functionality. You can give it to more people, so you get broader coverage.

Ed: And you can tell the cameraman to come back from the chip cart and get back to his camera?

Nicki: You’ve got to be a little bit careful if they go to the restroom.

Ed: Now, for the Clear-Com 50th anniversary, you’ve introduced something else very new?

Nicki: We have, something that we’re really proud of. It’s the new E-IPA card and it provides the best port density available on the market today for IP solutions. It’s licensable in 16 port steps so you can start at 16 and go straight up to 64 ports on one card and you can put a number of these cards in the frames to support up to 256 ports, so it’s a pretty powerful solution, and together with the IP transceiver we’ve also introduced at the show, we have a really strong solution now for IP networks.

Ed: And what are the celebrations for the 50th anniversary?

Nicki: We’ve had lots of celebrations here at NAB, which is great. Recognising a lot of people who have worked with Clear-Com since the very early days, since 1968 when we first started, and people who still work with the business today on a consultancy basis … actually a design engineer Charlie Butten, who worked on the initial Grateful Dead concerts where the beltpack concept was conceived back in 1968. He actually still works for us and comes into the factory regularly. The other exciting thing is we’ve just introduced a new factory in Carlsbad, just north of San Diego, and that was opened last week.

So, it’s a brand new manufacturing facility, much larger than we had previously down in Poway, and a new headquarters which is great. It’s a really inspiring place to work offering a fantastic opportunity for our employees and NZVN our business to continue accelerating growth.

Ed: Well that’s sensible because the more interviews I do, the more I see people are moving into internet protocol rather than expensive cables?

Nicki: Absolutely, because it’s native AES67 and ready for SMPTE 2110. You make sure it’s standardised as well, that was my point really – the fact that it’s standardised IP is important for future interoperability.

Page 8

Atomos for Protel We’re here at Atomos with Dan Chung product marketing.

Ed: So, Dan, I’m sure everybody knows Atomos as the provider of onboard camera recording systems and I guess we must start by saying that the camera manufacturers have really upped their game recently in terms of their onboard recording capability. In the early days, you’d get a lower level that some people were happy with, but others really wanted that high resolution, so bung on an Atomos and you’ve got, not only a great recorder, but you’ve also got a little monitor. What’s Atomos doing to make future customers happy having an onboard recorder?

Dan: I would start by saying that Apple ProRes still is the industry standard format for production – in large parts of the world anyway – and whilst the camera manufacturers have increased the internal recording quality on a lot of the cameras, most of them ( not all of them ) still don’t record ProRes internally. So, we give you all the benefits of the ProRes codec and efficiency is one thing that ProRes has always been well-known for.

I know people have tried to use internal codecs from some of these mirrorless cameras and found that their editing system, which they thought was perfectly capable, actually struggles to edit that material. The frame quality looks fine for some uses, but the actual editability of it is not that great.

So, by actually recording it in ProRes to start off with, you save yourself time because, for the same resolution, framerate, whatever else, you can find yourself editing on a much lighter weight machine; in certain infrastructures in larger companies they can’t change computers on a whim, they change them in cycles. Part of the reason why ProRes is so standard is because people have learned to work with it and expect their computers and systems to work with ProRes.

production, is actually larger than even the highest ProRes RAW-HQ version.

ProRes RAW-HQ, at the highest bitrate, is still less than 444 – so that’s if you had a very noisy subject – dark, lots of noise, it’s going to push up towards this end. If you have a nice clean image, it’s going to be back down towards this end which is actually slightly less in its most optimal format than 422 HQ. Then if you went down to ProRes RAW, the standard version not the HQ version, it’s actually slightly less than 422 HQ, which is again a very common production codec. In some cases, again, if you’re shooting a white polar bear in a perfectly lit nice landscape, you’re going to get a bitrate that’s actually lower in ProRes 422 and still be RAW, so highly efficient and completely optimised for Mac. So available initially for Final Cut Pro X – Apple hasn’t given it to anyone else at this stage, it’s all about FCP X only. That may or may not change depending on what Apple wants to do – I’m not Apple, I can’t speak for them, but it’s entirely optimised for a Mac workflow. It has all the benefits of GPU and CPU simulation and what that means in reality is that you can edit multiple streams of ProRes RAW in 4K 60 on a reasonably powerful machine, but also on a midspec’d current or a nearly-new MacBook Pro or iMac.

Ed: Now ProRes is a compression format and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a sign here saying “ProRes RAW”. Is that not an oxymoron?

Dan: No. Now we have the next version of ProRes. This is a massive workflow option change that hasn’t existed before. This is Apple’s very, very latest codec and Atomos, along with DJI, are the very first to implement it. The idea here is to have all the power of ProRes and RAW together combined in one – an efficient codec that is actually RAW. It’s a genuine RAW format, it’s not some sort of hybrid RAW format, it is a RAW format. It comes in two flavours, ProRes RAW and ProRes RAW-HQ. Regular ProRes tries to hit a target number for bitrate. ProRes RAW rather more cleverly is actually trying to hit a quality standard, therefore the bands of bitrate which it operates in are wider than old original ProRes. I can show you on this graph here. So, ProRes 444, which is very common in Page 9

AtomHDR capability, it’s full HD, so if you look at competitive monitors that are just monitors, they’re in that price bracket. So, we’re then giving you that, plus all the recording, plus it’s got a slot for an expansion module – we’ll have different expansion modules that clip in – it’s essentially a bigger audio IO so beyond a battery extender which we are committed to, we haven’t published or said what those other modules would be, but you can imagine what some of those might be. It turns it more into a flexible production tool with ins and outs. As it stands, it’s just HDMI in and out, but potentially it could be all sorts of other things you can imagine.

Ed: But not all your product is just HDMI in and out is it – you have some SDI? Dan: We do SDI on our 19-inch Sumos, on our Shogun Inferno, Shogun Flame and our Shogun Studio line. We have a lot of SDI products and, in fact, the Not a lot to see on the outside - it’s all inside.

ProRes RAW, at the moment, has to go over SDI because the only support cameras are putting You’ll still be able to edit one or two streams of RAW it out over SDI, so that’s FS5, FS52, FS700, FS7 with without hiccups or stuttering, which is unheard of in the the expansion pack and FS72 with the expansion pack – RAW area. Normally, you tend to have to spec up to it’s quite a long list – C300 Mark II, C500, VariCam LT get to be able to deal with RAW. So, the idea is to be and Panasonic EVA1. able to work with RAW almost as easily as you can do with regular ProRes but have all the benefits of RAW. The EVA1 is unique in that it does 5.7K output which we can record to ProRes RAW and that will happen in the Ed: Okay, if you’ve got a Windows machine, there’s next few weeks. no point in buying an Atomos device?

Dan: We still support CinemaDNG which is Adobe’s RAW format. Adobe may or may not bring something else new; if they do of course, we will endeavour to support it. Again, it’s a licence issue, it’s not up to us, we use what we’re allowed to use and that is their RAW format. It is larger and requires more computing power and it requires faster SSDs because there’s more data, but it works very well. But this ( FCP X and ProRes RAW ) is a lot more efficient.

Ed:

Any other codecs …

Dan: DNX and ProRes. In terms of day to day production, that’s most bases covered and we have 250,000 units out there in circulation now. I think we’re pretty much giving a lot of people what they want. We’re not doing MPEG, we’re not doing H.265 at the moment, we’re not doing any of those sorts of codecs but I think if people genuinely in sufficient numbers want stuff, we’ll look at it. We are an enabling company; we try to give users what they want and I think that is evident by the product line-up and the price points. I think that, as we go forward, you will see that more and more products are in line with users’ expectations. The 5-inch Ninja V that we have just literally launched at the show as being the latest one of those that really shows … that’s the single most demanded thing from our users. It does everything that our Ninja Inferno does practically. There are one or two things maybe that are slightly different, but instead of being 7 inches it’s 5 inches. It’s way smaller, it’s barely bigger than an iPhone 8 Plus, something like that.

Ed: What have your statistics told you that users are looking for – is it primarily the recording or primarily the monitoring?

Dan: I think it’s a combination of both. If you look at the price point for Ninja V, at $695, it has 1,000 nits, Page 10

backup, as well as primary record – probably a good even split will be going on there.

Ed: What I’ve heard is that people are finding the good value in them is that they’ve finished a recording and the editor can immediately take that device off the camera, take it away, plug it into their machine and start editing straightaway while the cameraman’s still recording to the onboard card, so you’ve got the best of both worlds.

( In fact Ken at Protel has since downloaded and installed the latest firmware V9.1 for the Sumo and confirms it now accepts 5.7K25 RAW from the EVA-1 output.)

Ed: And as camera resolutions go up – I mean, it’s 4K or nothing these days – you need to not only have a screen that resolves images well, obviously it doesn’t have to be true 4K, but it has to be pretty good, but also you have to have a higher recording rate and capability to handle that amount of data?

Dan: Handling the amount of data coming in is what we’re good at. Even so, what ProRes RAW does is that it allows us to take in whatever the camera manufacturer’s giving and it’s not a variable rate coming off … whatever they send is what they send – we take that and we encode in the most efficient way possible according to the user’s choice. So, the user can choose DNX, they can choose ProRes LT, ProRes Regular, ProRes HQ, but then you’ve got all the way up to ProRes RAW in both its flavours and CinemaDNG at the top end in terms of data rate. I think there’s enough choice there within the unit – certainly more choice than anybody else has got within their unit now.

Dan: I say to people that there are many ways in which you can use an Atomos product and I think that’s part of what we’re trying to achieve. There is no “one size fits all” solution for every user – no two users have exactly the same use case and we try to give them as much as possible.

We can’t give everybody what they want, but we try to give as many of them as possible what they want. I think that’s evident by our sales, it’s evident by the reaction you get out there, you know you walk around and I think even those who don’t necessarily buy us because they have another solution, they understand what we’re about and what we’re trying to do. We are very much trying to be an enabler – I’m sure some of the competitors would have charged for ProRes RAW but we gave it for free, as a free update to Sumo19 and Shogun Inferno. Any existing user with one of those nine supported cameras who didn’t even know about it on Saturday, by Monday they were able to download it for free. If they’ve got Final Cut already they can download the update for free, so they got the whole lot for free if they already had the right gear.

Ed: Okay, you’re not making any money out of that upgrade, but have you released anything else at the show that is a new clever product?

Dan: The Ninja V is the new product.

Hugely anticipated and I think people have been wanting it for such a long time, we have finally given people what they want and I think that’s evident by the reaction here, it’s won multiple awards here at the show and people seem very excited about it. I mean, multiple

Ed: Now that question about the camera manufacturers upping their recording ability, do you see your product being more used as a backup so that you’re actually recording two streams?

Dan: I think different customers want different things and we see an awful lot of use now for ACs, people using them as director’s monitors who want instant record and playback; you’ve got people who used them traditionally on DSLRs and probably that’s still the largest part of the market.

With the 5-inch, I imagine they’ll be in equal measure as a sort of confidence and

To be fair, the crowds were there for a prize draw.

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use cases, the obvious one is on top of your mirrorless or DSLR but also confidence monitoring, director’s monitoring, games recording, we’ve had people into medical capture … there’s tons of people who want something small that can record 4K 60, has HDR in and out. HDR is becoming a thing … after a couple of years of people saying “you know this doesn’t really matter”, I think regular users are finally beginning to understand that there is potential for them in HDR and we are of course ready for that because we were one of the early companies into the HDR game.

It’s kind of flattering to have Apple using our stuff for their cameras for HDR. Ed: I think it’s important also to mention that you don’t have to have a camera to input into one of your products, any device that provides an HDMI signal, of course apart from a television set because you’re not supposed to record off television, but there are other feeds that you can put into there and record a highquality signal?

Dan: Games capture is definitely one of our growth markets.

Ed: They can look back and see “oh damn, I shouldn’t have gone left” …

Dan: “Next time I’m going right”, yes exactly right.

I’m too old for that, but I get that a lot of younger people, and actually some older people, do spend their time doing that consistently.

Ed: I noticed downstairs there was a wall of connector product – is this something new?

Dan: It came out last year and most of them are now shipping. We basically connect, convert, scale and the common conversions are now available in that range, very reasonable pricing but also reliable build quality.

We’re aiming to be the best friend of anybody involved in that end of production systems creation – anything like that.

Ed: So, these are mainly giving different inputs into the device?

Dan: They are different conversions, yes, and all the common ones essentially. It’s pretty comprehensive.

I’ve got a picture someone was showing me on a phone earlier of 15 or 20 Atomos recorders stacked up recording a gaming party.

Ed:

That’s what young people do.

Dan: That’s what the young people do and when they have graphics cards that cost $1000, a $695 recorder for them … if gaming is your thing …

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NZVN

Call Protel for all your Atomos product requirements Phone: (09) 414 9102 Email: ken.brooke@protel.co.nz Or visit their website: www.protel.co.nz

Lectrosonics For Sound Techniques, we’re with Stephen Buckland at Lectrosonics with Karl Winkler.

Ed: Karl, your radio mics are well proven to be top of the line, they keep getting smaller, are we looking at something smaller again this year or just better?

Karl: Added features is the word of this year’s line-up.

The latest transmitter products are the latest in the SM series line but they’ve always been a very compact transmitter among the smaller offerings and, via user requests, we’ve added some key features to these latest versions.

Ed: So this is actually a new radio mic, it’s not a case that you can firmware upgrade existing mics?

Karl: No, all new hardware. We still make a single battery version that’s now called the SMWB and a dual battery version that’s called the SMDWB. So what have we changed versus the old ones? No1, these have a much wider tuning bandwidth. The old ones tuned 25 MHz wide ( we call that one block ); well these tune 3 blocks or about 75 MHz wide. So that’s why they’re called the SMWB wide band tuning – that’s what they do.

Ed: Is this in response to governments around the world trying to sell spectrum off to telecommunications people and we never quite know which band they’re going to sell, so it gives you more options?

Karl: It does and it is partially in response to that and partially just the response to more and more wireless being used all the time, so the RF spectrum in general is getting more and more crowded. All those things are pushing us and the users towards equipment that tunes over a wider band so you have more options. Exactly right.

Ed: Okay, other features?

Karl: We’ve put a richer LCD display on here so you can see more information about the status of the transmitter without the cryptic older style LCDs, and it’s easier to set it up and programme it. We’ve gone to a 5 button design rather than 4 buttons, so again it’s a little easier to use. We’ve added an infrared sync feature which was not on the SM series until now, and that allows for very quick setup when using it with the SRc or the Venue2 receiver systems which have infrared sync. Using those products with wireless design allows you to choose your frequency very rapidly, to do calculations to avoid intermodulation issues, and then use infrared sync to set the transmitter up very quickly.

It’s much faster and far fewer button pushes to get to where you need to be; so infrared sync’s a pretty big feature. These still use the same 5 pin connector for the microphones that we’ve always used, so if you’ve got your stock of your favourite lavalier microphones,

Karl and Stephen.

they will work directly with the SM wide band units.

Then one other pretty big feature is that we’ve added an onboard recording feature on Micro SD cards. You can use these as a transmitter or a recorder; there are some situations where using it as a wireless unit isn’t practical – maybe the distance is too great or maybe you’re doing a scene in an elevator or something where radio is not going to get out, it’s a metal box, that kind of thing, or in the trunk of a car … those kind of things.

Ed: And it’s a safety backup obviously. You could be in that situation – I can imagine also in racing cars or something like that, you might pick up 99% of the audio but this gives you 100% guarantee?

Karl: This gives you another option, absolutely. All the SM series respond to what we call “Dweedle tones.”

It’s a phone app that lets you set up the unit with your phone and change settings without having to dig the unit out of the actor. You can start and stop the recording the same way, with the remote app. So a lot of power, a lot of flexibility here, SM wide band series – orders have been fantastic since we introduced it and there’s a ton of interest in it. It’s been an exciting product.

Ed: And does the dual battery version give you twice the runtime?

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Karl: It’s actually about 3 times the runtime.

These are pretty current hungry like any high quality units and the single battery obviously is the smallest; dual battery will run about 3 times as long.

Ed: A good thing Stephen?

Stephen: It’s a very good thing – the runtime, the ability to have a wide variety of frequency choices and the usual Lectrosonics things like the solid build make them very useful. The only negative at the moment is trying to get them in sufficient supply to satisfy our customers.

Karl: Orders far exceed the ability to supply it at this point.

Demand is really high. We’ve shipped quite a number of these already and we’re building them as fast as we can.

Ed: Okay. Is it possible to mix and match so if people have got a previous model of transmitter and they want to have an upgrade in the receiver end, does one talk to the other or do you have to have them paired?

Karl: These are all on the same digital hybrid platform as we’ve been doing for the past 12-15 years, so you can use an older receiver with these new transmitters no problem – as long as it covers the same frequency range.

Ed: That’s got to be good?

Stephen: It is good, though most people when they start going down that path realise that actually you’re better to pair new with new, but it does make it versatile and they can presumably be used in 100 mode through to digital hybrid mode can’t they?

Karl: Yes they’ve got the various modes in them as they always have – IFB mode, digital hybrid mode, 200 series mode and so on.

Stephen: To other brands’ modes as well if you’re trying to link them with other brands of radio mic.

Page 14

Ed: And you think these should cover all the possible spectrum changes that could happen in New Zealand over the next 3 months?

Stephen: Oh over the next 3 months sure, but beyond that there’s a whole other story which we’ll save for another issue of Video News. I’ve already raised the ire of various clients by daring to mention … of course you need to read the detail of what’s happening in New Zealand. If you actually give a damn, there’s a good opportunity for you to comment coming up very shortly.

Ed: Do you want some help painting placards?

Stephen: We’re not at the placard stage yet, all you do is put a submission to the government. Placards will come later and putting on the boots and the helmets!

Ed: I’ll look forward to that. As they say, but wait, there’s more?

Karl: Wait there’s always more. Duet is a product we introduced last year that has really taken off for us, for two main markets with potentially a third interested as well. What it is, is a digital IEM or IFB system. That means it’s fold back for the on air talent, for cueing, and the markets we’ve seen it accepted in already are for sound performers, like house of worship, praise bands, touring musicians, anything like that, and also for TV studios as an IFB system – as a high quality IFB. We talked about spectrum a little bit earlier, but you know that all around the world, available spectrum is shrinking, it’s being sold off, auctioned, reallocated – whatever you want to call it – so the pressure on using less spectrum is on all of us, and digital gives us some unique options that analogue systems didn’t do. What you can do with this system is, compared with an analogue IFB system where you have one audio channel per RF carrier, you can actually have 2 audio channels on one RF carrier. You can save half the number of RF carriers for an equivalent analogue IFB system. Sound quality is superior, the range is fantastic and being a digital design you’ve got a lot of new options and flexibility in how you set up the transmitter and the receiver versus an older analogue system. For one thing, the transmitter can be fed with a Dante signal – that’s an audio over IP standard; you can also feed it with analogue; and then the receiver can be set up in stereo or mono. You can even use the receiver with an older analogue IFB system in a compatibility mode. So we’ve made it backwards compatible and we’ve looked way into the future in terms of how to use an IFB system.

That’s the Duet M2R receiver and M2T transmitter system and that’s been another thing that we can’t supply fast enough since we introduced it.

Orders far exceed how fast we can build those too.

Ed: For those interested in the technical nature, how do you get 2 channels on to one frequency?

Karl: It’s digitally multiplexed so the RF carrier is carrying a digital modulated signal that has 2 audio channels on it. So on the receiver, if you want to run it as a mono live feed, you say “I want mono channel 1 only on that carrier” and that’s all you hear out of the output. On the next receiver you can say, “mono channel 2 only” – that’s going to pick up that same RF carrier but all you hear is the audio on channel 2 and because it’s digital there’s no crosstalk between the 2 audio channels. People have done something similar with analogue IEM systems, but the problem is it doesn’t work very well. There’s too much crosstalk, so you don’t get enough separation. You might hear the other feed on your feed, but with digital, it’s 90 dB separation so it’s complete you know mono – 2 dual mono. So it gives you that flexibility.

Ed: It sounds like a very good thing Stephen?

Stephen: Yes, we’re looking forward to getting our hands and our customers’ hands on a system as soon as possible.

Ed: So where do you see this application?

Stephen: Well similar to what Karl’s just said.

Obviously theatre, music which is a bit of a branch out from what we normally do, but also a broadcast solution, location sound. Film sound mixers are also interested because they can see that both the quality and the extra channels are useful in a crowded RF environment. If you’re on a hundreds of millions of dollars film and you can impress the directors or the producers with higher audio quality, it’s obviously going to be an advantage to a sound mixer.

Karl: Sound mixers who have adopted this system, they’re using it for 2 different things. One of them is as a high quality fold back for the boom operator, so the boom operator can be completely wireless and yet hear a very high quality reproduction of their own boom mic.

Then the sound mixer can switch back and forth between a com channel and the boom feed for the boom operator.

That’s one place it’s been used. But we’ve also been starting to hear from sound mixers who are using this as a wireless confidence channel where before they would plug their headphones right into the mixing console to be listening, and you’re sort of tethered to your cart or your bag. In this case, you can use this as a wireless feed and still have high fidelity audio. So it gives you the freedom to get up and move around and still be hearing what is coming through your mixing console. That was kind of a surprise, I mean, we didn’t really think of that, but because it’s such a high quality unit and has good range, the sound mixers are adopting it as a wireless headphone feed, so it’s showing up on sets already.

Ed: It’s often the case you make a product and people use it in a totally different way than you thought?

Karl: It happens all the time and it’s great, we learn NZVN new things.

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To find out more about Lectrosonics product, contact Sound Techniques.

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

Panasonic For Protel we are at the Panasonic stand with Rick Haywood and Rick’s going to tell us what’s new at NAB and why one should look more seriously at Panasonic at that top end of movie / documentary production.

Ed: Rick, we’re standing by a wall with pictures of a whole lot of Netflix shows that have been shot on Varicam?

Rick: Yes, we’ve got things like Orange is the New Black; Better Call Saul; Gypsy; OA; Ozark is a big one, and so I don’t know the actual percentage of Netflix shows that are shot on Varicam, but it’s very significant because the Varicam ticks all their boxes. It’s 4K, it’s got the appropriate codecs and so on. Probably one of the most interesting things is that, late last year, we released the EVA1 which is a compact production camera, cinema type camera, and that too has now just been given approval by Netflix for production purposes.

Ed: The other feature I would think is that this is, ergonomically, more a traditional television camera as opposed to a cinema camera and it has that greater low light capability?

Rick: Yes, Varicams have dual native ISO, so they can run at 800 or they can run at 5000 and the noise level is basically the same at both of those and the dynamic range. So if you have a look in this set, you can see the types of pictures we’re producing that are far greater than what your eye can see.

Ed: And one would never naturally light a set as dim as this, would one?

Rick: No, one wouldn’t but one may be trying to shoot under street light for example, under available light and this camera can capture that. I think a lot of the industry out there are very aware of how good the Varicams are at capturing at 5000 ISO. That’s kind of shifted the focus away though from the fact that the Varicam has beautiful colour science in it, and people are starting to wake up to that. For more and more shows and feature films, DOPs are starting to shoot on Varicam, certainly major television productions, and you talk to the people and they just go “the look of this camera is a beautiful look”. We’re getting the same feedback on the little EVA1, that it’s got that very filmic organic kind of Varicam look that people are loving. So, great to have the dual ISO and the low light capability, but don’t forget that at 800 or at 5000, it’s shooting beautiful pictures and if you look at this for example, in this very dimly lit set we’ve got these coloured bottles up on the wall and it’s pulling highly accurate colour out of a very, very low light situation. Now almost every other camera would struggle to produce that much colour information at this light level.

Ed: It’s not just the brightness, it’s actually the accuracy of the colour that’s coming out of the picture, and also the skin tones?

Rick: Yes skin tones, the ability to have accurate colour across the whole dynamic range. Most cameras will handle it and produce nice accurate colour in the mid tones, but a Varicam will continue to produce very accurate colour at the low levels and at the highlight levels. And it’s got that very nice roll off that people are looking for in the highlights. So it’s really gaining some traction here in the US and in Europe and at home; we’ve obviously got Shortland Street who have been shooting Varicam for a couple of years and there’s a number of Varicam 35s and LTs in the rental market too.

Rick with the latest EVA1.

Ed: And if you really want that cinema look, well you can put primes on it and away you go?

Rick: Yes. It’s a PL mount camera … to be honest, it’s designed to give the cinema look from day one. It’s got the V-log recording in it and on the Varicam 35s and the LTs that will give you more than 14 stops of dynamic range.

Ed: But by choosing the right lens, you don’t have to have that shallow depth of field that you traditionally have with a cine style lens?

Rick: Yes sure, and if you don’t want a shallow depth of field, then you’ve got your 5000 ISO that you can use, and I know several productions where they’ve shot the whole production at 5000 and that gives them a deeper depth of field if they want it, or allows them to use money that they would have spent on lighting on more cameras for example.

Ed: Now am I right in thinking that, when Varicam came out, the name “Vari” stood for it’s a variable framerate but it’s sort of “grown up” since then?

Rick: Yes, the very first Varicams were tape based and were the first video cameras in the world that could give you variable framerate and they also gave you a wider dynamic range to play with. They became, for probably 4 or 5 years, the go to camera for wildlife, TV commercials and for documentary.

Ed: Well I know I’ve seen that the BBC David Attenborough shows have been using them in the Antarctic for some of those really impressive “penguins leaping out of the sea onto the ice” shots?

Page 16

Rick: Yes exactly. It was called a Varicam, as you say, because of the variable framerate, but people fell in love with it for its imagery. At the end of the day, the framerate was “yeah, that’s great to be able to shoot off speed”, but this camera’s producing beautiful images.

Ed: But of course, you’ve moved on from tape – did you move to P2 or where is it now?

Rick: Basically the Varicam 35s and LT’s use a new form of P2 card, called a P2 express card but it’s still the same P2 form factor, they just had to beef it up to get the data rates that were required. I mean the Varicam35 can shoot 4K at 120 frames a second ...

Ed:

So you don’t need a fancy off-board recorder?

Rick: No it’s all built in, and on the Varicam Pure with the Codex recorder that can be 12-bit RAW. Ed: Now it’s not all about Varicam – we’ve moved on to a smaller format camera Rick, but it’s still a proper one?

Rick: Yes, we’re looking here at the AU-EVA1 which was released late last year. Last year at NAB, we hid this under a shroud and sort of teased it that there was something new coming in terms of a cinema type camera. We released all the specs at Cine Gear last year, and then the camera became available on the market about December last year. What is special about it is, like the Varicam the sensor has dual native ISOs. This has 800 and 2500, so this isn’t the same sensor as the Varicam; it’s a new sensor, it’s capable of 4K but the sensor is actually 5.7K. So it’s oversampling and the reason it does that is, because all these cameras have single chip sensors these days, when you debayer, you effectively reduce the resolution. So if we can record at 5.7K off the sensor, when we debayer, we end up with a true 4K resolution. That’s why it’s 5.7K. The design concept behind it was to make something as compact and light and small as possible; that’s what the market told us they wanted – they wanted to be able to put it on gimbals, put it under a drone, and have something that’s a very lightweight “run and gun” type camera. So Super 35 sensor, comes standard with an EF mount so you can just put Canon lenses straight on the front of it. Third party manufacturers like Wooden Camera are making a PL mount for the camera, so you can remove the EF and put the PL mount on it. It’s got a lot of the Varicam pedigree in there. We don’t call it a Varicam because it is a different sensor, but the feedback we’re getting is that the imagery coming off it is very, very similar to what you get off the Varicam.

So not quite as good in low light as the Varicam, but still gives you that ability to flick a switch and suddenly all your noise and your gain disappears again and effectively you start again. With the Varicam, if you were to wind 800 up to 4000, you would see the noise come in and then when you hit 5000 that noise disappears again and then you can wind on up from there or down from there. But the main thing is we get the same dynamic range at both 800 and 5000 on the Varicams and 800 and 2500 on the EVA1.

Ed:

Now what’s this lens mount on the side of it for?

Rick: This is not a lens mount, this is where we mount the handgrip on the side of the camera. You could try putting a lens on there but it’d look a bit sideways!

When the camera was released in December, we said that we were going to release new firmware in the first half of this year, which we’ve just done. It unlocks a whole lot of new codecs, so we now have all intraframe codecs available on this camera. One of the things that this can do is record 10-bit 4:2:2 onboard at 4K and we now have codecs that run up to 400 megabits a second

in the camera, recording on to an SD card. The other thing that we introduced with the new firmware was the ability to get RAW output off the camera. We can now feed 5.7K RAW out of the camera to an external recorder. You may say “what external recorder can do that?” Well, Atomos have been working really closely with us and with their new ProRes RAW, they can record the full 5.7K off the sensor and their feedback is very positive about the results they are seeing by doing that.

And of course we can get 4K RAW off there as well, but again that extra resolution is meaning that we are not losing as much resolution when we start to debayer the pictures.

Ed: Isn’t a Codex recorder capable of that sort of level?

Rick: Absolutely and we have Varicams with a greater level than that.

Ed:

But that comes at a cost?

Rick: Yes absolutely. We have a Codex recorder that docks straight on to the back of the Varicam 35 and that will record 4K uncompressed RAW, but at a massive data rate. You’d need to talk to Atomos more about what they’re doing …

Ed: I will. I understand that the EVA1 is now Netflix approved?

Rick: Yes, with the introduction of the new codecs in the camera, that allowed us – I can’t remember their spec, it has to be over 260 megabits a second or something like that – we have a codec at over 400 megabits a second, that was the last box that needed to be ticked. Obviously 4K was the first box that needed to be ticked for them, but yes, very encouraging to see

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it’s got the same log curve or the same log in its recording capability, but because it doesn’t have the same dynamic range as the EVA1 or the Varicam, we can’t call it a true V-Log curve, so it’s a V-Log Lite curve.

Ed: So it’s not a case of transferring that log information from an EVA1 to the GH5S? Rick: No … well you can’t take a look or a scene file from an EVA1 and load it into the GH5S. Ed:

that they’re happy to have a camera of this size and in this price range as a full production camera.

Ed: Now a little camera that we’ve seen on the cover of NZ Video News this year, the GH5S and this is a small but very powerful camera?

But you could do it to a Varicam?

Rick: Between an EVA1 and a Varicam, you still wouldn’t do it. The EVA1 has scene files, the Varicam not so much because it’s assumed the person who is operating that camera is going to create their own look in there. So you can’t do that between an EVA1 and a Varicam.

They will have very similar looks though, because it’s the same factory that makes the sensors for both cameras, and makes both cameras. But my understanding is the GH5S can be married up to the EVA1 very nicely from what I’m hearing. Users are saying “yes it can easily match it.”

Rick: Yes sure. We’re seeing it here lined up alongside Varicams and all sorts of very high end, very expensive cameras and that’s not insignificant that we display it at a show like this. It’s the only …

Ed:

Ed:

Rick: Yeah, since tape.

MediaWorks have been running P2 cameras for I think 12 or 14 years – somewhere around that – and they’ve still got some of those original cameras. But what is new in the P2 world is P2 Cast. P2 Cast is a whole workflow for News. It’s a Cloud based service that Panasonic offers, a subscription based service, that we integrate into Avid, and now Premiere Pro, so for example at MediaWorks or TVNZ, who are also running a lot of P2 cameras now, they can go directly into Avid while in the field – let’s say there’s a new News story, they go into a module in Avid called iNEWS where they enter the metadata for that story, so who the shooter is, what the story is, who the reporter is, what the location is, and then they might add in which camera is shooting it. They then save that information, P2 Cast looks at that information in the background and says “right there’s new updated

DSLR style?

Rick: Yes, mirrorless let’s say, or DSLR style camera that we have here. Now I know you’ve run the story on it, so there’s probably not a whole lot to tell you about it other than we’ve had the GH5 for quite a long period of time. We’ve now released concurrently the GH5S; so both of them are still in the market. The GH5S is aimed almost exclusively at the video market, so everything about it is optimised for video – it’s got timecode in and out, it’s got an XLR audio module that you can put on top of it, it has a new sensor. The sensor is dual native 400 and 2500 ISO. So, as I say, everything around about it has been designed to take what was a very, very good video camera in the GH5 – you know 10-bit 4:2:2 onboard, but really skew it towards video production.

Ed: Do you see this as a standalone or is this like a second camera to match an EVA1?

Now on the broadcast camera market, P2 cards?

Rick: We’ve been using P2 as our format or our recording medium for a long time now …

Ed:

Since tape?

Rick: I guess that really depends on your budget. There are a lot of young people coming out of film schools who maybe can’t afford an EVA1, but they can afford a GH5S; then you get other people who go I’ve got an EVA1 or I’ve got a Varicam or whatever – any brand of camera – and this is a great little camera to sit as a B camera alongside that; or I need a camera to fit into a very compact space or to be discreet in shooting out there, so it’s a good solution for that sort of work.

Ed: Can you share information from this camera with other ones – like the log information?

Rick: The GH5S uses what we call VLog L, so the Varicams and the EVA1 use V-Log; this uses V-Log L or V-Log Lite so

The GH5S is small but powerful.

Page 18

information here, there’s a new job”, it sends an email to the camera operator that says “there is new metadata available for your camera” and when he or she gets to the job, they press “confirm” and that metadata gets downloaded in the background without them knowing anything, to that camera for the next job. What then happens is that, while they are shooting ( and they can be shooting continuously for half an hour for example ), every 2 minutes, P2 Cast is sending proxies back directly into Avid Interplay.

What that means is that the editor is sitting there as the clips are appearing in his bin, and he can start cutting the story while it’s being shot in the field. When they finish shooting it, he finishes the edit and he’s cut the half hour down to a 3 minute item or whatever, and he saves that 3 minute item having used the proxies. P2 Cast then talks back to the camera and asks “can you send us these clips in full resolution now?”

Ed:

And the cameraman is not involved?

his or her eye away from the camera. But we’ve also got our own streaming built into these cameras as well, not just a bonded solution.

Ed:

So that’s where the WiFi comes in?

Rick: Yes.

Rick: He doesn’t even know it’s happened. We can send him a notification saying “don’t turn your camera off” and we send him a notification when it’s finished, but it will upload just the bits it needs with some 2 second handles and that will then appear on the timeline in Avid as a full resolution sequence.

Ed:

The P2 Cast package.

Is this using satellite technology or cell?

Rick: It’s using cellular technology, or anything … you could do it over WiFi, you could walk into a Starbucks and log on to their WiFi with your camera and it will use that. You can plug it into an Ethernet port.

Ed: So in fact, you could shoot it somewhere, hop in your car, race to a Starbucks and just sit there having a coffee while the editors back in town download and work away until they tell you you’re done?

Rick: Yes. And if you’re shooting in an area that’s got 4G coverage, then you just tether the camera to your phone and while you’re shooting it’s sending those low – when I say “low res proxies”, they can be up to 6 megabit a second file, so they can easily go online ...

Ed: Well they’d put them on air wouldn’t they, if it was breaking News … I’ve seen some pretty ropey stuff?

Rick: They are more than satisfactory to go to air.

Ed: It’s better than what you see out of India sometimes?

Rick: Yes, well for breaking News, a crayon drawing can go on air can’t it …

Ed: So at what stage do you need the Live View and when don’t you need it?

Rick: Typically, Live View would be used in a situation where you want to get pictures “live to air” off the camera.

Ed:

So full playable pictures?

Rick: Yes, so a live cross to a presenter in the field.

You don’t use Live View typically with the P2 Cast scenario, which is by far the majority of the shooting, where you’re shooting it at one o’clock in the afternoon and it’s going to go to air at six o’clock at night.

When we do that, the way we get the pictures back is that we can either plug a 4G dongle directly into the camera, we can tether the camera to a 4G phone, mobile device or a portable hotspot, or you can find a WiFi somewhere and use that or plug it into an Ethernet port and use that. So any way you can get data over the internet will work.

Ed:

That’s very clever.

Rick: Yes, it is. And the final piece in the puzzle for us has been, while we’ve had Avid integration for iNEWS and Media Composer, we now have Avid Interplay integration … for example, both MediaWorks and TVNZ are running Avid Interplay.

That’s the final bit in the puzzle really that now those pictures, if they want to do this, could be coming back from the field, so the camera operators never bring the NZVN cards back.

Ed: So this is a pretty good relationship you’ve got with Live View and Avid … it’s all working together nicely?

Rick: Yes, the Live View integration basically allows us to get information from the Live View pack to the viewfinder of the camera. It will show you the battery level and the signal strength and so on, on your Live View pack, so the camera operator doesn’t need to take Page 20

To find out more about the EVA-1 with the latest software updates installed, call Ken Brooke at Protel, Phone: (09) 414 9102 Email: ken.brooke@protel.co.nz Or visit their website: www.protel.co.nz

Skaarhøj We are at Skaarhøj ( obviously a Scandinavian company ) with Kasper Skaarhøj.

Ed: Now Kasper your name’s on the company so I guess you’re heavily involved.

Kasper: Yes, I am the founder of the company – surprise, surprise.

Ed: Have you come from a technical background or a television / film background?

Kasper: I would say technical background.

I’m not a professional in the industry like I haven’t done broadcast for 20 years or anything; I have a high passion for doing video, but I’m an engineer, I have a Kasper smiles whilst David investigates. software background, I have hardware in my personal baggage. I have done eLearning and a lot of teaching Ed: Okay, and I guess there’s a USB connection there materials using video and so on and we got into control that you can plug into your computer and download the panels – I just love doing this, this is like coming home. latest updates of software and new apps and all that sort of thing, and you can do it all yourself?

Ed: So this is hardware, but I guess, in there is some firmware that you’ve developed?

Kasper: That’s true and this is how you connect to our “app store” if you will, which is online on our server Kasper: Yes. It’s hardware and software and the and this is where you pick the device course you want cool thing about the software is that, on all our controllers, the same software runs. It’s called an to have on your controller, then it generates a custom operating system and we describe it a little bit like if firmware for you, download it on the controller and you have an iPhone and on the iPhone you have IOS – there you have all the features you need for controlling that’s an operating system. You can install apps and your particular set of devices. the apps decide what your iPhone can do. Likewise on Ed: That sounds fantastic. Now I can see plenty of any of our controllers, you can install the same – we applications here and I see that you’ve got some PTZ call them device cores which are like apps that enable a cameras there and obviously controlling those these controller to talk to a particular broadcast device. So if days is something that everybody wants to do? you want to control an ATEM switcher, you install the Kasper: Yes that’s true and I think we have some app or the device core for the ATEM switcher and then really amazing PTZ control which is significantly the controller will be able to map the button presses to different from what you find on the market if you look commands on the ATEM switcher. You can do the same at generic controllers for PTZ cameras. What I mean is, for any of the other 50 different products that we have if you lift the controller up and the generic one, not one on that list. The cool thing about that is we can then from Sony, then that controller will typically be limited provide a lot of different form factors, so if you look at to do Pan Tilt Zoom, preset recall and it can maybe our product range ( and you really have to look in our adjust the iris up and down; but our controllers know catalogue or see the pictures ), then you’ll understand that we have surfaces for desktop, like big switcher surfaces, small switcher surfaces, we have rack mounted units, we have RCP form factor units and all these different form factors are useful in different cases. They can theoretically all talk to the same hardware devices in the broadcast infrastructure.

Ed: And in terms of the operating system, this is a proprietary one, you haven’t got Windows Vista or anything like that?

Kasper: No, it is a proprietary one that’s true. We made it ourselves and we use the word “operating system” to communicate that it is the same that runs on all controllers – like you can have an iPad, and iPhone, you can have iPad Pro and you can install the same apps on all of these devices. Likewise with these controllers.

Page 21

the cameras much better than the average generic controller. For instance, if you want to control the iris, we know exactly the value range from like F1.9 to F22 for one camera, but if it’s another camera, we know that it has a different value range. So we are very particular about supporting all the basic commands for the models that we have specifically implemented and that’s very unique for a generic controller.

We also have preset recall with labels – so we saw the problem that has been around for a long time, that people cannot easily remember what preset 7 was, where does that go, is that the drummer, is it the lead vocal, what is it? Now what you can do on our controllers, because they carry OLED displays on the buttons, is you can type in a label so that when you look at the button and display associated with it, it will tell you what that preset is.

That’s an amazing development in preset recall. Something you won’t see anywhere else maybe in software solutions, but one of the points is that people in the visual media industry, they need to keep their eyes on the screen, so a touch screen is not so good. It’s the content they create they need to watch, and this is why tactile control is still so important.

Ed: And you don’t need those little sticky labels anymore?

Kasper: You don’t. So instead of providing space for a little scribble strip, you can now have the OLED

displays do it for you – and you just use the web interface to type in those labels, press the save button and they’re instantly available on the controller.

Ed: Fantastic. location?

And you make them in a quality

Kasper: Quality location, yes.

We make our controllers in Denmark. Of course, some components are made elsewhere, I mean we don’t make the microchips right, they are made somewhere else in the world, but we are based out of Denmark, we assemble

Page 22

the products in Denmark, we produce the electronics in Denmark and so it’s a “Made in Denmark” product.

Ed: And that’s where the buck stops – it all comes back to Denmark?

Kasper: Yes. Ed: So if anybody’s got a problem, you’re in charge, it’s got your name on it?

Kasper: Right, the buck stops in Denmark … I didn’t know that expression before.

Ed: Well David, that’s very impressive. Obviously, you personally with Techtel have taken on these products, or certainly are seriously looking at them, and you’re going to be providing the support in AustraliaNew Zealand.

You’ve decided that this is a good product to add to your stable?

David: Well it actually does really work in with our larger aim I guess, which is system integration solutions – because so often you find yourself coming up to a hurdle when you’re configuring a system where there’s a certain choice of cameras let’s say, a certain choice of switcher, or maybe a certain choice of …

Ed: The controller …

David: There are many different components and maybe some of them might be legacy, some of them may be a preferred one that you really would like to bring into the picture, but it looks like it’s tough to do.

But the Skaarhøj product has great potential to be the glue that brings those things together – not a bit of bodge up, it actually does it well and adds some elegant features to the whole process. It adds value into the bargain which is what I like about it.

Ed: And it reduces that legacy aspect because you don’t have to buy a controller for a particular camera brand or particular model, you just buy a controller and then you can choose your camera and it’ll work with a software app.

David: Yes pretty much. Within certain limits, it means that there is the option of going best of breed.

Best of breed is really what people much prefer to do.

Ed: And for a hire company or backup units it would be ideal?

David: Actually for a hire company that’s true, because they often have a mixed inventory and they’re always having to tackle a new scenario that a client puts to them – a new event, whatever it might be.

At this point David is jumping up and down with joy, but NZVN I’d better stop him! Bits might fall off!

To find out more about Skaarhøj product, contact David Colthorpe at Techtel, Phone 0800 832 485; Email info@techtel.co.nz Or visit their website www.techtel.co.nz

Ed: Or they’ve got a breakdown and one unit can be configured to suit any other configuration?

David: Yes very true, so that would give you redundancy in terms of your inventory because you can multi-purpose the kit you’ve got.

Ed: I can see there’s going to be a lot of thinking going on as to how best to present this to the market?

David: Yes I know, we’ve got to work on that.

Ed: But it’s a product worth working I would say?

David: Yes I think so.

It’s very exciting.

Page 23

Studio Technologies We’re at Studio Technologies Inc for Oceania Sales with Randall Kelso.

Ed: first well you,

Now Randall, tell us about Dante – you’re known for Dante aren’t this is the big product?

Randall: For the last 4 years we’ve been very focused on Dante.

We have released 2 dozen or so Dante products -mainly for the broadcast industry.

Ed: For the uninitiated, what does Dante mean?

Randall: Dante is an audio over internet protocol or technology and we think it’s fantastic. It’s very easy to use and to configure your networks.

Ed:

So the previous method of audio transmission?

Randall: It replaced our analogue audio products and our digital audio products – now we are focused on digital audio over Ethernet.

Ed: Okay, so that means basically “lossless” as a starter?

Randall: It’s all uncompressed 24-bit audio sampled at 48 kHz. We’ve focused a lot of our Dante products on the intercom world and replaced the traditional partyline systems, where we have lots of experience, but Dante is much quieter.

We’ve eliminated a lot of problems with hum and buzz, things like that.

Ed: Is it still possible with an Ethernet connection to have hum and buzz?

These are physically smaller than the Announcer’s Consoles we have been making for many years and are quite well known for. They are targeted for people who don’t have much space – like a courtside commentator in a sports venue.

We also have the Model 208 Announcer’s Console which is nice to mount under a desk in a TV set, and we’ve just come out with our Model 391 Dante alerting unit. I think that’s a pretty new product, there’s nothing else like that right now in the Dante world, but it’s been around for a long time in the analogue intercom.

It provides a visual and / or audio alert to intercom users.

Ed: So that little … gosh what is it, a rhombus on the top lights up when …

Randall: Yes, you see that, we have a working one over there; and there’s also an audible alert too (beep beep beep beep).

Randall: They are all electrically isolated so it’s much simpler and works well over fibre. It’s easy to get from copper Ethernet to fibre and go long distances without any loss.

Ed: So any new products in the line for this year?

Randall: We have four new Danteenabled products we are showing at NAB this year.

First we have our Models 205 and 206 Announcer’s consoles.

Page 24

Ed: Does it do different noises and different colours depending on what information?

Randall: You could configure it in 2 different modes with our Windows application; you could configure the colour and how loud and how long the tones are and things like that.

Ed: But it just tells you that there’s something happening, it doesn’t give you different colours for different …

Randall: No … there’s only one alert signal.

Ed: Maybe model?

Randall:

next

year’s

Maybe next year’s model.

It uses an inaudible tone, a high frequency tone just like the old alerting system, so it’s compatible with old intercom systems as well.

Ed:

So you can add this to your old system?

Randall: system.

Ed:

Yes, you could certainly have a hybrid

So who’s going to be using these products?

Randall: Our intercom products … a lot of our big customers right now are big broadcasters with mobile trucks, but you can also find them in a facility like a studio or at live concert and theatre venues.

Ed: Now you’re also known for expanding your Ethernet products into studio – well other audio products, some older products?

Randall: One of our older product lines is the Model 400 SDI over fibre family. We started with the Model 400 which would take 12 SDI signals and transport that over 4 fibres.

Randall: Right. Maybe the truck pulls up and has SDI for video but is using Dante or audio over Ethernet, so you’d bring this to inside the venue, have your cameras connected and then connect this to an Ethernet switch and connect all your Dante audio devices.

Ed:

And the model number for this is?

Randall:

This is Model 412.

Ed: In a mixing desk, you could have a Dante card, and that would enable you to do what?

Randall: With the Dante card, your mixing desk could send and receive on air audio through this Model 412’s fibre interface into the venue and you could also have your intercom audio coexisting on the same Ethernet network.

Ed: It sounds as though you listen to your customers and figure out products that are going to suit the situations they’re in?

Randall: our goal.

Then we added the Model 410 which carries 3 SDI signals on a single fibre; you could mix and match 400s and 410s; and then slightly newer is the Model 412 which transports 6 channels over 2 fibres and gigabit Ethernet over a second pair of fibres, which you might use to connect to all of our Dante products.

Ed: So this would suit a situation where a broadcast truck might have some legacy SDI system but also wanted to add Ethernet capability?

Page 26

Well you are quite right, that is certainly NZVN

To find out more about Studio Technologies Inc contact Oceania Audio Sales Limited, Avondale, Auckland.

Phone (09) 845 7800 Email nigel@oceania-audio.co.nz Website www.oceania-audio-sales.com

Matthews We’re at one of my favourite stands at this show for it’s a little joy to my heart every time I meet Linda Swope from Matthews Studio Equipment again and we take our photo.

Linda: I’ll show you this one right here. So there’s a stop block, you just can’t, it’s going to stop at a certain point.

Ed:

Can you adjust the stop position?

Linda: You can if you have a bigger tube, but right now, this is the biggest tube. So it just gets to a certain point and then grabs on, but it goes no further.

You can tighten this as much as you want, and it’s not going to crush the tube.

They have the kind now – like broom holders – the kind that are in your closet, a broom holder, and you push the broom and it stays in. Some people are using those and they’re not good at all.

This won’t slip, you can pull hard enough and it’ll come out, but the trick is it’s not going to slip and move around.

Ed: Very important. Okay and next? Oh, the Dutti Dock … now we’ve seen the “Dutti” name before with the Dutti Dolly …

Linda: Ed:

Yes you have.

So this is Mr Dutti making up something new?

Linda: Exactly, because Mr Dutti is a camera operator. When he’s on set, in a studio or wherever and he’s working his camera, he’s got to put it down to change a battery, to switch something else out so what they do is, they’ll put it on their knee and they’ll balance it, or they’ll sit on the ground and they’ll put this beautiful, very expensive piece of equipment on the ground. He said “forget this” so he invented the Dutti Dock. It’s basically a docking station for your camera;

Ed: Now Linda, we’re starting off with a simple mount … well it’s not that simple a mount is it Linda?

Linda: Oh it’s pretty simple.

It’s not high technology, it’s just something that we thought was needed, so we’ve come up with what’s called the MQ mount and MQ stands for Matthews Quasar.

We’ve done a lot of business with Quasar who make these lighting tubes, as well as Kino and other manufacturers. But we’ve come up with the MQ clamp which is a basic clamp that mounts to the tube via a three-eighths threaded pin that can mount into grip heads on a C-Stand, on a Drop Down, however, that mounts to the tube, and the beauty of it is you cannot overtighten it. If you’re using a standard Matthellini and somebody comes and really tightens down on that, you’re going to crush that tube, you’re going to crack it, and that’s not cheap at all.

Ed: And it’s important to have made it because these tubes are becoming really popular?

Linda: They’re very popular on movie sets, in studios, on location, News – they becoming really popular.

Ed: it?

So how does it work – how can’t you overtighten

Page 27

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when you’re using it, there’s usually a Ronford camera plate – dock your camera, change your battery, do whatever you want – it’s got these hooks for your tape, for your jacket, for your belt, for your water bottle, for whatever and it’s on a stand.

The stand will be with wheels so you can move it wherever you’re going to be.

Ed:

Simple but very practical.

Linda: Yes, if you’re a cameraman … cameramen come in here and they get it, they’re like OMG and other people are like “what is that?” They don’t know.

It’s definitely a cameraman’s tool.

Ed:

Right.

Linda: And then we have the Steady Rest and what it really is, is a support stick …

Ed:

It’s a monopod?

Linda: It’s sort of a monopod, support stick for Steadicam operators. Steadicam operators walk around with that Steadicam, they got to put it down, their assistant’s right there …

Ed:

It takes the weight off the shoulders and back?

Linda: And when they’ve got to go, they pick up the Steadicam, their assistant grabs this and off they go.

Ed:

But you could also use it as a boom pole?

Linda: Exactly – a handheld boom pole to get something up and over someone.

Ed: But the thing is that it is a heavier grade, so your boom pole operator wouldn’t want to be using this all day, however it’s certainly going to take the weight of a fully rigged Steadicam.

Linda: It’s the Steady Rest, very simple again.

Grip equipment is just so simple.

Ed: And again you could clamp this into a rig and use it as an extension pole, so a very flexible item, and nice black and orange? And this next item is a panel stand?

Linda: Yes, and again we have beautiful graphics.

What we did is we took a Mini Vator and we took a Roller Stand and we kind of put them together …

Ed:

A marriage made in heaven?

Linda: Yep. So on this stand, the base tube all the way up is the Mini Vator; the legs are Roller legs because, as you can see by that one, they get real low, so you have 360 degrees of clearance on the bottom.

So anything that you have here that’s going to hang down here can hang freely, like that light. With the regular Mini Vator, the legs come down way up here.

You couldn’t do that because it’s going to hit the legs, so it’s got clearance. With the bigger monitors, you can drop them down; a lot of things are going vertical format, it’s becoming really popular, so the vertical mounts can come down lower.

It’ll support 100 pounds; it’ll go up to 10 feet; and its price point is very attractive US$999 list price.

Ed: Well again I’m sure that you could find a whole lot of uses on set for this.

Linda: Oh sure you could. You know, with the standard Junior Receiver, with the Baby Pop Up Pen, so yes you could use it for anything really. But the selling point is the 360 clearance all the way around the stand.

Again, the panel lights that are becoming so popular …

Page 29

Ed: And a good heavy duty crank for lifting it up and bringing it down?

Linda: Ed:

Yes exactly.

Wow, you continue to innovate?

Linda: We do – we have to.

We’re an old company, but we have to stay fresh and hip and cool NZVN you know – as cool as grip equipment can be!

To find out more about Matthews products, contact Chris McKenzie at PLS Phone: (09) 302 4100 Email: chris@kelpls.co.nz Website: www.kelpls.co.nz

LitraTorch We’re at the Litra stand, Professional Adventure Light -ing, and I’m not quite sure if this is my show pick already, having just had a quick look at it, but this is a pretty amazing little light, and to tell us more we have Andrew Siminoff.

Ed: Andrew, where’s this come out of?

Andrew: This light was designed in the USA but it’s manufactured in Shanghai.

We have some high end global lighting partners, that are part of our engineering teams, so really high grade LED technology. Our initial offering is the Torch – a simple light with 3 settings, 100 lumen, 450 lumen and 800 lumen …

Ed:

And strobe?

Small but very powerful and versatile.

Andrew: And daylight safety strobe, not controlled by the hot shoe. Daylight temperature of 5700K, wide beam angle, no centre hot spots or harsh edges. It’s waterproof to 30 feet, ¼ 20 mounts on bottom and back and a magnet. You can mount this on a shoe mount, you can mount this on a Go Pro mount, you can use this as a hair light, fill light, focus light, drop in the pool or hot tub – anywhere you want to use additional lighting. This light won the CES Innovation Award so it’s been well regarded, came out in 2016 and we have toured worldwide with this, retailing at US$80.

Ed:

There’s also a pack of filters, is that an extra?

Andrew: The filters add an extra US$35 retail. It comes with the Roscoe tungstens and 5 colour filters and the cages to attach so that you can put that on that way whether you want it just warm or cool or you want to put colour filters on for effect. We also have a Smartphone mount, the metal plate we call Magic Mount is on the back of your phone, so you can magnet this to your phone. Several other accessories such as handle, Double Mount for a light and Go Pro or Triple Mount for 2 lights and a Go Pro. So that kinda rounds out what the LitraTorch is about.

Ed: Except the button press – you start it by pressing a button which is in a rubberised blister so there’s no water getting into it; you press it again, you go to the next lighting level; and again to the next etc. But if you hold the button down, it turns it off, you don’t have to go through the whole cycle to get it back to off?

Andrew: Ed:

Correct.

And in terms of charging?

Andrew: It’s a micro USB standard port so we ship with a short cord, but you can run a longer cord if you want because you can also run it continuously. It takes 2 hours to charge it from dead and it’ll charge faster if it’s not all the way dead, and the light will blink when it’s charging; it will stop blinking when it’s fully charged so that you know that information.

Ed:

And rough runtime?

Andrew: On the low, on 100 lumen, it will run for 4 hours; on medium, it’s an hour and 10 minutes ( which is 450 lumen ) and on the 800 lumen setting, it’s 40 minutes.

Page 30

Ed: And if you wanted to you can, as you say, plug in the micro USB, run it from an external source and it’ll go for as long as whatever?

Andrew:

Yes.

Ed: Wow. Okay and there’ll be a photograph to show you quite how small it is.

Now there is a slightly larger version of this?

Andrew: Yes, the LitraPro. So the LitraPro light has an OLED display which tells you where the battery is and what percentage of power you’re using; also colour temperature.

This light is full spectrum with no green spike but enhanced red.

So in LED technology, this is a first in something this size. You can go down to zero or 5% all the way up to, at 100%, 1000 lumen, so very, very bright with a CRI of 95 and I’ll show you the skin tone – that’s 3000K all the way up to 6000K, adjusts at 100K intervals if you hit it one time. This is controlled by Bluetooth as well, so you can do brightness and temperature settings, set your favourites, run 7 lights at a time and control them individually or group them into 3 different groups and control like front, mid, rear. This light is waterproof to 100 feet underwater; it will run 10 hours at 10%; one hour at 100%; it can be run external like the Torch. This light retails for US$199; it will come with a diffuser, Go Pro mount, a shoe mount, charging cord, and 2 of those magic plates like the Torch.

It fits on the Torch accessories so it will fit on the Go Pro accessories or Smartphone mount and it will have some unique accessories which I’ll point out to you … barndoors for US$40; softbox for US$40; colour filters ( you don’t need the tungstens because you have the tungsten range within the light ) for US$30; and a honeycomb attachment for US$30. This light will be available at the end of July.

is an 80 degree beam angle, so very wide angle, very even light pattern, very high CRI, very portable, very durable, aluminium.

Ed:

So where’s your notice saying “Best in Show”?

Andrew: We won the CES Innovation Award for the Torch and we just won Best in Show award for this show for the LitraPro! NZVN Contact Tim Timlin at Panavision NZ. Ph: (09) 360 8766 Email: tim.timlin@panavision.asia Or visit their website www.panastore.co.nz

Ed: I can see more uses for this than just on a Go Pro? Andrew: Exactly. The original light fits in the Go Pro housing, it has the same beam angle, it has the same runtime, it does everything to be a Go Pro accessory … we found a lot of people are using it on DSLR and continuous lighting; there’s been a large movement away from flash in the continuous lighting, so when we came out with the Pro, we brought the CRI up, we brought the lumen up, we brought the runtime up, we made it Bluetooth and we made it bicolour with full spectrum. We added a lot of features to still a very small, very portable, durable light.

Ed: But I can see this in the cinema and in the documentary world where you want an unobtrusive light or a hidden light that is just going to light up a little corner off the main scene, just to give it a bit of a kick, because they’re so small?

Andrew: Very small, versatile, very wide angle, this is a 70 degree beam angle and the Torch ( the smaller one ) Page32

MOG We’re at MOG Technologies for Atomise and, no Richard, no Nuno, but we have an old face here … well a young face, whom you’ve heard from many years ago, Miguel Paixão from Portugal.

Ed: It’s lovely in New Zealand now Miguel.

Miguel: Better than in Portugal for sure. It was snowing yesterday in Lisbon.

Ed: But we’re in Las Vegas, home of the free, land of the brave. Anything outstanding from MOG? Miguel: Yes and as always at this time, we bring our news to the show and definitely we have a couple of things to share with you. As you already know, the mxfSPEEDRAIL is our product line for central ingest media whether it is a file base or a baseband. It’s up and running in full power, together with the new business units that we have in the company.

In mxfSPEEDRAIL the news is baseband capturing already supporting IP recording directly from the cameras and for both main protocols in the market – the 2110 and the 2022. A new feature that we released as well over the last months in capturing workflow, is the capacity to record a 4K60p streaming that records straight into a shared storage in AVID DNxHR. That’s a project with a video gaming production company in Canada, where they wanted to have a 4K file resolution being recorded easily for a post workflow. It’s way easier for them to manipulate for media promos creation and quality control process. Directly from a game console, we create the file into shared storage.

Ed: But you could also do 50p for our PAL market?

Miguel: Yes, 50p is also included.

Ed: So this is a product for the gaming watchers …

Miguel: And the companies that produce the games, events and others.

Ed: A very useful addition. Right …

Miguel: We have been doing our business in the broadcast market as usual, but also in postproduction houses with the same concepts. Advantages that we are bringing to the post world are exactly the same that we did with the broadcasters and mainly with the News departments where most of our customers are using that worldwide. With an easy to use centralised ingest system, you have automatic ways you can ingest whatever media you have, whatever the format you’ve got. Working like a black box, media comes in and media goes out in the desired formats, codecs and creating proxy versions of it. Nowadays it doesn’t make any sense at all for an editor to spend hours and hours on the media treatment on the technical side, but we still find customers that ingest media using Media Composer, using other NLEs and it doesn’t make any sense at all, because their time is very expensive and there’s a lot of ways to save money. For those, we are showing here, as a new feature, encoding in JPEG2000.

Recently we added as well Ikegami support considering it is a brand that is growing in the market.

Ed: I think the JPEG2000 side of it is particularly interesting, because we’ve come across a number of suppliers who are still talking about JPEG2000 as being a very stable and versatile codec?

Miguel: A lot of people use JPEG2000 as an archive format. mxfSPEEDRAIL can create it into a shared storage or read from it bringing media into an editing environment in a more suitable codec for editing workstations because it is a very heavy format so it’s difficult to edit over that. This definitely was something that we wanted to add in our product and it’s already up and running.

So, that’s the news for our mxfSPEEDRAIL, the centralised ingest system business unit.

Apart from that, recently we increased our

product range into other areas. Over the last two years we have started to support 360 editing workflows, and today we have our own camera that was designed by us and it’s called the Bright-VR, streaming directly from the camera into the Cloud in 4K 30p. Stitching is done in the camera itself, and it has the capacity to record via Ethernet into a shared storage or locally into an SD card. Our intention is not only to do business on those, but mainly to give full support from the capture to the player, including all management and distribution over the Cloud. So what we want to do is to provide any company, whether it is a broadcaster, a training company, a company that likes to bring to their customers a view of their facilities, that capacity handling all with a single provider, MOG. If there may already exist other cameras, we are capable of including them in the solution and we will design the most interesting and cost effective solution for our customers. Not forgetting that we can create apps to run the player that will be able to play the media and to monetise media as much as possible.

Ed: Now just to be clear with the 360 acquisition; this is like a standalone product – you can even supply the camera and the software and the hardware to run it and you don’t have to buy the full MOG system?

Miguel: Definitely not. Our intention is not to sell parts of it; what we want to give to our customers is the capacity with a single vendor to have full support for all of the different pieces of the workflow. So if we have someone saying “I’ll find another camera I want to use for a particular reason”, we’re all good with that.

We just need to know what the model is, and we will be able to help them with a player, help them with the control of the resolution, with the control of the costs, and other things. We have lots of stories that people were even fired after the bill comes at the end of the month … it’s true!

Ed: Okay, and what else?

Miguel: Then we have the SKYWATCH that we have already introduced two years ago at NAB. It’s based on a platform that we developed ourselves. That platform helps management levels in companies to have a complete reporting tool on the production side of the business. We collect indicators from workstations, from widgets installed over the network, from whatever part of the production we want to have complete control over, and report. It gives users a complete feedback about the environment. All dashboards and reports are

Page 34

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designed and developed specifically for each customer so they will have exactly what they want to see.

Recently we have been collecting a lot of new projects on that business unit. SKYWATCH is not a Media Asset Management, although it can have one included. The advantage we have is the fact that we always have been managing and controlling file media formats, and then we have the capacity to extract a lot of different data from those ones. We can trace media through the network, we can read and integrate with almost all storage in the market and give a full capacity to understand how much stuff that storage has that is really being used efficiently, so how much of all the existing assets have not been touched for the last 6 months or more, and in an online storage that could be pretty expensive if you consider having new equipment every time the storage is full. You may have a request to buy new storage, but at the end you don’t really need it, you just need to clean the one that you have to get a better archive. If someone is looking for a tool to help production management inside the postproduction and broadcast world, SKYWATCH is the answer.

SKYWATCH is not a product that you will be buying from the shelf, that’s not the idea at all. We can show and demonstrate it, but we need to understand the customer’s real environment before we design and propose this tool.

Ed: Okay, now I know a lot of the customers are already Avid customers, because you play very nicely with Avid, but why wouldn’t they go for an Avid solution of media management and not yours?

Miguel: They could go for using Interplay for a media asset management solution of course, or any other AVID tool. This platform doesn’t compete with AVID. What we create is not the capacity to manage the assets, but the capacity to understand how productive the Media Composers are being, how the usage of Interplay has been and how effectively the AVID storage is being used. We can even integrate several manufacturers’ indicators under the same umbrella, inside the same reports. It may be the case that somewhere in the past, a different media asset management was used; we can work with both, creating a federation MAM. In fact, one of the recent projects we started is to have a complete real time overview about the whole AVID installation. So we control productivity of the editors that they have on their Media Composer; we give them the chance to have several different storages and have a single point where they can have a normal view about how the storage is being used – whether it’s an ISIS or a NEXUS or any other brand. Everyone at a CEO level is able to access a complete report about how the tech side and non-tech side of the business is.

Ed: So more of a business than a production tool?

Miguel: That’s right, it’s way more in the business than a production tool.

Ed: Right, Video Cloud?

Miguel: Video Cloud – that was something that we started when we were initially only streaming video into a CDN. We handle Video Cloud as a component of service; we can include whatever media our customers want to ingest from the Cloud into their local storage, or the other way around, after editing streaming it up to the Cloud. Whether it’s a 360 video or not, we are helping our customers in all the video distribution chain.

Ed: Now I’m sure some mid-level production companies and top end production companies that are taking in a lot of client data and manipulating that might be thinking well this is really for broadcasters, but the MOG systems also work and fit very well into the business models of these production companies and not just broadcasters?

Miguel: True. So our legacy was always the News departments in broadcasters and productions being done in the broadcasters. Most of our base customers are indeed broadcasters, but we have been growing a lot and we have of course been doing a lot of work opening new doors in postproduction companies, because they are as well having more professional workflows. They understood they couldn’t support their bills at the end of the month without being professional on how they were handling media. Accelerating media exchanging formats reduces editors’ time consumption, which immediately reduces costs on the postproduction.

Even more when you can have so many different file formats on the sources.

Ed: It’s got to be better for them to have less time for the editors ingesting material and converting etc to use it, and when they add up the cost of this product over a year, I’m sure they’ll find the time saved by the editors should pay for it?

Miguel: It’s definitely beneficial. In some of them we have to do as a proof of concept, and then they can really see how easy their life will be. We have to justify the investment on those projects. When they have several projects running at the same time with different formats, and understand that one single box can run 24/7 and it can be shared by all those different productions, even if they will be using different formats, they see the big picture of it, and how much money will be saved after the implementation. Talk to Richard, our NZVN man in New Zealand!

Contact Atomise - Email: atomise@atomise.co.nz Ph Wgtn (04) 380 5010; Auck mob 021 0669 286 Or visit their website: www.atomise.co.nz

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ARRI Lighting At ARRI with Sean Dooley, now we’re covering the lighting section.

Ed: Well is it all about SkyPanel or are there other lights that are available Sean?

Sean: SkyPanel Firmware 4 is probably the biggest announcement from the lighting side. We’ve also brought out a new range of ballasts called the EB MAX ballasts into all size of bulb to drive HMIs from 575W all the way up to 18kW with our ARRI Max head. EB Max have a lot of advanced features including DMX control and better dimming as well as Autoscan to optimise the light based on varying country power frequencies and to also allow for flickerfree high speed shooting.

We’re also controlling the amount of voltage loss over a cable now, so if you run a long cable from your ballast to your HMI head, you won’t see nearly as much brightness drop. Our Autoscan features also lots of things that, if you’re into ballasts, they recommend you check out. But I think the most visual thing on the booth this year is Firmware 4 for the SkyPanel. There are 10 new features and I’ll take you through a couple of the more interesting ones.

The most visually obvious one is that we’re now giving customers the ability to control the individual light engines on each SkyPanel. So the S30, the 30x30cm square SkyPanel only has one light engine, but the S60 has 2, the S120 has 4 and of course the S360 has 12 individual LED light engines. So now, through DMX, you can address each of these light engines individually which means that in, like the basic colour control mode, the S360 now takes up 193 channels of DMX, but it enables you to pixel-map stuff, play videos through Mike Wagner from the US, Sean Dooley and Anna Lena Binder them, programme all your own effects like the from ARRI, in front of the ARRI spaceship. cop car or the fire effect, you can now do them same colour rendition if you set them to the same yourself just on one fixture. It’s kind of moving into a setting. space where people would normally use LED video walls to project content to light a subject but that as a light Ed: Okay, so who’s going to buy one of these – a source has a really bad colour rendition index and News studio? they’re not particularly bright, so you can use our Sean: Well a lot of people already have. It was S360s and get excellent colour rendition, great skin announced yesterday that we’ve sold almost 50,000 tones, but still have the movie image kind of thing.

SkyPanels in the last 3 years.

Ed: Now is the 360 actually one light – can you Ed: No no no – one of these UFOs? actually purchase this UFO looking device as an item?

Sean: No, that’s just a custom rig we did for the Sean: So the spaceship in the ceiling on the ARRI show; it’s similar to the L shape we did at SMPTE. But booth is made up of – Oooh I’d say 20-something S30it’s a really flexible system so you can make silly things Cs, 4 S360s, and 15 or 20 L7 and L5-C Fresnels. The like this UFO. Moving on to the other features I’ve show’s just about to start so you’ll see the individual spoken about in the individual light engine control that light engine control working on those ( the 360s in the came out in the firmware, there’s also a new mode centre ) and you can look between all of the fixtures called extended colour control. This gives people the there, Fresnels and Softlights and notice that the colour option that, if they pick any colour in one of the colour rendition is exactly the same, and that’s a big point modes – so it might be a particular level of hue or it about why people like SkyPanels.

We take our might be a gel file, they can then finesse it.

So calibration very, very seriously. extended colour control means that you can take any Ed: Yes, I’ve seen it in the factory. colour that the SkyPanel puts out, so you might select Sean: You can be sure that all of the LED engines an individual gel or a particular colour that you like, but in all of our products are going to have exactly the if the DP comes and says “hey can you just make that a

Page 37

little warmer” well now you can change all of those colours in how much saturation is in the colour, if you want it cooler or warmer in colour temperature, or if you want to have any more or less red green blue cyan yellow or magenta.

So you select a colour on the SkyPanel and the DP says “oh can we just take a little bit of yellow out of that” well now you can and it’s really simple to do it either on the fixture or via DMX, so it just gives people an ability to kind of massage and finesse the colour as opposed to having to pick an absolute one which you previously had to do.

Another feature we’ve brought out is stage mode. A lot of people have been wanting to use SkyPanels in theatrical situations, but the dimming from zero to 0.1% was never really smooth – and you’ll find that on every other LED product, it’s just a function of how the LEDs work, it’s very hard to get them to dim right down all the way to zero. We’ve managed to do that, so there’s a new mode; it’s still as bright as a normal SkyPanel at 100% but fading from the 1% to the zero is completely smooth, you can do a really nice soft ramp right off.

That means, if you’re sitting in a dark auditorium, no one notices all the lights suddenly switch off when they get to those low levels. So that’s a new feature of the SkyPanel we’re really excited about for kind of a new market. We don’t recommend using this mode for film and television applications because you’ll probably see a bit more flicker in this mode than you would otherwise, but to the human eye, it’s imperceptible and will work really well in theatrical applications.

There’s one more that I want to talk about – our new web portal for the SkyPanel.

Previously, if you connected the SkyPanel to a network – and really these are all computers with a couple of LEDs on the front – you could go through a web portal in which you could change some settings, but we’ve really taken that and refreshed the whole concept.

So now, if you plug your SkyPanel into a network with an Ethernet cable or if you use a little wireless modem on the back of the wireless router on the back of a fixture, or if you use our SkyLink base station which has wireless RDM control for the SkyPanel, you can now, in your iPhone or tablet, just type in the IP address of the fixture and bring up this really lovely graphical user interface which has all the different SkyPanel modes, all of the different functions and settings for the SkyPanel; you can even see the real world values that get translated from the DMX signal that’s being sent.

which is pretty handy for troubleshooting, so you can go round and see oh, this SkyPanel is not set up correctly, or missing a channel or whatever, because you can see where the colour is wrong.

Ed:

Is it also valuable for planning a set up?

Sean: Sure like when we did the big lighting LED demo in Wellington a month or so ago, we’d set up the whole rig and found that there were a couple of

So if you have a lighting desk and you’re in hue saturation intensity mode, you might set a colour temperature and then put a bit of colour in, well now in the web app, you can see okay, the SkyPanel’s currently set to 4300 Kelvin.

So it’s going to translate those DMX values for you, Page 38

SkyPanels that weren’t behaving in the same way as the others, so we had to go through and manually check the DMX addresses and everything.

But now with this new mode, you can see all of the fixtures on any DMX universe at once and you can tell that oh, the colour temperature’s wrong, so that channel must be out of whack; or the hue saturation intensity – any of those values – it’s just a really easy practical way to see how the SkyPanels are receiving DMX and what they making of those inputs.

Ed: I’m sure there’s a T-shirt around that says “It’s not all about SkyPanel” – you have many other products in the Fresnel line which continue to be sought after?

Sean: Sure and even tungsten you know.

It’s still a big part of our business. Recently an order was placed in China, I believe, for 50, 24 kilowatt tungsten Fresnels.

Previously, for the last 4 years I think, we’ve averaged maybe 3 or 4 fixtures a year, but all of a sudden, there’s a big demand in China for tungsten Fresnels and of course we still produce those and still have the best light quality output.

Ed:

Fresnel lens and all that kind of stuff that, I guess, you can only get with tungsten.

We’re not trying to tell people which way to go, we’re just giving them the tools to make creative choices and LED happens to be one of them that’s been very successful.

NZVN

And this is for the throw, you want the distance?

Sean: It’s kinda hard to say. Most people would now be going to an HMI for that size of fixture because they’re more efficient, but some DPs still really like the quality of light and how you can feather edges with a

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To find out more about ARRI lighting contact Sean Dooley at ARRI Australia Email sdooley@arri.com.au Website www.arri.com