October11 NZ Video News

OCTOBER 2011

IBC 2011 – Another Great Show I finally found out that IBC means the “International Broadcasting Convention” and I guess that really does sum it up. A lot of what goes on at IBC is actually behind the scenes, it’s not the trade show, even though that’s the main focus that I go there for – to see the new products and talk with some of our suppliers – but this year, I did in fact go to one of the seminars. There was a particularly good presentation on loudness and how the Europeans are managing it, or not managing it as the case may be. Again, it turned out that it’s an example of a non-united Europe as to how they might implement this, but I won’t tell you any more just at the present.

The show itself is different from NAB in that it’s spread over about 13 different halls, all connected by doorways or corridors and it really is a bit of a labyrinth. This now, I think, is my fourth year and I don’t get lost quite so often, but it’s still difficult to find your way around. The official attendees were over 50,000 visitors and over 1,300 exhibitors from more than 160 countries and I think that the difference at IBC is that there are more exhibitors than at NAB even though their stand size is much smaller. There are a lot more from European, Asian and Middle Eastern countries here so it really is more cosmopolitan than NAB. One of the reasons I discovered for that when I was in Shanghai on my way back, was the difficulty the Chinese have in getting visas into America. It is really difficult and quite expensive and you have no guarantee of getting in, even if you have an invite to the show, whereas Europe is much easier. continued on page 2

Vol 174

Sony at IBC Sony are the only exhibitors to have their own hall at IBC and that was where I met up with Scott Webster … and no, he wasn’t playing.

Ed:

You’ve been let out on your own without “father”?

Scott: Yes, the training wheels have come off and they’ve sent me out into the world all alone.

Ed:

Amsterdam’s a bit of a risky place to send a young lad?

Scott: Yes, it was a bit of an eye-opener for a young fella on his own in the big bad world Grant.

Ed: Yes, well, that could be the subject of another issue! But “Sony – beyond HD” – this is a continuation of the NAB theme I guess and really that’s pretty much what I’ve gathered from this whole show. People are looking to the next level. In some areas that’s 3D; in other areas that’s Super nVISION and 4K, so obviously Sony’s looking in those sorts of directions too – maybe not the Super nVISION, but …?

Scott: Yes, it’s very much a carry on from NAB. At NAB we made a lot of announcements, but we didn’t confirm a lot of the details behind those announcements. Here at IBC, we’ve followed that up with the product on the stand and with definite delivery dates and costs on a lot of those earlier announcements.

NZVN on the web. Go to <https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews> for more news.

All the latest IBC news from Sony, Gencom, PLS, Quinto, Syntec and Protel - as well as DVT’s “Aftermath” party.

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One of the other major differences with IBC seems to be that there are a lot more computer-based and webbased presentations, more mobile technology, etc than at NAB. NAB, as the name “National Association of Broadcasters” suggests, is heavily weighted in the direction of the broadcast community, whereas IBC seems to be much more media based and a lot wider in its spread.

Right now it’s time to sit back, relax and read some of the latest stories from IBC from our special suppliers NZVN who bring you these pages.

Ed Sony at IBC continued

Ed: And I guess the big one is the F65 which has got quite a crowd of people around it?

Scott: Yes, the F65 is certainly our key announcement at IBC, mainly because we have a release date for the camera, the specifications, the price, the end-to-end workflow … basically it’s the total package in terms of Sony’s entry into the 4K marketplace.

Ed: And this is not something that you would shoot a wedding with, or handhold even – really this is a movie machine?

Ed:

And the lens is US$300,000?

Scott: The lenses are your choice for whatever budget suits.

Ed:

What’s the sensor size … so it’s a 35mm sensor?

Scott: It’s a Super 35mm sensor, equivalent to a 3-Perf 35mm film; it is an 8K sensor with 20 million pixels, processing 16 bit linear Raw or MPEG-4 SStP HDCAMSR native recording.

Ed: And how they’re showing it here, which we can’t see in print, is in a very darkened set and honestly the pictures just look beautiful. I don’t know if any of you every saw Barry Lyndon which was a movie that was lit entirely by candles, but it has that feel to it. It really is a beautiful look Scott?

Scott: Yes, we’re very lucky that Sony UK brought in Steve Lawes who is the DOP behind Sherlock that was recently shown on TV One. He’s come in and built and lit the set to what he would want to see – more of a set than just a stand that you would normally see at a show. So he’s put lights in very strategic places to light the talent and really show off the dynamic range of the F65 and he’s done a wonderful job. Steve was also the man behind the F3 promo shoot Convergence, which was online and got hundreds of thousands of hits. He did a wonderful job on that too.

So a very talented DP and he’s done a great job for us here.

Ed: It beautiful. see on there’s an

certainly looks Beside the F65 I another tripod, F3?

Scott: Yes the F3 on the stand here – as you can see this is our 35mm “world”.

Why this is important is that Sony now offers a large sensor option for all budgets, from the FS100 and F3 up to the F65. So there’s now plenty of choice for people looking for a large sensor from Sony.

Ed: And people who know how to use a large sensor?

The F65 in very low light.

Scott: It is targeted at cinema and what you’d look at for high end TV drama, commercial work, but the camera itself, not only can it do 4K, it also has the ability to do HD and that’s just a recent announcement at IBC. So people had an understanding that, yes it’s a 4K, 16 bit raw camera, but now we have the ability to do HD which opens up a whole new level for the camera to work at; and because of an amazing entry level price of US$85,000, this is quite …

Ed:

For the body?

Scott: No, that’s the camera body, rotary shutter option, the viewfinder, the SR-R4 SR memory recorder, it’s a 256GB card, and also the SR-PC4 a data transfer unit that we’ve released.

Scott: Yes, certainly it takes skills to operate these cameras, it’s not something you can pick up and play with like a third inch camera. You do learn that there are skills involved in operating this cinema style – a way of shooting.

Ed:

That’s why you have ordinary cameras?

Scott: Oh none of our cameras are ordinary Grant – how rude.

Ed: David told me to ask that question as a test – be happy, you passed.

Scott: Excellent … so on the F3 shown here, we have what we call the SRMASTER Portable Recorder, the R1. This can record HD up to 880 megabits per second, so the equivalent to what would have been on SR tape and we’re looking to release a package that you can preorder, which will include that recorder and two

Page 2

Ed:

Without gyroscopic effects on tape?

Scott: Ed:

Yes, correct.

Excellent – and you could also take it surfing?

Scott:

Yeaaaaaah, no!

Ed: Okay, so the funny shaped box that we saw first is actually for going on the back of the camera as a recorder, but I guess it could play out of that as well?

Scott: Yes, there’s a little box from AJA that is an offload device which basically takes the SDI feed from the SR-R1 and transfers it via Thunderbolt into a MacBook Pro using the Thunderbolt connection to get a superfast transfer time.

Ed:

And then you edit it on Final Cut Pro X?

Scott:

I'll check with Stu!

Ed: And for the studio situation, there’s a very nice little black upright box here Scott?

Scott: Yes, this is the SR-PC4. This is basically a data transfer station that’s been developed for field use to offload SRMemory. On the back of this, we’ve got a 10 Gigabyte Ethernet, an eSATA connection and we’ve also got the ability to monitor out via SDI. Ed:

But not Thunderbolt?

Scott: Not Thunderbolt, no, they haven’t included that on this.

Ed: Do any connection?

Sony

products

have

a

Thunderbolt

Scott: Not that I’m aware of at this stage.

Typically they’ve gone with Ethernet or USB3, but no, I haven’t seen any Thunderbolt products here. cards. It works best with the F3 when the S-Log feature is enabled on the camera.

Ed: So even though this is just a block of memory, it actually has quite a lot of potential according to Sony?

Scott: Yes, absolutely.

SRMemory has write speeds up to 5.5Gbps which means it can support 4K data rates or you can record and playback multiple HD streams simultaneously. You can extend the life of any camera with an SDI out …

Ed:

A RED and you don’t like the RED format?

Scott: Aaah yes, you could use it for that, but probably not the best match. But certainly something like the F900R, you could take the 4:2:2 off that and record to an SR-R1 recorder. And what we’ve got is three sizes of cards and three speeds – 256, 512 Gigabytes and a 1 Terabyte card with speeds of 1.5, 2.5 and 5.5 Gbps across the range.

Ed:

Why would you need that sort of speed?

Scott: You’ll need that if you’re doing the F65 raw material at 4K. Part of the development process with the F65 is the ability to record 4K at 120 frames per second.

Ed: Now to operate one of these SR memories, do you need that large box there or surely, if it’s just a memory block, you could just have a little “slotty box”?

Scott: No, there’s a bit of technology to deal with the data coming through, that has to be managed by something that size, so …

Ed:

But great potential for a wide range of recording?

Scott: Yes, there’s a lot of potential … I talked to a customer who’s looking to add something like this to his helicopter rig, so using a Cineflex gimbal and looking for an alternative HD recorder that can emulate SR tape, and this is where the SR-R1 comes into play.

Now we’ve just been into a little cave and had a look at a comparison between an LCD, a CRT and the new Sony OLED monitors and I must say that there was a good range of tests that they went through in terms of looking at the colour at different light levels and looking at the resolution of very fast moving graphics, but the real killer was the black. When the display started, you could only see the LCD and the CRT monitors and you didn’t actually know that there was an OLED monitor in the middle until the Sony logo came up.

Ed: I think that proves that the OLED monitor is pretty cool Scott?

Scott: Yes the monitor itself is awesome, as is the technology and, proving that, we have won a Design

Page 4

Scott:

Grant! You’re so cruel.

Ed: Now in the “really beyond HD” side of things, we have something that I saw last year in a back room and was sworn to secrecy, but this year it’s on display.

However, it’s not actually for sale Scott?

Scott: No this is a service Sony provides. They bought a company called Hawk-Eye which was a company that specialised in tracking – like tracking balls in a tennis match in terms of how many aces someone did, where their first serve landed and where their second serve landed. So they’d be able to map each of the ball strikes on the court and display it graphically, and part of that is what they call Sony stitch video and it’s enhanced with Hawk-Eye data. This is a service that we can provide to OB companies if they want to take advantage of this type of representation of data during a game.

Ed:

The OLED look is really nice.

and Innovation Award here at IBC in 2011 given to that technology and the guys from the factory are very proud to accept that award. As you can see, the technology is amazing and it really is a massive leap forward in terms of display technology.

But it’s not just all about graphics is it Scott?

Scott: No, we have three cameras that can be set up and what they do is they take three shots of the field, or a court or whatever your action is and then stitch the pictures together. Using three 1920x1080 HD cameras, they then stitch those three shots together, and it gives you the ability to pan across the total field

Ed: So hopefully Sony’s going to continue to develop this, make lots and lots of them and we can have them in our homes one day?

Scott: Yes let’s all look forward to a 42 inch OLED in our homes to watch the news on – it’d be great.

Ed: There’s actually a range in size of OLEDs? Scott: Well what they’ve announced at IBC is a third version of the OLED technology, a series called the BVM-F series which we are pitching as a broadcast monitor. This is in between the BVM-E series, which is our grade 1 grading monitor if you will, or for critical evaluation of pictures; and then we have the BVM-F series which we are looking at for the broadcast market; and then we have the PVM OLEDs for less critical monitoring and they all come in 25 and 17 inch versions.

Ed: So these are the ones with just a few dead pixels?

Stitching is more complicated than it looks.

Page 6

and zoom in. Because you’ve got enough resolution within the 1080 picture to do that, you can go anywhere on the field and pick up a lot of information that’s missed in a typical OB setup.

PMW-350 or 320 body, and you can actually shoot 2D on this and use only one sensor to do that.

So examples of this include off the ball action, where the OB broadcaster or the cameraman or director has moved on to follow the play, but say something else has happened off the ball, using this system you can capture that data, because you’ve got a total shot of the field.

Scott: Yes absolutely, you can utilise it that way, but obviously we’ve designed it for the 3D market.

Ed: That’s right, so on the replay, you can actually go and take a different shot?

Scott: Correct, you can go to that instant, take a shot from the stitched video and use that as showing the action that happened at that time.

Ed: And I guess why Sony is doing this as a service, is I imagine because it’s quite a business to set it up?

Scott: Yes well, a lot of specialist equipment and knowledge is part of this and it makes sense for us to keep that technology in house at this stage and provide it as a service to those people who need it. What I’ll do is I’ll just give you a demo of what I mean by zooming in and out of the shot?

Ed:

Bit hard to get that on the recorder, Scott?

Scott: Ed: Ed:

Ed: Excellent and in this situation it looks as though it’s set up in a studio configuration?

Scott: Yes it looks like they’re utilising it as an OB setup with a Sony Fibre Optic adapter there, which is the HDFA-200. The interesting part of this is, rather than the two slots on the camera, we’ve got four slots for the SXS cards, so you can take four 64 gigabyte SXS cards and get 800 minutes of recording on the camera.

Ed: And they are dedicated, they’re actually labelled “A” and “B”?

Scott: Yes rather than “left” and “right” but they’ve also got a “left” and “right” at the bottom.

Ed:

Yes, Sony imagine …

Ed: No, no, no, you’ve got to pause between the “Sony” and the “imagine” – Sony … imagine.

Scott: through!

Scott: No, there’s two dedicated half inch Exmor sensors in there, the same as what’s in the PMW-320.

Scott: Yes that’s what they call a glassless 3D viewfinder, so it gives you a 3D image without requiring you to put on glasses.

Yes.

That was a strap line once wasn’t it?

Scott:

Ed: But you’re not getting half the information that you would in a 320 or 350?

Ed: Just in case you’re confused.

Interesting viewfinder, is that actually a 3D viewfinder?

I know, you’ll have to …

Imagine?

Scott:

Ed: So in that way you’re not buying a dedicated 3D camera, you can go out and do your 2D shoots as well?

Good to see marketing got the message

Ed: Okay, continuing beyond HD, we’re into 3D and as well as the stitching version, we have a stand alone 3D camera?

Scott: Yes, we’ve got the PMW-TD300. This is our 3D shoulder mounted camera, which is effectively two half inch sensors within almost what you would call a

And the box underneath the 3D camera?

Scott: That basically takes the 3D signal from the camera and transcodes it for transmission over optical fibre.

Ed:

So again, very good for an OB situation?

Scott: Yes absolutely. effective OB 3D camera.

It makes a very cost-

Ed: Now we move onto what I impolitely called before the “ordinary” Sony cameras … but these are the video cameras for people who are actually shooting videos and not movies, is that right Scott?

Scott: These are cameras for people who make money out of doing this for a living, and they’re the best tools for the job Grant.

These are cameras they pick up and they do work every day in New Zealand.

Ed:

Sticking with XDCAM disc?

Scott: Absolutely.

We also have the PMW-500 which records the same format but to SXS cards, but just what we have on demo here is the PDW-F800 with a Wi-Fi dongle, and a new release for IBC is the XM Pilot workflow.

Ed: Aaah, people interested in that?

are

going to

be

Scott: Yes absolutely, I think this is going to be a real useful tool for all those XDCAM owners in New Zealand, all those owner-operators who work in reality TV or long form production. This tool is going to be an absolute godsend for postproduction and workflow.

Yes, it’s got two lenses and four card slots.

Page 8

Ed: News crews will be happy to get this too won't they?

Ed: Okay, just before we go into any other cameras Scott, Sony now are not making any tape based cameras, is that correct?

Scott: No, that’s not correct. You can still buy a Z7; you can still buy a Z5; you can still buy tape cameras.

Ed: Very good, I’m sure there’s still a market there, I might buy a second one.

Scott: There’s still a big market, you can still buy those cameras and they haven’t ceased production.

The XM Pilot area.

Scott: Yes, I think it does have a place for news crews, but this part of it is more suited for production rather than news.

Ed:

Explain Scott?

Scott: What XM Pilot is essentially, is an automated logging tool and why it’s really interesting is that it uses a Wi-Fi dongle on the camera to communicate with either a tablet like the iPad or even Sony’s new 'S' Tablet. Basically you create a project on a laptop or on the slate itself; that sends the metadata to your disc or your card in the camera and it allows you to effectively log shots on location using your iPad, your Tablet or even your phone or iPod and it will speed up ingest and editing no end.

Ed: And you can even monitor the picture on your Sony Tablet?

Scott:

Yes, we like Sony Tablet.

Ed: There’s also something new for the F3?

Scott: We’ve got an F3, but what we’ve got on it, which is very cool and a first, nothing else in the world like it in terms of this lens, is we have a zoom lens for a 35mm sensor. Now when they first brought out the F3, people were going “well what’s the zoom rocker for, that’s on the side of the camera?” and this is the reason. What we effectively have, for people like you Grant, who can’t deal with large sensors and the ability of not being able to zoom, is an electronic zoom lens!

Ed: …

Oooh – you’re on shaky ground here Mr Webster

Scott: And I know you’re getting old, so it also comes with auto focus and auto iris.

Ed: Great, it’s got an auto switch, I like auto switches.

Scott: I knew you’d like it, I knew this was the lens for Grant. I can finally get him on to a big sensor camera, because it comes with a zoom lens that’s like a video lens.

Ed:

Aaah but it still has a depth of field?

Scott: Yes it does, it still does that wonderful depth of field that we all like out of our big sensors. So, yes, it is very cool and, as I said, it’s very unique to Sony, no one else has got this technology on a camera.

Ed: ( Scott’s playing with the rings – frustratingly! ) So focus it Scott.

Scott: I’m hitting it, I’m hitting it … it’s not easy is it Grant. But then I could always hit the auto focus …

Ed: EXACTLY. You’re learning, you’re learning.

And this is actually a proprietary Sony zoom and it’s using the real connector on the F3, no adapter?

Scott: That’s right, no adapter. It’s been named the FZ mount and the zoom lens connects directly to that. So you take off the PL adapter and you’re connecting the lens directly to the camera body.

Ed: I knew there had to be a reason for that particular connector?

Scott:

Yes, and here you have it.

Ed: And lots and lots of accessories for the F3 … I imagine quite a few of them made by Sony, but there’s a lot of third party stuff now?

Scott: Yes, as you can see, we’ve got an FS100 here fully decked out with

The real zoom lens for the F3.

Page 9

a Vocas handheld rig. MTF Services based in the UK have made an EOS lens iris control and an adapter for the FS100.

Scott: Yes, this is quite an interesting little product. It’s a pair of binoculars that records AVCHD video via SD card– and we need to find out more. ( Scott talks to pretty lady demonstrator from Japan. ) Ed: Rie, can you tell me a little bit more about the binoculars?

Rie: They are digital binoculars able to record movies in 2D and 3D and also take still photos. Those are the main things.

Ed: So this is a new tool for that sort of surreptitious video recording that you always wanted to do?

Scott:

This is a bit of a worry isn’t it, really?

Ed: Okay, I just want to finish off with the FS100 because it certainly seems to be very popular at this show.

There’s a lot of FS100s here on the Sony stand and, when you go round the show, nearly every stand ( that last year had DSLRs ) has an FS100 on it, with some sort of accessory that these companies have made.

So very popular here?

Scott:

Yes, obviously.

I think why it’s been so popular is because it hits that price point where it gives you a lot more than the DSLR investment that you’ve made and the third party manufacturers have really come to the party in terms of giving you accessories to take the kit to where you want to go in terms of how you want to put it to work.

And because it’s basically a very simple shape and they provided a lot of mounting points on the body itself, the manufacturers have really come to the party to take advantage of that.

Accessories for every occasion for the FS100.

Ed: You can remotely adjust the iris on any camera that’s got an EOS lens on it?

Ed: And it really does give you quite a progression in terms of that 35mm look from that right up to the F65?

Scott: No, this is a specific adapter for the FS100, because EOS lenses traditionally don’t have an iris ring, so the only way you can effectively control the iris is usually putting it on a DSLR, setting the iris, taking the lens off and putting it on a camera.

So this gives you the control over the iris on an EOS lens on the FS100.

Ed: So why would you want to put an EOS lens on an FS100?

Scott: Because people own the glass and want to use it.

Ed: Now in the “believe it or not” department, Sony have come out with a product that’s a little bit off the ballpark here?

Page 10

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Ed: And you can bypass the AVCHD recording system if you really want to?

Scott: Yes, you can do that via HDMI and there are a lot of manufacturers just providing HDMI only recorders.

Ed: And to finish us off, your comments on the show.

Have you enjoyed the time here without David – Oh, sorry, I meant ... we’ll cut the bit about “without David”?

Scott: Yes, great time.

I’ve

had

a

This is my first IBC so it’s quite interesting seeing the difference between an NAB and an IBC. I particularly like how the stands here at around about 5 o’clock break open the Heinekens.

I’m sure it will have many uses.

Scott: Yes, one of the major benefits of the FS100 is that it has the same sensor as the F3, so you’re getting access to that sensor at a much lower cost.

This is something they should adopt at NAB I feel.

Ed:

Page 12

Oops it’s 5 past 5, gotta go, bye.

NZVN

Gekko Technology For PLS we are at Gekko Technology Limited, United Kingdom and we have David Amphlett.

Ed: Gekko – we haven’t heard of this. We have tuataras in New Zealand but this is a lighting company David?

David: We are a lighting company that started in 2004. My background is as a director-cameraman, so all of our fixtures are designed very much from an application perspective.

Ed: So you know what you needed and you’ve made it to suit?

David: Yes, I started in much the same way as Freda from Kino and Dedo did – on set and knowing exactly what the user wants. Kisslite was our first product which we launched in 2004 and it is an oncamera ringlight system that combines the light and the matte box together in a controllable form. Very briefly, I was shooting a documentary in the Far East in 2000 and, like many of the products on the set, there was nothing that suited the needs that I had at the time. I came up with this idea, tracked the technology, and launched Kisslite. It’s a modular system and you can configure it in a number of different ways depending on your camera platform. It will work on a 35mm camera, on a digibeta, on a news gathering camera, and it will work from a very simple basic kit that you can literally fly all round the world with you, including the battery charger that will work anywhere in the world or off a car, to a big complex rental kit which you could use on a Panavision camera and multiple filter stages, tungsten head, daylight head, different lenses, and all sorts of different accessories.

Ed: It looks quite heavy?

David: It’s not heavy at all – it’s actually quite light. It weighs about 450 gram but that’s the lamp and the filter stages combined – 4x4 a rotating tray; 4x565 Panavision tray.

Ed: And they’re all LEDs? David: They’re all LEDs. LED-based.

All of our products are

Ed: And they’re daylight level or what?

David: Daylight or tungsten.

Ed: Are they adjustable?

David: They’re adjustable in terms of dimming, and they’re adjustable in terms of subsector, so you can switch courses off.

Some people don’t want the ringlight shape all the time, but they want to stay on access and have the lamp attached to their shoulder.

So you can turn off sectors … if I’m shooting an RT store presenter who has got a baseball cap on and I don’t want to create a shadow from his hat, I can turn off the top sector and come in from underneath but staying on access. It was designed for shooting in changeable lighting conditions, where you don’t want it as a primary key source – obviously the ringlight goes back 70 years to the medical industry and then all through the fashion industry, but it’s designed where you, as the cameraman, want to stay in control and have a fill. In the modern technology days of high definition and very, very unforgiving high resolution video, cameraman often want to put a bit of contrast control in, but they don’t use it as a primary light source. They might be tracking down a corridor with an actor, or walking through a set, they might just want to turn a bit of glint in the eye, or glint off the features …

Ed: It’s a very even light; what I’m looking at now is very even, very flat – no discernable shadows.

David with Kisslite on camera.

David: And for that reason (I’m mentioning no names), but a certain artiste contractually insists on Kisslite specifically, both in America and in the UK. Ed: Right, now I’ve just asked David a question about colour temperature and of course they’re just one colour temperature of LED, so if you’re doing a track from indoors to outdoors or vice versa, you’re going to have to live with a slight colour shift, but if you have a little bit of time to set it up, can you adjust for this David?

David: You could put colour correction on; if it was one continuous shot obviously you can’t, just the same as you can’t drop an 85 filter in, you have to come in outside from daylight or you’ve got to pick your dominant colour, but if you wanted to shoot two scenes, you could put colour correction filters in or change the head.

Ed: Right, so that’s the portable version and does that work off the camera’s battery or does it have to have its own?

David: It will work either off the camera battery or off a D-Tap; it’s also switching so it will work on any voltage between 12 and 40 Volt, so that doesn’t alienate either the video community or the film community. The film community tend to work on 24; video tend to work on 12; it will run off a D-Tap; it will run off the Anton Bauer battery at the back; it pulls a very low amount of power. We’ve also got battery bolts for it as well – or if you’re working on a steadicam, you can power it off the sled either on the 12 Volt or the 24 Volt, no problems there.

Ed: Okay, a very flexible power supply and one thing we haven’t mentioned, all your products are manufactured in the UK? David: Yes, everything’s designed and conceived and manufactured and assembled in the UK.

Page 14

Ed:

Which enables you to do what?

David: It enables us to control the quality and keep consistency in all of the parts. It enables us to do evolutionary or iterative design improvements if somebody makes suggestions on something “oh I’d like that” – you know we don’t have thousands and thousands coming in on a container and we’re committed to an older design. So we make continual tiny iterative design changes based on feedback from users at shows like this.

stages, very simple, either on Panavision or ARRI standard rods, slides on, mounts and that’s it; again, daylight, tungsten, a range of spotty and diffusion lenses – less modular than Kisslite but, depending on certain markets, it works extremely well. So that’s the ringlight series of lamps – they all do slightly different things and slightly more or less functions.

Ed: And in the larger version, you’ve got some … they look like studio lights?

Ed: And with the pound where it is at the moment, it’s good for us down south?

David: We have a range of spotlights, studio lights, traditional lights, fixed focus and Fresnel focusing lamps called Kezia and Kedo. All of our lamps tend to start with a “K” – there’s no particular reason for that …

David:

Ed:

Yes, absolutely.

Ed: Oh dear, and here’s a product that looks like it’s for a DSLR?

David: Lenslite is a smaller ringlight system, it’s less modular, it only comes in a daylight version, it’s more robust but it still has the filter stages, still has the switchable ballast and has most of the tricks that Kisslite has, but it’s more prosumer level.

It was designed to work in conjunction with the Sony Z1 that had a fixed microphone, and we designed it to fit underneath that microphone, so you could stay on access with the camera. A lot of people were shooting documentaries, “fly-on-the-wall” behind the scenes rock and roll, they wanted a light to do that, but all the other offerings on the market shielded the microphone.

Coincidentally, it now fits extremely well with the Canon 5D which, whatever the purists like to say, is here to stay. So we’ve made a mount to make it work for the Canon 5D – in handheld modes it will work, you can flip the mount over so you can use it with the Canon battery pack, and again just be ergonomic and easy to use and not obtrusive, not have loads of cables and everything trailing around with it.

Ed:

Can it run off the camera’s battery?

David: I’m not sure that it will run off the camera’s battery … it actually pulls about 28 Watts.

Ed:

Well you’re the boss, you can do what you like.

David: They’re all based on a technology called “kleer colour” which is Gekko’s proprietary technology that mixes multiple colours on the chip and monitors the thermal feedback, electrical feedback and optically measures the output. This allows us to create the recipes specifically for image capture, not for eye capture, and work specifically with film stocks and digital chips to emulate tungsten or daylight – and you can switch between the two. So it’s a very, very sophisticated technology which has gone into OHM which is a light reproduced and designed for an American company called PRG, which is the most sophisticated of our range of lamps, again based on our kleer colour technology.

So going completely into “geekspeak” we control light colour within four decimal places on the CIE curve – and one of the important things about a light which you use on set is that the

Oh alright, maybe not the camera’s battery then.

David: No … and then George which is the largest in the ringlight series. It’s designed specifically for drama and higher end production where they’re using large front element lenses which Kisslite would be too small for – like the Angenieux zooms, the bigger zooms where they still want all the tricks, and George is incredibly simple. It just goes on the rods, no filter Page 15

ambient temperature differential on a film set can be quite dramatically different.

Ed:

So 20, 30 foot up on the rigging, it might be 20, 25, 30 degrees hotter than it is at floor level, and you want your sources to look all the same, depending on where you are in the set.

And we’re just looking at the close-up of the OHM here and David’s just dialling in the temperature on the side of it … the ability to get a perfect flesh tone – wooooh – or some really wild flesh tones, is just a case of dialling it in.

So if you’re on top of a tungsten source and 20 foot up in the air, you want to be able to ensure that the colour of the lamp that’s up there is doing exactly the same as the lamp on the ground. The only way to do that is with quite sophisticated algorithms and maps.

Ed: So it might seem like an ordinary light, but in fact this is the “Rolls Royce” of lights?

It’s for a reason?

David:

Ed:

Absolutely.

And is this remote controllable?

David: Yes, fully remote controllable, DMX and RDM … I can change the colour of it, I can change its dimming level, I can readjust them remotely, I can see exactly what they’re doing in terms of what temperature they’re at; I can colour grade the whole set from front to back in warm to blue increments, so I can make you get colder as you go there. When the director at the last minute suddenly decides, “actually I want to turn round and see the reverse,” in the old days, you would have had a cherry picker out gelling 200 lamps – now we can just push a button on a remote desk, and within 2-3 minutes you’ve changed the whole set from grading cold going backwards, to come round and do the reverse.

Ed: I can see why Chris wants 300 of them. And honestly, what continues to strike me, is that these are all LEDs and even though these lamps look as though they’re tungsten lights, there’s just no heat coming out of them … there really is no heat?

David: So the volumetric distribution of light, not the peak output in terms of LUX but what it distributes volumetrically, is equivalent to a 6 kilowatt Space Light in a black skirt on a dot. So if you measured that and put them up in the rigging and looked at what it was putting out across the whole volume, rather than just one peak max reading, you’d get as much output as you

David: It genuinely is cutting edge.

It’s phenomenally complex … a team of about 12 people worked on development, despite the fact that we’re a very small British company, sort of five PhD scientists …

Ed:

And Chris is going to buy a whole lot of them?

David: And Chris is going to buy probably 300-400 of them. The reason for the technology is not to be a smart-arse; the reason for the technology is to give the DOP and the cameraman and the director colour consistency; and added to that, we can get other functionality like the ability to tune it between 2900 Kelvin and 6500 Kelvin; we can remotely address them; we can create colour depth on the set, which allows the people in the 3D realm who tend to work on slightly wider angle view lenses, to see more of the set – and control all of that remotely by DMX. You can even realise that once it’s gone up in the rigging, you can readdress it, and if it’s called 314 now, I can call it 510 later on. So it is very technologically absolutely cutting edge, but it isn’t “cutting edge” for the sake of it being “cutting edge” as I say …

Page 16

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would from a 6 kilowatt Mole in a black bag on a dot, and that’s drawing 400 Watt conservatively at 12:1 saving. The other huge benefit as well, if you do that – touch the top of the lamp, it is ice-cold. A Mole Space Light, the top of it gets to 170 degrees centigrade. Now imagine the heat that puts into the set, the airconditioning you need to control it.

Ed:

And going right down the other end, K-lite?

David: K-lite is the tiniest in the range and there are many camera-top lights out there. The difference about K-lite is, if you come from a news environment, you need robust tools that don’t fall apart …

David’s just banging it repeatedly on the rigging at this point and it’s still going!

David: So K-lite is manufactured out of a solid piece of aluminium, it’s machined out of one solid block to be incredibly robust and, for example, you’re walking into an environment you’ve never been in, and inevitably you’re going to crack your lamp on the top of the doorpost. It’s designed to survive that kind of robust treatment, which is not the way we’d like to treat our tools, but it’s kind of a bit inevitable.

Ed: And it’s got some simple little swing-in filters for diffusion and colour temperature … and on a bracket below this light there are some light strips?

David: We have a range of strips called Kicklite.

Most of our products have an emotive term – it’s the job that they do – and these are simple little Kicklites or the Americans would call them “nook lights”, just for getting you out of trouble and putting a little splash of light in. They get used a lot in cars and again, because they’re robust and they’re safe, we’ve had them used in car crash rigs where obviously they don’t want glass and they want to be shatterproof and they want to be able to withstand vibration.

Ed:

accessory on very quickly with our kind of unique magnet mounting system. Same with George.

Ed: Very hard to see in print, but a very, very cool means of attachment. So … oooh, there is more?

David: Finally, we have a range of softlights called Karess – big soft wraparound sources and we have tungsten and daylight, and a blendable version, again designed for the user. A lot of them are going into television studios now, we’ve probably got them in 25 TV studios across the world. Sky News has got 4 or 5 studios with them … incidentally Kezia was used in a Sky News studio in the Gherkin in London which is a very environmentally controlled and ecologically sensitive building.

The whole studio is fitted out with Gekko lights, and interestingly (and again completely uniquely) the studio’s controlled 15 miles away with a remote DMX. It’s been running for about a year and a half now, so that’s how confident they are – they don’t even have anybody there, all the lights are dimmed and colour corrected and controlled by DMX. Ed: Wow, that’s certainly a good way to start Day 2 and to find out more, go and see Chris at PLS because he’s going to have these in stock real soon isn’t he David?

David: Absolutely – we’re relying on Chris to push NZVN our brand into New Zealand.

Which a fluoro wouldn’t do?

David: No, exactly – a fluorescent light wouldn’t sustain that kind of vibration; the Kicklight has been used on a rollercoaster ride for a commercial for the same reasons – robust, shatterproof and able to withstand vibration.

We pride ourselves in good but functional design that is kind of application led, so our accessories, very simply and robustly, just cling on with magnets. Again, there’s no tricksy pins or brackets to fit up and you can put an

A great selection from Gekko.

Matthews Supports We are now at probably my favourite location and that is – you can guess readers – it’s Linda Swope from Matthews for PLS. Ed: And Linda, the colour of your hair this year is?

Linda: It’s brownish-red. I used to be blonde, but not anymore.

Ed: Oh you’ve been a variety of colours, I know.

Linda: brownish.

I tired of being a blonde, so now I’m kind of

Ed: I think we’d better get on. We have one product that you say is not new, it was at NAB, but I missed it

and we’re going to talk about that shortly, but what I want to focus on is Matthews worldwide. For a time, you were really tied in with the American film industry, it was a Hollywood thing with big chunky bits of solid equipment to carry big cameras and lights, but things have moved on. You say you’re now in 78 countries worldwide?

Linda: Yes, 78 countries worldwide. We’re literally all over the world, still in our own backyard but, you know, a lot of films are not made in Hollywood anymore and there’s more locations out there, equipment is more readily available where it didn’t used to be. Also, probably about 10 years ago, we changed our

Page 18

Ed: And I guess they’ve been really impressed by the latest product that we saw at NAB – your slider?

Linda: The DC-slider has been doing very well.

Before the end of NAB, we actually sold out the first run of 30 pieces. We have since sold out the second run of 30 pieces, and the third run of 30 pieces is about half sold as we speak – and that won’t even be available until October.

Ed: We’re looking forward to a demo in New Zealand at some stage?

Linda: Well if Chris bought one I would gladly fly to New Zealand and demo it for him and his staff.

Linda surrounded by support items.

marketing plan and started going after the international markets, knowing that things were beginning to change – e-commerce was coming of age. You know we’re not an e-commerce company, we don’t like to deal with ecommerce companies because it’s just not our model of a stocking dealer where you can walk in and you can get five of these and six of those and ten of another.

So, yes, we’ve actively searched out different markets in different countries and are knocking on doors all over the place, trying to get in to where we’re not.

Ed: Well there’s a challenge Chris, there’s a challenge. We’ll hold her to that.

Linda:

I’ll do it.

Ed: And do you know the sort of people who have been buying the DC-slider?

Linda: Most of the people who have been buying it have been end users; like at the trade show at NAB when we first debuted it, we sold it to all end users, except for two dealers who bought them. That is an exception, yes; when we have trade shows, you know

Ed: And that’s it, you can find Matthews on the web and you can go and have a look at all the products that are there, but you can’t buy it off the web?

Linda: No, our website will give you everything that you need as far as information; there’s videos educating you on product, but you cannot buy from our website, it refers you to dealers all over the world. You go to a dealer network and you can go through any dealer and go from there.

Ed: And that’s a model you wish to continue, for what reason?

Linda: Yes, I would definitely want to continue with the dealer network. We established our dealer network probably 40 years ago when we first started doing Matthews and it’s grown slowly but surely. We’ve got those very good dealers out there that send us stocking orders, that have showrooms so that people actually come in and they can buy stock, they can get what they need, they have the support, because we support the dealers. There are people who a lot of times will call and say “I don’t want to deal with the dealer, I want to come direct.” You really don’t want to come direct – I mean I give the best customer service there is and I will to every single one of my dealers, but if I had every person who called and said “I want to come direct” it would be out of control and the dealers manage that for us. We have some really fabulous dealers all over the world.

Page 19

we love our dealers, we represent our dealers but we sell the show stock off the floor. Now in the case of the DC-slider, it was a brand new product and we wanted it in the hands of users, so that’s a lot of the reason why we pushed those into end users, because the word gets out, and then the dealers start ordering them because guys are requesting them.

Ed:

But you haven’t stopped there?

Linda: No we haven’t stopped there. We have another version of the DC-slider that’s the heavy duty version. That will hold 30 kg of weight while the current version holds about 14 kg. So with that big one, you can put a RED on there, you can put an Alexa fully loaded – not a problem.

Ed:

And is that one going to be longer as well?

Linda: No, it’s the same length, just a little beefier. That was one of the main questions we had at our first trade show at NAB – “can I put RED on it” “can I put an Alexa on it” and then it was like “no … but just wait and then we’ll have one that will do it for you.”

Ed: I guess if you made it too much longer, you’re going to run into the lever principle and you’re going to need too much counterbalance?

Linda: Yes, too much counterbalance, you won’t be able to travel with it as easily, because it all fits into a case right now. There’s other sliders out there that can be as long as you want them.

Ed:

But they’re not Matthews?

Linda: They’re not Matthews, so they’re not as good of course!

Ed: Having said that, the item that we missed at NAB consists of three suction cups and some arms that look as though they’ve got a name already. What’s this Linda?

Linda: These are our car mount systems. There are two systems; there is one that utilises a big 10 inch suction cup and two smaller cups along with items from our micro-grip line.

Our micro-grip heads and our micro-grip arms – and the whole idea behind this is to triangulate your camera on the hood or on the door, because as you triangulate it, you get the stability that you need, so the camera doesn’t wiggle, it moves with the car. We’ve got a large one that will hold about 24 kg and the smaller one about 15 kg. It’s real simple and it works great.

It’s a super suction device.

you to break that seal; and you’d have to break the seal NZVN on all three of them, so you’re pretty safe.

Dedolight For PLS, we are at the Dedolight stand and we have Roman Hoffmann.

Ed: Roman, I’m under a very even soft light here, and I’m very impressed because we saw this light at NAB in the prototype form and now it is in reality and it looks beautiful. Tell us more?

Roman: It’s the new 40 Watt LED daylight light source from Dedolight. It has a daylight balanced LED

Ed: And this means you can mount your camera actually quite a distance off the bonnet, unlike using just a single large suction cup, where you could mount the camera pretty well flush with the top of the suction cup?

Linda: Yes, exactly.

And there are different accessories that are sold with it. If you want to get out away from the door and bring the camera back into the car to film the driver, it’s a piece of cake. If you want to drop it down to film the wheels, you can. There are just so many cool, different options with it.

Ed: And I notice that suction cup is sort of going over a piece of bodywork that’s not totally flat … it’s still going to hold?

Linda: Ed:

Oh yes, no problem.

Do you think I’d be able to pull it off?

Linda: If you really tried, all you have to do is break that seal, but if you’ve got your camera on there, you’re not going to go up there or let anyone get near Page 20

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chip inside. In the near future it will come also in tungsten and bicolour.

Ed: Is it switchable or can you purchase it in those different formats?

Roman: It will be available in daylight or tungsten and in both versions where you can switch and mix the colours. There will also be a studio version controlled

by DMX and the interesting thing about that is that we have only one lens that replaces the two lenses that you have in the classical Dedolight. It is a little more compact, but the front diameter is the same like on the Dedolight classical light, so you can use all the existing accessories like the imagers and projection attachments. So the 40 Watt saves you a lot of energy; the light output will be approximately comparable to a 100 Watt halogen Dedolight. The target group is the mobile crews that use batteries, so that they can work longer on one battery and most probably there will be a new kit consisting of the focusing light heads, the 40 Watt LED light, combined with LED panels so that you have a combination of softlight and the precise focusing lights.

Ed: It sounds like quite a new direction?

Roman: Yes it is – let’s say it will be an addition to the already existing Dedolight range. Still the idea is the same like on all other Dedolights, the precision of lighting, the light quality, the even light distribution and colour distribution …

Ed: But you’ve made a big change here – you’ve gone from black to white?

Roman: Actually it’s not white, it’s grey! Yes, just to point out that it’s a different light source that we use there, and we are pretty sure that it’s going to be quite popular because for all those people who work in daylight conditions, we just offer a precise light in daylight colour temperature. So for all those reporters who go out every day on the street, that will be a good addition to the sunlight.

Ed: And it’s got a ballast attached to it so you can dim it?

Roman: Exactly – it will be dimmable, it has its own separate ballast so it’s not a 12 or 24 Volt power supply, it’s going to have its own ballast because the LEDs are very susceptible to voltage changes.

Ed: And I guess the other major thing about it is the focusing system is simple but very clever?

Roman: Exactly. On a traditional Dedolight, you have to turn a knob and then move around the car-

Roman is very proud of the new light.

riage, but here the ring is included in the light, so you just turn the ring on the light and the radiator moves out or in and this is actually the simple focusing. And the good thing also, there is quite a big radiator on the rear of the fixture and this is actually the only place that really gets hot. The focusing ring is quite cool also after working the whole day.

Ed: But it’s not going to burn your fingers like a tungsten would?

Roman: Watt.

Ed:

No it won’t; and also because it’s only 40

And a fantastic set of barn doors?

Roman: The barn doors are actually the standard Dedolight barn doors but they work excellently also on the new LED fixture. They give a sharp projection of the shadow; we don’t have multiple shadows, again it’s because of the optics, not because of the LED, because of the lens that is a new one that replaces the two beforehand.

It looks good, it is compact and it’s energy saving.

Ed: Is it available now?

Roman: Let’s say we have started production, but to be honest, like on each new product, it will take a couple of months to see how the feedback is, what people need, what we need to change. But so far, if we quote Dedo, we are in production, but to be honest, let’s take a look on a year to come, to get all changes done and I’m sure during the second half of the next year, it will be NZVN available in good numbers.

Page 22

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Sennheiser and Neumann Part of the Sennheiser booth is the Neumann section where I met up with Robert Sloss from Syntec Australia.

Ed: Robert, this is early in the show and you’re looking bright and chirpy?

nice looking speaker.” It might look nice, but you’ve got to listen to them don’t you?

Robert: It’s a bit like an ice-cream – it may look good in the cone, but until you eat it, you don’t know how good it really is!

Without continuing the food analogy, I moved on to the Sennheiser side to speak with Sven Boetcher.

Ed: Well Sven, we’ve discovered that for probably the first year of many years, there’s actually nothing new in the Sennheiser range since NAB, but we have found out a little bit more about the digital shotgun microphone that we featured at NAB. That has been accepted very well in the sports area I understand?

Sven: Yes we have quite a lot of interesting projects like the NBA or Super Bowl in the US where these microphones were used for production.

People liked very much the high directivity of the microphones and still the offaxis let’s say frequency response, which is very smooth and nice. So these Robert Sloss with Neumann speaker. are very suitable, especially for picking up sounds in sports, on the football field or Robert: Yes well I’ve had a good flight and a couple baseball – whatever. of days rest before the show, so I’m fine. But it’s always good fun, very exciting at the show at IBC, Ed: And can you put very simply how you do this in some good products, good technology and Neumann is the construction of the microphone? Is it a physical a company that’s done some good things with new thing or is it a software thing? product … we’ve got the KH120 loudspeakers which are Sven: It’s a physical thing, so of course a shotgun part of the new Neumann designed loudspeaker, microphone has an interference tube which is a physical originally based on Klein & Hummel. The KH120s are affect which allows us to kind of narrow the beam. That the small monitor – very, very good – well received in depends on the mechanics of the microphone and the Australia and around the world, and there’ll be some other special thing about this MKH microphone or new models to follow later.

MKH8000 line is they are RF frequency condenser Ed: And it’s been a good marriage, the companies microphones.

A normal condenser microphone is coming together and I guess sharing the technology always kind of delicate in outside situations when it from two very important manufacturers? becomes wet or when the air is humid. With the MKH Robert: Yes, I think the decision to split monitors technology, this is not the case.

This is a real into the Neumann side of the company and the PA into condenser microphone but, as the transducer uses a the Sennheiser side of the company has paid good capacitor in and out circuitry, it has a very, very low dividends. Certainly the first monitors from Neumann noise and is very insensitive to humidity. continue the high quality and the standards set by Ed: So you can use them in diving situations?

Neumann over the last 80 years.

Sven: Well not so deep, and still above the water Ed: And you’ve made some good sales? please, but humid air is OK. Robert: Yes, some really good sales, both in Ed: Now Sven, a major issue that is concerning us in broadcast and in recording, so we’re very, very happy.

New Zealand, is radio spectrum and the TV stations and Ed: What are the sorts of comments people are Telcos taking over our spectrum that is used for radio making about these speakers as opposed to what they microphones. What’s the situation with that in Europe might have had before? and what’s Sennheiser doing about it?

Robert: I just think they like the quality and I guess Sven: In Europe, the situation is in full swing, so there the sound in general. There’s been a lot of technology are countries like the UK that have nearly finished this go into the product; they not only look good they sound process of changing the spectrum. This will be done by good and I think the KH120 particularly will become an the middle of next year. In Germany, the decisions are industry standard. already made and the spectrum is reallocated; the Ed: I guess that’s a very hard thing to do – to look at a brochure or an ad in a newspaper and say “oh that’s a

people are now changing their equipment to other frequency ranges, so everything above 790 MHz in

Page 24

very happily together with the regulatory authorities to make it clear that there is a big need for frequencies for wireless production. People often only see one or two microphones on the stage; they don’t know that for the whole show there are 20, 30, 40 or even 60 microphones working in parallel.

So raising this awareness is the first point, where we were already successful.

The second point is making it clear that, even though we don’t bring billions of dollars to the markets like mobile phone operators, still this is a very essential production tool, otherwise shows wouldn’t happen and nobody would have content.

Ed: And you really had to explain that to them?

Sven Boetcher from Sennheiser.

Germany is not allowed in the future anymore. People can use it, but they must expect that they will have disturbances from so-called LTE ( long term evolution ) mobile phone networks so people need to change their equipment to lower frequency ranges. We are working

Sven: We really had to explain this and we did this and there is the first successes … for example, in Europe now, we have an additional frequency range of 1800 MHz and, in this frequency range, we are the first to have products there. It is for the semi-professional market, it’s not for the pro market at the moment, but

Page 25

this kind of puts a little bit less stress on the spectrum because people can move with some applications outside the spectrum, and at the end it’s the first thing that the regulatory authorities recognise the demand and allocate some spectrum which is exclusively for audio production.

Ed: Sven, has there been any statement or regulation made by the authorities that have set in stone a band for broadcast use?

Sven: It’s not a dedicated band for broadcast use, but it’s a band for audio production, so therefore there is a band which is exclusively for audio production, which can be used for broadcast and also for theatres and hotels and conference centres, for audio transmission.

That’s unique, that’s the first time, because before we always shared the spectrum in the UHF range with TV stations, using the gaps which were in the spectrum …

Ed:

What’s the range?

Sven: It’s 1785-1800 – so it’s 15 MHz which doesn’t cover all the needs, but it gives some relaxation in the spectrum already.

Ed: Is it open to anyone to use, or do you have to register?

Sven: That depends on the country. For example, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, Spain and I think in Belgium, it’s free to use, anyone can jump into this without a licence; and in other countries like the UK and France and so on, it’s required to apply for a licence in the UHF range. As I mentioned, this eases up the situation a bit, but it will take some time for the countries and for the markets to adopt this, depending on the pressure on the UHF spectrum, which is not always in Europe the same. In Germany, the spectrum pressure is high, so people adopt the 1800 MHz range products which we already have; in other countries where the spectrum situation is more relaxed, this will take a little bit more time.

Ed: And I guess the situation will be that the manufacturer with the most powerful transmitter will win out over the other one?

Sven: Well that could be right in a digital world. In the analogue world where we have analogue transmission of wireless microphone, you have a big range where we have interferences between microphones if they work on the same frequency. So therefore, what you have to do when you work with analogue microphones, is first switch on your receiver, check if the frequency is free and then you can work. Otherwise you run into trouble.

In a digital world, this is basically the same – the only result is that disturbances normally occur as muting of the system, so you don’t hear any disturbances in the

Rycote For Syntec we are at Rycote with Tim Constable sporting a very bold red gingham shirt.

Ed: Do you ever get mistaken for a laid table?

Tim: All the time – it’s my trademark shirt for trade shows. Everyone recognises me for this.

Ed: It’s good to be noticed. Now the Rycote stand has been pretty busy, people coming and going.

There’s not a lot new since NAB, but a couple of key products – just run us through those?

Tim: In front of us at the moment we’ve got an enhancement to the portable recorder suspension.

Customers always like our shape and style and same basic sort of materials as the previous portable recorder

way, like crackling noises or something, but I mean it’s muted, that’s not what you want, so therefore you always should allocate the frequencies right, check if it’s free before you switch your transmitters on. That’s a very conventional way which is necessary because we have very crowded frequency situation, often we have to squeeze many channels in a TV spectrum and automatic frequency movement in shifts and jumps and so can be pretty tricky and a common problem.

Ed: So where is the radio microphone development going … is it going into transmitters with a wide spectrum range or a number of different bands so that you can pop between them and look for a free one, or is it moving towards 100% digital – or both?

Sven: At the moment, the market is not synchronised in its views. There are different strategies out there.

Our strategy at Sennheiser is to put as many channels in a given frequency spectrum, so frequency efficiency is the key for us, because we see that the spectrum we can use is getting less and less. At the end, the regulators have now recognised “okay, there is a need” so we ask for a dedicated spectrum there, which already we have first developments with the 1800 MHz range as I mentioned. And so this is our approach and still we need to be very flexible because we have long transition phases – it’s most probably not worldwide in the future the same frequency range … we still have the broad frequency range of the UHF, it’s 470-860 in some countries, so therefore we need flexibility also. So our target is frequency efficiency and flexibility. And then, of course, digital is an important topic, because digital can provide us with even better audio quality in microphones, but we’re still convinced that analogue microphones will also be long in the market, because going digital means a lot of difficulties to overcome, because you normally cannot just pick any chip from the mobile phone operator or whatever and use this for a wireless microphone, because the requirements for wireless microphones are very special and very high in terms of reliability and other things.

Ed: Have you put forward your pleas and requests to the regulatory groups just as Sennheiser or is there some sort of group involved?

Sven: No as this is a topic for the whole industry, we are working together closely with our competition, with Audio Technica, with AKG, with Shure and other manufacturers to have a like approach together with them towards the regulatory authorities. We have set up a group which is called APWPT, which is a working group, which is applying for these – kind of putting on papers and talks and lobbying in the regulatory authorities and the governments in Europe.

NZVN

suspension, but we’ve also added the Rycote name to it. On top of it, we’ve got a nice red rubber foot, colour coded with the Rycote logo and what-have-you, but it smartens up the whole image.

Ed: And it serves a purpose?

Tim: Yes it serves a purpose in terms of, when you tighten the screw, it acts like a washer to hold the portable recorder on top of the suspension nice and tightly.

Ed: So little improvements. I guess you could supply the rubber piece itself for previous versions of this device?

Tim: We hadn’t thought of doing that, but I guess we could do, yes.

Page 26

Ed:

Well it’s about product support isn’t it?

Tim: Oh yes, totally. The previous one had a bit of rubber that was perhaps a little bit thicker and went along the whole top, and this is just a slightly different design … but if somebody wanted the new rubber in there, I guess we could look at doing that, yes.

Ed: Contact your dealer. Right, and a really cool little addition to your camera?

Tim: We’ve got a wireless mic receiver bracket …

Ed: Well it’s not just for wireless mics though is it – it’s a little bracket that goes onto one of the shoes?

Tim: Yes, it goes onto one of the shoes.

At the moment we see it with a wireless receiver in there, but as you say you could more or less put anything in there at all, because we’ve got two Velcro straps which go round the baseplate. On that baseplate you could attach a wireless receiver or you could attach a solid state recorder – basically you could attach anything you like to it really.

Ed:

Or put two wireless receivers in there?

Tim: Exactly, yes, it’s more than capable of putting two in there if you wanted to – there’s loads and loads of Velcro there, so you could get something that’s quite large dimensions in there as well.

Ed: And there’s a whole range of – what do you call these things?

Tim with Rycote accessory.

Tim: What we’ve got here is a quarter inch thread adapter, various hot shoe attachment threads and we’ve got some other bits from the universal camera kit – we’ve got the camera clamp adapter, we’ve got a 10 cm hot shoe extension …

Page 27

Ed:

What, there’s more?

Tim: Yes, there’s more – there’s eight bits of the kit altogether, so by buying the kit you get a fantastic bundle in there, but one of the extra bits of kit that we’ve got is the boom pole adapter, so with the InVision video hot shoe suspension, you can take the arm off of it and then you’ve got the boom pole adapter which you can screw onto the bar of the suspension itself with the screwdriver that comes with the kit. That enables you to attach it to a boom pole or onto a microphone stand or a tripod or anything like that.

Another good use for Velcro.

Ed: So that’s it, there’s lots of little gadgets that make the job of putting things on your camera so much easier?

So you can mount the mic independently of the camera which is great. The other thing you get is the quarter inch thread adapter which is very useful for the photographic markets; and then finally you get the camera clamp adapter which is a plastic device which enables you to put it into the microphone clamp on the side of a video camera – you’ve got a cold shoe fitting at the back there, so you can then fit the suspension on top of that.

Tim: Exactly – if you look at the Rycote website for a reference point, you’ll see loads and loads of tiny little gadgets as you say, that just make life a helluva lot easier. What we’ve done over the last 18 months or so is that we’ve been out listening to a lot of end users, picked up the feedback, found out what they’re looking for, and come up with lots of little interesting products that basically help make life easier.

Ed: And a lot of them you put together in the Rycote universal camera kit?

Tim: Yes exactly – we’ve put a lot of those in the universal camera kit, so basically in the camera kit you get the wind solution with the Miniscreen and the Miniscreen Windjammer; you get the suspension system which is the InVision video hot shoe attachment; and then you also get a 10 cm hot shoe extension that basically increases the space that you’ve got on the hot shoe, so you could put a microphone on there or the suspension that comes with the kit, but it also gives you a bit of space there for some light panels as well.

With the hot shoe extension, you can either have it going lengthways along the camera, or you can have it going at right angles.

The good thing with that hot shoe extension is that it’s got two screws on the bottom to adjust the tension. If you release the top one, you can move the screw further along the hot shoe extension itself, so if you did have it lengthways along the camera line along the lens, you could push it right to the front, so it gets up to your eye socket level, or obviously you can turn it at right angles as well. If you did have it lengthways along the camera, you could have something like a microphone behind it and then something like one of those new Manfrotto LED small little panels at the front.

It gives you a nice little solution so you can get light and audio together on a camera nice and easily, keep your shooting rig nice and tight, compact and a lot more user friendly.

Ed: It’s amazing what you can fit on a camera with a Rycote accessory?

Tim: Oh yes, exactly, we can make it into a total Frankenstein rig if we want. We’ve got all the kit and the technology to do that, so it’s absolutely fantastic.

Also in the kit as well …

Simple but very handy.

It’s quite clever, because it comes with a detachable sleeve – the reason why you get the detachable sleeve is because all the camera manufacturers don’t use a common diameter for the microphone clamp, so what we’ve got is a sleeve there, so for the ones that are a larger diameter, you put the sleeve on; for the smaller ones you just take the sleeve off so it fits there nice and easily. And as it says, it’s a total universal camera kit – you can use lots and lots of different mics in there, because the InVision video hot shoe takes any mic between 19 and 25mm, either cylindrical or slab sided, so that’s universal, but also it transforms an HDSLR to a video camera, so you’ve got all the shooting possibilities covered – so it does what it says on the tin: “total universal”. It comes in three sizes 12, 14 and 18cm depending upon the size of the mic you’re using. Those sizes refer to the Miniscreen wind protection that you’ve got on it. Fantastic bit of kit, you shouldn’t be without one.

Ed:

Page 28

Or two or three.

NZVN

Is new technology always desirable?

The IBC Daily News article was titled “The Apprentice faces Tapeless Task”. It said that the producer in the UK version of The Apprentice has warned of the huge logistical challenges involved in moving, logging, tracking, managing and storing data. Now this was in the session held at the show called “Cloud Computing and Going Tapeless – Case Studies from the Coalface”.

The producer spoke of switching from DigiBeta to XDCAM disc for the show. She said “We opted for XDCAM because we shoot hundreds of hours of footage and the alternative would have been to spend £10,000 a day on memory cards. So we are really only part of the way to being tapeless, because we still use an optical disc.” Another problem she reckoned, was that they would have required 20 new members of staff as data wranglers to keep tabs on the footage if they’d gone solid state.

Then there was the managing director of a UK production company who said that the uptake of the Cloud by the production community would face similar teething problems, because although users have potentially unlimited storage, they’re still at the mercy of upload and download speeds. He also added that production companies needed to be given assurance that their precious footage was going to be safe. He said “At the moment it feels safer to put it on tape. We are still examining whether the Cloud is going to be the game-changer it’s hyped up to be, or a promise without a practical application.”

So there are two comments on the future of archiving, short-term, long-term and the implications one faces when one changes a workflow. Be warned, tape is not NZVN dead yet!

ED Page 29

Broadcast Pix We are at Broadcast Pix with Dennis Breckenridge and Nicki from Gencom.

Ed: Now Dennis, you’ve surprised all of us by saying you’ve got a new product, it’s shipping and it’s working?

Dennis: That’s true. We have the new Mica systems, just released this morning, the first day of IBC and we’re actually already shipping the units, so it’s a little bit of a backwards thing for a manufacturer to do …

Ed: Hey, but you guys are always out there leading aren’t you … I mean this is it, you’re known for being upfront and for product that works?

Dennis: Yes, we believe in delivering products to people that are going to solve their problems today and so that’s really what we did. We came out with a new product that, for a lot of schools, universities, businesses, really reduces the cost point of going to HD and doing integrated production with CGs, graphics, clips, all the things that we’re famous for – but packaging it in a way that’s really attractive.

Nicki and Dennis at Broadcast Pix.

Ed: Now Dennis, there’s been one particular but lower cost mixing system that has recently hit the market, that really sort of comes in at a very, very low pricepoint.

In your view, your product has superior qualities?

Dennis: Yes, there’s several pieces in production that you have to look at. Of course, there’s always been vision mixers that are low price-point, but the features and the functions of what people really need, and the reliability of what they really need, that’s really what it comes down to. So, yes, you can pay small amounts, but is it really meeting your production objectives? The difference with our product and the still aggressive price-point that we have, but certainly not at that same base level … our systems are complete at the price-point that we’re talking about whereas with these other products, you have to add on computers, you have to add on different devices for CGs and things like that. So the price when you actually get the studio complete is sometimes the same or a little bit more than what our solutions are. We are giving you a complete solution, it’s integrated, tested, working, proven – rather than you having to find the way yourself, putting together these various different pieces.

So it’s a difference in belief in and understanding of what people really need. Do they really need you to just come with an attractive price and then the actual implementation is different, or do they want you to come with a solution that’s proven and tested?

Ed: And I guess the other major thing is that, if you have to build it up yourself from a number of components or things that you already have, there’s more potential for things to go wrong?

Dennis: Yes, more potential for things to go wrong and less usability. So we always have to talk about the user’s ability to utilise this technology and use it effectively, and the more different manufacturers, vendors, components that you have to put together, the more difficult it is for users to be able to do that in a

logical manner. So it might take more operators, it might take more training, it might take lots of things to achieve the same goals in your production.

Ed:

So this is called the Mica Desktop?

Dennis: Well we have a whole line of Mica products, so it’s 1ME switchers and we start at a desktop version and then you can add different control panels and surfaces right up to our Mica 2000 which is a large 1ME system.

Ed: And I guess these are mains electricity – it’s not a portable version?

Dennis: Currently rack mount system, into that 4RU, so it’s clips, graphics, CGs package.

not a portable version, it’s a 4RU but it’s completely incorporated a complete system including the – everything within that 4RU

Ed: Can you upgrade at any point, or do you have to go and get a complete new package … say if you went and bought the desktop?

Dennis: To set up our systems from desktop to any one of our other models including the control panels, it is simply a case of plugging in the control panel, it automatically senses what it is and it upgrades your functionality. So the Mica is eight external inputs, cameras, VTRs, whatever you want to use; and then start with the desktop, if you want to add a panel later, plug it in, it just auto-senses it and it keeps going.

Ed:

That’s pretty good for future-proofing?

Dennis: Yes, very good for future-proofing. It also runs on the same platform or operating system as our larger Granite system. So a user that learns on this can easily work on a Granite and we have an upgrade path – if people even want to upgrade from eight inputs to 22 inputs, we have a full trade-in package for that as well, and it’s the same operating environment, same control panel, same everything for the user.

Ed:

Page 30

Is there a basic model Dennis?

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you can just add panels if you want to in the future.

So definitely the Mica desktop is a great starting point for anybody.

Ed: And who would you sell this to in New Zealand?

Nicki: Schools and universities and churches …

Ed:

Houses of Worship you mean?

Nicki: Houses of Worship, yes, there’s one big one in Auckland that actually has Broadcast Pix.

Dennis: Yes, the Mica desktop model has all the same functions and you can operate it from touchscreen, from keyboard or mouse, and do all the switching, graphics, everything; and then from there

I’d like to say that certainly if anyone is interested in a mixing system with graphics, go and have a look at some of the low-cost solutions that are out there, they might suit exactly what you want to do.

However, make the comparison, come and have a look at the Pixel Power products from Gencom – either the Granite or the Mica – and really see that you’re comparing apples with apples; really see that the product that you want for your purposes is the low-cost solution, or does this offer you something much, much more at a price that is compatible when you compare all the add-ons you NZVN might need.

Page 32

JVC For Gencom, we are now at JVC with Noel Oakes.

Ed: Noel, JVC’s logo has the strapline “Tomorrow’s Technology Today!” and you’re covering two bases I understand?

Noel: We are.

The product behind the theme “Tomorrow’s Technology Today!” is twofold. We are showing here at the IBC stand new 4K display and acquisition technology, cameras and monitors; and we’re also showing further developments in our 3D display and acquisition technology.

Ed: Now 4K seems like a … well it’s new, it’s a totally different line to 3D, but there is strong interest in that level?

Noel: Yes there is. There’s always been interest in acquisition, especially with the film end getting to 4K, things like the RED camera that had all the noise behind it several years ago …

Ed:

The noise behind it, not the noise in the picture?

Noel: No, exactly – bit of artefacting – but at the moment I think that is where the real world applications are in having 4K displays. A lot of the workflows now for postproduction are at 2K or better than 2K, and so having a 1920x1080 display, whether it’s a projector or a monitor, doesn’t cut it for postproduction anymore.

Therefore, having these displays that are capable of up to 4K resolution, means that these production companies, broadcasters potentially, can use them now, and they still have room into the future, keep them relevant for perhaps 3K workflows and up to 4K workflows.

Ed: Okay, just to sort of refresh us on the idea of 4K … what does that actually mean in terms of picture resolution?

Noel: There are a variety of standards depending on who you talk to but, basically, 4K display means 4096 horizontal pixels by 2160 vertical pixels; so it’s roughly 4 times standard HD of 1920 x1080 high def screen.

Ed:

That’s pretty sharp?

Noel: Yes well, even the image that we’ve got here on the stand, which has actually been shot with a prosumer 4K camera, is pretty stunning …

Ed:

Not with that little camera there surely?

Noel: Yes it is, it’s with that small little single chip 4K camera. JVC have shown that, with the idea to garner interest in having a camera like that, measure the popularity with users.

They’re not saying at the moment that they’re committed to producing it, but at this show, the Japanese that I have spoken to from the factory, are getting a lot warmer about the idea, so I’m hoping we will actually see that coming fairly early next year for the market.

Ed: And I have to say, looking at the pictures on that screen, it really is better than HD. That’s very, very sharp especially from such a little camera?

Noel: Yes, it’s amazing actually the technical breakthroughs that have been made by this industry,

by JVC and other companies – absolutely amazing.

Ed: I would imagine that this is sort of the start and one would hope that bigger versions of 4K cameras might come out in the near future?

Noel: Well JVC have developed a new chipset which is an LSI chip or Large Scale Integration chip is what they’re calling it; and they’re using that not only with

Noel with a very small 4K camera.

the 4K cameras, which is what enables them to reach the 4K resolution natively, but also even in our 3D cameras. Two of those chips are used to process two full streams of 1920x1080p left and right for the channels, and they’re also using that chipset in our projector technology and in our display monitor technology.

So it’s really come down to the development of that chipset that’s enabling these new breakthroughs in resolution.

Ed: And talking of projectors, I guess the 4K projector is really something that a lot of people are looking forward to?

Noel: Look, again, true very much, and I mentioned earlier that one of the key commercial industries for that will be postproduction with their 2K workflows, but also these projectors are being released for the home theatre market, to give people at home the opportunity of seeing 4K images, be they native or upscaled, ( which these projectors will do for them ) and increasing the viewers’ experience at home.

Ed: And that leads us to the other technology, the 3D and that’s not stood still?

Noel: No, it’s not stood still at all. The pickup on the consumer side perhaps hasn’t been as fast as some of the manufacturers would like, but on the professional side, again especially for the film industry – as we know, everything comes out now with 3D, so that’s driving it.

The workflow process is driving the development by JVC into broadening our range of displays, cameras, different sizes of the displays for different applications, and also technology that’s built into these monitors for not only showing 3D, but as a 3D assist tool to use with stereo camera rigs out in the field. It enables a mix of left and right signals and to set safe areas for 3D, and I guess actually act as a 3D assist out in the field for cinematographers or stereographers as they call themselves.

Page 33

Ed: And in the camera range there – is it just that one little 3D camera that you’ve got?

they’re LED backlit.

What this means is that it increases the overall lifetime of the panels, but it also decreases the power consumption of the panels.

So in today’s world, where everyone’s needing to meet standards for emissions and “green” standards, they’re going to respond nicely to those calls. Also these new monitors – well we’ve done the 3D, but there are some there that will do 3D; the new monitors will incorporate things like dual HD-SDI and 3G capability for greater than 2K signals.

Ed: And this will be great for many of Gencom’s customers?

Noel: Yes – well Gencom, of course, have been wonderful distributors for us and wonderful partners in New Zealand; there was some great business done via Gencom with Park Road and Weta in New Zealand recently and you will see that these monitors will become, I think, more relevant again than they are currently, for the postproduction and broadcast industry.

It’s hard showing 3D in 2D.

Ed:

Noel: Yes, at present it’s the one small camera, the handheld unit. Down the road there are plans for us to develop larger shoulder mount or more traditional larger cameras with 3D capability, but at the moment these smaller cameras are being used as fill cameras on 3D shoots, and also aimed at keeping the price-point low enough to encourage the consumer market to uptake as well, to help drive further development.

Ed: I mean that’s a sensible thing with the very few 3D movies available on disc, to actually have the video of your kids in 3D, be able to play that at home, it’s so cost-effective?

Noel: Yes, well look I believe too that what you’ve just said about the 3D with the kids is a real driving factor.

If the manufacturers want to get the economies of scale going, we need the consumers to pick this up at home and one of the best ways would be, well, if your children have filmed your grandchildren in 3D, then you’ll need a 3D monitor to watch that. So that’s not the only factor, but that’s going to be a critical factor in getting the uptake into mum and dad’s home.

And Gencom’s customers?

Noel: And Gencom’s customers, abso-lutely, which make up that group.

Ed: Now, in the ENG market, JVC has a range of cameras for ENG, professional use and studio use?

Noel: Yes, creation gathering ... so we have in our range three cameras.

The flagship camera we have is the GY-HM790 which is a dual purpose studio and ENG camera, in that you can take the camera quickly and easily out of its full studio kit, take it out in the field and use it. That’s also very good not only for broadcast applications, but for educational institutions that are teaching film and TV in that they don’t have to set aside one budget for their studio camera equipment and one budget for ENG. For the GY-HM790, there’s been a collaboration with Telecast Fibre Systems Company, where rather than a big large multicore 26-pin cable for studio, we are now able to offer the camera in studio configuration or for ENG with a fibre output option to both control the

Ed: Okay, that’s the future sorted, what about the present – what about 2D? Noel: JVC have always been very well recognised and lauded for their monitoring technology and their camera acquisition technology, so at the show here, we’re showing our next generation of monitors and cameras, starting with the monitors – JVC are introducing two new ranges for monitoring which will be incorporating 10-bit panels which will allow for 444 processing which again is very important to the postproduction and broadcast industry.

We’re also introducing new technology where they’re our LCD monitors, but Page 34

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$50.00

Ed: You could do the Bathurst with this couldn’t you?

Noel: Yes, you could indeed, so it’s really renewed interest in these cameras, especially from the broadcast sector, for live events, for sporting events, outside broadcast, etc – it’s really pushed that along.

camera and send images for up to 10 kilometre links using the 790. So that’s in conjunction, as I say, with this Telecast copper head base station and all JVC’s normal CCU controls etc interface to that as well.

In the past we’ve been limited to multicore cable runs and the main link to that’s been up to 200 metres, so now we can get up to 10 kilometres and over a single cable as well.

The next camera that we have in our range is the midrange shoulder mount camera, the GY-HM750.

This was released about two months ago. It’s again a one third inch, 3 chip camera; it uses Sony XDCAM-EX format for its codec and you can shoot file formats as .MOV for Final Cut Pro users, .MP4 if you’re using Avid or Edius or Sony Vegas or other NLEs and one of the features that has been reintroduced to these cameras ( it went away two generations ago ) is that you can record standard definition again.

So when recording standard definition, it records the files as SD.AVI files, which again is a very common format. The cameras all record to very cost-effective SDHC cards, so you can pick those up quite costeffectively just about anywhere, and that camera has been probably the stable workhorse for us in the corporate area, in news gathering ( especially in regional areas ) and also for education markets that are teaching these courses and general corporate cameramen.

Ed: And to me that’s a big thing, that the codecs are varied – you can choose your codec and the top end codecs are the same Sony codec, so every NLE will be able to use these without any extra plugins?

Noel: That’s correct, so it will take the card, the SDHC card can come straight out of the camera, you’ve already formatted it for the codec you want and you can start editing straight away, no ingest required.

Ed: I guess the other beautiful thing that I find about them is the viewfinder. I have yet to see a viewfinder that’s as clean and as clear as that?

Noel: Yes, they’ve put a lot of effort into both the LCD viewfinder and also the main eyepiece viewfinder. The LCD viewfinder on the side is greater than 1920x1080 resolution. It is compressed, but the image that you’re getting off it is absolutely amazing and we do get that comment from users and cameramen all the time. With the eyepiece viewfinder as well, that is actually an LCOS ( liquid crystal on silicon ) colour viewfinder and that’s extremely high resolution – greater than 900 lines resolution there as well. So JVC, years ago when they started to develop this new range of ProHD cameras, said they were going to listen to what the cameramen out there want, and would deliver – and I believe they have. The functions on the camera, the buttons, are exactly where a cameraman would expect them to be, they’re very easy to use and, as you say, the images you can see for live monitoring and confidence checking are just stunning.

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Ed: And the last item – this very nice desktop box that’s got the Blu-ray logo on it Noel?

Noel: Yes, so this is the new SR-HD which was shown at NAB this year; we’re showing it again here at IBC. The update with this is that it will now be available for November-December release. For those who might not be familiar with it, what this box is, is a multi-deck

recorder. This allows you to record HD-SDI streams directly and burn them directly onto Blu-ray discs and play them back out again.

So that’s the key feature of this new unit – a lot of people have been asking for that from the broadcast, post and general corporate sectors, so we’re looking forward to that, we’re very excited about it.

Ed: And tell me, lastly, disruption to production of JVC product from the tsunami, was there any of that?

Noel: Yes look there was, we had some shortages in some product … monitors particularly over the last say six months, however the latest news from the factory is that they are back now, they’ve caught up with production, from September onwards they are back with no production shortages foreseen.

Ed: Excellent – let’s there’s not another one.

hope

Noel: Well I was there that day, and that wasn’t fun!

Ed: Noel, do you think we used the name “Gencom” enough?

Light enough to go in a helicopter it was.

Autoscript We are now at Autoscript for Gencom and Nicki is listening while Robin Brown from Autoscript England talks to us.

Ed: Robin, you were just saying that teleprompting sounds as though it’s a very easy thing to do, but in fact …?

Robin: It’s actually very complex. You can add as many tools as you like, the basic idea of actually getting the words on the screen is quite simple, but the tools to make sure you have the right words, the right accessories, the right bit of script at the right time and the right place when the producer changes it – there’s a lot more to it than that.

Noel: One Gencom.

more

time

– NZVN

It has a compact hood; the hood folds flat, so if you need to take it on a plane, it’s carry-on size. It has an integrated tally light which means that when the camera is cued up, the tally light will go on.

Traditionally this is used with quite a small ENG field or even prosumer sized camera – you won’t be able to see the tally light when the hood’s on the front, so that’s the purpose of using the tally on the front of the

Ed: As they say in Monty Python’s “Novel Writing from Dorset”, “the words are all there, it’s just getting them in the right order?”

Robin: Correct – getting them in the right order is a tricky bit but finding the talent to read them is the most tricky of all.

Ed: Okay, so in terms of the base units, I see there’s a very neat little one here – what’s that called?

Robin: The small unit is an 8 inch LED backlit High-Bright that is 1700 nits of brightness or candelas, so it’s fully daylight readable – you can use it outside in the setting sun if you need to.

Robin explains teleprompting.

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monitor. It has auxiliary power out, so you could use a little fill light if you want to bolt a light to the bottom of it for example. It has an adjustable plate for full sized ENG to the smaller cameras.

Ed: A very, very robust little unit. And then going up to the larger ones, I guess there’s a whole range here?

Robin: There is. We go from the entry level sizes, the smallest is the 6 inch; then we go all the way up to a 19 inch which would be for a big full size studio lens and camera on it. The issue normally is the weight capacity. People want cameras to get smaller and tripods to get smaller, but they want prompters to be bigger, so there’s always a tricky counterbalance, metaphorically speaking, between having a large prompter for maybe your aging talent, but wanting to reduce the overall weight and obviously the cost, by having smaller cameras and lenses.

Ed: Now I notice you haven’t gone the way of some prompter manufacturers where they’ve introduced iPads and iPhones and other little nifty devices. These look like they’re all labelled “Autoscript”?

Robin: That’s correct. We thought about it for quite some time, but it’s really not our market. There is a large market for that sort of entry level production where the iPad concept seems like a great idea, but really it’s not for us. We make a very high end product – the bigger products anyway are for larger serious broadcast installation and the iPad, although it did seem like a nice idea, the concept seemed good, as far as actual prompting goes, that’s not really the angle of prompting that we’re at. We’re looking at much more integrated newsroom tools …

Ed: Something that’s robust and is going to last a long time?

Lots of extras now available.

Robin: Yes, you need some resilience; build quality.

All we make is prompters; these are all manufactured, supported, warrantied in the UK; they are not “off-the-shelf” units. It’s a complete unit which is built as a quality prompter, not just a PDA or another device that you could use as a prompter.

have been on a truck or on a dolly that has maybe a preview monitor on it. So we tried to combine all of that by making a mount for an under-slung preview monitor which will show either programme or that camera’s output and integrated to that is a clock which displays SMPTE timecode which can be generated either from your own studio clock in studio time, or a timecode generator that we have. The important thing about this is that everything is integrated in that it can all run from one power source. The clock, the talent monitor and we have an LED camera number display also – and all these units together can be run from the same power source. You don’t need lots of feeds, you don’t need lots of additional cables, it’s a very compact integrated unit.

Ed: Now one thing I see on the screen here, it says “voice activation disabled” … “voice activation”?

Robin: Yes, we’ve done it for quite some years now. We have a voice activated prompting system which means that the script is imported absolutely as per normal … traditionally prompt operation is done using a hand or a foot control, not by talent, but we have a system that allows you to take an audio feed from the desk, a clean audio feed straight from the mic, you plug it straight into the PC that’s running the prompter and you read and the text follows.

Ed:

And it pauses when the talent pauses?

Robin: You stop talking and it stops. You can ad lib to an extent – it recognises the words and it matches what you’re saying to what it thinks is in the script and that’s how it knows where you are. It’s voice activated, not voice recognition, but that means that if you ad lib to an extent it will keep going.

Ed: Very cool. Now the other thing that I’ve noticed is that there seem to be a lot of little extras – lots of lights and even a clock. What are all these for?

Robin: We try to make the prompting accessories enhance what the actual prompter itself does, and one of the most important things in studio is obviously to have timecode. Talent always need to know what time it is, especially in a newsroom environment, and traditionally those clocks have been wall mounted or

Ed: And there’s also a little light that you can add which tells you whether the camera’s on, on standby or off?

Robin: That’s correct. We have a new product which is just a very small simple idea. It’s a light which again bolts into the front of the prompters; it has a little tally sensor that comes into it, and what this unit does is it displays three colour states – it’s either (in any choice of colour) the live camera, the standby camera, or the camera that’s cued up next in the switcher. You can have three different colour states, so provided the talent can understand the concept of three different colours, they will know …

Ed: And how far does this go back? I mean do you have to have the latest model Autoscript to add these accessories?

Robin: No, all these accessories are retro-fittable from when we started making TFT units, which is

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probably about 10 or 12 years ago. All these other products are compatible with older products; also, they’re not unique mountings, so you can use other people’s systems as well, but we can add these accessories to them. The basic concept of it is they’ve pretty much stayed the same for quite some time.

We’ve just been tweaking and refining it.

Ed:

Now a weeny, weeny little one?

Ed: An excellent wee product. So Nicki, there is now really a good range from Autoscript to cover every base?

Nicki: Of course, we’ve got the main broadcasters who use the product and this last little unit that Robin’s just showed us – can you imagine a nervous bridegroom at his wedding, having his speech on an Autoscript?

Ed: But I guess the other area is the rental, because these look very robust, so a rental house would …?

Robin: In the London office, we have quite a big outfit – we have a sales department on one floor of the building, and the ground floor is all rental. We have 25 fulltime operators, we have a fleet of six vans, we’re partnered with another company that has a grip department which is part of the same group as us, so apart from cameras, we’re kind of a “one-stop-shop” in London for that.

For the smaller jobs ( great camera.)

Robin: This is a 6 inch LED backlit above lens prompter. Traditionally with a prompter you have a through the lens setup where the prompter mounts right in front of the camera lens, there’s a piece of glass at 45 degrees, it reflects the text. This is an above lens mount, so it’s very portable, it goes straight into this uni-mount or the hot shoe in the top of the camera handle, it consumes very little power and has a very smooth scroll. But it’s not a “through the lens” so it’s traditionally more for handheld where the shot isn’t completely static, there might be a little bit of movement, or for real on the fly news gathering; or if you’re just looking for a budget solution. But you need to be aware, the point of this is it has to be rigged as close to the lens as possible, because you’re not actually looking into the lens when you’re reading it.

Ed: Exactly and it’s beautifully mounted on a JVC camera Nicki?

Nicki:

Of course it is.

Although worldwide, a lot of sales of Autoscript equipment have gone into rental houses, especially in the States, most of those are dry hire, they don’t rent with an operator. You send the equipment out if you’re doing a large sporting event or something like that, any kind of large political event and you need to have lots of prompting … quite often production companies might have one or two, but they need to rent them out in large numbers, and so that’s what we do. An interesting part of the rental side is that really feeds the build quality of the products as well.

Everything gets real time testing and thrown on the back of a truck, used by people who don’t really know the equipment – and that’s a great way for us to perfect the simplicity of the build and the strength of the products.

Ed: To me, it’s always a test of the quality and reliability of a product, that the rental houses choose that brand?

Robin: Absolutely, they need to know that when they open the box it’s going to be easy to put together and every bit’s going to be there and that it’s going to work. Often they’re not familiar with a product, they’re in a kind of a time crunch and prompting is unfortunately always seen as maybe the last thing that people need to take care of, when in fact it’s the frontline.

NZVN If the prompt goes, everybody knows.

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BMS Wireless Now, as the glasses holding the welcome drink of water say, we are at BMS for Gencom.

Underneath the BMS logo letters there is a squiggly line which is sort of a sine wave but not really.

To find out more we talk with Reinhard Kuehn.

Ed: Reinhard, what does the squiggly line under your BMS logo mean?

Reinhard: A sine wave carrying wireless information Ed: It’s a sine wave meaning wireless – so what are you selling?

Reinhard: Wireless systems for broadcasters and non-broadcasters.

Ed: Now what do those waves do?

Reinhard: We do microwaves systems which can carry the data of video, audio or whatever you need for live transmission of cameras to OB vans, and OB vans back to the station.

Ray with Reinhard from BMS.

Ed: Now this is a technology that really has advanced in recent years, because I know even five years ago, you had to pay a lot of money to be assured of good clear signals in that microwave area. There were a number of people coming in with cheaper products that were good for short distance, but your product is up there and very stable I understand?

Reinhard: That’s true.

Even today you have big difference in transmitter quality in respect of distances and robustness in the field. It becomes quite difficult for many customers to distinguish which one is the real one, which is one you can count on, and which one is just cheap, but not the right stuff.

Ed: So how do you tell the difference … what is there that makes a good quality transmission system?

Reinhard: The robustness in respect of technology.

Problems get solved by the technology and not by the operators, so it has to be an easy system. BMS has field proven design made by engineers working for years in the wireless ENG business. Intelligent receiver technology which is the key to stay stable even in a congested environment when many operators are working close by.

We do not count on Wi-Fi based systems, which cannot be made reliable as everybody is allowed to use the same frequency. Wi-Fi based systems are very cheap but the locationa where you can use them are very limited.

Ed:

So you work in a specific band do you?

Reinhard: We are working in all bands which are dedicated for broadcasters. This means from 400 MHz to 8 Ghz any frequency. Input filtering, low noise Page 41

Reinhard: No we make it smaller and smaller from year to year.

Ed:

And it’s only got one aerial?

Reinhard: On the transmit side, you need only one aerial for the transmission; on the receive side, we work always with diversity technology.

Ed: Okay, so give us some examples as to how far away you can be from your base station with this?

Reinhard: With this simple application on the back of the video camera, easily we can go for 1.5 kilometres and have a very, very simple receive site with two small antennas.

Ed: That’s what we see there, those two looking like open boxes?

Reinhard: These open boxes are a very special antenna actually; it’s mounted on our fibre solution where the fibre unit can be set up from the OB van more than 1.5 kilometres. Let’s say you park the OB van outside the stadium, run the fibre in the stadium, so all the obstacles between the OB van and where the event takes place don’t interfere with our receive site, and you control via the fibre from the OB van, the outdoor unit which is inside the stadium. Then you have 100% coverage of the stadium that’s easy to install and easy to use.

Ed: up?

How many transmitters can that one receiver pick

Reinhard: One receiver is always dedicated for one transmitter; it’s one by one. You can use multiple antennas or one antenna for multiple receivers, but not

That’s the transmitter sandwich.

preamplifier with high IP3 are basics in all our receivers. All transmitters are built with direct modulation in order to minimise spurious signals and to get the transmitter into a small form factor in COFDM technology (Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing).

Ed: We’ll explain that at another time readers, but in the meantime, I know in other areas of technology it’s a case of “if it’s a hardware solution, it’s a lot more robust than a software solution.” Is that applicable in your area?

Reinhard: We do hardware and software solutions both; you need software today, but software has to go into a FPGA hardware enclosure and that makes it also very robust and flexible for future upgrades.

Ed: Now in terms of the product, I see there’s an ARRI camera over there with a little box on the back of it. Is that the first stage of your transmission system?

One receiver pair.

Reinhard: That is the transmitter behind the camera.

Whether it’s on this ARRI or it’s on a JVC or on a Sony camera, it is designed as a sandwich between the battery and the camera, so you just put it in between; you put the HD-SDI signal in and automatically it gets transferred to the dedicated frequency where the transmitter’s designed for and runs it through the air to the receiver.

Ed:

It’s not very big?

vice versa. So we have maybe one cluster of antennas; we did it for the IAAF World Championship in Athletics in Berlin – with just four antennas we covered the whole stadium and we were running more than 10 wireless cameras on those four antennas.

Ed: So I guess it means you don’t have a whole lot of cables to run around to all the different camera sites – you can cluster your receivers in one spot and they will pick up the cameras at those different locations?

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Reinhard: That’s correct, because from the receive site, the ASI signal goes into the OB van and then you can operate everything from the OB van.

Ed: And I understand these particularly well from helicopters?

work

Reinhard: From helicopters is more or less the same thing, but you’re using more output power from the helicopter.

We have airborne approvals for our transmitters, so we have no problems to install it in those flying platforms and from the choppers we do up to 80-90 kilometres long distance.

Ed: What’s the set-up in a large-scale situation?

Reinhard: It means around the OB van you have several small wireless links like a couple of wireless cameras running around like in a stadium, then you bundle them together, you do the post processing or the cutting in the OB van.

So the signal from the OB van will then be sent with the directional antenna up to a tower and from the tower you have a permanent connection to the switch room and therefore you don’t need any satellite connection.

Your ENG is now a point to point link, but the point to point link is moving with the OB van in various locations in the city where the event takes place, so you are very flexible with this solution.

Ed: And I guess that’s it – it’s the flexibility of the solution?

really had much exposure to New Zealand and we hope to be able to help with that involvement.

Ed: So really this is a very special relationship with BMS and Gencom?

Ray: Definitely. We are going to work together as a team to promote the products and develop the market in New Zealand and Australia going forward in the NZVN future.

Reinhard: Yes, and it saves cost because with that solution, you have a fixed cost from the beginning – then it’s just the operation but you don’t have to pay the transponder costs for a satellite.

Ed: Now I’m sure people would say that a cable solution is always more reliable than a wireless solution?

Reinhard: A cable solution is absolutely more reliable than a wireless solution, because you can count on the cable but, with good frequency management, wireless is absolutely reliable.

Ed: Unless somebody runs over the cable with a motor mower!

Now for his views as representative – Ray Sanders.

international

Gencom

Ray: Thanks Grant, as always.

Ed:

And Ray, your take on this?

Ray: We’ve only begun working in earnest with BMS over the last six months or so, and we’re really looking forward to the opportunities it can bring us because we see more and more demand for wireless solutions in sports, in news, and other broadcasting applications – not only that, but also in non-broadcast applications as well. So we’ve identified BMS as the company who have some excellent technology for this area and they’re very innovative people, easy to work with because they are also very flexible; they can do exclusive designs if necessary, for custom applications.

Ed: It sounds as though they fit in perfectly with the Gencom workflow and have the technology and the expertise that you’re happy to support as well?

Ray: Yes, they have a huge reputation through Europe and in Australia as well, through some legacy work they’ve done there ( and many other countries ) but for the New Zealand arena, it’s the first time I think they’ve Page 44

Evertz For Quinto, we are at Evertz with Mo Goyal and Alan McIlwaine from Quinto.

Ed: Mo, you’ve got some pretty cool products – a TV station in a box which has been very popular in Australia?

Mo: Yes the Overture RT Live is a sort of a channel in a box, a station in a box that we’ve introduced to the Australian market.

Ed: I’m sure it’s in other places as well?

Mo: Yes, the North American market as well.

We actually introduced the platform officially last year at IBC and we’ve had a lot of traction with it and we’ve had a number of installs with it.

Ed: Is it a single channel per box, or can you have multiple channels?

Alan with Mo from Evertz.

Mo: A single channel per box; it comes with a built-in A/V mixer with advanced internal graphics. It’s also got an internal video server that allows you to play content directly from the device, as well as an Evertz designed PCI card that allows you to bring up to six inputs of live video in and provide that into the mixer, as well as take out dual output, two outputs. So it’s a single channel but it’s a product where we’ve taken the strengths of our hardware engineering and applied them to sort of off-the-shelf components.

Ed: So there’s a fair bit of hardware in there rather than just a software solution?

Mo: No, it’s using off-the-shelf IT products, it’s a 1RU server that’s running a Linux platform with 1 terabyte of storage. The value add that we brought to it was taking the video input card and designing it ourselves – we’re not using an OEM package, we’re using something we can provide some value add. That allows us to add other technologies like conversion or embedding / deembedding types of things, that we could take off of a modular product and put that in there. The approach we’ve taken is whatever we can do in hardware, we’ll do in hardware, whatever we can do in software, we’ll do in software; and what you get is really the best of breed out of both.

Ed: So you could just use it as a stand-alone box, but it also is able to link with lots of other Evertz products?

Mo: Yes – I mean it falls into the whole Evertz portfolio, but it’s really more the technology that we’ve got in our modular gear and other product lines that we’ve incorporated into this. So the industry for the channel in a box has always been driven from a software perspective – a lot of automation vendors, a lot of companies that have been doing software, trying to do those components. We’ve taken it as a hardware vendor, we’ve done it in hardware and we’re bringing that strength into it and then wrapping software around it. So it’s a different approach to the puzzle and I think ours is utilising our experience in the hardware side to deliver a more reliable and powerful product.

Ed: So in Australia, the sort of customers who have chosen it, are they already broadcasters and they’ve bought it as a backup, or what’s the predominant use of it?

Mo: Right now, in this case, it’s for a regional operator, so essentially this is a broadcaster that already has a large install base with Evertz products.

What they were looking for was, with some of the rules loosening up in Australia, to be able to provide regional programming into the different areas and they want to be able to do it in a more cost effective way. Eventually the other applications that you’re going to see are things like disaster recovery, where they want to now provide the same services that they would have on their main feeds, but at a lower cost, in the case of a disaster. I mean a case in point, with the number of earthquakes …

Ed:

Australia has floods, we have earthquakes.

Mo: Well I was going to point that out … in New Zealand, for example, the earthquakes have reignited the concerns a lot of the broadcasters have of “how do I secure my primary and how do I back that up?” So there has been a lot of refocus on thinking about how to build disaster recoveries, but you need a very cost conscious method. That’s not just true for New Zealand and Australia, but other places like Japan – broadcasters looking at “how do I protect my assets and be on air, still providing a top quality broadcast at a fraction of the cost?”

Ed: But I guess they don’t have to have it sitting there doing nothing while they’re waiting for a disaster – it could be broadcasting a cooking show?

Mo: Exactly and that’s the other part of it; the architecture is to now launch new services cheaply without having to make a major investment. A primary example would be a good sporting channel. You would have your primary, it’s making money, it’s a high revenue channel, I’m going to keep it on my traditional broadcast path with the baseband and mass control.

But it made me want to launch off a travel channel or

Page 46

an adventure channel but I’m not too sure what kind of response I’m going to get. However, I’ve got the material all ready, so I might as well launch off this channel, spend a small amount of money to launch it and let the revenue drop. So it’s a low revenue start-up and if the revenue starts building up, I can then migrate that channel into my main architecture and it really doesn’t cost me that much. I’m not footing the outlay of a larger investment for a potential channel where I can just do a cost effective channel launch with the channel in a box and let the revenues go to justify a move to the main path.

Ed: And now a word from Alan Lambshead from Evertz.

Alan: Where this fits in, as Mo says, is where there’s a requirement to launch edge channels, new channels where you don’t know how much money they’re going to make, what sort of viewership, etc. To launch these edge services, you need something that is cost effective. Now there are systems that are basically a PC with a couple of cards put into them and, at the end of the day, you’ve got no control over drivers, new firmware, software, etc. At the top end, you have other systems which are broadcast capable systems, but you have to use that manufacturer’s automation and if you’ve got a different automation system, you’ve got a whole new learning curve. Where the Evertz offer fits in, is that the Overture Live will run other manufacturers – your existing automation system. It has got Evertz hardware and software built into it, it has the Evertz name for quality and reliability, so at a very cost effective price, you know that you can put a full broadcast channel to air and you‘re going to have that same degree of reliability and support as if you’d NZVN put a complete conventional channel to air.

Elemental Technologies For Quinto, we are with Dan Marshall from Elemental Technologies, USA. Ed: Now Dan, this is new for us and something that Quinto believe is going to be a big seller – what have we got here?

Dan: We are actually showing a couple of things.

This is a user interface that is giving access to both our live streamer and our broad-based streamer, which is file based transcoder or live transcoder.

There are three things which set Elemental apart from other transcoders, whether we’re doing linear transcoding or file based.

One is we’re GPU based, so we use massively parallel GPU processing versus very serialised CPU. So when we’re typically compared against a CPU transcoder, we get about 4-5 times greater densities.

Ed: So, for the uninitiated, why don’t the others use GPU? Dan: Ah, because GPU technology is very difficult to write to, so it’s a different operating language, a development code.

Ed: So you’re cleverer than the others?

Dan: Well it’s just not that we’re clever, we just started earlier.

We started development on GPUs six years ago, and you have to use what’s called the “CUDA” which is the operating development language that NVIDIA provides. There are other companies now trying to move with

Overture RT live display.

GPUs and they’ll be working with CUDA, but they’ll be 2 to 3 years behind us. So we were a leader to market on this.

The second thing that sets us apart is, because we have our GPUs and we have to write our own codecs, we don’t source the codecs on the open market, which

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Dan from Elemental Technologies.

means all of our encodes and transcodes for video are done using our own codecs. Now what that means is, I have control over the quality. I think 70% of the world’s codecs are supplied by MainConcept. My video quality is absolutely superior to those and I can differentiate it by always performance tuning; I’m not bound to their schedule or delivery schedule, so that gives us a lot of control over the quality and the delivery.

Ed: So when Apple comes out with a new tablet, you can write a codec for it quite quickly?

Dan: Exactly and we have a very large customer of ours with HBO and one of the things they tasked us was doing Adobe Zeri output. So because we create our own codecs, we were able to go ahead and provide that for them. Our competition quoted 6-9 months.

We turned around that codec in about 3 weeks, so that’s a real differentiator for us.

The third thing is that we’re Linux based and we think that’s a huge differentiator also. Our customers, they are putting us in their 24/7 operations, you know these are becoming revenue streams for customers today, and that revenue stream has got to be maintainable and stay up. So those are the three things that set us apart.

How it culminates ( and this is the demonstration we’re running here ) is, I’ve got a live box. This is a 1RU, PC server with some NVIDIA GPUs. We’re using all “off-the-shelf” components and in the 1RU, I’m running two 1080p input streams at 50 megabits, and I’m running 10 different streaming profiles coming off of that.

Ed: So that’s two channels or two different feeds in?

Dan: Well the way the product works is that you can either run Ethernet, which is through an MPEG transport stream, or through an SDI direct. We have some customers running 4, 6, 8 simultaneous inputs and then with multiple profiles per input coming out. So, for example, what we’re showing here, is we’ve got these two 1080p streams coming in and in each of those streams we have some output profiles.

Here I’m running some – you can see here, some 5 megabit and it’s a 1080p; here’s the 720p 3 megabits and you can see some HD sources.

Ed: And it’s all H.264 I see?

Dan: This is H.264 but it can be MPEG2. Here’s a 60 megabit and a 1 megabit MPEG2 output; and then down further I’m showing again H.264, a 224p, 360p – so these are very low bit rates for things like HLS delivery to iPad or to Androids. But the point here is that we’re getting these 20 simultaneous outputs on two HD input streams, coming up on a 1RU streamer and I’m supporting HLS for Apple – as you can see there, I’ve got some iPads running; I’ve got some Flash moving to the desktop, so I’m doing Flash, I’m doing Smooth Streaming, I’m doing HLS all out of the same box, at different bit rates, providing adaptive bit rate functionality as well.

Ed: So if you want to add more channels, what do you do?

Dan: You actually just go to the user interface and go ahead and configure ‘em.

Ed: Yes, but you must run out of space at some point?

Dan: At some point you do. When you start running out of space or taxing the GPUs, you’ll start getting dropped frames. But you can go ahead and measure the dropped frames by looking in at the individual streams and it will tell you.

Ed: Then can you go and add another graphics card?

Dan: You could, on those configurations that allow you to add graphics cards. We sell a 1RU box and that has two graphic cards in it; we sell a 4RU box with two graphic cards that we can add additional. So if there’s room available, yes you can.

Ed: So it’s probably a wise decision in this market to future-proof a little bit?

Dan: You could build redundant configurations, where you’ve got a bunch of boxes or appliances lined up and streaming and if one of them fails, another one kicks in automatically but, to be quite honest, the densities of these things are so large, that customers, I think, they’ll push the thing to 2 or 3 or 4 and put streams running a multitude of output streams and those are densities that they don’t see anywhere else in the industry. We have probably 3-4 times greater densities than our competition. And they’re pretty cost effective solutions, so when a customer has reached the limit, they just buy another machine.

Ed: But really the key point is “live and file”?

Dan: Live and file – we do both and the value proposition for the customer is cost. Because they are buying fewer units of mine than the competition, their capex is reduced; because these are 1RU devices they take up much less space, power and cooling than standard devices, so there’s an opex saving as well.

So really if you can’t save your customer money or help them make the money, you don’t have a proposition, but we’re doing this with no sacrifice to quality. In fact our customers are telling that they’re moving to our technology and getting better quality, which is what we guarantee, that’s why we develop our own codecs.

Ed: It certainly looks fine on those iPads?

Dan: Yes, it really does – I mean that’s an excellent video quality for an iPad …

Ed: And you’re “green” Dan: We’re green because we’re eco friendly. You would use a 1RU server to replace 4-5 of our competitors’ CPU only. We save the customer about one third in power and in the rack space and the cooling that’s required when you put these things in the data centres, it makes really good sense for the environment.

Ed: And no animals were harmed in the manufacture?

Dan: I can’t guarantee that … no, of course not!

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Marshall Electronics For Quinto, we are at Marshall Electronics and we have Robert Foster with Alan McIlwaine.

Ed: This is a totally new product line for you Alan?

Alan: Indeed it is, we’re very excited with this. We’ve looked at Marshall for many years and it’s always been seen as being very quality conscious.

Ed:

Why has it taken you this long?

Alan: We’re very patient – we’ve been waiting. We’ve just come to an agreement with Marshall, that we’ll be taking over the distribution and so we have Robert here today, who we will be working with closely in the near future.

Ed: Are you taking over the whole product line of Marshall?

Alan: We’re taking over the monitors on the broadcast side, the on-camera monitors we will have access to, but that will also be another company – a specialist camera company working with that as well.

Robert with the 18.5 inch monitor.

Ed: So Robert, Marshall Electronics is a big company and you’re the specialist in the monitor side?

Robert:

Yes I am.

Ed: So what have you got to offer – I mean monitors, everybody does monitors?

Robert: We have the largest choice of different size monitors with different inputs in the industry. We have monitors from as small as a 2 inch size screen up to a 37 inch. We offer a lot of different rack mountable monitors in different quads, duals and triples, many different sizes, different inputs, different feature sets in them – more than anyone else in the industry.

Ed: So when you’re putting together a package Alan, this obviously helps to complete that picture?

Alan: Yes, Marshall is very complementary to our existing product line and we see it integrating in very well in the future.

Ed: So in terms of the build of these monitors, they are all built in the USA? Robert: We have a few monitors that come in from overseas but 90% of them are made in the USA. Ed:

And this is a good thing?

Robert: A very good thing – we control our own engineering, we design all the product, we have complete control of our product line.

Ed: So apart from lots of inputs, is there anything special about the screens … I mean, there’s one manufacturer that’s won an award for an OLED design.

Have you got research, or are you going in that direction?

Robert: OLED screens is still an upcoming technology; it’s not totally there yet. Currently Sony is the only one – they have the screens made exclusively for them, but if you look at them, the colours aren’t right, the viewing angles aren’t totally there yet. If you move to the side of the monitor, the colours will

change. So we are looking at it, we’re keeping close tabs on it, but it’s not totally there yet.

Ed: I guess that’s a big part of being a big company – the amount of time and money you spend on research and development?

Robert: We spend a lot of money researching the market, engineering and designing different products, what feature sets we want to put on it.

Ed: And I guess a lot of that comes from customer requests?

Robert: We design a lot of our products around customer requests. Our most successful monitors were from a customer asking for a certain monitor and we built it for him.

One of our current top models is this 18.5 inch rack mountable monitor or field monitor.

It accepts composite, component, HD-SDI inputs in, it’s full of features – you’ve got the built-in waveform, vectorscope, histogram, phase metering, peaking metering log; it can accept up to 16 channels of audio onscreen, as well as two speakers on the front. So it has every feature that a professional would need.

Ed:

So you say it’s portable, is it 12 Volt?

Robert: It is 12 Volt as well as 24 Volt – it’s got two separate inputs depending on what you’re using.

Ed: Wow – and what makes this the “product de jour” Alan?

Alan: Oh I think because of the capability that the unit has, when you can see not only the visual picture, but all the electronic elements that go with that, not only for video, but for audio; and the fact, if you look on the back, it’s got a V-mount, so you can have a power supply or you can even run it from a battery.

Ed:

So a very versatile monitor?

Alan: Absolutely, and that’s what people are looking for – it’s “bang for bucks” these days and versatility is most important.

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Page 50

PAG Batteries It’s Sunday 3 o’clock and we’re at PAG with Nigel Gardiner.

Nigel: Nice to see you again Grant.

Ed: People will start to talk Nigel?

Nigel: Yes, every six months we have this chat, this covert operational chat.

Good to see you Grant.

Ed: And also good to see that what was a “Secret Squirrel” a little while ago, the PAGlink system, is now up and running and operational and shipping?

Nigel: We’ll be shipping towards the end of September. We’re just waiting for the UN testing, which is the authorisation certificates to be allowed to put these on a plane. Once we get those, which we’re so confident of getting, we can Nigel shows us how easy it is to connect. ship.

Ed: And just run through for us what this PAGlink such that the batteries will try to come down in pairs to system is? equalise themselves out. You know we don’t want a situation where one battery is fully discharged and the Nigel: The ability to link two or more batteries up other ones are not, so we’re trying to bring them down to a maximum of eight. Practically, no-one’s going to equally. The other thing about that is if we can do that, really link more than 2 and 3 together, but it gives you then we’ll have no problems with putting them on the extended runtime on your camera which, if you’re into charger, we can charge them in pairs or triplicates. the high end stuff, the REDs, the ALEXAs, you need a lot of power not only because of the camera, but also Ed: Now Nigel that’s all well and good, but in the the accessories really come up hungry. The PAGlink situation where you are using these on a particularly system gives you the equivalent of 190 Watt hour for hungry device – a RED for example – and you are two; or three would be a 270 Watt hour battery. When taking a draw of between 8 and 12, when those two you put two together, your current rating goes up from batteries get down to a pretty low level, you can take 8 to 12 Amp. There’s nothing around that is going to the back one off and hot-swap a new one on, but you’ve be taking more than 12 Amp, so it’s a good solid suddenly got that imbalance situation. You’ve got the battery. As I mentioned earlier, once we get the travel back one full, the front one low still keeping the camera facility, it’s under the 100 Watt hours, there’s limitless ticking over, but you’re not going to get more than that numbers that you can carry, unlike the ones that are 8 amp in that situation. What do you do? bigger than 100 where you have the transportation Nigel: In that situation, you’ve got to put two on, problems. and then those two will give you the 12 amp and the Ed: And just to make it clear, it is one battery we’re first battery is really doing nothing and your last two talking about here – it’s not a range? are running the whole device. It just keeps it alive while you’re changing the batteries.

Nigel: No, it’s one battery. However, there is coming out – and I might as well take this opportunity Ed: And the good thing is that those two at the back to tell you – we will be bringing out a time version, don’t actually discharge into the first one? which will give you hours and minutes of runtime, but Nigel: No. Each battery is individually protected the beauty of it is that in any string of batteries, you from anything either side of it. There’s a rail that goes only need one of these, because it will give you the time through the batteries, so that the batteries are hanging of the total battery pack, as opposed to the individual off a rail so to speak, and therefore the energy is going battery. from the battery to the rail and not from the rail to the Ed: Okay, now there are other systems out there batteries. where two batteries clip together and then unclip, but Ed: But in the situation where you’ve got a normal this is clever in the way that it operates. Take us camera that’s not taking more than 8 amp, you can through the scenario – you start out on the shoot, quite happily just swap one? you’ve got two of these clipped together on the back of Nigel: Oh absolutely – you can go on forever. If your camera, they’re both fully charged … what it’s under 8 amp draw, then you’ve got no problems at happens, what’s the discharge scenario here? all, it will just keep on going forever.

Nigel: Well they will discharge together, keeping Ed: So in that situation the first battery you put on them in a balanced form such that you can take one off the camera should be the one, once you’ve made it, and put two back on there, because ( as long as you with the runtime? don’t go right down to zero ) there’s always energy left Nigel: Absolutely, that’s right! in the battery that is nearest the camera. It’s protected Page 51

Ed: As the years go on, I am getting the hang of this Nigel.

Nigel: Well you are a bright young lad you see – you’ve been around long enough to see this and we’ve had many of these conversations in the past. It’s an interesting project and we’re quite proud of our achievement. All we need now is for people to take it up.

Ed: Yes – and I guess the one thing that’s hardest to explain unless you actually see these, is that if you put three of these on the back of a camera, one would think “oh that’s a little bit sort of dodgy and you give it a

Ed:

And there are no bolts involved?

Nigel: No bolts – just press one little plunger and the whole thing comes apart very easily. You’re relying on the “V” which you have to, plus the actual contacts with the back contacts which are the ones that are the linking contacts – they are very well supported with a very high current capacity.

Ed:

And the final word is that these are actually light?

Nigel: Yes, I think they’re about 780 grams, so that’s a pretty light battery. Actually if you put three together, my maths tells me that that’s probably the same weight as an old fashioned 5 Ampere hour NiCad battery which was approximately 60 Watt hours and we’re looking at about 270 Watt hours for the same weight. Not bad energy density.

Ed: And the economy model does have a single button on it which you press and there’s five little LEDs that light up, the number of which depends on how much juice you’ve got left in it, but a very nifty little battery at a very reasonable price, especially with the pound where it is.

A very clever connection system - and strong.

nudge and one’s going to break off” but in fact the connection system is not only a power connection, but it’s a very robust clip arrangement?

Nigel: I think the best way for your readers to verify this is for them to actually buy it …

Ed:

Well just go and see Shane – he will show them?

Nigel: Absolutely. Technically, the “V” is not a very clever device, but we’ve tried to enhance it as much as we can to actually make it much stronger than the simple “V” that it is.

Nigel: There’s one more thing I would say … the very fact that you have a “V” on the last battery and a contact, means that we will be able to ( and are going to be able to ) put devices on the last battery. Two or three come to mind – one is we will be able to put a little block on there, which has 2, 3 or 4 DTaps, so you can then power other devices off the back end so to speak.

We are working on a device which you can take 7.2 Volt out of, so it would be an ideal product for the lower end. And thirdly, we’ve been asked for a display which can track, give you the full information of what’s happened to the battery, the cycle life, you know, its potential, the whole gambit of what’s happened to the battery, so that you put it on there and read it. I think we’re looking to see whether we can’t have some sort of smart iPhone app which you can actually get all this information from.

Ed: And you could talk to your batteries over the Apple product?

Ed: I guess it’s a compromise – you want it to be able to get batteries quickly on and off, but still be robust?

Nigel: Yes, so when you’re lonely you can talk to your lovely batteries and get all the information from it.

Nigel:

Ed:

Absolutely.

Autocue We are at Autocue and we have Richard Satchell from Autocue with Mike Ellis from Quinto.

Ed: Richard, Autocue’s well known for prompters, but we’re not talking about prompters right now, we’re talking about the server which we saw at NAB this year – but you haven’t just stopped there, you’ve continued to develop this server?

Richard: Absolutely, we’ve expanded the range of hardware options, so we’ve added a two-port digital version, which has the same form factor as the fourport that we had at NAB, so it’s 3U high, just slightly less deep …

Ed:

And a lot cheaper?

Richard: A lot cheaper, yes. The price per channel is the same as the four-port, so effectively we’ve cut it in

I’m sure Shane will be keen on that.

NZVN

half and say, for educational applications, for simple tape replacements, it’s about the most affordable solution that you’ll find on the market.

Ed: But already that four-port one was still amazingly cheap?

Richard: Oh yes, it’s very keenly priced in terms of your currency.

Ed: Yes, yes, we’re pretty good at the moment with the pound.

Richard: With the pound, it’s roughly £2,500 per channel for either two-port or four-port and then additional software licences on top of that. We’ve also continued to develop the software that works with it and so added a number of additional licences such as chaining the servers together for either ingest or playout. So, for example, we did a recent installation in a

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football sports stadium in the UK, where we had three servers chained together; they were ingesting from five cameras, syncing that ingest and doing instant live replays, slow motion replays, as well as compiling halftime packages.

So chaining servers together is something we’ve added; also time delay, ingesting and then setting a time delay on the playback of that clip.

And the server’s something that we continue to focus on – so we’re flexible to customer requirements, we want to be as agnostic as possible in terms of codecs and formats and in terms of workflows, so as opportunities arise, as customers come in and help us to find those opportunities, we’re more than willing to work with them and develop the product accordingly.

Ed: Well that’s what we want.

So I guess a lot of this is software controlled and that’s where your cleverness comes in?

Richard from Autocue with Mike (right) from Quinto.

Richard: Yes, absolutely. It’s Linux based and, as you might remember, we’ve had the server for a number of years as part of our newsroom and automation system. When we launched it as a stand alone product, we essentially added a GUI to that and it’s that GUI and the control of the ports and of the server that we’ve been developing. As you say, that’s the clever bit that we can offer.

Ed:

Have you sold heaps?

Richard: We’ve sold heaps. There’s always more that you can sell, but yes, the combination of the price point, the flexibility of the product in terms of the codecs, the formats and workflows, is very, very appealing not only as a lead system, as an eVTR, or as part of an automation and play-out system, but often, also, as a redundancy option to some of the higher priced servers that we see in the broadcast transmission space.

Ed: Now Mike, Richard’s just said that he’s sold heaps of these servers, have you sold any in Australia yet?

Mike: Our first customer has recently been the ABC for a newsroom video ingest application. They will be able to automate regular scheduled recording of news feeds, start to playback and review the incoming content whilst it is still being recorded, and export marked segments of interest as new clips ready for editing, using the servers sub-clipping function. The response to the server at the recent SMPTE show in Australia was also great.

We are following up with other prospects right now, about using it in many other applications, such as more incoming news feed recording and sub-clipping, multi camera capture and replay using the new ability to chain multiple records and playbacks together, for applications where you want to record and replay multiple camera angles in sync, such as for race courses and other sports, and on-set HD video recording and playback.

Ed:

What about sales in New Zealand?

Mike: We have a number of opportunities that we’re working on, shall we say. The product’s been very well received; at the moment we’re in the process of doing demonstrations to a number of very interested customers across a wide range of fields, both for applications like recording incoming news feeds, applications like recording multiple cameras for racecourses and that kind of thing – so, yes, lots of applications.

Ed: And I guess even though Autocue is a very well known name, when they branch into some other product, you still have a hurdle to overcome, but not such a big hurdle?

Mike: The thing to bear in mind is that Autocue has been in the business of putting together newsroom systems for people for many years and the server product originally. I guess, came out of play-out solutions for some of their newsroom systems. Now it’s really been spun off as a separate product in its own right, but the expertise has been there for many years and it’s now bringing that out in a different form factor really.

Ed:

So it shouldn’t be a hard sell?

Mike: No absolutely – I mean the price point is great, the feature set’s great, so it’s a nice box.

Ed: And Richard, in terms of teleprompters, it’s the same as NAB?

the

Autocue

Richard: The same as NAB, the three ranges – Master, Professional and Starter, from live broadcast news environments all the way down to first time users, education, corporates – whatever the requirement, whatever the budget, we’ve got the best solution to offer all points of the market.

Ed:

You’ve certainly got the name for it?

Richard: We have, yes, and it’s a great asset, the brand, absolutely. Our heritage is strong and long – like in terms of the teleprompting industry, we’ve been around for over 50 years and we continue to develop and lead the industry.

NZVN

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IO AUDUAL VIZ

Audio 2 viZual, A2Z Technologies Ltd, 29 Sale Street, Freemans Bay PO Box 91641, Victoria Street West, Auckland 1142, New Zealand P. 09 375 3085 F. 09 375 3089 E. sales@audio2vizual.co.nz W. www.audio2vizual.co.nz @Audio2viZual

Audio2viZual

Avid for Protel Protel has a bite at the Avid stories this IBC and we start with Tom Graham.

Ed: Tom, starting this story for Protel, who are recognised as the Avid audio people in New Zealand – Pro Tools – I mean it’s been around for a long time and really it’s the choice if you want to do professional audio editing. Now you haven’t got anything actual at the moment, but you’ve got some plans?

Tom: Yes, we’ve got some exciting things that we’re showing at IBC and it’s a technology preview, so it’s essentially not anything we’re committing to – there’s no version number, there’s no price or anything of that nature, but some exciting stuff we are showing and that’s regarding Pro Tools and post-audio, some long time user requests, clip based gain. So essentially the idea that each clip or “region” as the Pro Tools term was, can have its own independent gain level, separate from the volume automation. Not only can it be a static clip gain, but it also can be a dynamic with break point automation in there as well. So that’s really exciting and that translates from Media Composer into Pro Tools as well, so that improves the Media Composer-Pro Tools workflow.

Ed: That’s always been it hasn’t it, it’s been this hopping backwards and forwards between Media Composer and Pro Tools without any losses or any difficulties?

Tom: Correct, that’s correct. One of the other things that’s been a long time request, is the idea of real time fades. Currently in Pro Tools, lots of little files make up the fades and it can get tedious and cause longer session times so we’re working on the idea of real time fades and faster session times …

Ed: In other words, just “drag and dropping” a fade tool onto the end of a timeline?

Tom: And not having it rendered. A lot of our clients, especially in post, want to work with network attached storage, or the ISIS Unity system, so we’re really working on Pro Tools being able to play nicely on any network attached storage. We’re currently diving into the disc scheduler that did all the typical hard disc communication and improving that.

In fact, we’re working on the idea of a RAM disc, where a walled-off chunk of RAM outside of Pro Tools can be used to literally load your entire timeline of your movie in and

Tom shows us what’s new with Pro Tools.

have instance access, instant RAM playback anywhere on the timeline. So a real big performance boost in speed.

Ed:

That would require a big chunk of RAM?

Tom: The demonstration we’re using here today I believe has 16 gig of RAM, so you can really expand your usage of what’s going on with RAM. Another long time request and something that we said we’d keep working on that we are, and that’s the development of EUCON Phase 2 for Pro Tools, so that means the Euphonix – previously Euphonix control surfaces being more integrated with Pro Tools. So in the coming months, you should see this better integration. For instance, one example would be the EQ curves for Avid EQ plugins showing up on the Euphonix console on the meter bridge. Another long time request is with our file based processing the Audiosuite handles, being able to render an effect and maintain the edits underneath in case you want to adjust the “in” and the “out” points, so having handles or being able to process the entire file underneath what’s showing. We recognise the post community is really important to us and we’ve been listening; we’re really trying to implement the things people have been asking for.

Ed: That’s it, when you’re a big player you’ve got to have a whole range of product that assists the postproduction organisations otherwise they’ll go elsewhere?

Tom: That’s absolutely right.

Movie making isn’t getting any easier, it’s getting more intense, more complicated, more tracks, shorter deadlines, tighter budgets, so we’re trying to help our clients achieve more with less time and more demanding soundtracks.

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To tell the video side of the Avid IBC story, we have Angus Mackay from Avid Montreal.

utilities that let you move your projects from Final Cut or Premiere into Media Composer. So you could then take all the existing footage which you can’t open in the newer version of some of these products and then bring it into Media Composer and take advantage of all the great tools that it offers. Some of the ones that I think make a difference to editors of different platforms would be Avid Media Access or AMA which is our file linking technology. It lets you access all of the file-based formats that are out there these days with full metadata.

Ed: You can “drag and drop” a whole range of media onto the same timeline and it will know what to do?

Angus: That’s exactly right, it’s got real time “mix and match” plus AMA – you add those together and you have an extremely powerful system with real time playback and adjusting all the settings of your clips to fit into your project timeline.

Angus has Media Composer for you.

Ed: We are looking at Media Composer because of events in recent times where people are going to migrate from another editing platform.

Media Composer is an obvious choice, but maybe some people are a bit scared by an Avid timeline. What have you got that’s going to make it easier for that migration to happen?

Angus: Well it’s an incredible summer, lots of interest in Media Composer on the part of editors who’ve used different products. One in particular has got a lot of attention and I think that Media Composer makes a great alternative that people should explore.

One of the big things that would make a difference to someone who is using a different NLE was the addition in version 5 of our Smart Tool. The Smart Tool is a new way of interacting with the Avid timeline, where you can actually go in and “drag and drop” and grab elements in the timeline and do your trimming and assemblies that way. So this is a more familiar interface for a lot of editors who have come from different backgrounds, who are perhaps new to the industry, upcoming talent that is interested in taking a look at Media Composer. So the Smart Tool is really a great way to help them get into the world of Avid Media Composer style of editing.

Of course we’ve kept all of the old ways of working that are tried and true and come from over 20 years of development, working with top end editors in Hollywood and around the world, so you get the best of both worlds as a matter of fact, starting with version 5 Media Composer.

Avid has also offered a cross-grade promotion for users of Final Cut, where we have very competitive pricing if you’re an FCP7 or earlier user, and we actually include a great Media Composer for Final Cut Pro users training DVD with that cross-grade. We’ve gone to the trouble of setting up a whole forum on our community site and providing a number of tools that will help people easily make the migration. One thing else I should mention is that we have great partners in the form of Automatic Duck and Boris Effects and both of them offer transfer

We also offer PhraseFind and ScriptSync which are two unique features to Media Composer.

They’re phonetic indexing tools – it’s a little bit of magic actually to see it working.

Media Composer essentially listens to all of the audio in the clips and then lets you type in a cue word to find a take where that word is spoken.

It’s extremely powerful technology, very useful for reality television, documentaries, anything unscripted or where you might be going to seek out just a specific word for instance in broadcast, where it might be to cut in a news or highlight reel.

Ed: Now, just going back a wee way, I’m under the impression and I’ve heard this from a number of people, that Avid was developed from the film industry, so for a film editor, it’s a very sensible timeline, but for a video editor – someone who’s only been in the video world – a product like FCP or Adobe Premiere just has that “easier to understand” functionality?

Angus: Well the film origins of Media Composer are really one of its strong suits and, as I mentioned, being able to build on 20 years of feedback from the top end editors around the world, has allowed us to make Media Composer a very robust and complete tool. Obviously film editing is only part of the market that Avid addresses with Media Composer and it’s used in television, digital video, corporate events – any kind of digital content creation is perfectly suited to Media Composer, it’s incredibly flexible. We had a couple of customers here yesterday speaking on our booth – one was a feature film editor, big effects, really uses all the tools in Media Composer to the maximum; and that’s compared and contrasted with a documentary film editor who presented in the afternoon, who said “I saw this morning’s presentation and it’s a completely different tool in that other editor’s hands.” It’s very broad and versatile and can be used for a variety of applications.

Ed: I guess the other thing that might frighten people who are used to either Premiere or Final Cut Pro, is that they’ve come from a package, they’ve come from a suite of products, that has a graphic product inbuilt, it has an effects product, a sound product – all in the one package, DVD authoring that you can hop backwards and forwards … does Avid have a similar arrangement?

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AJA for Protel We have Dan Sinclair from AJA in the United Kingdom.

Ed: Dan, you’re going to tell us what’s new since NAB? Dan: We’ve got a brand new mini converter called the UDC. It’s an up / down / and cross-converter, 10-bit quality, same as in the FS2 and it’s the same standard size as the Hi5-3D – very small form factor; very low price as well, it’s US$695, which is a very, very low price; bolt onto anything, and will be brilliant to work along with the Ki Pro Mini.

Ed: I was about to ask, why do you need a converter? I mean there’s so many editing programmes these days, they convert everything in software inside the machine?

Dan: A lot of people find that hardware conversion is better than software conversion … it’s crisper and it’s a lot sharper, generally it’s a bit quicker as well. With AJA, it’s all about hardware conversion.

None of the AJA conversion is done at software level, it’s all hardware based, so you know it’s quality throughout all the products.

Ed: So how do you use it with your Ki Pro Mini – do you convert on the way into the Ki Pro Mini or do you do it later on?

Dan: You can do it whatever way you want really. If you’re outputting high def from a camera and you only want to record as standard def, convert on the way in; if you want to output to a high def monitor, you can put it on the way out – it doesn’t matter where you put it really.

Ed: So you’re talking about a converter from standard to high def and vice versa, or NTSC to PAL? Dan: No NTSC to PAL, simply from standard def to high def and from 720 to 1080, and also high def down to standard def as well. A great little unit.

Dan with the UDC from AJA.

Ed: And I guess it can also be used in a stand alone situation, it doesn’t have to be tied into a Ki Pro? Dan: Exactly, yes, so it can be in any sort of scenario.

If you’ve got a test signal shooting round in high def and you only want a standard def signal, then you can plug into that and you’ve got another output there.

One other thing about it as well actually, it’s a dual link HD-SDI 3G signal on the output and also an HDMI as well – they’re both live at the same time, so you can go to two different displays at the same time.

Ed: Dan we’ve just been to the AJA press show and one of the key things I noted was that Ki Pro has really now come of age – there’s been a convergence between the Ki Pro Maxi and the Ki Pro Mini in that you’ve come out with version 3 software which is for both?

Dan: Yes, it certainly is. There’s quite a few new features on version 3 – if you ask me what the full list is right now I’m not sure, because I only found out about it this morning, but one of the main functions that people were after, was the superimposing of the timecodes on the output. It doesn’t burn it in, it’s almost like closed caption, so it’s on there, it’s always enabled, or you can turn it off.

Ed: So it’s just metadata?

Dan: Exactly just that. the signal itself.

It just pulls off

Ed: And as always with AJA, it’s a free upgrade?

Dan: Absolutely, everything about it is free, and that’s for both the Ki Pro and the Ki Pro Mini.

Ed: It’s a firmware upgrade – now just tell me, how do you upgrade firmware?

Dan: On the back of both the units there’s an Ethernet port, so once you’ve set up an IP address on the unit itself, you plug it into your network and you go onto any web browser on Mac or PC or Linux or whatever – even your iPhone or iPad, and as long as it’s on the same network you’ll be able to get onto it – type in the IP address in the browser address bar and you log onto it and from

More accessories for your FS100.

Page 61

you can use to capture, playback and simply just output from your Mac or your PC or from Linux. It’s all rolled into one.

It’s really easy to use and it controls everything … it’s literally the control room for everything.

Ed: Do you need some AJA hardware to go with it?

Dan: Yes you do. Generally the Kona cards or the Io Express units, they all work with it, so that’s the Kona 3G, the Kona LHi, Kona LHe plus and the Io Express.

Ed:

Okay … and again it’s a free download?

Dan: Absolutely, yes, free downloads; all updates are free from AJA, just go on the site and check for updates every now and again when a new one gets released, and just download it for free.

Ed: Now when I was at NAB, you announced the Phaser, this little box that had a codename but wasn’t quite released yet. It’s now released and it’s got a new name – the Io XT? there you’ll be able to choose the upgrade bar. You can download the firmware from the AJA website for free and then you simply browse through it and choose the right page on the Ki Pro browser.

Ed: And I guess if you’re not really keen on doing that yourself, you can take it back to your dealer?

Dan: I guess so. I don’t think everybody offers it as a service, but you can ask them for help – they’ll definitely give you help on it.

Ed: And the other firmware upgrade, that obviously a lot of people are going to like, is the Avid DNxHD upgrade?

Dan: Absolutely, I mean we’ve proven with the Io Express, when that became available to work with Avid Media Composer 5.5, that Avid is definitely one of the areas we’d like to venture into, and so having the ability to record into DNxHD will definitely please a lot of Avid people and help to get the Ki Pro and AJA name out there a bit more.

Ed: That’s good, so you’re not just tied to Apple anymore?

Dan: Absolutely not. We never have been really, I mean, on the stand today, we are the only company that’s showing Apple, Adobe, Autodesk and Avid.

Ed: Probably a very good move on your part?

Dan: Absolutely – keep everybody happy.

Ed: Now one of the products that really intrigued me was the AJA control room software, cross platform … but what is it?

Dan: It’s basically an amalgamation of all the other applications that we had before. So you’ve got the AJA VTR Exchange or Mac NR as it is on PC and you’ve got the AJA TV which is the play-out side of it on the Mac. It basically throws everything together and across all platforms on Windows, on Mac and on Linux for the OEM side, and now everything looks the same. You don’t have different people trying to work out how to use Mac you know when they’re just used to the Mac and vice versa. So it’s a brilliant bit of software that

Dan: Yes, that’s the Io Express version with dual Thunderbolt ports on it.

Ed: And it’s the dual Thunderbolt that’s really got people interested – why’s that?

Two Thunderbolt connections.

Dan: With Thunderbolt, you can daisy-chain it, just like with FireWire 800. So with dual Thunderbolt, it means you can go from your Mac to your Io XT to your RAID and then to an external monitor. If you only have one Thunderbolt on your IO device, then you can’t have an external monitor, because you always need a RAID to capture. That’s why it’s so big, because most people need an extra monitor to view and it means you can keep daisy-chaining things off there all the way through.

Ed: And you’re one of the few that have got that?

Dan: Absolutely, absolutely.

Most of the manufacturers have only got one Thunderbolt port on their IO devices; that’s more of an end point, you know, you can’t attach anything else onto it after that. You’re NZVN stuck with a smaller setup.

For AJA products and accessories contact the friendly staff at Protel.

Auckland ph. 09-379 8288 Wellington ph. 04-801 9494 <info@protel.co.nz> <www.protel.co.nz>

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it's in the bag.

winning people have great baggage - whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s your case?

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

Support 318 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn, Auckland

Service tim.timlin@panavision.asia

GoPro for Protel At GoPro we have Frank Eberhardt from GoPro UK. Ed:

Frank, any improvements in the audio?

Frank: When audio is important, we have an open door and we have also a skeleton casing for a non-water environment and that improves the audio. We’re working on more improvements like an external microphone and a remote control for example, but we cannot release any date of when and what will happen.

Ed: It’s good to see that you’re continuing to improve – there’s one little accessory that I see here, it’s called a “Floaty Backdoor”?

Frank: Yes, we had some complaints of people losing them in action sports like surfing or waveboarding and instead of bagging them up, sometimes in very deep situations, they will never find the bag.

This is a simple floating device that can stick on the back of your camera and it will stay floating when you lose it.

Spot the GoPros on this car beside Frank.

Ed: So you just take off the backdoor that’s there and you put this one on?

Frank:

Yes, that’s it.

Ed: And lots and lots of mountings here for putting the camera in all sorts of situations … and on the stand

here there’s what looks like a pretty serious off-road vehicle?

Frank: Yes it’s the winner of the solo category in the Dakar Race of 2010 driven by Tim Coronel. There’s 8 cameras with a 3D system as well, and that’s the angle, corner, insides, on the bottom, on the front, on the back – a lot of cameras on the inside.

Ed: And he made a movie?

Frank: Well he was filmed during the race a lot of times and got a lot of attention as leader in the race.

It’s not yet a real movie.

Ed: Okay, and a big improvement for security with GoPro? Frank: Yes, every model is now serialised and we are in registration now where everybody – it will be as of September 1st I believe – all the distributors are registering all the numbers and where they’re going to, to see if something falls out of a truck they can track it and where it went, if it’s found very cheap on the Internet.

Ed:

Fantastic.

For GoPro cameras and accessories contact the friendly staff at Protel.

Auckland ph. 09-379 8288 Wellington ph. 04-801 9494 <info@protel.co.nz> <www.protel.co.nz>

Floating back door in the middle.

Page 64

NZVN

Atomos Recorders We are at Atomos for Protel and we have David Shapton from Atomos in the United Kingdom. Now you probably won’t know the name “Atomos” but you certainly will know the names “Samurai” and “Ninja” which really took a lot of interest at the NAB show this year. But these boys haven’t been sitting on their bums since NAB, they’ve actually been working hard.

Ed: David, what have you done now?

David: Well what we’ve been doing since NAB is selling a lot of Ninjas and, as a new company, we wanted to make sure we could get these products out as quickly as we possibly could.

Ed: And that they worked – that’s quite a novel approach in this industry?

David: Yes I know – revolutionary almost. What we’ve found is we’ve got them in the hands of users, they’re using solid state storage and spinning hard discs (we’re the only company that makes a recorder that works with spinning hard discs) and we’re just getting amazing results with these low cost discs – under US$100 for 750 gigabytes, you can record 8 or even 16 hours of high def video.

Ed: So why do they prefer the spinning disc as opposed to solid state which now you can get up to 128 gigabytes?

David: And even higher capacities than that … it’s cost. You know, 8 hours of HD recording for round about US$100, which is astonishing compared to any other medium, especially media like SXS and P2 cards, which are so expensive that people actually have to hire their storage. It should be the other way round; they should have to rent the camera. So it’s a revolution in the cost of storage and in the quality of storage. What we’ve been doing since NAB is that we’ve developed the Samurai which is the HD-SDI version as opposed to HDMI … most of the cameras in the world have HDMI, but as you move towards the top end, you’ll find that they have SDI or its HD version, HD-SDI. So we’ve built the Samurai which is fluent with SDI in and out, so you can actually record your material and then play it out onto an SDI monitor in full HD. It has the same

David with a Samurai on another FS100.

incredibly low cost recording characteristics. So that’s the Samurai – it has a 5 inch screen, a very high number of pixels on the screen, so you can absolutely use it as an electronic viewfinder, and we’re announcing today that we’re adding viewfinder features. So you can think of the Samurai as a recorder that has a monitor, or as a recording monitor, or electronic viewfinder. Samurai is going into production this week and it should be available within a few weeks worldwide.

Ed: I guess the big question that people have though is what are the codecs that it supports, because these camera manufacturers come out with all sorts of little weird twists and so on – for example, I see you’ve got a Canon here and we know that it does a 50 megabit per second signal, can you manage that?

David: Well what we do, is we don’t use the Canon’s codec, we bypass the codecs completely. We take the uncompressed output from the camera, straight from the sensor and record that at a much, much higher bit rate, you know up to 220 megabits per second.

That’s way beyond any broadcaster’s requirements for quality; it’s visually the same as uncompressed, but it uses one-sixth of the storage, so that’s an incredible advantage.

Ed: But can you have recording format as well?

a

compressed

David: Well Apple ProRes is compressed, but it’s mildly compressed.

It’s compressed only so far so you don’t damage the quality.

Ed: So what you call an “uncompressed format” is actually the Apple ProRes? David: Yes, so what we say is it’s uncompressed quality, it’s visually lossless.

So an expert would not be able to tell the difference between pure uncompressed and ProRes which is compressed 6:1 and is visually lossless.

Ed: Are there any lower compressions that you can use; is there a flexibility in that?

David: We go down to about 100 megabits per second and even that looks fantastic.

But the other thing we’re Page 65

Transforms your video produc=on by: •

Elimina=ng the need for capture cards and wasted =me logging and capturing by avoiding the lossy, =me consuming capture-­‐to-­‐edit process.

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Bypassing the image-­‐degrading compression needed to squeeze HD onto in-­‐camera flash storage.

•

Providing limitless and cheap storage through the use of removable 2 ½ inch hard disks.

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Including all accessories in one rugged case -­‐ BaNeries, Chargers, Disk Caddies and a PC/Mac docking sta=on.

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codec at the camera in the field: simple.

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Recycling older cameras with obsolete tape and compression technology and upda=ng them with a modern, high-­‐ quality file-­‐based workflow

Record | Monitor Playback/Playout | Ready-­‐to-­‐Edit The revolu*onary Atomos Samurai is a portable touchscreen Professional 10bit HD Recorder, Monitor, & Playback device that captures pris*ne video and audio direct from any camera with HD/SD-­‐SDI. It encodes in real-­‐*me to the visually-­‐lossless Apple ProRes format, onto low-­‐cost, removable 2 ½ inch hard disks or SSD. You can then review your footage in real*me on the pris*ne 5" display or out onto any HD-­‐SDI capable device, including directors monitors & broadcast equipment. With up to 10 hours baPery from the 2 included Lithium Ion Camera baPeries, you truly have a deck & monitor in the palm of your hand, a super high quality deck & monitor. Protel will have limited stock available this month.

announcing at the show, is we’re going to be supporting Avid DNxHD. So we will have the two main editing codec formats for Final Cut and for Avid and they work on a lot of other stuff as well …

Ed: On the same device?

David: On the same device – the DNxHD is an optional extra, it’s round about US$120 I think and will be shipping later this year.

Ed: Alright, so if somebody was at the level of a camcorder that didn’t have the HD-SDI out, but had the HDMI, then the Samurai is not for them – it’s the Ninja?

David: It would be the Ninja, which is our entry level product and does a great job. But what we’ve also announced at the show is our Connect Converters ( “Connect” is the brand name ) and these will take, for example, HDMI and turn it into SDI, or they’ll take SDI and turn it into HDMI. So you need one for each of those directions. The great thing about these is that they actually slot into the back of the Ninja or Samurai.

So let’s say you’ve got a Ninja which has HDMI and you have an SDI camera; buy a Connect Converter S2H ( that’s what we call it ) and that will take your SDI and turn it into HDMI without quality loss. It will also remove any pull down cadence you have in real time.

These are self-powered, the batteries last for hours and hours and they also have our continuous power system, which is they have an internal battery that lasts for two hours and an external battery that we supply you with that will last 15 hours. You can change that external battery without stopping the converter, because it switches to its internal battery. These converters will also fit on the back of Marshall monitors, small HD monitors, very versatile, or just use them stand alone – keep them in your pocket. They’re signal generators as well, they generate audio and video signals; they’ve even got a built-in LED torch.

They’re just incredibly versatile converters.

Just keep one with you all the time – or keep ten!

Ed: So we’re looking at the Samurai now and I see there’s a big slot on the side there. That’s the slot for the hard drive is it?

David: Yes. The hard drive goes into what we call a “master caddy”, which is a protective case. It just slots in the side; you don’t even have to turn the device off, you just hot plug it, push it in …

Ed: And you have a different caddy for a card do you?

David: No, we don’t use cards, we use spinning hard drives or solid state drives, which are the same size and shape as the spinning drives.

Ed: Oh I see … are these solid state drives particular to the Samurai?

David: No, no, these are commodity drives, Intel 320 series, buy them in any computer store. We don’t always supply the storage with these recorders, because you can buy locally if you wish, so it really does keep the cost of storage down. Use SSDs if you’re going to be sat on a motorbike; use hard drives for almost everything else.

Ed: Now in terms of mounting these devices, I notice that you’re using the shoe on the top of the camera, but I guess you could also mount these on the tripod if you were doing that sort of shoot?

David: Oh yes – we’ve got tripod mounts, quarter inch top and bottom. We don’t supply any mounting

because there are so many different ways that people want to mount them. If we supplied ten different types, there’d still be 30 other ways that people would do it, so to keep the cost down we don’t do that. It’s very easy to find hot shoe adapters for all kinds of things, so it’s never been a problem. Although they’re made out of aircraft grade aluminium, they’re pretty light weight, so they don’t unbalance the camera … most people just put them on the top of the camera and they’re fine.

Ed: One of the problems I hear people have is with the HDMI connection – they find them a little bit insecure. Do you supply your own HDMI cables?

David: No we don’t, because to be honest there are so many types out there. Use good ones is the recommendation … and keep them short, because HDMI does not work over long distances. You try pulling that HDMI cable out, it’s okay; it’s not a locking format, but it is a tight format and our HDMI sockets are designed to be tight, so they do hold the cable. I have to use both hands to pull that out.

The Ninja kit exposed.

Ed: Now we’re just looking at the Ninja and it’s a package?

David: Two batteries, a dual charger, a docking station which has FireWire 800 and USB 2 and 3, so the hard disc comes out of the Ninja and slots into the caddy and then that connects to your computer. It is then an attached drive, you can actually edit directly from the drive you’ve recorded to. ProRes is such an efficient codec that actually works fine. So you get a complete package; you get this nice carrying case as well.

Ed:

What, you get two hard drives with it?

David: Yes if you wish as we offer several packaged options with and without drives. You can purchase your drives or SSD’s separately if you wish.

Ed: Wow and you get these from Protel in New Zealand.

NZVN

Page 67

For Atomos products and accessories contact the friendly staff at Protel.

Auckland ph. 09-379 8288 Wellington ph. 04-801 9494 <info@protel.co.nz><www.protel.co.nz>

After the Aftermath We are at DVT after the aftermath, talking to Stuart Barnaby about the show that was held while I was eating my way back from Europe via Salzburg and their chocolates and Shanghai with their lovely soupy dumplings. So, for all of us who couldn’t be there on the night, here we are to hear a little bit about what we missed.

Ed: Stuart, this was really about the demise of a particular product for our industry wasn’t it?

Stuart: Yes, we were taking a really good look at Final Cut Pro X and having a look at our reasons as to why we thought Apple have made the decisions that they have regarding this product … and then looking at paths forward for our customers moving on.

Our customers have many different choices moving forward.

Ed: Is Apple going to support Pro 7 for a bit longer?

Stuart: No, Apple are providing no support whatsoever for Final Cut Pro 7 so it’s basically a “dead duck” product. However Final Cut Pro 7 still does what it did 3 months ago, 6 months ago and if that’s all you want to do for the next 3 months or the next 6 months, then it may be an appropriate choice for you to just sit

on the product and keep using it. But at some point, there will be an update to your operating system that will break it; at some point there will be a new camera format come out that you’ll want to use that will break it; at some point you’ll need support for the product that won’t be there; at some point you might want to get an extra license for the product which won’t be there. So at some point you’re going to have to move to something else.

Ed: But as a dealer you’re still going to support users of Final Cut Pro 7 in any way you can, surely?

Stuart: Absolutely.

We’ve got a wide installed customer base using Final Cut Pro 7 and we’re definitely not deserting them like Apple have, but as time goes by, our ability to provide high end professional support for that product is diminishing rapidly.

Ed: So the alternatives?

Stuart: So the alternatives are to go to Final Cut Pro X and I think it has its place in the market. It is really a glorified consumer product. Apple have just recently made some announcements where they’re running around very apologetically and throwing a few extra features back in … you can kind of get XML workflow happening with Final Cut Pro X by using some other third party product like CatDV, but really it’s a very hokey and unsatisfactory solution. But where Final Cut Pro X really does fit in I think, is if people are doing

casual editing. If people are wanting to make one video a month of their latest product that they‘re creating, and they want to use the product for half an hour a day, once a month, then it could be a good product for that sort of application.

So for casual use, low end corporate, low end educational market, I think it’s really good and of course for the prosumer at home, it’s a great product for them.

So it does have its applications, but if you’re a mid-range to high end company doing any professional work, then I don’t think it’s a good fit. There are other alternatives like Sony Vegas and Grass Valley EDIUS which in themselves are very good and capable products and are well supported, but the issue with those particular products is that they’re not industry standard in New Zealand.

So although they’re good products and you could move to them, Sony Vegas, for example, isn’t used widely by the professional community in Australasia, neither is Grass Valley EDIUS, but EDIUS might work really well for you if you’re a broadcaster and it tied into their back end Grass Valley servers or some other playback systems or whatever; then EDIUS might be a good choice for you.

So for these reasons that they’re not widely embraced by the industry, you know we’re not recommending those products, and that just leaves the two other alternatives – Adobe and Avid.

Ed: And they’ve been pretty aggressive in coming to the party to try and capture those Final Cut users?

Stuart: Yes exactly – both Adobe and Avid have come out with cross-grade deals, because obviously they see the opportunity in the market with Apple deserting the professional community. So both Avid and Adobe have come in to provide opportunities for people to get across onto their product pretty easily.

Ed: So what was the feeling at the show after hearing this?

Stuart: It’s pretty straightforward now, I think, by reviewing what it is that Apple did. Certainly we had a good discussion about ( in our opinion ) why Apple have done what they’ve done, which is largely about Apple being a consumer electronics company, really focusing on the broad market. For example, when they’re doing an upgrade to Final Cut Studio 3, they could pitch that upgrade at all the existing users of Final Cut Studio 3, which is somewhere between 5 and 10 million customers; or they could take that product and revamp it and pitch it towards their entire Macintosh customer base. And so because they are a consumer focused electronics company, producing a range of computers that are appropriate for home use and corporate use; also things like iPhones and iPads which are very consumer products, I think they’ve basically just taken the reincarnation of Final Cut and pitched that towards their larger customer base.

You know, if I was Apple that’s probably what I’d do; however, if I was Apple I would have explained that to the professional community a little bit better.

Ed: One would have hoped Stuart that you would have had a bit more sense of customer care?

Stuart: Yes, absolutely – and this is part of the problem with Apple.

Really, a key element of what this is about, is trust.

You know, when you are investing in the tools of your trade, whatever that may be, you trust that the person providing those tools is going to stand behind them and look after you for a long period of time and, in this case, Apple have really acted in a very untrustworthy manner and there’s no one at Apple you can pick up the phone and call and have a conversation about this, so it’s left to speculate about what they’ve done … I don’t think anyone who came to our event argued with our opinion more on page 71

Page 68

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The revolutionary Samurai is a portable touchscreen Professional 10bit HD Recorder, Monitor, & Playback device that captures pristine video and audio direct from any camera with HD/SDSDI. It encodes in real-time to the visually-lossless Apple ProRes format, onto low-cost, removable 2 ½ inch hard disks.

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Email: sales@dvt.co.nz

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Kit includes Genus Cine Mattebox kit, Bravo follow focus system with 0.8 pitch gear, height extension bracket for GWMC Mattebox and video camera shoulder mount system. Or customise your own.

The Genus range of products are designed and built to exacting standards and offer exceptional value for money. |

45 Fairfax Avenue, Penrose, Auckland

PRODUCTION | POST | VISUAL EFFECTS

Adobe Solutions & Video Professionals

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Final Cut users save 50% off Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 or Adobe Production Premium CS5.5.

The top five reasons to purchase: Broad native format support Import and export virtually any format and skip time-consuming transcoding and rewrapping processes when working natively with file-based and DSLR footage.

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Digital Video Technologies (NZ) Ltd

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Phone: 09 525 0788

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Email: sales@dvt.co.nz

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45 Fairfax Avenue, Penrose, Auckland

CLASSIFIED

For Sale

Sony PDW-F330 XD-CAM CineAlta HD Camera is in terrific condition for Sale. $6500.00 ONO Including gst.

(I need to sell so please make me an offer) This Camera is HD 1440x1080 and produces a fantastic picture. It is perfect as a complement camera to a 350 or 700 kit or as a stand alone kit. It features 3 1/2 inch sensors. The Lens is a Canon BCTV 18 x Zoom Lens VCL719BXS. I will include the case and 2 VLock Batteries and of course the Tripod plate as well as approx 30 XD-CAM discs.

Free shipping nationwide.

Straight out of the Camera Operation: 000792H Operation (rst) : 000792H Spindle (rst) : 000113 Laser (rst) : 000113 Loading (rst) : 001458 Seek (rst) :000632H The camera was updated with the latest firmware 2 years ago which essentially turned it into the PDW F 335.

Contact Mob 021 828791.

Wanted to Buy

A solid state or hard disc recorder to go on a Sony HDV camera.

This could be the Sony “clip-on” or a Firestore type device but must be working perfectly and be at least HDV capable. What have you?

Call Grant on 09-5276154 or email <finnzed@xtra.co.nz> with your offer.

For Sale Manfrotto Tripod System 116 Mk2 head, 075 legs, 181 dolly Supports up to 10kg Hardly used, was $1464.80 when new e-mail: vogtr@ihug.co.nz, Phone: 04-566 0726, Mob: 021-151 4067

from page 68

of it, in fact it’s widely held in the marketplace that Apple have really deserted the professional community.

I think also, from Apple’s perspective, they probably look at the professional editing market space and go “you know what, that’s well catered for, there are other vendors out there doing it well; Adobe’s doing it well, Avid’s doing it well, we don’t really need to play in that niche professional editing market space anymore."

Ed: But they wouldn’t go on the record to say that, obviously?

Stuart: They can’t say that, but I’m not Apple, I can.

Ed: It actually sounds like what happened with Edit quite a number of years ago, when Discreet just dropped Edit as an editing platform in their portfolio.

Suddenly it was no longer there?

Stuart: Oh there’ve been a number of vendors over the years who have tried to either enter a market with a new product and failed, or who have traditionally played in certain markets and then given up and gone off to focus on something else. A classic example this year was HP coming out with their tablet. It lasted 48 days and then they canned it. That was remarkable from a massive, major vendor like that to produce a product and call it a failure and get rid of it. In fact now it’s a popular item, people can’t buy enough of them!

Ed: And I guess it’s not going to end here – there’s going to be more of these and the answer is, if you’ve got a very well established relationship with a dealer, then the dealer’s there to support you with a move, a change, to keep you working?

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Stuart: Yes, so at the event we gave demonstrations of both Adobe and Avid, so that customers could understand how they work, their relevance … you know certain choices that you’d make to go either one way or the other. In fact, anyone that gets Avid Media Composer is also going to need a copy of Photoshop and probably After Effects as well, so they’ll actually have all the Adobe production premium bundle anyway.

And Premiere has become an extremely more robust capable editor since CS5 came out; since it went 64 bit and they re-architected it, it is now actually quite a good capable editor.

So there’s great choices with relative merits between the two, and that’s what we’re here to help our customers with – figure out which is going to be the best workflow for them moving forward; and in addition to that, we’re also providing training courses which are one day switcher courses with the help of Andy Day, to train people up, either in Premiere or in Media Composer.

The great thing about Andy is that he’s a fully certified Apple trainer, so he knows Final Cut inside and out, obviously as a master trainer for Apple. He’s also a fully certified trainer for Adobe so, again, he’s ideal in terms of doing switching for that; and of course the other great thing about Andy is he started his career with Media Composer, so he’s been using Media Composer for the last decade. He’s the ideal guy to be able to do training for people who are moving from Final Cut across into either Adobe or Avid.

Ed: And to get all that, they come to DVT? NZVN Stuart: Absolutely.

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