NOVEMBER 2017
Vol 241
Panda TV Channel 37 Freeview has a new Chinese language station produced in Auckland in the studios of NZC Media Group in the industrial centre of Ellerslie. What was a standard industrial building is now a fully functioning, on-air station. Heading the team is Twinsen Chen. Ed: Now Twinsen you have brought in Gencom to help you create your vision into the latest and best modern TV station, Panda TV? Twinsen: Yes, Gencom was recommended to us by Kordia. Ed: But you have had some experience in the media business before – you’ve run a newspaper, you’ve got a radio station up and running and you’ve had a little play with television, though this is a great leap into bigtime television? Twinsen: Yes, we’ve been doing radio for over seven years, newspaper is three years and magazine about one year. Panda TV is another building block on top of our multi-platform media business. Ed: You are broadcasting to the Chinese community within New Zealand but you’re looking to a wider audience? Twinsen: Well everything is in Chinese and targeting the Chinese community at this moment; we are planning
Keith, Twinsen and friends.
to create more content for third generation Chinese here in New Zealand. Ed: Because I guess, third generation Chinese are growing up here with English and so some Chinese language broadcasting would be of great benefit to them? Twinsen: Yes, hopefully the knowledge we provide can help them in the future. Ed: But some of your programming is actually going out in English with Chinese subtitles?
Twinsen: Yes, China Theatre is the programme, it is a soap opera with English voice over and Chinese subtitles, I don’t think anyone has tried this before in New Zealand. Ed: Well I have seen Mr Ed dubbed in Maori which I thought was quite amusing … so where is this dubbing taking place, here or in China? Twinsen:
In China.
Ed: So that could be quite amusing, yes it would be. But, as you said, your plans are grand and they are to provide a service to the New Zealand Chinese community. Does that extend into the education areas or just pure entertainment?
The well lit main studio.
Twinsen: Well, the Chinese community is mainly interested in health, education and entertainment programmes, these are the three we broadcast heavily. Our health programmes are about traditional Chinese medicines, herbs and such. We don’t have an education programme yet but we’re working on it; teaching Chinese is a good one, surprisingly, there are many New Zealanders who can speak Chinese. Ed: Do you get support from the Chinese community, or are you purely a commercial operation in terms of selling advertising to local Chinese? Twinsen: Our main source of income is from advertising, we also organise stage performances, shows and exhibitions and activities. Ed: At the moment, how much of your 24 hours is live and how much is taped? Twinsen: We’re doing five hours live television and the rest is satellite feed. With radio, we do seven hours live and the rest is live feed from satellites. Ed: Now of course, some of that is actually combined, so your television is fed to the radio audience? Twinsen: Yes, we’re doing simulcast, three hours of content is broadcast both in TV and Radio. However each platform has its own commercial breaks, and we needed a system that could switch between the live feed and trigger different commercial playlists, that was the challenge. Ed: And that’s where Gencom comes in – so Keith, you took the challenge of providing this brand new studio from the ground up and I guess your first issue was the acoustics under a metal roof?
Keith: Oh yes, we had to start with a concrete floor and a tin roof and build the studio and control rooms from the ground up, which has its challenges with, as you say, rain on the roof and the acoustics of an industrial warehouse type building. Ed: But having a clean slate to start with, you were able to put in “fit for purpose” LED lighting? Keith: Of course, what else would you do these days … I think the word “incandescent” has left us behind hasn’t it? So yes, in the studio, it’s all LED lighting from Lupo, which means air conditioning and power requirements are nice and small. Ed: And the cameras – the operator is in the booth and not actually in the studio? Keith: Yes. The brief was to make an efficient operation with the minimum number of people required to produce a show. We teamed up with Panasonic to use their AW-HE40, pan-tilt-zoom remotely controlled cameras – four of those – and they’re controlled by the NewTek TriCaster which is a one man band studio production system. This handles the switching, the graphics, the camera control, the video record, the video replay, virtual sets and even audio mixing. Ed: So that’s really the heart of the operation – the TriCaster? Keith: It is, it is and that allows one person to control a show. It’s very easy to switch between one show and the next to go from a green screen virtual set situation, immediately to the other end of the studio where a presentation can be made against a video wall.
Go to https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews/ for more news. P10 Protel with Sony at IBC. P15 Rosco backdrops at PLS. P18 Gencom News from IBC. P23 Goodbye Bernie Huynen. Page 2
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our new Cantonese programme. It should be on air very soon. Ed: Are your presenters trained in New Zealand or in China? Twinsen: All our presenters are trained in China. There’s actually a real degree for television and radio presenting in China. Not many countries can provide this kind of degree, all our presenters have worked in television and radio for over 10 years, they’re very experienced. Ed: They’re not trained by the North Koreans though I hope? Twinsen: We need the passion but not politics.
Radio is part of the mix.
Really, there are three parts to the operation – there’s radio and then there’s the television studio and then there’s channel playout which is a separate piece. Ed: But does that one channel playout handle both radio and television? Keith: No, they’re three separate pieces. So the TV channel playout is done by a German manufacturer called Cinegy and that is a suite of software products for doing satellite ingest, media management, archive, creation of TV playout schedules and that TV channel playout. It’s a suite of software modules running on a computer server up in the server room and it’s a client server arrangement where it’s all controlled by three client workstations down here for doing that ingest, media management and channel playout. Ed: Considering the green screen, was that a case of “we want the green screen for the TriCaster” or was it a case of “we’ve got the TriCaster so we can go virtual set?” Twinsen: The chicken and the egg question – in reality, we have a small studio, it has to be compact, we can’t fit everything in one room. We decided to use a green screen which Keith suggested, we wanted the magical space. A very small studio can look big and at the same time we saved enough space to construct a real set and the monitor wall. I think it’s a very compact studio, a very compact solution and it’s working very well. Ed: Now one thing is obvious in the studio and that’s the graphics – you have to have Chinese graphics as well as the English graphics. Was this something that came with the TriCaster or did you have to import your own? Twinsen: Tricaster handles Windows fonts very well. We can type Chinese into the TriCaster and it still understands, which is pretty cool. Ed: Now in terms of language, I guess at the moment you’re only broadcasting in Mandarin. Do you have plans to include Cantonese at some stage? Twinsen: Yes, we have plans to start a Cantonese programme on radio. We have two presenters who can speak Cantonese and they’re drafting up a plan about
Ed: Now in terms of the actual style of your channel’s presentation, I’ve seen Japanese television and to me it’s really quite bizarre – lots of bright colours, huge graphics all over the screen and “picture-in-picture” shots of people making funny facial gestures. What does your audience expect on a Chinese channel in New Zealand – is it similar to that Japanese style? Twinsen: I’ll have to think about that … I think Chinese programmes are more formal. If you look at Japanese society, they’re very fast moving people. Everything is fast, even their television programmes. Chinese programmes take longer to tell a story but it is deep. Every TV programme has its own pace, we are trying find ours. Ed: Now back to the equipment – you’ve been happy with the technical suggestions from Gencom, that they’ve provided you with the right gear? Twinsen: Yes, I had heard a lot good things about this kind of system, but I had never seen one for real. We went to Gencom and they gave us a demonstration of what the system is capable of. To run a station like ours, it needs to be cost effective, we’re only targeting 200,000 people and it is expensive to own a TV station. Tricaster is just the product for that. Ed: But this is the start, there’s obviously an opportunity for you to provide programming to go back to China and to other countries for their Chinese speakers? Twinsen: We have a close relationship with broadcasting industries in China, we exchange programmes on an occasional basis. Ed: And apart from the support obviously that Gencom provides – your technical people are from New Zealand, they’re trained in New Zealand? Twinsen: Most of our tech support are from New Zealand, they’re very knowledgeable people. Systems in China are different from here. I have never found a Chinese trained technician who can do this kind of stuff, so I’m more comfortable using locals. Ed:
And it’s been a good project for you Keith?
Keith: It has. These sorts of projects are always interesting and challenging to try and achieve something that is quite highly automated or with the least number of operators involved – so using robotic cameras and Windows based operating systems that
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allow you to do so much on a computer, with so much flexibility. Products like TriCaster and Cinegy allow you
to do so much on the single machine and automate so much, and really achieve efficiency for the end user. Ed: And an easy integration with what little legacy equipment was here before? Keith: Well we started from scratch really. All we had were walls and a ceiling, so we were able to build a system without having to consider other legacy systems around it, so green field opportunities like this are great. Twinsen: The only legacy system we had to consider was our radio. Most stations have switched to digital, our system is still analogue, integration was a challenge. We spent a reasonable amount of time. Keith: You’re referring to Mr David Valois, our project manager, who’s about to walk in the door and get interviewed. Ed: Dave, you’re the main overseer for Gencom here at Panda Television I understand? Dave: Yes, it’s been a wonderful job – it’s been really good with a fantastic client, very understanding. Ed: It must have been easy because you’re starting from scratch, you don’t have to connect anything else into the system? Dave: Well we had to work through and develop the concept. Of course, you know it’s never always as clear as you think it’s going to be, but they’ve been incredibly realistic about it and it’s been good to be able to adapt as we’ve gone on. Ed: And what are you checking here today – that the TriCaster’s working properly? Dave: We’re just having a look at a few little bits of last minute cabling for election coverage – it’s always the way with elections. Ed:
And you’ve got a bit of Ross gear here I see?
Dave: We certainly have. We’ve got the Ross openGear and some of the notable inclusions in the openGear range are the satellite tuner cards. Ed:
Rather than using?
Keith: … rather than using a conventional rack mounting IRD or a set top box, we’re using the satellite receive cards that fit inside the openGear frames. Ed: But this also gives you the possibility of adding more cards into your system if they’re so required? Dave: Absolutely, and that’s what happened with the success of the first two – Twinsen decided that he wanted another two and they were here really quickly and we’ve got them up and running. Ed:
And the Ensemble Avenue box, what’s that for?
Dave: That’s really just a little problem that we had which needed some processing and that’s not required anymore. That’s one of the things that Gencom does for clients. We can rush in a bit of kit when needed. Ed:
Oh I see, and then take it away at no cost?
Dave:
laughs absolutely.
Ed: And there are a couple of Blackmagic products here, the multiviewer and the Smart Videohub?
Dave and a rack.
Dave: There certainly are. The Smart Videohub’s the heart of the station and the monitoring is monitoring stations all around. Page 6
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Ed: I see in the server rack a great block of hard drives?
Meanwhile, back in the studio control room, we find Raymond Yu from Gencom. Ed: Raymond, your part in this project is …? Raymond: I helped Panda TV to set up the Cinegy playout system. The Cinegy system includes the Cinegy Archive which collects all the information off the media files and database, plus an output system with the playlist. Ed: So once you’ve got it set up, they should be able to operate it without you popping in every day or two? Raymond: That’s the idea. Ed: up?
Raymond: Yes, quite a bit because the Cinegy system has different components. I have to integrate all the components into one system and that takes some time.
Raymond at the controls.
Dave:
Is it a difficult system to set
Absolutely.
That’s hosting the Cinegy playout and the Cinegy ingest and also one of our wonderful products, Mediaproxy LogServer for their compliance monitoring.
Ed: So it’s not just a box product, that you plug and play? Raymond: It’s not that easy. Twinsen:
I think the real challenge of Cinegy is because it is a Windows based system. Ed: What, it doesn’t play nicely with Windows 10? Twinsen: No, Windows is not very reliable at the moment. I would go back to Windows 7 if it is still supported. Ed: I’ve heard that before. Now as part of your workflow, you have crews that go out into the field – what are they recording? Twinsen: We have a few crews using the Panasonic PX270 P2 cameras with WiFi connectivity, we can transfer live footage back to the studio using cellphone as long as there is reception, we’re doing it for the election on the final Saturday.
Ed:
Ed: And at other times, are they recording for documentaries to be played out at some other stage, or is it just News?
And they all talk together nicely?
Dave:
They do over a network.
Ed: And in terms of size, it’s a little bit smaller than the previous installation we were at, but there’s still room to grow Twinsen? Twinsen: Yes, we have planned room for growth, the control room for example, we still have more space to fill up. Ed:
So you hope Gencom’s going to fill that shortly?
Twinsen: customer. Ed:
Once a happy customer, always a happy
Well if it’s anything like the price of the Avenue …
Twinsen:
Deal.
Twinsen: Only News for now, it is our first months of broadcasting, we have three programmes lined up in production. Ed: Do you have to train them into the style of your channel or are they all experienced operators? Twinsen: We have some experienced people here, we just have to slowly train the rest. It takes some time, but they will eventually pick it up. Ed: Does this include bringing your radio people into television? Twinsen: They have no trouble switching, most of them actually came from a television background. Radio is almost too simple for them.
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The NZC Media Group together.
Ed:
So you see Panda TV going worldwide?
Twinsen: Well right now, it’s only Auckland, we’re only starting but once we start making enough money, we will be increasing our coverage. The first stage is to switch to HD and the second is going countrywide.
Hopefully we can make programmes for other Chinese stations as well. Ed: And you’re all technologically prepared to provide a streaming service? Twinsen: We have people designing a phone app. Our system is capable of streaming. We’re ready for it. NZVN
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IBC Protel Product Highlights Part 2 Ed: So Ken what other products are worth mention-ing which were released at IBC this year? Ken: Sony has released new palm -sized XDCAM broadcast cameras with stunning autofocus features as a result of their 273-point phase-detection AF sensors. They are the XDCAM PXW-Z90, NXCAM HXR-NX80 and consumer Handycam FDR-AX700, all equipped with 1.0-type stacked Exmor RSTM image sensors. If you’ve ever wanted a broadcast camera that would nearly fit in a jacket pocket, Sony has answered your dreams. The new camcorders support an instant HDR workflow, enabling users to produce breath-taking HDR content with minimum postproduction. The PXW-Z90 is an upgrade from Sony’s existing XDCAM PXW-X70. It gives you 4K right out of the box, but the real improvements are in autofocus and connectivity, making this an extremely useful small camcorder. The autofocus will hold onto subjects even when shooting through objects in the foreground. You can touch the screen to pick your focus point and rack focus by touching different points on the screen. The hybrid phase-detection autofocus shows the focus point with little green boxes on the screen to indicate what it is tracking. You can choose whether it autofocuses over most of the frame (WIDE) in a zone, in the centre, or with a flexible spot focus. You can also choose how fast it focuses. PXW-Z90 CONNECTIVITY Sony have brought back the LANC 2.5mm remotecontrol connection. Sony have an expensive remote-
control box that will control everything on the camera, but I think it’s a normal LANC socket that your old remote will fit. The Z90 has 3G-SDI and HDMI outputs, either of which will provide timecode and remote trigger, though you can’t use both SDI and HDMI at once. The camera will work in a multi-camera switched setup either wired or wireless. With a Sony MCX-500 switcher and RM30-BP remote controller, and a few cameras, you have a live broadcast production setup ( with tally lights on the Z90 screen!) Second, the Z90 also has WiFi built-in ( 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz ) that lets you stream wirelessly. The camera can stream to network servers, USTREAM and Sony’s XDCAM AIR. As well, you can FTP straight out of the camera, and it can simultaneously record full res footage and a 1280×720 proxy. You can also sync multiple cameras’ time codes over WiFi from a phone app. ( The wireless timecode link licence costs extra – Sony will advise pricing later.) You can also purchase MPEG ( both 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 ), as an optional upgrade. PXW-Z90 SENSOR AND LENS The 1” Exmor RS sensor gives you a 14.2M QFHD 4K ( 3840×2160 ) XAVC image that holds highlights and is acceptable to those used to 2/3” broadcast cameras. With the 1” sensor, you can have shallow depth-of-field at telephoto settings and it’s surprising how nice the image is. You can choose picture profiles, set up your camera’s colour to your liking, and shoot in S-Log 2 or 3. It also does Sony’s Hybrid Log Gamma style of HDR.
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Whether you want live output ready to broadcast or shoot Log footage for colour correction in post, this camera will do it. The Z90 has a 12x optical zoom that is sharp and the camera has Sony’s “Clear Image Zoom” magic seamless zoom that crops in on the sensor to give you extended zoom range without quality loss. The touchscreen is nice with improved resolution ( 1555K vs 921K on the PXW-X70 ) and they’ve upgraded the OLED EVF on the back of the camera with more resolution ( 2359K now, compared to 1440K on the PXW-X70.) The EVF is very useable, unlike a lot of the smaller camcorders out there. POWER AND BATTERIES It uses the same NP-FV batteries as the PXW-X70 and a number of other Sony cameras. Under the detachable handgrip with the XLR jacks is a multi-interface shoe so you can use the Sony radio mics on this body without the grip if you want to go more stealth. Low light ability is really good. The lens is f/2.8 at wide and stops down to f/4.5 at telephoto. You can ride exposure with a wheel at the bottom left side of the camera, choosing whether it controls shutter, iris, or gain with push buttons. ND filters are on a switch at the back and fall easily to hand. A COMPACT PACKAGE With the difficulties of traveling by air with gear these days, the small size of this camera is a life saver for journalists. The new PXW-Z90 shares the same body as the PXWX70. PXW-Z90 AVAILABILITY The PXW-Z90 will be available in December from Protel and the PXW-X70 will remain in the Sony line up. Also, there is a new 4K consumer version of the same camera: the HXR-NX80, which has XLR audio inputs but no SDI output or NZVN WiFi. Page 12
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Rosco Backdrops On a visit to PLS, we met Tom Schwartz and Phil Greenstreet from Rosco in the USA. Ed: Tom, I understand that Phil is the inventor of this screen technology? Tom: Phil is the driving force for our backdrop business and we’ve been doing that for 25 years. We’ve won an Academy Scientific Award for our backdrops and this particular backdrop that you see behind us is our new product developed by Phil called SoftDrop. Put simply, it’s the same technology, day/night – you light it from the front it becomes your day scene; you light it from the back it becomes your night scene.
Tom and Phil at PLS in Auckland.
Ed: And you can grade between the two I understand, so you can actually have a progressive look to it ie. nightfall? Tom: Yes, that’s correct. But the magic about this is that it’s a flat matte – there’s absolutely no shine. It takes half as much as light as you would use on a vinyl drop, which is the standard. It is seamless, up to 12 metre high by 51 metre wide – seamless. It is so easy to shoot, so easy to transport because it folds up into a box. Ed: And this is something that people don’t have to purchase, you can rent a range of premade backdrops? Tom: We have a rental stock, but most feature film productions buy these drops. However, they’ll buy them to lease, so at the end of the show, we get the drop back to increase our rental stock. So it’s really a win-win. Ed: But if you have something particular – like you want to have your own company logos in there or something that’s very specific to you, you will make something up for anybody? Tom: Yes we can, and that’s most of our business. We do custom drops. Phil flies around the world and photographs the day and the night scene – it’s a great job, a great gig – but also we have professional photographers that the film companies
would use to do artwork on our specifications and then we just print them. Ed: Are you in New Zealand for any particular occasion? Tom: Yes, the New Zealand Cinematographers Society Awards Show. They gave us the opportunity to give them a new backdrop for the back of the stage, for the presentation, as we did last year. And it’s a stunning, stunning piece of art. Ed: So have we seen any of these backdrops on any feature films recently? Tom: Fifty Shades of Grey, Hidden Figures; we just did the new Blade Runner – gosh, I mean there’s so many of them that we’ve done. Ed:
And these come in all sizes?
Tom: Any size you want up to 12 metre high, but as long as you want – 12 metres is pretty high, right. Ed: Tell me, what sort of part does PLS play in the scheme of Rosco International? Tom: Ed:
PLS is our best dealer that we have … In New Zealand?
Tom: Yes, in New Zealand. Chris has been very, very supportive of Rosco and he’s a great partner to NZVN have.
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Gencom IBC Highlights Well I didn’t make it to IBC this year, but one who did was David Barnard from Gencom. Ed: David, what did you find of interest this year? David: It was very busy. There certainly were a few new brands that I had not seen before; I had a look at some good display panels, conversion gear – things like that. We don’t see as many people from our part of the world just because of the distance and the expense of getting there, but you do see a stronger presence from manufacturers that we don’t really see as much of at NAB, because of the distance from Europe.
David home at desk.
Ed: IBC is important to you because a good number of your key suppliers do have a European base? David: Yes that’s right. We’ve got suppliers from the UK, Italy, Germany, Norway and Sweden, and some of them make the trip to NAB, but many of them don’t. In many cases, they have a larger presence at IBC and it’s a better opportunity to talk to product experts and key sales executives within the company to really get an understanding not just of where they’re at today, but where they’re headed. Ed: And those European suppliers tend to base their cycle on release at IBC as opposed to the yearly cycle release of NAB? David: I find that the organisations that do have an annual cycle tend to be the larger ones, and those usually are at NAB, so more often than not, you see the product introduction at NAB and street dates around IBC. So when you get to IBC, they actually are hitting the ground, but that said, we did have a number of suppliers who were introducing things for the first time which were cool to see. Ross Video was showing off their new – formerly Abacus – now Ross Mira Express – replay server which is an entry level, very low cost but very, very high capability, 4 channel replay server. They were touting a new SSD architecture which allows them to make it cheaper – I’m not exactly sure how, but it seemed to be a very full featured system and significantly lower priced than what you’d expect for a product of that reputation and capability. Plura introduced a new full HD, OLED reference monitor. While certainly 4K is a big part of what everybody’s talking about now, it’s become common and now the big exciting thing is to talk about 8K but there’s still a real place for full HD which is certainly, in New Zealand, what most of us are doing. While Plura does have some 4K products, their new, full HD OLED is a beautiful reference monitor. You know with OLED, you get deeper blacks and a higher contrast ratio than you’re going to be able to get out of any similar LED panel. It looks great, it’s a 24 inch monitor, so it’s a good size Class A reference monitor.
Ed: I always enjoy speaking with Ray Kalo at Plura interviews because Ray always seems to know the technology, but does not introduce anything that Plura hasn’t proven to be 100% reliable and actually useful. There was no vapourware, there was no “well you’re going to need this in the future” – it was “you want this right now”. David: That’s exactly right and Ray is well known for that stance. I remember when we were asking him about 4K, he said “oh well, we continue to look at it and we’ll have something …” But he’s absolutely right, he doesn’t release a product until he’s absolutely certain that it’s ready for primetime, there is a demand for it and they’re able to consistently meet Ray’s high quality standards. As I said, they do have 4K monitors now, mainly larger panels focused on Multiview or control room type applications, but the quality of the panels that he’s getting for his full HD reference monitors is second to none. Ed:
… speaking of monitors?
David: Yes, Ikegami had a 31 inch LED DCI 4K HDR monitor. That’s a mouthful and a lot of TLAs ( Ed:
Page 16
Ray Kalo at Plura.
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Three Letter Acronyms ), but basically what it means is that it’s a grading reference monitor for cinema applications – for broadcast, what we call UHD or casually refer to as 4K, is actually 3840 x 2160; whereas the 4K that you see in the cinema is 4096 x 2160, so there’s some extra pixels there, and if you’re grading for theatrical release, you really want those extra pixels. So this one does that, there’s a version of it that exists now. It’s not bright enough to qualify for the Dolby Vision HDR but I’ve been told that they will be releasing a 1000 nit version at the end of this year, so it will be fully Dolby Vision capable. Ed: Ikegami is not a name that we hear very often in New Zealand. They were known many years ago for their cameras, but since then, they’ve kept fairly quiet? David: Yes. As you say, many years ago, they were everywhere here and in fact, there’s still a number of SD Ikegami cameras in use in New Zealand. They sort of fell behind the technology curve for a while and lost market to Sony and Panasonic, but then they bounced back. About the time I got here 6 years ago, they were starting to introduce us to their latest and greatest HD studio cameras which are, we feel, very competitive spec-wise and cost-wise with Sony’s latest and greatest. Cameras aside, they do make some great monitors, in particular their OLEDs are really nice and we’ve had good success with selling those into the major broadcasters. Some of their monitors would be ideally suited for a postproduction environment or a high end production environment where they need the best monitors. Ed: Talking about Italian manufacturers, Lupo – and we’ve got a story in this issue about a studio that’s been fitted with the Lupo panels – this is an outstanding product range for you? David: As you say, we’ve been having a lot of success with them in the market and they’ve got a great base of products now across a range of both Fresnels and panels. They’re durable, they’re lightweight, they’re designed to be battery operated on the go if needed; they are cost effective for the quality that you’re getting from them and stringers and broadcasters and independent video production people alike have really been singing their praises. They’ve got the highest CRI ( Colour Rendering Index ) of any in their class, which basically just means they’ve got the most consistent even colour. They do have dual-colour LEDs which are adjustable white balance, varying powers from very lightweight and easy to throw into a backpack, up to full on studio panels and Fresnels. For IBC they released a dual-colour version of their 2K LED Fresnel, as well as a diffused version of their LED Superpanel. Ed:
Okay, any exciting themes?
David: I found it interesting that HDR ( High Dynamic Range ) video and HEVC – which is the newest video compression format that is about twice the efficiency of H.264 – are both really, really in the mainstream now. Everybody’s talking about them, everybody’s got products to handle them. Not everybody still understands quite what that means, but I think the manufacturers are really doing a good job this year of showing how they’re actually integrating into shipping products, and as I said with the Dolby Vision demo, it was great to see how HDR grading and mastering worked. Ed:
What is it – HEVC?
David: HEVC stands for High Efficiency Video Codec and it is the latest generation of video codec for
OTT for internet video delivery applications, but also for contribution. Ed: But not recording … it’s not a case that you record directly into this format? David: Ed:
It depends on your application.
Streaming for example?
David: For streaming you might very well do that – the same way that many prosumer cameras these days are using AVC which is a form of H.264. HEVC could very well be a replacement for that. We’re not seeing it in those cameras yet, mainly because they’re not putting it in the mass produced silicon chips for those cameras, but that will come soon I expect. It’s really being used as a contribution linking format, so we’ve got a lot of encoders, for instance, Vislink, Haivision, Digigram are all offering HEVC contribution encoders. What that means is that you can now deliver twice the video in the same amount of bandwidth, or cut your bandwidth down by half and still deliver the same quality of video, which obviously ( especially when you’re linking over internet ) can be very valuable and open up a whole lot of new opportunities. Ed: So this is also potentially good for broadcasters using a satellite platform? David: Definitely. Vislink in particular is really focused on that space. But the big focus right now is internet delivery to consumers. We’re already seeing Netflix using HEVC; I expect that some of our local broadcasters will be making that move soon as well. I don’t have any specific knowledge but I wouldn’t be surprised. Ed:
Okay, other themes?
David: IP … everybody’s talking about IP. It really started being a thing at NAB last year, but now everybody’s talking about what they can do and showing “use cases” where people are actually using
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uncompressed IP video to route video signals around their facilities instead of using traditional SDI video signals. Using IP video adds a whole lot of complexity, but it also creates a whole lot of opportunities to centralise, to improve your ability to monitor and control the quality of the network, and for a new facility – whether it’s a postproduction facility or a broadcast facility, or linking between facilities – for a new building, if you design with IP in mind, you can lower your costs in the long run. Most of our vendors now are offering products that are compliant with SMPTE 2022-6 which was the first uncompressed IP standard to be ratified. I think 2022-7 is actually now ratified also, which deals with seamless protection switching. The final standard when it’s ratified will be SMPTE 2110, which rolls audio into it. That’s very close to being finalised now, so a lot of manufacturers are already including support for their products. That’s going to be of importance to large broadcasters or anybody who owns a video production facility, but it should also increasingly be of interest to smaller independents who are looking to do, say for instance, remote production – to do video production over a network where the cameras are in one place but you’re switching it in another place. That can all be done using a standard IP network. Ed:
That could also be wireless?
David: It could be … I don’t think I’ve seen any products that transmit uncompressed IP wirelessly although some have the option to convert to IP on the receive side ( instead of SDI ). Because of the bandwidth required for uncompressed, that’s still usually being done over fibre or over an Ethernet network. It’s starting to make its way into the real
world, which is exciting. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that over the next 3-5 years. Ed: I’ve noticed at NAB that in the last couple years, the whole top of the South Hall has been IP and it’s creeping into other areas as well? David: Yes. Almost all of our vendors who are offering video distribution products are offering IP products of some form or another. On the lower end, that may be HDBaseT or it may be just using compression formats like SRT, Zixi – things like that – and on the high end of course, they are now using uncompressed IP or JPEG 2000 for the best combination of bitrate and low latency. How you use IP depends on the application, but everybody’s using it in one form or another. Ed: You mentioned HDR before. How is that entering into the equation? David: High Dynamic Range is a really interesting development. Much like 4K, it’s really being driven by the consumer television manufacturers, to give you another reason to upgrade from the TV you bought two years ago, which is still perfectly serviceable. But you get much more bang for your buck with HDR. Whereas 4K requires at least twice the bandwidth of an HD broadcast, you only need about 25% more bandwidth for HDR – from there it’s just metadata. And viewed in the right environment, even HD resolution HDR seems to glow and pop off the screen in a way that can be very dramatic. And from a production standpoint, the workflow doesn’t really change that much. Dolby was doing a very interesting demo about a grading workflow that allowed for creating both SDR and HDR versions at the same time.
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Ed: How are the big computer people – I’m talking now about Apple, Microsoft – how are they meeting these challenges? Are they looking at what’s going on here and wanting more of the action? David: Well Apple I think is probably a bad example because they seem to have decided to go a different route … Ed:
Is anyone surprised?
David: Well, mind you, I’ve got a fair amount of Apple technology around me … but I think that, for video production, they really had a very strong presence in the market with Final Cut a few years ago, but they stepped away from that and they decided to focus on consumer products instead. So aside from seeing people using Apple laptops or i-things to demonstrate other products, there’s not a whole lot of presence for Apple at the show. Microsoft on the other hand, has their Azure Cloud platform, which is starting to gain traction. Many of our manufacturers now are offering versions of their products in the Cloud. Amazon Web Services is certainly the largest platform for that, but Azure is there as well and many of our products you can put either into Azure or Amazon Web Services. That’s an exciting development because it really allows you to optimise the use of your resources, not have to buy a bunch of hardware that you’re just going to have to replace in 3 years’ time, but actually buy the technology, buy the processing power and the storage as you need it, while you need it, and always know that you’re running on the latest and greatest. And it makes running a highavailability environment more manageable. So being able to offer the products that we sell on to those platforms and help our customers figure out how to connect the dots and make it all work together is a pretty exciting new area for us. So yes, Amazon, Microsoft and Google had fairly large booths at the show. Google now have their own Cloud offerings; they’ve got a lot of machine learning algorithms that can be applied to things like categorising a catalogue of video content, to help you realise the best value out of it by finding out what you actually have. Amazon Web Services has a similar service they’re calling “Rekognition” which can go through an entire back catalogue of stuff stored in their S3 storage platform and then you can search for whatever you need – say I need a dog running on the beach, I can find that one clip that was shot 20 years ago that has exactly what I need.
there was one booth and then a whole lot. Has it got even bigger or has the offering rationalised? David: No it has got bigger – you definitely see it. Many vendors had some sort of 360 degree demo or augmented reality demo on their stands. It’s becoming more popular, but I still don’t know that I’d call it mainstream. I think people are still trying to figure out the applications. We’re getting much closer to the release of a couple of new generations of products that might make this more interesting. Actually, this is an area where Apple is influencing the direction of things. The new iPhones with AR capabilities are really helping to drive support for 360 degree video, for augmented reality products, but also their HDR screens as well are driving the demand to produce and finish content in HDR as far as augmented reality is concerned. One thing I did see which was at NAB but it’s now shipping, is Ross Video’s Frontier platform which is an augmented reality design and rendering system that’s built on the Unreal Game Engine. Anyone who’s familiar with working in the Unreal Game Engine of which there are many developers and designers around the world who know how to do that – they can now create photo realistic, real time 3D virtual set environments, and when you combine that with robotics and the other compositing technologies that Ross and other vendors are coming up with, you can start to do some really, really cool virtual set and augmented reality productions. We saw some really cool demos – we saw them from Ross, we saw them from Vizrt, there were a couple of others around the show that were showing it as well. I mean, whether it’s a sports broadcast where, all of a sudden, as you’re introducing the players, they burst out of the screen on to the set, or whether you’ve got the announcers walking into a virtual environment. We’ve seen virtual reality game shows where it’s a reality show but it’s all set in a made-up reality where all of a sudden they’ve got to complete these challenges in these crazy virtual fantasy environments, which is kind of interesting to see. I think we’re at the stage now where people are figuring out how can we create cool content with all these new
Ed: Even though you haven’t labelled it “Dog running on the beach”? David: Exactly. These algorithms can figure out emotional content of a scene; they can figure out the subject of the scene; they can figure out based on colour scheme, based on mood – it’s pretty impressive and more than a little scary what can be done these days, but we’re only going to see more and more of that. Ed: So some of those early images that you uploaded, people might find them now? David: Let’s hope not … nobody wants to see that! Ed: Okay, 360 camera technology – this is something that jumped into place very quickly from one year to the next -
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tools we have available, and over the next couple of years, as whatever they introduce finally gets introduced to market, we’re going to start to see more of these applications really take centre stage. It’s pretty cool because it creates a whole new type of storytelling for project creators. Ed: So I guess your challenge now is to present these to the local networks and see if you can get buy in. With the challenges that our broadcasters are facing with competition and reduced advertising revenue, is new technology going to be a big sell or will it potentially reduce their costs by bringing a lot of what was “nuts and bolts” and operators down to a lot of software? David: Well I think there are two separate points in what you said there. There’s the technology side of it as a way of improving efficiency, and I would extend that to say also improving the way they reach their viewers, the way they interact with their customers effectively. Internet delivery technology, IP production technology, lower cost production technology such as studio 1A that TVNZ has built ( NZVN October 2017 ), all these things are ways for them to adapt and to succeed in this new world that we’ve created of almost infinite choice. But on top of that, there’s also a need to find new ways to communicate, to find new ways to tell a story and it’s still early stages. I think it’s up to our customers to figure out how to use these tools to tell a new and interesting story, and as they do that, we’re there to help them sort out the technology side so they can sort out the creative side and find things that work, and hopefully go from there. NZVN
Not a plumbing fixture.
Bernie Huynen 1951-2017 The New Zealand video industry lost one of its shining lights last month, when Bernie Huynen passed away peacefully at home surrounded by his family. Bernie was well-known to many in the industry, particularly in Wellington where he spent most of his life and the South Island where he could regularly be found touring or racing one of his classic Austin Healeys. Bernie got his start in broadcasting in 1970 as a technician trainee for NZBC. After spending a number of years overseas he came to General Communications Ltd in 1984 as a Sales Engineer. Over the next 30 years he became the face of Gencom in Wellington and the South Island, and developed many lasting relationships due to his open, engaging manner and genuine interest in everyone he came into contact with. Bernie was equally at home with broadcast cameras and lenses, tripods and the like, and with video display and distribution technology. He was also one of New Zealand’s foremost experts on video projection. Over 300 friends, family members, and colleagues turned up at the Southward Car Museum in Paraparaumu, to celebrate his life and send him off in a manner befitting the way he lived. He was a truly unique person who made a positive impact on everyone around him, and he will be sorely missed.
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