NZVN August2016

AUGUST 2016

Vol 227

ENTECH Show in Auckland - July 2016.

In late July in Auckland, at the Aotea Centre there was the ENTECH Show. This was not really a show for the television industry, although there certainly were some items of interest to small production and postproduction facilities.

The main direction of the show was theatre lighting and theatre sound. Counting the names we are familiar with included a large presence from Sennheiser; there was PLS under the guise of Kenderdine Electrical and René from Protel on the Riedel stand. Speaking of René, we will start with him.

Ed: You’ve got a little tag on you saying “Protel”, but the rest of the stand is all branded Riedel. Riedel is certainly one of the products that Protel has on offer and looking across the range here, there’s stuff for the really big boys, but for the smaller operator, I am drawn to your talkback set?

René: Yes certainly both wired and wireless intercoms are areas where Riedel can provide good products for the small user who needs quality and reliability.

Ed: Well who doesn’t?

René: Everyone does – the small guys through to the big guys.

Ed: That’s where it starts isn’t it, that’s your introduction to the Riedel family, but then it can grow – and it can grow in a number of ways?

René on the Riedel stand.

René: Certainly a starting point would be wired beltpacks – you just need two wired beltpacks and a cable running between them and you have an intercom. From there, you can daisy chain beltpacks and there are various expansion opportunities that way. You can also expand that into a wireless beltpack intercom system as well. The key things with Riedel are that they are digital so they’re pristine quality audio.

Even the wired beltpacks are a digital system. That pristine audio quality is maintained to the extent of their range, so while you’re in range, the system always provides top quality audio.

Also, the wireless system is running in the 1.9GHz DECT area – effectively the home phone space – and that provides them with some very clear communications where, with other products that you find in the 2.4Gig band or RF type products, you would be subject to interference from the ever increasing squeeze on bandwidth from all the other wireless products and transmissions in that space.

Ed: On the beltpack, there’s the transmitting system, but you also need your headphones and your microphone to go along with that. Is it necessary that you have the Riedel system complete? Do you have to have the Riedel headphones and the Riedel microphone and the beltpack?

René: It’s not necessary. The key component is the actual beltpack itself. The beltpack is where all the “smarts” are; to all intents and purposes, it’s the standard 4-wire microphone headset that plugs into that. Riedel do have some very nice offerings in the headset space – light and medium-weight headsets that are very robust and made of modern materials and they’re good sounding microphones too, but in general, any of your major brand, 4-wire headsets will work with

them. At the higher end of the market, with their heavyweight headsets, they do have a lot of customisation features which make them very good, but at the mid and lower end of the market, the standard headsets work fine with them. Although in saying that, the Riedel headsets aren’t any more expensive than third party brands.

Ed: Now what impressed me when we spoke earlier about this, was the scalability of the Riedel system.

You can start off with a couple of beltpacks but you can go way up to a full blown system?

René: Yes, if we start with standard wired intercom, they start from just “beltpack to beltpack” systems. But then you can introduce a controller into that as well, so if you were looking at fixed panels, 19” rack panel intercoms, or integrating into wall systems, then you can go from there into a digital matrix or effectively a full party-line system. From there you can transition or, at any point in time, add a wireless component. The Riedel family is not only intercom systems though, it also incorporates audio, video, timecode and data infrastructure products as well, so basically getting all that information from one place to

Go to https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews/ for more news.

P11 Dedo explains LED colour.

P21 Channel 10 News, Sydney.

P23 Doing good at home.

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another place and being able to control what goes where. Riedel call this “Real Time Media Networking” and this is performed using Riedel products in a distributed routing structure.

The intercom products are one corner of the product range, and they can all be dealt with individually, but you can actually integrate them with the Media Networks to effectively create anything up to a worldwide network. To help facilitate this at the highest end, Riedel can facilitate the provision of international fibre backbones ( that you can put their products on either end of ) to create worldwide networks.

Ed: So this is a product range that really fits into a theatre situation or a large studio situation, or I guess an outside broadcast type arrangement?

René: I suppose general applications that we deal with on a daily basis with Riedel are your film set and theatre sites, then on into your broadcast space with your outside broadcasts events, plus event management and facilities management – really all facets of those. Another thing I should mention is that,

Ed: Wow, and that’s just a case of hiring the bandwidth I guess?

René: Pretty much. Riedel as a company is very interested in that.

Thomas Riedel started the company providing UHF radios as rentals to various events and facilities in Germany, and then started to develop the technology that increased the intercom capabilities, and then into the digital space, and into the wireless space.

Then, of course, all these products really followed on from that to the point now where the Mediornet range of products are full blown broadcast routers that are easily managed, or even self-managing – but it all started from the intercom rental side of things and that’s where a lot of their business still is.

Beltpack and headset.

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while you can make a relatively small investment into Riedel product, you don’t necessarily have to buy more product to make that system grow.

Ed: If Thomas Riedel started with rentals, has the company kept on with rental offers?

René: Roughly 50% of the company’s business worldwide is in rental, so while they sell systems, they also have a huge rental pool servicing many of the world’s biggest sporting and festival events. So you can buy, for example, a 5 headset wireless beltpack system and then you come up to a major event or a major production and find that you need 15, 18, 35 of them, you can just rent the additional devices that are required to make that happen.

Ed: Is this something that you do through Protel, or is this something separate?

René: Protel can facilitate it; the rental business tends to be direct with Riedel, but as their agent in New Zealand we can help make it easy for the import / export or the return of equipment, or help if someone breaks a headset – things like that.

Ed:

That’s one of the good uses of Protel.

René:

There are many good uses of Protel Grant.

Perhaps the first step in this instance is to give us a call and we can help design and configure the best comms solution for your needs!

Moving on to the Kenderdine Electrical experience – is that what it says? Hmmm, I haven’t got my glasses on … “suppliers of …”

Here’s someone who looks just like Cory Schultz, I’ll ask him.

Ed: Cory, Kenderdine is known by another name to the rest of us isn’t it?

Cory: By your readers as Professional Lighting Services, our sister company, yes.

Ed: That’s right, and Cory is the man in charge of sales and he’s the one who makes up those wonderful ads that we see every month from PLS. Cory, how do the two sides of this business work together, what the synergy there?

Cory: Kenderdine is definitely more of a traditCory Schultz and Aidan Simons. ional theatre and theatrical lighting and dimming and power for events and houses combining two operations, back when Chris McKenzie of worship, and theatres in schools etc, whereas PLS is and Hugh Kenderdine joined forces. certainly the film and TV side of the company.

Ed: Like with the Auckland Council – the Ed: Why do you need two parts? amalgamation?

Cory: It’s a historical thing I think – a Cory: We are the Super City, yes, that’s right. combination of two companies that came together and Ed: But you don’t have anything to do with now we refer to them as sister companies.

Kenderdine, apart from being here and holding down Ed: But you’re all on the same premises?

Cory: Yes we’re all on the same premises, all with the same low overheads giving the benefits you get by

the furniture?

Cory: Oh no, I do sell Kenderdine products but I chose to specialise in the film and TV industry.

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Ed: What is the crossover because, in terms of “it’s a light, it needs filters, it needs focusing etc,” there are similarities obviously?

Cory: Well both theatre and film have Fresnel lights for example.

Film Fresnels are designed to be tougher, they certainly cost more and they can handle the rigours of being knocked around on set and in the back of a lighting van, whereas a theatrical fitting might be a little more cheaply made, a little more lightweight and designed to be rigged up high and left alone. They might both use lighting gels … whereas a theatre light will use sort of colour gels to add a mood, film will use correction filters and correction gels and diffusion and ND and so forth.

More of a means to an end.

Ed: So really it’s the products. You’re not going to mix and match because the television light would be just far too expensive for a stage situation?

Cory: And the stage light would be a little too delicate for the real world scenarios that the film guys are dealing with, yes.

Even in terms of their rigging equipment, Kenderdine rigging is all 48mm pipe clamp and hooks and safety cables, whereas the film world is certainly all about your 5eighths baby pin and everything else that works on that.

Ed: But I guess your service technicians at PLS and Kender-dine are the same people – they work on both lines?

Cory: Yes that’s right. The GM covers both areas, the office manager pays the accounts for both companies and the workshop and technician repair both.

I suppose the real synergy is in the hire department where you can hire theatrical or film fittings from the same team, and we have various people down there with a wealth of knowledge across both divisions.

Ed: And you’re learning it as you go?

Cory: Very slowly, but I have left Glen and other colleagues like young Aidan here to specialise in the theatrical industry whereas my interest was always film and TV so why not put my efforts in there.

One product range that covers stage and screen is that of microphones which are well represented here on the Sennheiser stand by Sennheiser NZ Manager Daniel Rowe.

Ed: Daniel, I understand that there is a promotion going on?

Daniel: Yes, absolutely. We dropped the price on our new digital wireless system, the AVX. The ME2 version had a significant price reduction as a special for 3 months and it’s going incredibly well so that will become a permanent price reduction on that particular SKU. Ed: What are the comments that you’re getting back from users of this, because it is very new in the market, it’s a totally different bandwidth and people know there’s a slight delay in there, but obviously users continue to buy it so the delay cannot be significant?

Daniel: Firstly the AVX system is 100% digital. It uses 1.9 DECT band in its transmission, which is not a busy part of the spectrum and is license free and absolutely futureproofed – Digital Dividend immune.

The delay is actually part of how the system manages to avoid conflicts of frequency, so you do not need to scan or set anything transmission frequency wise.

Inherent in DECT technology is a 19 milliseconds latency as part of that standard which, as we’ve discussed previously, is within frame sync so it’s not that large of an issue for video production for its intended users. It’s actually how the system handles its frequency when you’re out in the field. If there’s a conflicting frequency, it uses that latency to jump out of the way to another time slot within a transmission frame and find a new free one and it does this seamlessly, you won’t notice it happen. It is a very small sacrifice to make for a system that requires no set Page 6

Daniel with the EK 6042.

up in the receiver or the transmitter. AVX has found a lot of favour in a few different worlds – from the entry point user who wants something with simplified set up but with no compromise on sound quality, to applications in the professional arena where speed of deployment is a real consideration. Broadcasters have jumped on board for the run and gun style jobs where a user has got to get a story fast, they’ve got to get out there and have got a lot of other things to worry about when they are out in the field. It’s a solution that talks to those sorts of requirements.

Ed: I like the really robust nature of the receiver – you just plug it into that canon input on your camera and switch on your transmitter and you’re ready to go.

There’s no mucking around with picking a frequency or anything. It’s just plug and play?

Daniel: Absolutely and there are a lot of other things to worry about when you’re out on a job – you know, keeping the talent under control, framing the shot, lighting, everything else …

Ed:

Oh tell me about it.

Daniel: So if we can take care of the audio side of a shoot for anyone out there, then that’s a huge advantage.

One of the really nice features of the system, as you said, is that ability to leave a very small format receiver plugged into your camera. It stays in the camera in the bag. If you have phantom power on your inputs enabled, as you turn your camera on, the receiver turns on with it, so that’s one less thing for you to worry about while you’re out and about.

Ed: I guess that’s why you’ve got the strap line “Relax, it’s an AVX”?

Daniel: Absolutely, and concentrate on the rest of your shoot knowing your high quality audio is taken care of automatically.

Ed: But that’s not all you’ve got. You’re showing a big range here at ENTECH including speakers, microphones, larger transmitter packs and lots more?

Daniel: Yes and a product that we’re all very excited about is our new EK 6042 dual channel, true diversity camera receiver. This is a very sophisticated professional camera system. We have been waiting for this for a long time from Sennheiser. It’s finally with us and, the irony is, had this come out a couple of years previously, we would not have been able to achieve all of the technical benefits we’ve realised in this product now that it’s been released at this point in time. So two dedicated channels in here, there’s an incredible level of backwards compatibility with this system, so whether

State of the art.

you have a G3 system transmitter, a 2000 series transmitter, 3000 / 5000 series transmitter which uses a different level of compander, the HiDyn compander, or even our revolutionary digital D9000 system, they will work with this receiver. Excitingly, you can use UHF in one channel, you could use digital in the second simultaneously – incredibly flexible, a very well thought out product.

Ed: So this means that, with one receiver, you can handle a whole range of microphones whereas, in the past, you would have to match your transmitter to your receiver, etc?

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Editing Solutions Experts

Avid Technology Showcase 18 – 19 August 2016

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Daniel: That’s it, one receiver to rule them all, absolutely.

Ed: I don’t see a gold ring on it anywhere – perhaps that would have added too much to the cost?

Daniel: This is the only one in New Zealand and Australia right now, so it is my precious at least. Look, in terms of its output, firstly there are a lot of different formats of camera out here, so we have adapters for 25 pin and for 15 pin. You can’t see this now as this is screwed into this sleeve, but that’s a drop-in slot receiver …

Ed: Aaah, the Sony in particular has those drop-in slots?

Daniel: That’s right – so ARRI, Panasonic, Sony, we have the pin adapters that cater to those different cameras. This is also super slot compatible, so will work with Sound Devices field bags which will also then show the receiver information on screen.

If you need to use this as an on camera solution then we can do that too, with this on camera sleeve that we’re looking at, and you can slide a battery pack into the side plate and run from two lithium ion hot swappable batteries.

This will give you 6 hours runtime, but if you have other batteries in your bag charged, you can run from one battery whilst you’re swapping the second. In terms of its outputs, you have an adapter cable from the base that will give you your channel 1 and channel 2 and that can be analogue or that can be digital AES3.

There’s also an auxiliary output that may run into a secondary recorder for example, and we actually have an auxiliary output that will take channels 1 and 2 from the top of the receiver as well. So if you have any issues with connectivity into your camera, then you can use those to run into the external XLR inputs.

Our 5000 and 9000 transmitters have optional coms buttons, so when that is pressed you can use the auxiliary output to route the audio somewhere else, bypassing the main outputs. The screen on top here is OLED. We’ve had this tested in very bright sunlight and that screen responds really well from any angle – that’s important when you’re out in the field. The display is very simple, there are no abbreviations, and everything makes sense. You can set the receiver up a number of ways … you can use it to perform a frequency scan for best available frequencies or via a USB cable and laptop browser interface to update and enter your own pre-set frequencies and bands.

transmitter, so you IR scan your D9000, it sets that channel to D9000. You scan in your G3 UHF system and it will make the changes required for the second channel.

Ed: Does it know which frequencies it’s not allowed to go into?

Daniel: That relates to the frequency capability of the transmitter …

Ed: Yes, but if you’ve got a transmitter that’s in the old frequency that the government doesn’t allow any more, will it accept that?

Daniel: The onus there is on the user not using an illegal frequency if they own it already! A good case in point would be MTS band which sits right in the middle of our usable licensed frequency.

The legal requirement for resale is that the transmitter cannot transmit into a problem area; the receiver actually does not matter in that situation. You may find that what is restricted in New Zealand might be available elsewhere in the world and you would want that available while overseas.

So as long as the transmitter is not user tuneable into a restricted band, you’re fine.

Ed:

You could block it if the customer wanted it?

Daniel: Yes – the operator can set this themselves actually. You can define your own pre-set frequencies and useable or blocked bands within the receiver which you can recall instantly in the field. Very useful for international operation where RF bandwidth access changes so much region by region. You would do this

The receiver and transmitter synchronise via an IR flash and automatically change settings to suit the type of Page 10

via USB and web browser interface. By the way, the tuning bandwidth is really broad – 184MHz which is huge.

Ed:

So when they sell some more frequency?

Daniel: We have broadband spectrum space to play with, that’s right. This will be highly advantageous if you travel worldwide with your work as RF frequency availability differs so much. Another great feature is the “scan to next” so, if in the event of frequency conflicts on a job, rather than rescan the entire bandwidth for a new usable frequency, it will scan to the next free frequency which saves a lot of time. Our older EK 3421 receivers had to be manufactured with pre-set frequencies; with EK 6042, as I mentioned previously, if you need to load in pre-set frequencies and pre-set bands that you know work in certain areas or regions, then you can connect to the USB input with your laptop and open a very simple, easy to use web browser interface to upload all of those changes into the receiver system. Those pre-sets can then be recalled when you’re out in the field. It is an incredibly well thought out system that certainly works in a lot of different situations.

Ed: Alright. The big question is do you need another mortgage to pay for it?

Daniel: Ed:

Everything’s relative!

Aaah you do then?

Daniel: It’s comparable to our previous broadcast level receivers. Obviously there are two receivers in there, so it’s going to be a wee bit more expensive.

Ed: But it should last a lot longer in the frequency battles still being waged?

Daniel: It certainly should last a lot longer, absolutely, and you have that added security of using all of your existing Sennheiser transmitters, right to the top of our line with D9000.

Ed: This is obviously a very new product and we don’t expect all the dealers to have it straightaway, but in any case, as with any Sennheiser product – and there’s a huge range – the best advice is to go and see your dealer and talk to them and say that you want to see this particular product and you want to compare it with something else, and so the dealer should be able to plug it in and play it or listen to it or whatever and you can make that comparison?

Daniel: Yes. It’s a high end system, we wouldn’t expect every Sennheiser dealer to have one on the shelf, and it will only be available through the dealers with the expertise in these product categories. But certainly, the great advantage of interacting with the dealer is that you have someone there 24/7 to back you up and to give you that objective advice and support. I would always encourage people to contact Sennheiser as well as we are responsive to product and technical advice related questions and we can certainly help marry up the end user to the relevant dealer. There’ll absolutely be situations where we approach the end user base to raise awareness of our systems, and then filter those leads back through our authorised reseller base.

NZVN

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Dedo explains LED Colour We are at Dedotec, better known as Dedolight to us from the civilised world, with Dedo Weigert himself. On this occasion, I would like to ask Dedo not to talk so much about lighting product itself, but to talk about colour and the use of the technology to provide the colour that best tells a story.

Dedo: There are some basics that are not in everybody’s mind.

When we talk about colour, the standard, the ideal is the full spectrum as provided by sunlight or halogen light. We’ve learnt to live with spectral characteristics from fluorescents and from HMIs which are spiky – there are peaks and valleys in there and we’ve learnt to survive that. LED is a different world with different rules.

We used to evaluate colour with a colour meter from Minolta, or now a Kenko or Sekonic’s one. Those are good still today for continuous, homogenous spectrum, but they look through 3 very narrow windows or filters and pick only selected points of the spectrum.

We’ve learnt how to interpret them for the discontinuous spectrum of HMI and fluorescent, but for LED, these meters give the totally wrong information.

So we have to go through spectrum analysis and that’s not everybody’s thing – not everybody used to have those and they used to be very expensive instruments in scientific institutes $100-150,000 apiece, but now there are already some portable ones that people start using and they’re getting very, very good.

Ed: Can I just interrupt here, because I remember at the last dealer meeting that I attended here, you handed round little viewing spectrometers … are they useful tools?

Dedo: The little spectral viewers are just something to make people aware of what is continuous spectrum. They’re not a measuring device at all.

Ed: But what I was thinking was, wouldn’t this be a very handy tool to have if somebody was looking to purchase or hire LEDs or any sort of lighting panel to look and see … no?

Dedo: No, it’s a look and see instrument to say “look, this is continuous spectrum, this is spiky spectrum, these are the lines you see with fluorescents”, but it’s nothing really on which you can base your choices. You need deeper information.

So people know about CRI – Colour Rendition Index.

It’s an old system from 1931 and it talks only about 8 colours, pastel colours.

It leaves out very valid information about red and skin tones.

Now we need to work with standard CRI – 14 or 15 colours, and that gives us better information. But that’s all based on the human eye and if we’re in the broadcast business or in film, then it’s not our eye that counts, it’s the eye of the digital camera.

Ed: And again that depends on the camera. every camera is the same?

Not

Dedo: So then comes TLCI – Television Lighting Consistency Index by Alan Roberts. A very big step forward, but it’s based on the response of the studio cameras, which work with 3CCD sensors, whereas in the world out there, people from the ALEXA, the RED, the Blackmagic, everything, CMOS – and they all look at LED light in very individual ways. Even if you take a Canon 5D Mark II and a Canon 5D Mark III … on one you might need a quarter correction and the other one you need an eighth correction. They see LED light differently.

So we started doing camera tests with all these cameras and, for many years, we got very diverging results, depending on the camera. It’s only recently that we have now LEDs that give us homogenous, congruent results for all of these cameras.

How do we do this? We shoot a human face – it’s not portrait photography, but we light one side with a reference light and the other side with LED and then we see does it match. They are not nice portraits, it’s just matching one skin tone to another and we do that with many different skin tones, Scandinavian, Mexican, Ethiopian and Angolan, because different skins react differently to light.

Okay, so that’s one aspect where finally we’ve come to a point where we can say with our LED lights, especially the focusing ones because they represent again a different challenge … a multi-LED panel light is easier to handle than a focusing light, because of the optics which exaggerate any defect that comes from the phosphor layer of the LED. There are problems like one of them is called “Colour over Angle” where the light emitted from the LED, from the actual light source in the LED, goes through the phosphor layer in the centre – a shorter travel than at the edge, so it gives you a different colour. That’s the quarter lambda, those are the colours you see on water

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more on page 16

in the woods, when there’s oil on it. So you can have colour deviations between the centre of a focusing light and the edge of a beam. We’ve conquered that but it wasn’t all that easy.

Ed: Is it possible in the future, or is it even necessary, to have computer controlled lighting so that you can dial in a particular spec or information for a camera, and your light then knows how to react to it?

Dedo: No, I don’t think so. There have been exposure meters – like there was one that was called Cine Meter II – and you had a lot of little dials and click here, click there, click here for filters and iSO and this and that and so on and so on …

Ed:

It gives somebody a job.

Dedo: It was a wonderful way to make mistakes you know. No, we live through a new generation, we have to realise that colour was never a scientific thing in movies and broadcast. When we look at HMI lights, the lamps used in HMI lights were all different – from the same manufacturer, same production run, same runtime, different colours. It was never a scientifically correct approach. Now we’re trying to do that, but there are hindrances that still exist in the phosphor mix, which is very hard to handle, and then the phosphor application on the LED, so machines sort out the LEDs. Like you order 10,000 LEDs and you specify certain colour coordinates but they can’t give that to you. They say we can give it to you if we sort it all out, you can get 135 that fit your specification, all the rest, if you pay for it, we’ll throw those away.

So this is called “binning” – where machines sort it all out, throw them all into little buckets called bins, ANSI ( American National Standard Institute ) binning, so that was okay – one way.

deviation from the Planck Curve and we have very tight tolerances, plus-minus 0.0054, and within those we have 5 groups which will be identified on each light.

That’s a much closer way than the binning. But the main subject for me is that I want to be on the Planck Curve, I want to have neutral colour. Then come other subjects in there, like where you have to consider what

We tried to identify, on each light, the bin number of the LED in there, so we can match them, so that from one light to another you had a better chance to get the same colour.

Now we go a different way. With our new LEDs, we’re very happy that we have reached a state of perfection where practically, with all of the lights in tungsten and in daylight, and below, down to 2700 up to 6500 Kelvin, we are always on the Planck Curve, the black body curve, and that means no green, no magenta. I believe that’s a good way, because who wants green, who wants magenta?

Ed: So how can you do that without binning?

Dedo: We go a different way. We test each and every one of our focusing lights after 20 minutes runtime and we determine the Delta UV. That’s a Page 16

happens over the lifetime of an LED. You talk about lumen maintenance – yes, they will go down. How quickly they will go down depends on the operating temperature. They come to 85 degree centigrade, it gets difficult; at 100, they die. But at 85, they’ll deteriorate faster than at a lower temperature. So we talk about LM-80 – how much time has to go by until you’ve lost 20% of the light output.

But the next thing is colour maintenance, and here we notice that over 10,000 hours I’m very happy that our tungsten LEDs go down in colour temperature about 100 Kelvin and the daylight ones over 10,000 hours go up about 200 Kelvin. So the wonderful thing about LEDs is the bicolour, where you can choose from candlelight all the way to cooler than daylight, just by the turn of a knob, but we never add green, we never have magenta, we stay on the Planck Curve and over age all that happens is we’ve got a wider range of adjustment for the bicolour light. For the monocolour light, the pure daylight, or pure tungsten, the deviation over age from 100 Kelvin is acceptable, because none of the lighting instruments ever was there.

Ed: So is that important – you’ve raised the point there about having consistent colour across your whole scene. Certainly you look at some productions where they’ll use a colour effect on part of the scene, but that’s adding that colour?

Dedo: Well consistent colour regarding green and magenta. Green and magenta are the killers for skin tones which is to be avoided. The beautiful thing about bicolour is that you can choose your key light, go for a slightly warmer fill light, a slightly cooler backlight, without any filtering, just by the turn of a knob. And then if you choose to have your background slightly cooler, it may give your image the magic of more distance, more space, because in every film school you hear about three-point lighting.

Ed: Because, if you investigate reality, the light from the sun isn’t the same all the time is it?

Dedo: It’s a tremendous variation.

According to the Kodak book, in June at 12 o’clock, if you’re around sea level, no clouds, you should have 5600 Kelvin. In June, I was shooting in Katowice, a town in Poland, there were no clouds and the light looked a little different and I could kinda chew the air … I took out my old fashioned colour meter and it said 2800 Kelvin, so pollution, all kinds of other influences. The window glass changes, adds some green to it, and so on. So on the one hand, we want to stay directly on the Planck Curve, but there’s one other issue that needs to be mentioned and that is that any colour that is missing in your light, you can never ever find again, neither in postproduction, nor through filtering. Neither LEE nor Rosco nor anybody can do that – filters can take away, they can never add and people are not happy about this, they don’t know about it, they’re not well informed. So it’s important to have full spectrum to start with, otherwise you’re missing something that you can never find again.

Okay, then there are these strange situations where, for example, you shoot in a surrounding with fluorescent light. There are lights that say you have a knob and you can dial in some green. I don’t trust that, because this will never be correct. So then I go for the filters, like in a bad fluorescent office, you may have on the Minolta something like 22 or 24 green, and then I would suggest a filter 12 or 13 and that’s like a plus green one half. And you put the same filter on all the lights and at least you have consistency all across the board and not people who dial the knobs in different ways. But it’s an easier way and it gives you reasonable results and then you do your white balance or in postproduction you correct the mistakes that you still have.

Ed:

I never went to film school.

Dedo: No? Key light, fill light, backlight, that’s it.

It’s not wrong – those terms are still useful, but that’s not an image, because an image should have a background, and especially when you happen to be the poor guy who uses a camera that only has one eye.

This camera can only give you a two dimensional image, so the magic that we add to it is the illusion of depth, of space, and that illusion can be by the structures of light and shadow; it can be by colours, it can be by exposure, and they can even go into great detail like in old black and white films from James Wong Howe where you could walk into a picture like into different layers of depth. Today, in the CRLS ( Cine Reflect Lighting System ) that would be called “zoning” – you create different “zones” of background, the illusion.

Today, nobody needs lights anymore for exposure. If you’re in the darkest tunnel, you push the button, you have an image, but is that an image, is that all the image making … and even in postproduction there are things you can’t add that you don’t have in your original image. That’s why lighting still has a place, by creating the illusion of depth, of space, of

Page 18

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three dimensionality, directing the attention of our viewer, and all of that only serves to help the story. If you don’t have a good story, go home.

Ed: So you’re saying that you can create the look by adjusting your bicolour LEDs for front, back, side – the different locations, so cooler background, warmer foreground. Is there any place in the product range that you offer where a coloured filter would actually add to that, or can you now do everything with a bicolour?

Dedo: No, no, no – there are all kinds of background colours you may want to choose or pick colours …

Ed: That you can’t get with bicolour alone?

Dedo: Yes. With bicolour, you ride up and down the Planck Curve from warmer to cooler, but then there are effect colours in an incredible variety that you may still want to add.

Ed:

Which will take you off the Planck Curve?

Dedo:

Yes.

Ed: But if you’re off the Planck Curve to start with, you can’t use a filter to bring you back on?

Dedo: To some extent, if the colours are all there, you can still correct them a little bit. If there are colours missing, you’re lost.

But there are no fixed rules – this is the way you do it.

Each story calls for a different interpretation, a different way of telling the story. Sometimes you go for the story of the old poet at home where you use one light and just do an outline of the face, like a Renaissance woodcut and the rest goes into dark, and it’s not about lighting.

Yes it is – it’s about precision lighting.

Precision lighting has precision shadow, but then you need also the soft light, the gentle transition of light and shadow, and then you start talking about the mighty brother of light, the expressions of the shadow, which can transport more moods and emotions than the light, but without controlled lighting, how can you control your shadows.

Ed:

And is that easier to do in black and white?

profession who “see” light, but to attempt to learn more about the character of light, to develop a feeling for it, that’s somewhere down in your belly and not in the books and not in the meters and certainly not in counting pixels.

Ed: So, in a nutshell, the sensible thing to do with your lighting is start with the consistent lighting … to start with a lighting arrangement that is as close to the Planck Curve as you can possibly get it, and once you’ve got to that point, then you can make the deviations according to what mood you want to add to that scene?

Dedo: Yes, but that’s just one point of view.

There are all kinds of crazy things that you can do, and some of the crazy things give you wonderful results, unexpected ones, and that’s the fascination of our profession – that you can make a habit out of making mistakes, but you have to learn. The good advice is just to go ahead and do it – do it, do it, do it again until you develop a feeling for it. All that we’re doing is that we’re just offering tools, and for a big painting, the painter may need a big brush for one part of the painting in 18K, and for other parts, he needs a precision brush that’s us, but to buy the most expensive tools doesn’t make you a good painter.

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Dedo: No. That’s just one style, just one approach, and you can have awful colours, you can have wonderful colours, depending on how you master that. The guy I mentioned, James Wong Howe, when he was I think 90 years old, he shot a film called This Property is Condemned with Natalie Wood and wonderful cinematography, wonderful colours.

Not a classic film that everybody needs to see, but the cinematography was absolutely outstanding from somebody who came from black and white and showed the young kids how to really deal with colour.

Some people have a feeling for it and it’s not bad to read the books, but in the end you have to experience it yourself, develop a feeling for it, because we cannot see light. Light is invisible and there are very few people in our Page 20

Channel 10 News, Sydney Following my ANZAC experience with Channel 9, I went up a number and visited Channel 10 to meet with Shannon Carr, Network Planning Producer, and head News cameraman, Chris Newport. Shannon’s at his desk with monitors all around because he’s the one who sends the News crews out to the different stories.

Ed: Shannon, the breaking News this morning was the apprehension of a 16 year old terrorist suspect and here we’re looking on Google Maps at a site where he is supposed to live?

Shannon: We’ve found out where he lives and we’ll send a crew around there now to the home and see if there are parents or anyone else home just before we head off to court. He’s up in court in half an hour’s time.

So we’ll do the home first and then round the corner to where he’s going to be up in court, and see what happens from there.

Shannon at his desk.

Ed:

Where are you getting your info from?

Shannon: Just from our own contacts, but we monitor other News channels as well to make sure that there’s nothing that we don’t know about happening out there.

Ed: But this is all just for local News, the Sydney area News?

Page 21

Shannon: That’s correct.

I continue to talk with Shannon while he works about the etiquette at News events ( such as at the Police Headquarters earlier in the day ) where the crews all gather and then suddenly somebody packs up and heads off in a hurry.

Everyone looks at each other and tries to figure out “wow, what do they know, have they found a story that we should be covering?” and that does happen, but it could also be that they decide that the current situation isn’t going anywhere news-wise so they will suddenly pack up in a great rush and when asked “where are you going?” they’ll reply “oh no, can’t tell you, can’t tell you, we’re off” and they race away. In fact, they’re just going home.

Shannon excuses himself for a meeting so I latch onto the head of the camera section, Chris Newport.

Ed: Chris, we’ve just been down to the van and had a look at your kit. You do say you’re in the process of changing vans and looking at a Subaru Outback?

Chris: Yes, an Outback. All the guys think that it is the car of choice at the moment because it’s nice to drive around in, and it’s a little bit higher, so you’ve got the all-wheel drive if you need to get into some rough terrain.

Ed: Because you’re not just covering News around the Sydney streets?

Chris: That is correct, yes. There was a choice between them and the Commodore wagon, but everyone seemed to like the Subaru better.

Chris with his shooting kit.

Ed: Well Commodore’s not going to be made for much longer either is it?

Chris:

No, so the Subaru won out.

Ed: Okay, so you fill it up with all the usual things and your camera of choice at the moment is?

Chris: We run the Sony PDW-700, the XDCAM disc camera. We’ve got one 800 in our fleet but there’s not really much difference from the 700, so same-same.

Ed: Well Sony might have a different story on that, surely? There must be some huge special feature?

Chris: I think the 800 does more when you have to shoot in NTSC and you can under-crank and overcrank, but we don’t require that.

Ed:

Well how often do you have to do that?

Chris: Ed:

Never.

Right. But no 4K cameras?

Chris: Not 4K no. The 700 does high def but, at the moment, we don’t capture our News in high def, we’re still in standard def.

Ed: Well in fact you’re not alone you know. There are still quite a few stations that do that and they have valid reasons.

Chris: There is an HD version of Channel 10. At the moment, the studio’s HD, but we capture News in SD and I think it just gets upconverted when it gets broadcast.

Ed: Do you know the reasoning for that – it’s not just a cost saving thing?

The main studio devoid of talent and workers.

Page 22

Chris: I think maybe it’s because of the bandwidth.

We’ve only got a certain number of channels

and a certain amount of bandwidth, so they try and squeeze as much in as possible.

I think also that our server system here is quite old, it’s due for an update which I think they’re in the process of, so once that goes through, then I think we will start capturing in HD. Ed: That’s it isn’t it – it’s a workflow.

So if one part of the workflow hasn’t been updated, you’re stuck?

Chris: Correct. We did talk about shooting in HD and archiving in HD, but we didn’t have the server space at the time, so glorious SD it is.

Ed: And you’re recording on discs, not cards?

Chris: No, we’re still optical disc camera, XDCAM. I think the decision way back when, when they were deciding between P2 and XD, the thought was that XD discs were better for storage. You can put a disc on the shelf, you don’t need a very expensive P2 card sitting on a shelf and stuff like that, so Sony won out.

Ed: Is that still the thinking because there are a lot of News channels going solid state?

Chris: At this stage, we haven’t heard that we’re going to upgrade our cameras, but obviously, the next batch of cameras will have to be solid state, because that’s the way the industry is.

Ed: Or you’d go purely streaming or streaming plus disc?

Chris: Correct.

We do stream back stuff via Dejeros. In Sydney, we’ve got 5 Dejero units and we’ve got 2 in Canberra and many throughout the other networks all round Australia.

Ed: But you’re still recording onto the disc as, I guess, the high res version?

Chris: Yes. For the Dejero, we utilise both the live ( if you have to do a live cross ) but also the “store and forward” capabilities. The Canberra boys use that quite a lot – you know, do a press conference and then store and forward it while they’re going onto the next one. It seems to work quite well. We’ve used them overseas and the support’s really good from Dejero, so they’re worth every cent you pay.

Ed: But you’ve got to pay for bandwidth or a channel don’t you?

Chris: Yes. We have four 4G modems in them.

In Australia, there are multiple telcos, so we’ve got two on Telstra, one on Optus and one on Vodafone. You could be in some area where Telstra’s better than Optus and vice versa; Vodafone’s pretty bad in Australia.

Ed:

Oh really?

Chris: I think they’re working on their networks, but when you go overseas, you obviously buy local SIMs. We do pay a licensing fee for Dejero which includes the support and to be on their network.

Chris hands disc into ingest.

the Aladdins just for the light weight and durability, but currently we’ve just got the normal LED lights. But they’re good because they cover both situations – you can run off mains power and battery power, which is beneficial for us being out in the field – we don’t always have a power outlet, so it’s good.

Ed: Do you have a big input into what the company purchases for the News crews in Sydney. Is that part of your role as senior cameraperson?

Chris: Yes … obviously it goes to a CAPEX committee, but we put in our “wish list” and then, if we’re lucky, we get some of what we ask for.

Ed:

You get a new Biro?

Chris: Yeah. But we’re quite friendly with all the other states and we’ve got stations in all the capital cities, so when new gear’s being rolled out, everyone has a bit of an input, so it keeps everyone happy.

Ed:

And you get a good sharp price from the vendors?

Chris: Correct. We try and keep everyone happy, buy local obviously, to help the local industry.

Ed:

Well it also gives you that local support?

Chris: Yes. There’s a company here, Lemac; we buy quite a lot of equipment from Lemac. They look after us quite well and obviously, Sony Australia have got a service agreement for our cameras. They look after us and sort us out – if there’s ever a blunder, we can have loan cameras and stuff like that. It works quite well. Also we run with Fujinon lenses and they give good support in Australia as well.

Ed: It’s about relationships isn’t it? How’s the radio spectrum furore been for you guys over here? For us it’s caused a lot of headaches and those headaches continue?

Chris: Yeah. In years gone past, we never really had any radio mic dramas, but obviously now they’ve changed the frequency spectrum and the government sold off some of the bandwidth.

Ed: Okay – peripherals. I just recently did a story with Cushla who is in the same position as you with Newshub in New Zealand and she was really keen on the Aladdin Flex panel?

It can be quite annoying now when you travel, because every state is on a different frequency. Also in New South Wales, if you go not that far out of Sydney, you can get interference from other things, which is quite punishing.

Chris: I’ve seen the Flex panel in action. They’re a very nice light. Obviously, we’d like to move towards

So we had to buy all new radio mics. We have noticed as well, at big press conferences, there are sometimes

Page 24

clashes with other networks. We try to minimise that, like everyone knows what everyone’s one, we work quite well with the competition, but there’s still the inevitable clash and it’s no good.

Ed: You should all have hats with little stickers on them saying “what’s my frequency”?

Chris: Yes, exactly. But for some reason, the Australian government decided they needed to sell off our spectrum to the telcos.

Ed: I know in New Zealand they’re discussing further sales, but it’s being kept very quiet.

Chris: I haven’t heard about that in Australia, but I think was the government expected to get a lot more money for the bandwidth. Also with our microwave link trucks, we had to change frequencies in them as well, but I don’t think they’ve actually sold off the band that we gave up yet. But you never know!

Ed: Right, now for a view on cinema cameras versus television cameras?

Chris: I think everyone, producers and whatever for shows, they love that shallow depth of field look and it’s great for sit down interviews, controlled situations, but I find for News, when it’s run and gun, those cinestyle cameras aren’t really set up for that. It’s the education process of managing what the producer or the end client wants, and what can actually be achieved.

We’ve got a show here, The Project, which is like a lighter look at the News, like a panel-led show, they shoot a lot of their interviews and stuff on a Canon C100. It looks beautiful, but they’re very controlled situations and set up stuff which is where those cameras come into their own. For your day to day News, it’s sort of impossible, and also you get hampered by lenses, because there is no lens that gives you the range that a broadcast lens gives you … we can go wide and super tight.

Ed: And also audio – the Canon C100’s not known for its audio?

Chris: Well they’re good XLRs – the 5Ds and stuff are a punish, but thankfully the 5D revolution is sort of dying out now. I think there are two schools of thought in TV here; for your reality shows and bigger productions, they apparently now love the F5, F55 Sony’s and then also for other stuff, people like the

C100, C300 for sit down interviews, more doco style, that type of stuff. Don’t get me wrong, the images are beautiful, they look a million bucks.

Ed: It’s not just all about the image though. It’s about how easy it is to do the job that it’s being used for?

Chris: That’s correct and also a lot of people find with the cameras like the F5, the FS7, the images are great but then you have to buy a rig and a handle and a shoulder pad … you start out with a camera that’s half the size of a broadcast camera and then you get all the add-on’s and you’re at the same size and it’s quite clunky to use. It’s always the fine line of image or how easy is it to use. But definitely for News, you would struggle to use cameras like that.

Ed: So currently, we’re back to the XDCAM disc … you’re out in the field and you’ve just shot the most wonderful interview of your life, you’ve got to get that back to the studio for the 6 o’clock News. What’s your deadline normally?

Chris: We’re a 5 o’clock deadline, because we’re “first at five” – it depends what it is and how important it is, but normally most of the time, journos like to be back here by 3pm to get the disc ingested, write the script, get it subbed, go to editing. Obviously being News, it doesn’t always happen like that, so we do have link trucks especially for court cases which are always late finishing. We do a remote file, so through the day, you’ll trickle feed your stuff back via a link truck or a Dejero, it depends on the day, and then the journalist will write the script, email it in, get it subbed, then voice in the field – so either voice in the car or in the link truck, and then the producer is left to piece it all together. So the journos nut out what shots they want where and whatnot and then they cut it away and it goes to air. Normally, you’d like to be back by 3pm, but it’s not unusual to get back here at 4.00 and even later. Some things, like sports stories, because they’re obviously later on in the bulletin, they’re not as stressed.

Ed:

Have you ever had one of your discs fail on you?

Chris: In the whole time we’ve used XD, I personally haven’t. I think in Sydney we’ve only ever had 2 disc failures and with one it wasn’t actually a disc, it was a camera problem – a problem with the laser, which got replaced by Sony under warranty and the other one was a disc problem, but the disc went back to Sony and they were able to recover the footage. It was like a file hadn’t been closed correctly, so they went in the sub-menu and closed it.

Ed:

Possibly operator error?

Chris: Maybe, although they reckoned the disc was slightly damaged and had a little glitch in its recording.

But, touch wood, we’ve been lucky so far with the discs.

Ed: That’s record?

a

pretty

good

service

Chris: It’s actually surprising how rugged those cameras are – you go from cold to hot to rainy and you very rarely have a camera failure. It’s testament to the fact that they’re built quite well.

Ed: Right, you’ve arrived back from the job, you park your van in the carpark, race upstairs with a disc in your hot little hand – what happens to it then?

Marc Mackie in ingest sorts it out.

Page 26

Chris: We take the disc to News exchange and hand it over to the person there. We run a system like “slugs” so your story slugs, say it was like you were at a crash and you’ve done the main interview, on the disc you’d write “crash – interview” hand it to the News exchange person …

you might not get the next time, they cut it up and then save it on the server. Then also once a week an editor sits down at the end of the week and compiles up all the good overlay and whatever. If we were onboard a navy ship or somewhere that you normally wouldn’t get access to, we keep that for file.

Ed:

Ed:

Do you put a date or a time on it?

Chris: No time, but the date and camera operator and who the journalist was. Then that gets put into an XD deck in News exchange and gets ingested onto our server. Unfortunately, it goes in at real time baseband, we don’t use the file system that XD does here on station. Out in the field, if you’re like on an away trip, we suck it in, laptop files … but here, we get ingested at real time. Obviously the journalist can view that as that’s going in, on their desktop. Our system’s called the MAM, so the journalist can sit at a desktop and start chopping up their grabs and getting their bits as it’s going in. Then once they’ve selected everything they want, they put that onto a timeline that also an editor in an edit suite can have access to. So the journalist normally chops their own grabs and puts that there and then the editor colours it in and does the audio mix and stuff, and they push that back to the server to be played out for the News.

Ed: Then what happens to that footage once the News is over – how is that archived?

Chris: Every cut story is archived as are all the bulletins. For the full camera disc, the journalist will normally then archive the bits they want. If you’re at a court case and we got shots of family or something that

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Keep everything I’d imagine?

Chris: Yes. Then your standard, everyday News disc, that’s a 7 day retention policy, so you shoot it on Monday then that gets bumped off the server and the disc gets recycled the following Monday. If you shot something important on your disc, you’d write “keep” or “hold” and then that flags it – “oh what is this, what do we need to do” and then you can file it away.

Ed: So that’s a lot of responsibility on the journalist, because you’ve got to give it some sort of naming system so that other people can understand what it is, to look for it?

Chris: Correct. A lot of the journalists use key words, like if you’re onboard a navy ship, when you’re saving it on the server, there’s like “metadata” for want of a better description, and you can write “ship, navy, HMAS Darwin” you know like a lot of sort of tags, so then when someone’s looking for it later, if they didn’t type in “HMAS Darwin” but they type in “ship” well there it is, “ship” would pop up.

Ed: Thanks Chris – and if you’re ever over our way, I’ll see if I can arrange a visit to one of our stations for you.

OK our lot?

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