NZVN October 2013

OCTOBER 2013

Vol 196

It’s Show Time in Amsterdam at IBC 2013 This is a full month. A Breakfast interview, news on the radio spectrum allocation and lots of IBC reports.

The Amsterdam show continues to be worthwhile to attend, although when I first sit down in the plane leaving Auckland, I think of 24 hours in the air as no picnic. This year, I got in early so that I could attend an ARRI workshop normally reserved for dealers of their lights and camera equipment. Thanks to Stefan from ARRI in Australia and Chris from PLS in Auckland, I had a most informative time – as well as getting a preview of all the new gear, learning mainly that ARRI is an innovative and trustworthy supplier to our industry. They don’t have the cheapest products, but they work extremely well, they tend to be upgradable and they last. Star of the ARRI show was the new camera, the AMIRA, which you can read more about later in this issue.

At the IBC show itself, there were many new products, but also significant software advances announced to support existing product. 4K was almost everywhere and looks like being more of a serious option than 3D ever was – no surprise to me.

It took me just over two full days to visit, interview and photograph all the areas of interest that were relevant to the wonderful New Zealand dealers who sponsored my IBC reporting through their advertising.

I thank those dealers and urge all of you, our readers, to gain as much info as you can from the following IBC stories – most this month but some coming in November – then go and visit your dealer for a personal demo.

Ed

Adobe at IBC To tell us the latest from Adobe we have Karl Soule.

Ed: Karl, we’re all now familiar with the Creative Cloud, but one step further is Adobe Anywhere. Can you explain what this means?

Karl: The idea of Adobe Anywhere is a better way of collaboration, even over long distances. People in the pro film and video market want to take the best creative people wherever they are in the world and be able to collaborate and work efficiently in a group setting, and to be able to share assets back and forth.

Up until now, that’s a big problem. First off, the video clips themselves, the media is heavy.

It usually requires long FTP transfer times or even, in some cases, physically mailing a drive from one location to another.

The idea behind Adobe Anywhere is that it’s designed to help solve those difficulties.

The good news, from a user perspective, is that you continue to use the same desktop applications that you already know. Tools like Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Prelude, are all tied into Anywhere and they pretty much work the same way in an Anywhere configuration as they would just running on a laptop or a desktop normally. You continue to use them in the same way, you continue to edit video in the same way as you would before. Instead of saving to a local project file, all of the versioning is actually handled by the Anywhere server.

Adobe Anywhere runs on a series of servers that live in a rack someplace in a facility, so in a broadcast centre, in a television station, larger post-production facility, or a university – and all of the media gets stored in that one centralised location. From an end user perspective, when you log into the server, you access your production the same way you would access a local project file, but instead of having media on your local computer, Anywhere uses some special streaming technologies that we have to stream the high res media off of the server to wherever you are in the world. It requires an internet connection to be able to connect to the Anywhere server, but it doesn’t require the same bandwidth of the original source files. For example, here at IBC, we’re showing AVC-Intra, 100Mbs footage on our Anywhere server …

Ed:

That’s never going to get to Auckland.

Karl: Yes, exactly … but there’s a special component of Anywhere called the Mercury Streaming Engine, which takes that high res media and, on the fly, it creates a compressed stream of that media, and that’s what the editor actually works with. It’s super responsive; you know you’re never going to see a buffering screen, it’s designed to deliver the same type of performance that you would expect if the clip was playing back locally.

Ed: I guess that’s providing the Telco has got their act together and is providing a good connection all the time?

Karl: Well in the initial 1.0 Anywhere release, we were looking at a minimum threshold of about a 10-20 Mbps

connection, so it was good for within a corporate intranet, or for areas with wide availability of broadband, but one of the things that we’re previewing here at IBC, is the ability to handle even lower bandwidth connections. So we’re working on pushing that minimum threshold down quite a bit. Eventually, we hope to get the bandwidth requirements down to a point where a tethered connection with your cell phone would be enough to connect and use Anywhere.

Ed: So is there any other option – I mean can you buffer? If you are in a situation where you do have a low connection, you can buffer and still look at your project?

Karl: Yes, absolutely. Your local copy of Premiere or Prelude is actually doing a lot of predictive caching locally on your system, so even if you don’t need that minimum threshold, it’s still possible to use the system.

Our minimum bandwidth requirements are based on a seamless editing experience – what the engineers are optimising for. However, I’ve done some testing in non -optimal environments, like connecting over airport wifi, and still found the system useable.

The other thing about Anywhere to keep in mind – there’s been a strong focus on quality of the video.

Adobe wants to be sure that you, as an editor, can feel confident about the quality of the footage you’re working on. Whenever you pause the video, you’re

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Dragon35 sensor. This is a 6K media clip actually playing back in Premiere, and again I can just hit “play” on this ( this is on a standard Dell workstation ) and I’m still getting really great performance with this; I’m not seeing any dropped frames in the clip while it’s playing back.

Right now, what I’m seeing here, I don’t even have the screen size to be able to play it back at full resolution, because I don’t have a 6K monitor to do that on.

Ed:

Who does?

Karl: The beauty of this is that we can work natively with all these different file formats and mix and match on one timeline, and it just plays. That’s always the beauty of the way Premiere works.

Adobe always has great tutorial sessions.

looking at the full frame of the original source media – bit-for-bit identical to the original file. A lot of other workflows usually revolve around the idea of creating a low res proxy file and then working with something like that. It’s kind of like dynamic proxies on the fly, but from a media management perspective, you just have one file sitting on your server back home. Whatever resolution, whatever quality level that you need here, it’s dependent on the bandwidth available, but if you ever need to do a quality check, you just hit “pause” and you’ll instantly see that full frame pop in.

Ed: Right, that’s something to look forward to. In the immediate future, I’ve already seen one presentation with a new camera where it was pointed out that Adobe was top of the list for supporting 4K editing, and it seems as though you’re right up there now with the codecs to be able to edit pretty much anything that any camera manufacturer decides to produce?

Karl: Yes. We have great relationships with all the different camera makers. Here at IBC we’re previewing the October 15th release coming for Creative Cloud members.

This includes new support for Phantom cameras working natively and Blackmagic CinemaDNG files running natively in Premiere, but what I have up on my screen right now is a RED clip from the new

Ed: And from what I understand, the flavour of the month is ARRI RAW and again, that’s something you support natively?

Karl: Yes we’ve actually had a really good relationship with ARRI for quite a while and yes, we fully support ARRI RAW format directly inside of Premiere.

Ed: And it’s ongoing?

Karl: Absolutely, absolutely. Some of the new formats that we have now are Canon C300 4K footage, Sony F55 XAVC footage, all playing back in 4K. Here I’m showing an example of the CinemaDNG format. This is a very interesting one for us, because Blackmagic is making these affordable cameras, and a lot of users were asking when would Premiere be able to support full playback of the RAW footage. Adobe Engineering was able to get that in for this October 15th release.

Ed: That’s being very proactive.

Karl: Yes, definitely. It’s kind of a funny situation in this case, because the CinemaDNG format was something that Adobe released as an open specification format for camera developers to use. We didn’t see a whole lot of development with it for a number of years, even to a point where we were kind of considering not having support for it anymore, and then at NAB 2012, Blackmagic surprised us and came out with this wonderful camera that uses the CinemaDNG format. So actually, at the point when they released the camera, we did not have native support for it in Premiere CS6, but immediately our engineering team went back to work and kind of fired up the engines again and so now we’re really excited to have native CinemaDNG support in Premiere CC. We have really nice smooth fluid playback, which is something that took a lot of work, but I’m happy to say it’s in there.

Ed: Well Grant Petty is known to be full of surprises.

Karl: Yes, definitely.

I’m actually looking forward to getting the smaller pocket camera, because I think the form factor of that seems like a perfect fit for me being a road warrior.

I’m circumnavigating the globe on this trip, I just came from California and I go back to Singapore, so it comes in handy.

Ed: Watch out for the Mad Max’s of this world when you’re on those Australian roads Karl. Take care.

NZVN

Page 4

Blackmagic at IBC At Blackmagic Design have Bob Caniglia.

we

Ed: Bob, this place is packed.

It seems to be that, wherever Blackmagic goes, there’s a crowd and they’re obviously looking at all the new things you’ve got, even since NAB. How do you keep up with it all?

Bob: Well the company is young and aggressive and I think that our structure is that we just concentrate on trying to create new cool stuff for people, and try and meet the needs that we see either at the time or in the future. I mean, we started working with 6G-SDI before NAB and afterwards everyone was like “oh yeah, that’s what we need” and so we have more 6G-SDI for Ultra HD 4K now on the booth.

Bob at the controls.

Ed: But then you’ve got Grant Petty coming out with ideas and saying to you “oh, why don’t we make one of these?” – and then you’ve got to make it?

Bob: Well yes, I know even on the pocket camera I think Grant said “here’s the size I want, go make it that size”; ultimately, the guys were able to execute his concept. Grant has some great ideas. He worked in postproduction, he worked in production, so he understands the pain of some of the roadblocks of the path, so he definitely comes up with a lot of great ideas and we have a great team to execute them.

Ed:

Yes, how high can you jump eh?

Bob: Absolutely.

We remanufactured some of the frames this year to include internal power supplies and all these things that he saw when he was racking up a kit. He was like “you know, all these power bricks are not good, let’s go with internal power supplies; let’s have aluminium frames so they’re more rigid” and so he critiques even our own products to say how can we make them better when we do the next generation, and then, we come up with the next generation, it’s the same place as it was, but now it has 4K in it and it’s really great to see the creative spirit not be limited by price points.

pay, you know, over a certain period of time, wouldn’t it be more conducive to your workflow to actually move up instead of replacing it with the same technology?

Often times, as we’ve added a lot to the 4K version, the price has been the same, so now you’re getting more features whether you use them today or in the future, but they’re there at the same price point.

Ed: And if the product fails during the warranty period you get the benefit?

Bob: Exactly – we swap them out and you get exactly what you paid for.

Ed: Right, so let’s start with the products … new since NAB, top of the list?

Bob: Top of the list would be the new ATEM 1 ME Production Studio 4K. What we’ve done is we reengineered our 1 ME switcher and now we’ve added additional inputs; we eliminated the external power supply, so it’s internal power supply; it’s all 6G-SDI, so it will work in standard def, high def and Ultra HD 4K; it has 10 inputs now instead of 8 and it’s a 1 rack unit, aluminium solid frame there and it has a monitor on the front that you can switch to three AUX buses on the front control panel now, so it’s no longer flat, it’s an active front panel. Like I said before, it has the world’s

Ed: I guess now – and I was going to leave this till later, but now is a very good time to bring up this particular topic, that I have heard from readers that they say, if a Blackmagic product fails, there’s not much point in fixing it, it’s a case of replacing it, and really what you’re saying now is that’s the answer, that the technology moves ahead so quickly?

Bob: Yes, I think especially in the cards.

I mean cards are difficult to actually fix, so often in the warranty period, we will exchange them if they fail. But yes, in the end, if you look at how much you Page 5

other manufacturers that were being viewed as a competitor and we said “if you want to open yourselves up to work in Resolve, no problem”. So, you know, they’ve always been like that and I think a lot of the hard work has paid off because we’re interoperable with everybody.

Ed: Right. Now, one of my favourites, disc recorders; any developments in that area?

first 4K DVE so Ultra HD DVE and it has six keyers – basically all the same features of the original 1 ME switcher, but now with 4K and we increased the size of the media pool. Before you had 180 frames in HD, now you have 180 frames in 4K, so when you run it in HD you have 720 frames to be able to play back animations and stingers. So it really has increased.

Ed: And that’s answering my question that it’s a little bit early for 4K switchers I would imagine, but I’m sure some people out there will try it because it has benefits in HD as well?

Bob: Right, it’s the same price, so there’s no reason not to buy it, because it’s the same price as the current switcher, and you get HD and you get one less rack unit, so you have more space.

Ed:

Convinced – keep going, next one?

Bob: Right – we also need to view 4K so we have the SmartScope Duo 4K that has two 8 inch monitors that you can use for scopes or monitoring, and you can use standard def, high def, and Ultra HD 4K – and it will even do the DCI 4K, so 4096, you know the large one, and you have two 8 inch screens and it’s US$995 – it’s the same price as the original SmartScope Duo that we announced at NAB. So again adding features without adding cost, so you’re future proofed if you will, so you can use HD, SD and 4K.

Bob: Yes, absolutely – the new HyperDeck Studio Pro 2 and HyperDeck Studio 2.

Basically, we have new metalwork for them, so they have internal power supplies, the new aluminium front panel and we’ve added more ProRes codecs to the HyperDeck Studio Pro. Now we do ProRes HQ, ProRes 422, ProRes LT and ProRes Proxy – and with Proxy a lot of people do air checks with Proxy, well you can record a whole 24 hours on a half terabyte drive and you have two drives, so you can record two days before you have to change discs. I can see a lot of applications for places that just want to do air checks for 24 hour operations. So the new codecs will really help there. And that will be a software update if you already have a HyperDeck Studio Pro and then of course all the new ones will have it as well.

Ed: Okay, so if you’ve got a disc recorder, you need a camera and you keep developing those cameras, and as you say, Grant wanted it small?

Bob: Yes, Grant wanted it small. I mean, if you really look at it, it looks as though he took an iPhone, turned it on its side and said I’ll allow you a little room for a battery and them “boom”, here’s a camera. As he says, you can make a small camera big by putting on a giant lens, and over here we have a US$50,000 lens on a US$1,000 camera, but you can’t make a big camera small, and this camera will fit almost anywhere. When you take it out and put a small lens on it, people think you’re taking still photos, so I can see a lot of applications where people want to take video images without actually being caught or whatever, so I think we’ll see some documentary style work, investigative

Ed: And it’s probably good to mention at this point that, going round the different manufacturers, the number is increasing that say Blackmagic Design product works with this; you can use Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve for example to do this. It’s just every time, every show, there are a few more who say “we work with Blackmagic” so it must be good for you?

Bob: Yes, some of the products like DaVinci have to interact with so many other companies that it really has become good for all of our products. You know, our capture cards are now in a lot more of the editors and special effects machines that they weren’t in prior, but it’s because we had the interoperability between the software.

We’ve always been very open about it, we publish our SDKs – I mean, I worked at DaVinci before Blackmagic purchased it and I remember that first IBC four years ago this week. We stopped by one of the

Small camera - big lens.

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cameras, it’s a Super 16 sized sensor, so those 16mm film lenses will fit with an adapter on these too, so a lot of schools that had 16mm film cameras in the past are buying the cameras now because they can shoot the same style, but shoot digitally.

Ed: Okay, internal recording or does it have a card?

Bob: It’s a card; we take “off the shelf” SD cards, the high frame rate ones, 90 megabits is preferred, but it’s not a proprietary card by any means.

Ed: So it’s not really designed as an action camera though is it. I mean, frame rate is one of the key parts of that?

The range is growing.

work, done with the camera. It takes stunning images, it’s not a video camera, it is really a cinema camera and we use it with DaVinci Resolve Lite and the DaVinci Resolve Lite was just upgraded, so you can do up to Ultra HD file sizes, not just HD. How about that!

Ed: Now with such a little camera, obviously there’s been a big surge in the market for these little cameras since GoPro came out with a miniature camera, and now everybody’s doing it. This obviously is going to have some impact in that market?

Bob: Yes I think so. It really is designed to do a little bit of everything. We’ve had third party companies come with their remote gimbals and helicopters and they’ll have a crash cam helmet and that kind of thing.

I think because it is so small, it’s adaptable to uses in a lot of different ways – underwater for example. I know that a lot of guys were using it as a B camera because it’s the small one, so they can shoot the main shot from the front and get this one on the side. Because it does have 13 stops of dynamic range, you’re going to be able to shoot RAW, so it really has a different toolset in terms of image capture. It’s small, but it also captures what you would expect from a larger camera.

Bob: Right, you would need higher frame rates probably for action, so that wouldn’t be a good application for it. We think more of it as a documentary style or film or music videos, that kind of thing, but as far as high frame rates that’s not something that it does.

Ed: But I’m sure if Grant gets the idea that will be what he will ask for next?

Bob: Yes, we can never tell what Grant will want next, that’s for sure.

Ed: Before we go, converters – where Blackmagic really started and made its name – you continue?

Bob: Yes well, now that we have Ultra HD 4K, we need ways to convert back forth and sideways if you will. 6G -SDI can only travel about 50 meters, so we have a new optical fibre converter which means you can run optical fibre a long distance and have 6G-SDI on each end. We have another one that’s our new multiplexer and that’s a 4K multiplexer, so you can take in 6G-SDI or dual 3G-SDIs or four 1½ gig SDIs and get 6G or dual or quad on the other end; and it even works as a DA, so if you put in one 6G-SDI you can get four 6G-SDIs out – US$495 as they all are; US$495 for the optical converter as well. The original optical fibre converter that had 3G-SDI on it, we’ve lowered the price to US$295, that just happened at the show. And then we

Ed: Okay, just run through some of the technical specs, because we haven’t actually featured this little camera before?

Bob: It will record ProRes 422 HQ at 1080p, 23.98p, 24p, 25p, 29.97p, 30p and we have a Cinema DNG RAW format, so you have 13 stops of dynamic range during colour correction.

You have an HDMI output, mini HDMI out, so you can run it to a monitor; it has a screen in the back – it’s not a touchscreen like the original camera, it has navigation buttons but the menus are very familiar. It has focus assist, it has auto focus if your lens is a Micro 4/3rds mount (MFT), so a wide selection of lenses can be used, whether they’re automatic lenses or they’re even manual lenses. I personally bought an adapter to get an old Minolta lens that my wife had for a 35mm camera, put it on, it had a tremendous zoom and it worked brilliantly.

So even the 16mm film Page 8

have SDI to HDMI 4K. So that converter will take in either 6G-SDI, two 3GSDIs or four 1½ gig SDIs to 4K on HDMI – HDMI 4K. Ed: So, just to wrap us up – how is this Australian company doing in the States.

Do the customers know the roots of Blackmagic and appreciate where it’s come from?

Bob: Yes, been here

I’ve four

years and we’ve grown tremendously over the last four years, not just adding more bodies, but really in terms of our product range has grown and so has our recognition. Everyone knows who we are from the smallest TV stations to the networks to – you name it.

Ed:

Even IBC – you’re a sponsor of IBC?

Bob: Yes, absolutely. We sponsor quite a few of the different local shows and the user groups and things like that, you know part of the community.

Ed:

Exactly, building up a community.

Bob: We have our own forum now and we have a lot of people on that and yes, I think Blackmagic is gaining a larger following. The interesting thing is it’s not just people who are just getting started, it goes the whole range.

Ed: I hope you never get to the stage of some of these companies that have fruit as their logos though?

Bob: We’re hoping to stay true to ourselves and I think NZVN Grant’s leadership will keep us grounded.

Autodesk at IBC For DVT we are here at Autodesk and the first person to tell me anything is Maurice Patel from Autodesk Canada and at some stage we’re going to have Nick Manning chip in.

Ed: First of all, Maurice, what I’ve heard, apart from Smoke on the Mac being a huge success, you’ve now moved onto Flame. So what can you do better?

Maurice: Oh there is Nick, Rama and Maurice from Autodesk. always something we can Ed: Okay, because you’ve already done that with do better, it’s a never ending process. But yes, at Smoke … I mean, you can say Smoke is a modern this IBC, our focus is on announcing the 2014 product. Flame – does it have the same history or release of Flame, but we also just announced on the same base, or has it been developed in Monday rental plans for our animation software parallel? product, so those are kind of our two big news items.

Maurice: No, Flame and Smoke go back way, way in time. Historically, they’ve been derived The month before we announced Maya LT, so it’s from the same core and so Smoke and Flame been a busy few months for us, but in terms of share a lot in common and a lot of the Flame 2014, the real big news here is that we functionality that we have, some of the advanced actually introduced this new version called the tools and things like that, are across these two Anniversary Edition for subscription customers and applications. I think what’s really different is kind now this becomes generally available, with the of how we’ve taken this technology – how we used 2014 release, to anyone who wants to upgrade or it, we developed high performance postproduction any new customer who purchases the software. solutions, this has been our heritage. It was the They will now get the new workflow that we heritage of Discreet Logic originally before it was designed for the 2014 release, which includes the bought by Autodesk and we’ve continued to focus integration of the editorial functionality with the on making sure we can deliver high performance visual FX as well as the new media management postproduction solutions which offer a lot of systems and all the improvements that went into interactivity and a lot of creative control to artists. the Flame workflow to modernise it and make it But at the same time, we saw an opportunity to take this technology and make it appeal to a more compatible with modern day digital formats.

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broader audience of editors and a lot of that demand was driven by the need for editors to add more to their projects. Obviously, digital media has exploded, people are doing a whole lot more and people wanted a lot more creative tools, and we are taking the tools that we develop for the high end and making them also available to a broader audience.

Ed: Well certainly Smoke on the Mac has been a huge success for you and helped get your name out there … what are you hoping with the latest Flame? Are you hoping that the people who have now become familiar with Smoke are wanting to go that next step up?

Maurice: Well obviously yes. I think that, as people’s businesses grow, we hope that they will continue to stay within the family and continue to add our tools to their workflows, but I think the

quickly and they want that video to look good, whether it’s to promote products or to promote the company etc. We do that ourselves, but at the same time, when it comes to the large budget commercial postproduction work, that’s actually been pretty good and we have a customer Bill Young Productions in Dallas for example, I think is a good example of someone who has created a great music industry company, they’re focusing on visual effects, they’re buying Smokes, they’re buying Flames, but they’re not embedded in an ad agency, they’re setting out on their own.

Ed: So what is it that a Smoke on the Mac user would see as a benefit to their business by going down the Flame path?

Maurice: Well the benefit would be if your business is scaled to the point where you need extra throughput and performance, then it is a powerful tool to add to your workflow, especially Flame Premium w i t h t h e i n t e g r a te d g r a d i n g capabilities …

Ed: Some specifics in terms of the actual look, feel or output of the Flame product?

Maurice: It’s an easy transition. If you know Smoke, you can make the transition to Flame fairly easily, but realistically we’re not expecting the majority of our Smoke customers to move into a Flame. The goal wasn’t to get everyone to Flame; Flame is a very premium solution.

Ed: In what way? How does Flame differentiate from Smoke?

real focus around Flame is of course the high end postproduction companies. I mean, it’s no secret that business has been very challenging in postproduction in visual effects …

Ed: Some of that is to do with advertising agencies taking on Smoke on the Mac and starting to do their own in-house work with your product?

Maurice: Actually I don’t think that’s been the real challenge, certainly not for us. I mean, that’s good in the sense that advertising companies can do more, but I think the real challenge that’s been happening in postproduction visual effects has more been on the visual effects side and kind of the price pressures on them. The real pressure is to deliver more for less – constantly to deliver more for less, that’s where we see a need to make our tools perform better, more efficient, more interoperable, continue to expand the creative’s capability … so the focus on Flame is enabling us to cater to that. We see the advertising and the postproduction business as very complementary; a lot of work obviously is being done in-house because people want to get stuff up on YouTube

Maurice: T h e r e are several different things. The first thing is that it’s a Linux based scalable platform. Smoke is kind of limited to what the Mac can offer; with Flame you have a lot of expandability.

You obviously have greater performance, greater graphics performance …

Ed:

Which means less rendering time?

Maurice: Yes, less rendering time, more interactivity, the network performance, you can put InfiniBand into it. It’s really designed for postproduction facilities that need scalability.

So if you’re a small start-up and you just want kind of broad desktop performance, then Apple offers a lot in the new workstation. But when you need to put it into a postproduction workflow and you need to be able to scale that workflow and connect systems together and do that in a high performance way, that’s where Flame comes in.

So a lot of it is to do with the workflow.

Now there are also some differences in the tools and the capabilities within the products. There’s definitely creative features within Flame that are not available within Smoke, so there’s some tool level differentiation, but ultimately, a lot of it’s based around the high end postproduction

Page 12

workflow and catering to that is a very specific type of workflow.

Ed:

So really it is a different market?

Maurice: Yes, I think it’s a different market.

People run their businesses differently in that market.

Nick: And that’s what we’re seeing with Smoke you know, the sales are now going into customers who would never really be a customer for a Flame – they haven’t got that budget, and it’s offering the toolset and more creativity to that customer who is obviously in a professional video space as the product is priced accordingly, but we’re definitely seeing a lot of traction in multiseat installations now with Smoke with the professional video customer who will be using perhaps an Avid Media Composer or an FCP. Ed: My impression would be that now they’re finding they can actually complete their production on the Smoke; rather than having Media Composer and a Smoke, they can do everything on a Smoke?

Nick: That’s been the intention from day one with Smoke for the Mac. We wanted to highlight to those types of customers that for sure, they’re highly creative and resourceful talented people …

Ed: Well they are, salt of the earth, all of them, every one of them to a man is.

Nick: They can weave together a myriad of tools in a very complex workflow. What we’re trying to say with Smoke is that it’s all in one creative environment, which does bring an efficiency benefit. So people are getting that and they’re buying Smokes for that reason, and they’re doing the work that we intended or envisaged that they would do. One of the things that speaks for some of the success around Smoke is there’s a new book – Wylie Publications have got a book now on Smoke. You know, it wasn’t justifiable in the past to write a book – it’s all about numbers with publishing, you know the customer base is there. So we’re promoting that at IBC.

ultimate editions, as well as for 3ds Max and Maya, as well as Maya LT. I think the big thing about our rental offering is that customers can obviously still purchase perpetual licences, but if they have short-term needs, they now have the option to purchase a rental plan. The break-even point is about 2½ years, so if you have a production need for more than 2½ years, it’s going to be more cost effective to be on a perpetual plan and that’s why we still have perpetual plans. But for shorter term projects, you can now have the option not to have to pay the full upfront cost of the software, but just purchase a rental plan for the time you need it.

We offer monthly, quarterly and annual rental plans.

Ed: And you still have student specials don’t you?

Maurice: Exactly – we still have a free student version.

Ed:

Well you can’t get cheaper than that.

Maurice: Well we try to be as flexible as possible to accommodate the different requirements.

Ed:

Well it gets bums on seats doesn’t it?

Maurice: Absolutely, but I think one of the things for us with the rental programme, as was mentioned before, is that things are definitely challenging, especially in the visual effects industry.

Companies really need the ability to scale up and scale down more flexibly. We expect most of our customers will have a production pipeline that’s a semi-permanent one, but if they have a deadline and they need to hire 10 freelancers for 3 months to meet that deadline, they don’t need to buy 10 licences, they can now just purchase a rental plan for the software for 10 people for 3 months.

Smoke 2013 started shipping last December, so it’s out of cycle with the traditional release cycle that we have, but we have had an extension release since then, which further supports Blackmagic hardware and IO and there’s a couple of new features, trimming capabilities, that have been included. The other thing with Smoke is you can see with the promo running now – 20% off, which we’re announcing on the 12th and available until the 25th of October, so it’s great that that’s covered in your publication.

Ed: Well you read it first NZ Video News! And in the rental space Maurice – you should be French?

Maurice: I should be – my mother liked Maurice Chevalier, so I suffer that like. We have just announced the option for rental plans for our animation products, for our entertainment creation suites, the standard, premium, and the Page 13

Ed: That’s obviously meeting a market need?

Now, what’s with Maya LT? Nick: So a couple of weeks ago we announced Maya LT which is based on the hugely successful Maya application, widely used in the games industry amongst other creative industries. The focus of Maya LT was to develop the product, to release th e product to be

targeted specifically at the mobile or independent game developer. Maya LT will run on the Mac OS as well as Windows platform, so covering the bases for a lot of mobile game development, but the price point is what has really hit the sweet spot for that space.

Many people are coming into mobile game development, either through an entrepreneurial opportunity that they’ve seen through the business itself, or they’ve come from the traditional games space where they may have been working in a big games studio or a studio that has closed, or perhaps had enough of the corporate grind and are wanting to start up themselves.

The price of the software was prohibitive to those types of small start-ups, but now with Maya LT, it’s a very affordable price point, plus there’s a rental as well which is incredibly cheap. So even a hobbyist user can now have access to a tool that can work side by side with a game engine like Unity and this time next year they could be a millionaire.

Ed: And if after 3 months they don’t like it, they can try something else?

Nick: They can change the rental – when the rental expires they can either renew the month or they could perhaps take out a …

Ed: Or they could go up to the full version rather than the lite?

Nick:

are free to purchase the individual products as a perpetual licence as well. So it’s a number of choices that people have got … the packaging of the product and then the licensing again is different – you can have a perpetual licence which you can buy and install and it’s yours. It can run for as long as you’ve got that installation …

Ed: And then you buy upgrades when and if they appear?

Nick: If you want an upgrade, you can upgrade. And another approach Autodesk has is our own subscription model which has been running for a number of years now, which is an annual fee that entitles that customer to additional Cloud services, training offerings, support, and previous release entitlement.

Perpetual with its subscription is the most cost effective way of maintaining that licence. What’s new is the rental approach which is available in either the monthly, quarterly or annual, and that gives tremendous flexibility and access to either the suite or the point product.

Ed:

So the rental is right across the …?

Maurice: It’s for all Autodesk suites and in M&E we’ve also introduced it for individual products, but the individual products are 3ds Max, Maya and Maya LT, otherwise the rental options are for NZVN suites.

Exactly, yes.

Ed: Okay, now there are some players in this industry where their business model has changed and rather than having a licence for a particular product indefinitely, there are monthly rental arrangements for a whole suite of products. Do you see you guys going down that road, or do you see your Maya and the Smoke, Flame continuing to be individual products?

Maurice: Because of the nature of the industry, I don’t think that just only offering rental is really the right solution for everyone. We believe that, if you need a permanent production, you need to manage those costs, you need permanent licences.

If you have variable production, then you need the flexibility of a rental plan. It’s better business for us to offer a hybrid model, and we believe that.

We work very, very closely with our customers, our customers build pipelines and tools around our products. I mean, if you look at an implementation of our software in a company like ILM or Weta, these are pipeline tools.

Nick: That’s also reflected in our approach to give customers choice in how even the applications are packaged. So we’ve got a suite approach with our digital content creation tools where you can buy different combinations of suites, where the applications have been designed to have a high degree of interoperability and offer some cost advantage to the customer as well as workflow with a suite; and of course, customers Page 14

Canon at IBC At the Canon stand we have Paul Atkinson who will be the first person to talk and the second person will be Kieran McGee. Ed: Now Paul, I guess where I really want to start with Canon is to say that there are not a lot of new products here at IBC for Canon, but you’ve come up with some pretty major firmware upgrades to people who have got “C” series cameras?

Paul: The 100, 300 and 500 is correct. Probably the biggest one is that all three cameras now have a maximum ISO rating of 80,000.

Ed: That’s a lot.

Paul: It is a lot.

Ed: As an aside, I popped into a little booth, because it said “enter here” and I wandered in there and it was very, very dark and you couldn’t really see anything except a reasonably bright picture on the monitor. Is that what you were showing?

Paul: That’s exactly what we were showing and the thing is that the camera is able to pick up images in almost complete darkness. So with a couple of features on the firmware upgrade, especially on the C300, this opens up the camera to a wider range of potential users. You’re retaining full colour and it’s gradable, so you’re not having to use image intensifiers IR you get the full colour image that can be de-noised in postproduction.

Ed: Is that the only part of the firmware upgrade?

Paul: No it’s not … we also have things like new colour spaces for C500 to make it more compliant with digital cinema, so we have DCIP3 plus. It’s a slightly wider colour space than the standard DCIP3, and the cinema gamut, which is pretty much collecting the whole of the visual spectrum, is giving a lot more colour information that’s available to be captured by the camera for subsequent use in postproduction. On the C300, we’ve added the option of one push auto focus and one shot auto iris when using EF lenses; and this again is because people are well established for using it for a broadcast production camera, but documentary, News guys said “we’d love to use it for the image quality, but having a fully manual camera makes it quite difficult to use as a run and gun.” So now we’ve done this, we’ve given them that feature but, as I said, with an EF lens they’re able to assign a button off the menu, they can press one push auto focus in the centre, one shot auto iris and they can run and gun with the camera as well.

Ed: But having said that, the broadcast standard is 50i – is this camera capable of 50i … which leads me on to part of a further question I’m going to ask shortly, about its applicability for broadcast and really to have anything for broadcast where the standard is 50i, you should have a camera that’s capable of 50i. So the C300 is 50i?

Paul: Yes it is. It’s a 50i 1920x1080 that has been used quite successfully for broadcast throughout the UK, throughout Europe, throughout the world, and has also been used in mainstream cinema as well.

Ed: Okay, certainly for cinema work, they’re going to use progressive, do you have a comment about the interest in progressive shooting?

Paul: The interest in progressive shooting?

Ed: Well for a cinema look, progressive is the way to go, obviously, but how does that translate to a normal video production or broadcast news?

Paul: Obviously we prefer to shoot in 50i to have a nice smooth image. It’s really that people need to

Paul Atkinson from Canon Europe.

know the capability of the camera from whichever manufacturer and then to get the best from it, they need to know how to use the camera properly. So that’s down to education which they can do themselves – we can help educate them as well; they can get lots of resources from the website, there’s lots of master classes, white papers available, so actually all users really need, is to understand the camera and to understand how it’s being used and what it’s being used for, and that way they’ll get the best from a very good product.

Ed: Because that’s it, in the old days, you had video cameras and you had film and really it was pretty obvious which was which. Nowadays, especially with your cameras, you have the capability in one camera of doing a video job or a cinema job?

Paul: Yes, that’s right. I mean we know the camera is being used in quite a few fairly major productions for the cinema – the C300 as well as the C500 – and directors of photography like the look that it gives; they like the versatility, the fact that it’s able to be handheld, it can be rigged, it can be used in small situations, or tight areas, so it’s an overall popular camera in a lot of different applications.

Ed: But then you take that particular rig setup for cinema, you can’t translate it directly into run and gun television production?

Paul: No you can’t, but with the form factor of the camera, especially the C300, it’s very easy to use handheld, almost the ergonomics of a medium format DSLR – and this is another appeal point to a lot of users, that they can use it in situations where they may not necessarily want to know that there’s a video camera involved, because it can be used in a manner that it doesn’t look like a video camera. So again, for some of the news guys who may want to use it …

Page 16

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Ed: Is this for example around London, where you avoid the security people?

Paul: Well not just London, but places where there’s a little bit of unrest in the world, where journalists are deemed as high value targets who work for very wealthy companies that may want a ransom for getting you back. So you’re not advertising the fact that you’re using a video camera.

Ed: Surreptitious recording. But something that also doesn’t look like a video camera is the 1DC and Kieran, you’ve got an announcement there?

Kieran: Yes, what’s really good news on the 1DC is that recently it’s been independently tested, based on the EBU for HD acquisition, and how they’re doing it is they’re recording in 4K and then downscaling to HD. The results of the tests showed that this is really an ideal product for use in broadcast. It’s the first time we’re seeing an SLR sort of officially accredited or approved for use in the broadcast industry. So in that sense, I think it’s really great news – great news for Canon, but it’s also great news for all those people who want to shoot with an SLR type product.

Ed: But again it’s that form factor that is a bit of a curse as well as a benefit … that it looks like a DSLR and it is a DSLR and evidently takes fantastic stills, but the stability – trying to take a moving picture with a steady frame holding a DSLR is not an easy thing to do?

Kieran McGee with more cameras.

Kieran: Absolutely. I mean there are so many devices out there now which are enabling handling and holding and steadying the camera, so I think this is a learning thing as well.

Ed: But then you have to ask the question, well why not make it a shoulder mount in the first place?

Kieran: Well this camera, the 1DC, is actually originally based on the 1DX which is the absolute top of the range photo camera ( it’s no longer film ) but digital SLR. So this would be the sort of product which would be used by all the top sports photographers.

Within that, we’ve built-in then the video capability at 4K. That’s where the stable is, so that’s where the form factor is coming from; and of course then you have 4K products like the C500 if you want to go into the more traditional video camera format.

Ed: And you said earlier, the 1DC is really a product that Canon has made, put it out there in the market and now people are finding new and clever uses for it?

Kieran: Yes absolutely.

We included this 4K capability into the 1DC and the initial reaction was “well, how is this going to be used; where is it going to be used?” But, very much like the 5D Mark II and then the 5D Mark III, the industry has shown us how it’s going to be used and they’re finding you know particularly small format, small spaces, so because of its really small shape and size they’re putting it in unique shooting positions. But they’re also using it for things like journalism, where they’re capturing stills and video at the same time.

So there are different applications I think and we’ve seen those emerging over the last six months.

It’s still new and all those applications are still only coming to the forefront.

Ed: And of course with a camera like that, you need some pretty good lenses and Canon continues to develop lenses?

Kieran: Oh absolutely. One of the key strengths of Canon is the whole lens range coming originally from the broadcast lens side, but right down to what we’ve done on EF. The interesting news here at IBC today is the launch of the sixth lens in the Cinema EF prime range. We’ve had five and we’ve added one which everybody’s been asking for, which is the 35mm T1.5 lens. This is a bright lens; it’s the full cine-prime shape design, the colour is that little bit warmer than the EF lens; it’s very well suited to cinema production activity.

It’s got the full focus ring control up to I think it’s 300 degrees, so it’s ideally suited for focus control and it’s got an 11 blade iris, so you get that nice Bokeh effect when you’re using the product. So this we think has sort of completed the set of the primes and we’re going to see those used much more I think now in movie making.

Ed: Now there’s a display here with a C500 with a very, very long lens on it … that’s obviously not a prime?

Kieran: No, that’s true – Paul maybe you can talk more about that?

Paul: We’ve got some of our cinezooms on some other products – one in particular is replicating a 4K live broadcast solution, with the 30-300 zoom lens on it. It’s a fantastic piece of glass that’s being used quite extensively again in broadcast and in filmmaking.

The optical quality is second to none, it’s 4K now and with our 4K sensor there’s optimum image quality.

Kieran: I could maybe just add to that, the interesting thing about the demo is that, quite recently, we with our partners tested 4K live shooting at Roland Garros and that was one of the key tests for us. Of course it’s still at an early stage to do 4K broadcasting, but we’re actually replicating a similar type of situation here where you can record in 4K and you can see the output on some of the new displays which we’ve got here. The displays are just a technology display, but they show you what’s possible in 4K. Ed: Now just looking at the roadmap for Canon going into the future, it is fairly obvious that there are two patterns here … there’s the DSLR looking type cameras, which tend to be the cinema cameras, video camera?

Kieran: Well we’ve got the X series, with the XA10, XA20 …

Page 18

Ed: … and the 300 and 305 traditional video type cameras. So there seem to be sort of parallel developments here. Is there a reason for this?

Paul: It’s just to make sure that, at whatever level videomakers, filmmakers are at, we’ve got a product that will suit their needs.

The Cinema EOS large sensor, interchangeable lens, is very much aimed at the digital cinema, people who want to use the EF lens range or PL lenses.

The fixed lens cameras, if you like, they’re the more traditional camcorders, so they’ve still got people who like to use those for their applications.

They don’t need to be able to change There’s not much room left now. lenses, they’re happy with the fixed say 18x zoom that Paul: The monitors that are on the stand at the you get on the XF300 series, and they’re still being used extensively. And with the smaller cameras, the XA20 moment, as Kieran said earlier, they’re technology and XA25 that you saw at NAB and now here, these are demonstrators and it’s something that we’re looking at, cameras that allow a small form factor, but give a really we’re gauging the market; they really would be good optical performance with a 20x zoom, the ability designed to be used by postproduction houses, onset to record AVCHD and MP4 simultaneously to separate monitoring and things like that. So they’re here, we’re SD cards and it’s given a lot more flexibility to not announcing anything yet about availability or filmmakers. So we think we provide a tool for every release – we’re just gauging reaction and trying to work level, from the entry level guy doing his events, his out exactly who would want this product and the likely weddings, right the way through to mainstream full 4K popularity. video production.

Ed: Dipping your toes in the water?

Ed: And something I saw at NAB in a little booth was Paul: Dipping our toes in the water, yes. a monitor. Canon’s going the 4K monitor range, sort of Ed: I hope it’s warm! not starting anywhere else, but bang, straight into 4K. NZVN

Avid Vision from IBC At Avid we are with Ren Middleton and we are talking for Atomise about the latest in Media Composer and things pictorial for Avid.

Ren: Well thank you Grant.

I’ll give you a bit of a generalised update. One of our latest philosophies is “Avid Everywhere” and one of the major reasons behind that is firstly, we want it to be everywhere out there in broadcast and postproduction and things like that, so we’ve brought the price down in Media Composer.

We did that with Media Composer 7 …

Ed:

What, not again?

Ren: A couple of months ago with Media Composer 7 Ren with a long list of Avid supporters. and that’s certainly got a lot of features in it which I’ll touch on in a minute, but the able to access your media from everywhere you are. other thing from the “Everywhere” philosophy is being So the idea is, and you’ve certainly heard of ISIS, Page 19

you’ve heard of Interplay, so we have a layer on the Interplay, which is Interplay Central. This platform is a real focus of our attention that will aggressively be developed.

At the moment it enables you to log into your database and storage and generate media on the fly out to your tablet, your IOS device or to a web browser; you can access your media from everywhere.

You can even edit that media remotely, you can add notes, you can add metadata, you can write a News rundown and stories as well, and that’s just the start. It really is the foundation of “Avid Everywhere”.

Ed: And this works in New Zealand with our Telcos?

Ren: This does work in New Zealand – in fact we’ve done tests in New Zealand specifically and we’ve done lots of customer demonstrations and it’s worked flawlessly. That was from New Zealand looking back into a system in Australia.

Central is sort of one of the big things …

Ed:

So Interplay

Did it matter which Telco you were using?

Ren: We don’t know, we just used our iPhone and put that on the desk and just logged in through the iPhone.

That was our connection to the outside world and that worked. So I think if we did that, I’m sure that you’ve got enough bandwidth somewhere there in New Zealand to make it work. So that’s sort of one of the major areas that we’re focusing on and that is going exceptionally well and has had a lot of interest. What’s new for this show is things like ISIS – so we’ve got ISIS 5000 which has been around for about 4 or 5 years now; we’ve just released ISIS 5500, which effectively is 64 terabytes of storage for about the same price as the old ISIS 5000 which was 32 terabytes – and the price point is essentially the same. So really the price per terabyte is down very low and very cost effectively.

Once again, we don’t want to give anybody any excuses to move to any other storage platform, because the price is so very, very competitive. We’ve sold over 50 ISIS 5000 systems throughout Australia and New Zealand; we’ve got lots of New Zealand customers on it as well and Richard’s done a fantastic job there.

Ed: He’s always doing a fantastic job, but coming back to this doubling of terabytes, it seems to me that, as soon as you double the terabytes, the camera manufacturers come out with a new codec that uses up all those terabytes, such as moving into RAW? Ren: That’s right and I think that is one of the significant things in this industry. We understand that and, you know, the files are getting bigger and bigger – 4K is the latest catchphrase of television broadcast and so that’s taking up a lot of resources. Avid still do a lot of offline-online workflows so that you’re not using all of your storage and all of your editors are accessing the high res – although they can, but that naturally means that you need to stack up more chassis so that you’ve got the bandwidth to get out to each one of the clients.

But we’re certainly ready for all of those things in the future, so resolution independence and things like that.

We understand that the market is heading that way, so we’ll certainly be ready when the demand is there. The other interesting thing about the ISIS 5500 is that now you can attach a Linux client and Windows 8 clients as well. So effectively now, Avid is a very, very open

company.

Everybody used to think that we were closed, but we qualify Final Cut Pro, we qualify Linux clients, we qualify Adobe, we qualify lots of things to work on our storage and guarantee the performance – that’s one of the big differences.

Ed: Well, let me say Ren, Avid has come a long way in the last few years.

Ren: Thank you Grant, that means a lot coming from you, let me assure you.

Ed: I guess one of the proofs of the openness of Avid now is a long list here of the partners, and pretty much everybody is in there, including some of your competitors?

Ren: That’s right. We understood some time ago that we need to embrace the market, so we have incredibly open APIs so people can get into our databases, we work with so many third parties – I’m looking at a list here of about 50 different partners that we integrate with, so we’re a very, very open company now. In fact the APIs that we hand out or that are available for other people are what we use to integrate our own systems together as well, so we’re a very, very open company now, there’s no doubt about that.

Grant, back to Media Composer, you mentioned handling high res and RAW files earlier. With AMA ( Avid Media Access ) you can instantly access and edit file-based media – including ARRI ALEXA MXF, RED ( EPIC, SCARLET-X, and ONE ), AVCHD, ProRes, QuickTime ( including footage from HDSLR cameras ) and other formats without transcoding or copying files, enabling you to either finish projects “in system” for HD deliverables, or maintain all metadata and changes for conforming and finishing through third-party systems.

A few new features in MC 7 to further enhance these workflows include Frameflex allowing you to maintain full creative control of the image reframing and keyframing. In addition, 1D/3D Look Up Tables (LUTs) and Colour Decision Lists (CDLs) make it easy to perform real-time RAW and LogC to Rec. 709 colour space conversions. Plus with Dynamic Media Folders, non-creative media tasks such as transcoding, copying, and consolidating can be automated in the background, without disrupting editing. A bit techy I know but all this really helps the workflow particularly in the high end post and film industries.

NZVN

Page 20

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Atomos at IBC We are here at Atomos for Protel and we are looking at the Samurai Blade with company founder Ian Overliese from Australia.

Ian: From Australia mate.

Ed: Oh, good on ya. How are ya cock?

Ian: Yeah pretty good mate, no worries.

Ed: The Poms have been beating you at cricket lately?

Ian: Yes, well, better than you lot but that’s another story.

Ed: OK, enough banter, the product – what does the Blade do?

Ian: Well it’s a high quality 5 inch HD monitor with a 1280x720p panel. It’s just over 300 dots per inch, it’s super high res, latest IPS, you know very wide angle viewing angle, extremely accurate colours. This has got SMPTE rec 709 full 100% gamut and they all leave the factory calibrated.

Mrs Sushi (they were yummy) with Ian from Atomos.

We’ve just announced today Ed: And Atomos is sticking with that hard drive our new calibration solution for user calibration, which technology, rather than going the CF card way? is an accurate colourimeter from DataColor that we’ve OEM’d and called the Atomos Spyder. It has our own Ian: You can put an SSD as well if you want Flash; CF software which can keep your unit through its whole life cards are just very expensive and unless you need that to rec 709 standard; shipping November. very small form factor, then really … well ProRes HQ you’re generating 100 gigabytes per hour, so there’s Ed: But let’s not sort of confuse the readers out there pretty large files. If you want to do a few hours of – the Blade it’s not just a monitor is it? recording, you need a few hundred gigabytes of space.

Ian: No, it is in fact a ProRes recorder – ProRes and Ed: Big cards and they’re expensive?

Avid DNx …

Ian: Yes, with cards you’d be paying for a few hundred Ed: In the one machine? gigabytes, so you’re paying a few thousand dollars, Ian: In the one machine, and you can choose between which turns into a media management problem, three different flavours of ProRes – LT, 422 and HQ and because you’ve got to constantly swap files, copy them you can choose between I think four different flavours over, delete them and generally it’s a pain and people of DNx – everything from 36 megabit up to 220 HQX – don’t want pains. Samurai Blade has added waveform 220 X, 36, 145 and 220. monitoring, so you’ve got three choices of size here – Ed: And each time you press the button changing the corner, full width and full screen. You can see here how settings, it changes its settings in terms of how much the levels are showing from 0 to 100%, and as I adjust record time is left? the ND filter, you can see how the exposure has now Ian: Yes that’s right. It displays the available hard gone down to about 50% on the whites there, and there disc space in terms of the number of minutes, based on it’s at 20, and there it’s 100 – you can see the the particular quality setting that you’ve got. automatic exposure of the cameras, they’ve pulled that Everything in the system is “touch what you can see”, just into 100 there. So it’s great for setting exposure, so if you want to change your setting, you touch the you’ve got RGB which allows you to assess exposure thing you’re looking at, that is the setting that’s and colour balance together; vectorscope, which lets changed. For example, the timecode, you touch the you assess where your colour balance is – you can see timecode. it’s pretty well balanced most of the whites around the centre. We’ve also improved the focus peaking – focus Ed: And I see here coming up on the screen that the peaking now has a choice in the settings – a choice of hard drive is …? colour background with the lines highlighted in a Ian: That’s actually a 500 gigabyte Hitachi spinning particular colour. drive. So “HGST” is Hitachi’s code for their spinning Ed: Just explain again the focus peaking – what’s the discs. The great thing about spinning drives is they are purpose here? more reliable than SSDs in terms of less problematic and more longevity than SSDs. The only thing is that Ian: Focus peaking basically highlights the edges that because they’re mechanical they won’t work in a high are in focus in a bright colour.

You can choose vibration environment like moving vehicles, if you’re whichever colour you want, if you want blue, red or doing a lot of running around and so on. But otherwise green, depending on what type of scene, and if you go they are like a tenth of the price per gigabyte of SSDs, to the silhouette mode of focus peaking, then you can so they’re by far our most popular drive solution. see that it draws just the lines in the image out. So the Page 22

Professional Audio and Video Solutions

www.protel.co.nz

Atomos wins two awards at IBC 2013 - For Recording and Acquisition Workflow!

For the third year in a row Atomos have been recognised by TVB Europe magazine. Atomos Blade and the brand new Atomos Spyder win TVB Europe Best of IBC 2013 Award, in the Recording and Acquisition Workflow category.

samurai blade AtomOS 5.03 Update featuring new audio meters Receives 14 channels (2 analog and 12 digital) of precision audio level meter monitoring, and adjustable view to either see two channels being monitored over headphones or all channels at once.

AtomOS 4.2 Update also out NOW

Ninja-2

Ronin & Ronin Duo

Samurai

Connect-AC & Connect

AtomOS 4.2 receives 4 channels (2 analog and 2 digital) of precision audio level meter monitoring and adjustable horizontal or vertical monitoring view.

AtomOS 4.2 receives 14 channels (2 analog and 12 digital) of precision audio level meter monitoring, and adjustable view to either see 2 channels monitored over headphones or all channels at once.

AtomOS 4 receives 14 channels (2 analog and 12 digital) of precision audio level meter monitoring, and adjustable view to either see two channels monitored over headphones or all channels at once.

Connect-AC and Connect have been updated to include HDMI Record Triggering to support new Sony Specification, and improvements to RGB to YUV Colour Space Conversion Accuracy with some sources.

ATOMOS SPYDER COLOR CALIBRATION In collaboration with Datacolor, Atomos Spyder color calibration tool calibrates to the SMPTE Rec 709 color space with a D65 white point with 100% gamut, enabling a simple one-touch color calibration of the Samurai Blade. Easy to use and compatible with Mac and PC.

AUCKLAND 3 City Road PO Box 6049 Auckland 1010

Tel +64 9 379 8288 Fax +64 9 379 0290 Freephone  0800 PROTEL

battery adaptors

Atomos to Canon 5D MKIII

Atomos to Nikon D800

(Sony NP to Canon LP-E6)

(Sony NP to Nikon EN-EL15)

WELLINGTON 15 Walter Street PO Box 6049 (Auckland) Wellington 6011

Tel +64 4 801 9494 Fax +64 4 384 2112 Freephone  0800 PROTEL

grey areas are lines that are not really in sharp focus and the green in this case that I’ve chosen, is in sharp focus.

Ed: Which definition?

is

particularly

important

with

high

Ian: Yes, it’s very important with HD where focus precision requirement’s very high … so there you can see things snapping into focus as they go from grey to the colour that’s been chosen.

Ed: So that’s a very versatile monitor that’s attached to a recorder, so really you don’t need anything else?

Ian: Not really no, apart from lights and cameras, microphones. I mean really we priced the Blade to make it about the same price as just the cost of a high quality monitor with these features. So the recording is kind of for free, but the recording really is the beauty of the product. It is its purpose. We’ve got the audio level meters in here that we’ve just added in the new firmware; it will show you the digital peak there as a little white line and then the average little … you can see as I talk my voice is going up and down. You can adjust for audio delay in case you’ve got a camera that doesn’t synchronise or some equipment that’s supposed to sync and I’m synchronising audio and the video.

Ed: And the Blade has an HD-SDI input, but for those still using cameras with HDMI outputs?

Ian: If you’re still using HDMI, then we recommend that you get the Ninja 2 which is a purely HDMI unit, which doesn’t quite offer all the processing … it does all the same recording functions, it just doesn’t offer waveform monitoring and the super sharp LCD. It’s an 800x480 LCD as opposed to the Blades 1280x720 LCD. So this here is our connector converter, which is a little very low power converter converting HDMI to SDI, so it allows an HDMI camera to be used with the Blade. It’s the only converter in the market that passes through timecode and start and stop flags from the camera, both to or from HDMI. It’s got an internal battery so it will power itself for about an hour. It also passes the power out – it is a battery if you like, so right now I’m powering the Blade and the converter’s being powered by the converter itself; I’ve just taken the power off.

And you can put power on the back of it and that now is going to be powering the converter and charging the internal battery at the same time. So we’ve got a dual

battery system on all our recorders to give you continuous power. It runs off one battery at a time. It will always instantaneously switch over to any battery that’s available if the battery dies or is taken off unexpectedly; you can also go into the battery settings page and decide that you want to select to run off a particular battery … so for example, if one of them is an AC power source and you want to run off that, you can select that manually.

Ed: So really the great thing is that if you do have an HDMI output camera, you can still get a Blade with the converter?

Ian: That’s right, yes. In fact a lot of people are doing just that. It’s a bit more expensive to do it that way, the Ninja is only – what is it Є545 now, so we’ve dropped the price of the Ninja quite substantially. You’d be looking at Є1300 with the Blade and the connect, but then you’ve got a much nicer high quality product.

Ed: If you want that fancy monitor, then that’s what you pay for?

Ian: Yes, and that’s what you get.

Ed: Now something interesting that I’ve discovered is that Ian is actually CEO of the company or joint CEO of the company, and you work out of Melbourne?

Ian: Yes that’s right, all the R&D is done in Melbourne, all the engineering and design work, all the marketing and basically the HQ is Melbourne. We have satellite offices for sales in Portland, LA, Frankfurt and Tokyo, but everything is Australian.

Ed: So not only Atomos, but Blackmagic as well coming out of Australia?

Ian: That’s right, yes. There’s quite a strong presence of broadcast professional video products.

Ed:

Grant Petty hasn’t made you an offer?

Ian: Well I was head engineer at Blackmagic for six years.

Ed:

You learnt your trade under Grant did you?

Ian: Well my father was a video repairman, so I guess I learnt my trade as video when I was 13 years old fixing TVs. Ed: Well you’ve certainly found a niche in the market and you’ve filled it very, very well.

Ian: Thank you. We’re proactive and looking to giving customers what they want and that’s important.

That’s why it’s a good synergy between Jeremy who faces the customers, you know handles all the sales and deals with people and I design the products and am in charge of designing the products. So we kind of make sure that the product we’re designing and delivering is what customers want, not what the engineers thought people should be having, which is often a problem in electronic development.

Ed: Well in that way it’s important to have good dealers such as Protel who provide you that feedback from the customers?

Ian: Yes, it is and the trade shows are also important for talking to people as well.

Ed: New Zealand customers should call Protel for their Atomos products Ian: You bet.

Page 24

NZVN

Avid Audio at IBC For Protel, we are at the Avid booth with Pro Tools and S6 Mixing Redefined. I thought it was all over with Pro Tools version 11, that pretty well that covered everything, but no, no, it continues to develop and to tell us all about it we have Charles Tetaz from Avid.

Charles: Pro Tools 11 is the software engine that underpins S6 which is our new control surface. We’ve had a long history, both as Digidesign and Avid, with the ICON control surfaces and we acquired Euphonix a number of years ago and they had a mixing control surface called System 5-MC. This is an evolution of those two concepts in a new device. So S6 is a control surface utilising the engine of Pro Tools; it provides a tactile surface to control that engine of Pro Tools. The main question is why use a piece of hardware anyway, given that you can do it all in software now? The one thing that we know from an ergonomic standpoint, and from an artistic and operational standpoint, is that having visual feedback is very critical to decisionmaking, particularly mixing in music and audio, and also having the ability to get control. So you hear something, you need to do something, you’ve got something you can grab or a button you can push or something you can do to then affect that sound. So that’s the fundamental reason why you would have a control surface of any flavour. S6 more particularly takes on board a number of the things that we are very, very familiar with, such as the visual feedback that you gain from a control surface that can be level, but also information about plugins and other aspects. We’ve taken that a number of steps further by adding TFT display screens that can not only show levels and EQ parameters, but also show the waveform and the clip information from Pro Tools. So, without the need of the main Pro Tools screen, we can still see information about the audio that is going through that channel strip.

The second thing that’s of interest is that it’s a modular …

Ed: I was going to say, because looking at it, it’s rather a large desk for any Pro Tools 11 user to suddenly go out and purchase?

Charles: Well, I only know we have a lot of Pro Tools users who have ICON or have System 5-MC and the feedback we had from a lot of customers was “I really like this, but I need just a bit more … I haven’t got the space to put that in, so I need something a bit shallower.” With ICON 2 structures, the D-Command and D-Control, a small one and a big one, and with MC we had one relatively thick size – it was modular, but the depth of it was the same. Each module in this console is about 30x30cm approximately and the modules can be faders, they can be knobs and buttons, or a button bank. You can arrange these in any way you like, so you don’t have to have a thick structure and that means that you can either choose to have more or less of something – and that might be a cost consideration, it may be an operational consideration, or may be a physical, logistical consideration in terms of space.

Ed: So I guess this is not only in the number of channels that you can operate at any one time, but also in terms of some of these functions you can still perform with the software and just assign some of them to be hardware controlled?

Charles: Well the hardware can take over control of virtually any aspect of the software. It’s designed so that there’s less necessity to go to the computer screen and use a mouse and a keyboard with the software … that the things relevant to the task at hand, which is mixing, are available on the surface without much need

Charles was itching to twiddle the knobs once I had the camera away.

to go over to that editing workstation. The modular nature means that, depending on a role, someone might be a music mixer, or might be a post mixer, or might be a post editor, might be doing ADR or might be doing Foley or effects. Each of those roles might need a slightly different configuration, so this modularity means I can say “look, what I need is a lot of faders and some buttons, but I don’t really need any knobs” or “I don’t need a screen, but I just want lots and lots of faders” so theoretically, you could have lots of faders, but not much of anything else. Having that flexibility, we feel, will allow customers to build a configuration that suits a variety of needs. The way that we link all of this together – the chassis has Ethernet and power and we use our control protocol called Eucon. The great thing about Eucon is that Eucon works not just with Pro Tools, but with Nuendo and Cubase and Logic and Media Composer and DaVinci Resolve and many, many other software applications, not just Pro Tools, and with the S6 we can not only use different software on the surface, but multiple different pieces of software simultaneously. An example could be someone who is doing a mix where there’s music and dialogue and effects coming in. The dialogue and effects are all being done on Pro Tools, but the music is being done on Logic Audio, and we could have both those workstations operating in one environment on a single surface at the same time. So that is a very, very powerful feature; there is no other console that can do that, and it then keeps the flexibility in the workflow so that if the musician needs to make changes, they can make changes on this Logic system and it’s automatically reflected in the console.

Ed: Does the connection to the different software have to hard wired?

Charles: Yes, it operates on an Ethernet network, so all modules are connected via Ethernet. Eucon operates over Ethernet and then every computer on the subnet that the console is on will have access to that surface.

Ed: But it’s a very simple case of rewiring it just by changing your Ethernet connections?

Charles: Well the assumption would be generally that the workstations that you want to have access to

Page 25

this would be on the same subnet; you don’t need to make any additional hardware configuration. There’s a little Eucon controller that sits on every application, where you see all the different software that’s available on the network, and they can go and grab the hardware when they need to, or from the Eucon hardware you can go and grab the software.

Ed: Now just to clarify something – in terms of flexibility, it’s not a case that if you have an older board of any sort, you can add parts of an S6 to that?

Charles: That’s correct.

S6 is the top of the pyramid.

So you need that, but then if you, for instance, had a studio with some Artist series on the desktop, older control surfaces and you have an S6 in the same facility, the users can seamlessly move their project from that Artist control to the S6 and they could all be operating in the same subnet, but this hardware can’t be added onto an ICON or to a System 5-MC. It’s a new surface; but generally we would find that someone would put a new console into a new room, or when they’re rebuilding a room, rather than having a Frankenstein of the old hardware and the new hardware.

Ed: But the good thing is that, as a Pro Tools 11 user, you can still keep using it as software and aspire to an S6?

Charles: Yes. So a good example would be in a post facility where you have multiple rooms, you may have some rooms with Artist series, some video editing workstations with Artist colour correction for colour correcting, and an S6 in a main mixing room. S6 just plugs into the Eucon network and becomes another mixing client. So for a facility that already has some Avid control surfaces, this is a very simple addition to that, and all the software that they had would work with

They all have a purpose - true.

this and all of the hardware remains compatible in their other rooms, and they can just migrate into this room.

NZVN

The Ministry Decides Radiomicrophone Summary of Submissions and Decisions - October 2013 The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (“the Ministry”) has completed consultation on the changes to radio spectrum usage that will affect radiomicrophones operating in the 518 – 806 MHz frequency range. The Ministry has made final decisions based on the submissions received. The final decisions are summarised as the following:       

confirmation that radiomicrophones will be able to use 698 – 806 MHz frequency range until 11 March 2015 on a non-interference basis but after this date use will be prohibited; the 502 – 582 MHz and 622 – 698 MHz frequency ranges will available for radiomicrophone usage long term; 582 – 606 MHz frequency range will be available for radiomicrophone usage after 30 November 2013; 606 – 622 MHz frequency range will no-longer be available for radiomicrophone use; use of the lower guard band (698 – 703 MHz) or any of the other guard bands will not be permitted beyond 11 March 2015; from 1 January 2014 there will be restrictions preventing the sale and supply of radiomicrophones that operate in the 698 – 806 MHz frequency range; and digital standards will be provided for radiomicrophones in the 502 – 606 MHz and 622 – 698 MHz frequency ranges.

A link to the full document is on the NZVN website under “Articles”.

Page 26

NZVN

ARRI Lighting at IBC On the ARRI stand we have Antje Rast ( Product Coordinator at ARRI Business Unit Lighting ) and we’re talking about lighting.

Ed: Now Antje, we are standing here beside the M8 which is the newest member of the famous family of ARRI lights, the “M-series” which started with the …

Antje: MAX technology reflector.

Ed: Right – so how many products are already in this series?

Antje: There are now 5 in total: M8, M18, M40, M90 and the ARRIMAX 18/12.

Ed: They all look very handsome and they all have a very similar form but obviously quite different light outputs. Now, what I noticed are the robust features of these, they don’t have any lenses, do they?

Antje: Our M-Series lampheads all have an open face. Although lenses spread the light evenly, they also reduce the light output. With the MAX technology we combine the advantages of PAR reflectors and Fresnel lenses. The special faceted MAX reflector creates a maximum light output.

Furthermore with the lens-less technology we reduce costs and weight. And you don’t have the hassle of changing any lenses.

Ed: You still have a piece of glass on the front there, but it’s a clear glass?

Antje: Yes. The glass is actually a UV protection glass. Since there is an HMI lamp inside the lamphead it’s important to reduce the UV light output. Therefore you have the UV glass that protects you, on the one hand from the UV rays, and on the other hand protects you from shards of glass if the bulb should ever happen to break.

Ed: And as I see, there’s plenty of space there for putting in …

Antje: … accessories!

With the M8 there are actually six different types of accessories to be used. It fits in either a 4-leaf or 8-leaf barn door, spill ring, scrims, filter frame or a speed ring for Chimera. A new frosted glass can also be inserted into the M8 accessory bracket. It makes the light output more even than it already is.

Ed: There are two “controls” on the lamphead. What is their use?

Antje: The knob found on the rear of the lamphead is used for focusing from spot (15°) to flood

(62°). The knob that sits on the side is the lamp lock lever. It is only used for releasing and replacing lamps.

Additionally it shows you the angle of the beam, if it is on spot or focus. It must not be used for focusing.

Ed: One of the other great features of the M-Series is their robustness. These are all aluminium aren’t they?

Antje: Since all lampheads have an aluminium housing and a die-cast aluminium front part it is indeed very robust. The accessory brackets attached to the front are very sturdy as well and the skid on the base protects the lamphead from falling over. The skid can also be used as an operating handle to pan or tilt the lamphead when it is mounted on a stand.

Ed: Okay, that’s the M-Series, but if one wants to go ecological then ARRI has also a lot to offer in the LED range. We’ve been told that LED products are about to come in a larger series – how many and how big LED products will we see in years to come? At the moment, the L7 looks very similar to the products from the M-series, just subtly different form.

There are actually two options of cooling you offer?

Antje: Yes, you can either use the ARRI L7 fixtures with active or hybrid cooling.

The difference you can see by just looking at the lamphead is that the active version is a bit smaller than the hybrid version. The hybrid version allows you to completely turn off the fan that’s cooling the LEDs so it can run completely silent. At room temperature the maximum noise is 20 dB(A) – so very quiet.

Ed: In the hybrid one, is there any other form of cooling?

Antje: There is a larger heat sink in the Hybrid version as well as a fan. This means you can run the Hybrid version completely passively or

Page 28

The latest from ARRI  L7 LED Fresnel  M90 9000W HMI

®

Available now in our Cook Street showroom

Phone: 09 302 4100

Email: info@kelpls.co.nz

Website: www.kelpls.co.nz

lamp. You will reduce the cost on air conditioning, electricity, on replacing broken lamps for example. And of course you don’t need ballasts and big power cables that you must have for HMI lampheads. There are a lot of advantages that you have with the LED technology.

Ed: That’s right, because with the M-Series, you need ballasts and that’s an extra bit of kit and expense?

with a fan if you are working in warm ambient temperatures.

Ed: And are there any other variations in the L7 range?

Antje: We have three different types of L7 fixtures in our portfolio: L7-C, L7-TT and L7-DT. The main difference is the colour temperature of the LED fixtures.

L7-C means that you can change the colour within the RGB+W colour gamut plus it can be used as white light ranging from 2600 K up to 10,000 K. L7-TT stands for “tungsten tuneable” with a colour temperature range between 2600 K to 3600 K. From today on you can also buy L7-DT which stands for “daylight tuneable” ( 5000 K to 6500 K.) Each L7 type is available in both active and hybrid cooling.

Ed: Wow, that’s giving a good variation! Now one thing which has puzzled me is that, with the M-Series where you’ve got a bulb, you’ve got a point of light source which then can go to the reflector and come out as a fairly parallel beam, but with an LED, you have an array. How do you get a spot in the end result, when you have an array of LEDs? Antje: ARRI uses a unique lens system which creates a superb light output. Moving the Fresnel lens attached to the tube in the front part of the L7 allows you to focus from either spot to flood or the other way round.

Ed: And naturally, the big benefit of this is saving the planet resources with less energy consumption?

Antje: Yes, it doesn’t need much energy, 160 Watts is the typical power consumption, but the light output comes close to a 650 Watt tungsten lamphead.

Ed: So you can set up a studio with the LED versions that might have a little bit more cost to start with, but in terms of operating cost and not having to replace the lamps so often, in the long-term, it makes a much more cost effective studio operation?

Antje: ARRI LED fixtures have a relatively short ROI (Return Of Investment) time. So you get the extra cost back in savings after about four years, and you can use the LED for a much longer time than conventional lamps. And of course you never have to replace the

Antje: It’s an additional cost of course while using the M-Series lampheads. You not only need a lamphead, but you also need a ballast to operate. But the ballast actually has a lot of features and advantages such as four different frequency outputs: 1000 Hz “high speed” mode, 75 Hz “flicker-free” or you can operate in “low noise” mode at 50 or 60 Hz. In the “low noise” mode the ballast and lamphead work very quietly. In fact you can put the ARRI lamphead next to a camera and it wouldn’t bother the sound guys. We tested that.

Ed: So just back to the LEDs, there is an intensity knob there.

Does it mean you can adjust the brightness?

Antje: The L7-C has three knobs: one to adjust the intensity, one to adjust colour or colour temperature and the third one to adjust the plus/minus green point or change the saturation of a colour.

Ed:

And all these lamps are DMX-able?

Antje:

Yes, they are all fully DMX enabled.

Ed: And this is the difference between just having a lamp on a stand and having the ARRI lamp on a stand?

What makes ARRI lamps special?

Antje: Well, ARRI lampheads are a symbol of highest quality. People love their robustness, the fact you can actually use these lampheads “for ages”, makes them so popular. ARRI lamps are really loved all over the world. I had customers coming up today telling me that they bought the lamphead in 1994 and they were still satisfied with it. I was overwhelmed to hear it, because now – almost 20 years later – they still have the lamphead and they are still using it, so that really satisfies me.

Ed: Something that’s been available in America for a number of years have been ARRI kits. Now ARRI is offering these lighting kits on European, Middle-East and Asian markets as well?

Antje: We have been selling a variety of lighting kits in Europe for years now. Additionally we now offer four new “Hollywood proven” tungsten sets, which were a big hit on the American market.

Ed: I guess these have been chosen for specific uses, for small documentaries or news production, that sort of thing?

Antje: We advise using them for interview situations, background lighting, etc. But our customers, of course, can use them as they like.

Page 30

Ed: So it’s not as though the Americans are making these and sending them back into Europe, they’re actually still being made in the traditional locations where ARRI lights are made?

Antje: Yes they are. All ARRI lights are produced in Germany, in Stephanskirchen. So are the four new tungsten sets. They come in a case with wheels and a handle. You pull them like you pull a trolley or a travelling bag so they are really easy to handle.

Ed: And the good thing, as I can see, is that they are typical ARRI quality; they are very solid, big clips and lockable?

Antje: Indeed. Also most of the lampheads come with a long cable and inline switch on it. They all come with a Schuko connector which is the typical European connector.

Ed: The local supplier would make sure that it had the New Zealand connector I’m sure. What about the other accessories?

Antje: The accessories that are actually included in the box are light stands, barn doors, filter frames, scrims and of course the lamps are included. So you don’t have to worry about buying the lamps when you receive the kit. There will also be an ARRI bag that includes some gloves, pegs and a lamp box.

Ed: They’re beautiful leather gloves with the word “ARRI” on them … you could almost use them as driving gloves I think?

Antje: Yes I think you can, and I am sure they will suit you well!

NZVN

Some of the ARRI lighting kits.

Dedolight at IBC We are here at Dedolight for PLS and we have Roman Hoffmann.

Ed: Roman, this stand seems to be getting bigger and bigger, so I guess IBC is very important for you, because being a European company there are a lot of your European resellers here and your customers coming to see what you’ve got and compare what you’ve got to the opposition, because the opposition is here too. How are you competing?

Roman: Yes we are actually facing ARRI …

Ed: But you’re good friends aren’t you?

Roman: Yes, exactly.

Ed: I mean you have the same dealer in New Zealand, so hopefully you are good friends?

Roman: Absolutely right.

Many of our customers know Dedolight covers a niche market, so we don’t compete with the big lights. At this IBC we have put an accent on colour quality of our LEDs. We have even brought a colour analysing instrument here to our IBC booth to show the visitors how high the quality of our LEDs is. Actually, the housing of our DLED Series, the optics were ready years ago, but we had not the right quality of LEDs. Now we are happy with our LEDs. So what we demonstrate here is that our daylight LEDs on the 4.1 series DLED Dedolight 40 Watt LED series, are now as high as on traditional professional light sources. We have this instrument which indicates that, on all our LEDs, we have a CRI

Roman in the spotlight.

value above 90 and some of them are above 95. This is our main task to show that now, finally, you can easily mix and match colour quality between all existing professional light sources.

And of course, we also demonstrate that we not only offer lights, but solutions.

The DLED 4.1 for example, which has a similar output as the classical DLH4, can easily be run from batteries.

It draws only 40 Watts which means that a 95 Watt hour battery will last for two hours with the 40 Watt DLED 4.1. We already have this experience that, for example TV crews, news crews who often have to run a

Page 31

lot and to work on location, do not anymore have to worry about carrying around heavy lighting kits and not having enough energy to run those lights. We also show our new DLEDs which are packed in our traditional soft cases. What we have here for instance is our daylight LED kits together with batteries and V-mount plates. In the near future, we will have the bicolour LED versions as well which we hope and which we think will be a maximum bestseller, because when you work with bicolour lighting instruments you save a second kit and you have the option to continuously balance colour temperatures. You can easily adapt your light to your environment and set not only Tungsten or Daylight but set any in between colour temperature between these two standards. So if you are in a mixed light situation, you just need to turn the colour temperature knob to the needed position, and there you go.

standard light output (25W), in high light output (50W), in daylight, in tungsten and in bicolour.

It has a fantastic colour rendition. We’ve sold thousands of them throughout the whole world. And now for those – especially for television studio work, for system integration, we offer a Felloni version with higher colour quality. We call this version “Dedocolor Felloni”, which means that the colour rendition is above 95.

So matching with traditional tungsten lights that are mostly hanging in television studios, you won’t have problems.

The Dedocolor Felloni will be available in all versions that we already have on our usual Felloni product line, but the price will be 25% higher. This does not mean that we won’t continue to sell the existing Fellonis anymore; we will still continue to sell the normal Fellonis, but the Dedocolor Felloni will have the better colour quality

Ed: Well that’s interesting because, in the issue about to come out, we’ve got a story with Breakfast television in New Zealand where the crew is out from dark through dawn and they’re crossing about every 20 minutes. So within that time, the natural lighting can change and so having a kit like this – I’m sure they’d be very keen to have one.

Roman: Yes, definitely.

With bicolour LED lights you’re able to work without any gels, without anything that eats up light; now you easily adapt the colour temperature by the light source itself. Maybe one thing is important to mention – daylight LEDs at the moment still have more light output than tungsten LEDs, so when you work with a bicolour LED, you have more light output in the daylight position than in tungsten and in the in between position where both LEDs types are running at maximum, you have the highest light output. This is something that should be known. Also with our 40 Watt DLED fixtures working from batteries is very easy. Power cables which run from the fixture to the plug are always a mess.

Working with batteries which can be fixed to the stand or to the light itself like on the Fellonis makes the work much easier. This method allows the crew to be more mobile, to move fast to change the lighting set up quicker. We also have a new version of the Felloni …

Ed:

Ed: Well before we get onto that, just tell me roughly what percentage light loss do you get when you put a gel in front of a light?

Roman: It depends on the gel …

Ed: A blue gel.

Roman: A blue gel, at least one stop. With our daylight or tungsten conversion glass filters it is even two stops. So having a bicolour version …

Ed: And for spun or putting a glass frosting plate in front?

Roman: It very much depends on the diffusion material that you put in front of a light. I think in most cases you lose at least one stop … it depends on the density of the material.

Ed: So having the technology built into the lamp head itself keeps that light output way up there?

Roman: At the maximum, exactly, yes that’s right.

Ed: Right now, the Fellonis?

Roman: The Felloni for those who don’t know is a standard 30x30cm LED panel, which is available in

So it’s a good addition to any lighting pack?

Battery powered Felloni.

Roman: Yes, and it’s a good addition to our spotlights because the Felloni is a soft light and very often the mixture of different light characters, soft light and spot light, makes the picture.

Ed: Now you mentioned before in your kit that you are including batteries – hopefully you’re not making your own batteries?

Roman: No, we have found a manufacturer called Lith. The battery has a very nice price-performance ratio and it has a couple of features which are very interesting.

The battery has the charger built-in already, so you go with a normal three pin standard plug, plug in and you charge it. There is also an LED indicator for the capacity on the side, the battery has a V-mount lock and very importantly, it’s a lithium ion battery, so to be allowed to take it on an airplane it must not have a capacity more than 100 Watt hours.

So this one has 95 Watt hours. You can either put this “light weight” battery on our Felloni or you can use it together with our external V-Mount battery plate and the battery dimmer for the DLED 4.1 40W LED light.

We see many people working with Fellonis with batteries because working with batteries on the lights makes you mobile. You can move around very quickly, you don’t have to look for a plug, so working on location where there is probably no energy supply is not a problem anymore.

Unfortunately, the younger more on page 35

Page 32

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generation thinks that this is the standard, so we have obviously created a trend, but we have also to make it clear that the traditional lights with higher power consumption of course need power cables to be able to run from mains.

Ed: Now, something that’s dear to my heart is the Ledzilla. It’s a fantastic little light and now you’ve got a bigger version?

Roman: Right. We call it DLED 2.0 – 2.0 stands for 20 Watts. The Ledzilla draws 8 Watt. The 2.0 has a power consumption of 20 Watts. The main difference is that you have double the light output, but you also have a different lens diameter. So the standard Ledzilla accessories do not fit on the 2.0. We will have a separate accessory range for the 2.0. There will also be a soft box for the 2.0 which you can put in front of the lens and you will have also traditional imagers, projection attachments just the size of the accessories will be different.

Roman: Talking about the series 400, we are successful with them, but when it comes to repair, they are not easy to open and to repair. Replacing a socket might take half an hour to 45 minutes. Dedo will change the existing Series 400 housing design to the quite new Series 1200 housing design. The design of the housing will be very easy in terms of repair. The side part of the housing just opens up and you have absolutely easy access to the socket, to the lens, the cables. So now everything that has to be replaced can be done in a couple of minutes. The housing will look like the 1200 but of course it will be smaller in size.

Ed:

And very easy to clean the dust and moths out?

Roman: Right. The design of the Series 400 ballast will be equivalent to the design of the Series 1200 as well. It will also just be smaller than the 1200 ballast.

Ed: And you’re still limiting the Wattage output of your lights – what’s your largest Wattage light?

The DLED 2.0 we have in two mechanically different versions; we have one that has the electronic part and the battery block adapted to the light, but it seems to be a little bit too heavy for small cameras …

Ed: After holding it I was going to say that, yes.

Roman: So this is why we have developed a second version which has the light head separated from the power block. The power block will be an external dimmer which you can attach to your clothes, to your belt, or to the camera. Again, the focusing mechanism is very similar to the one on the 4.0 series. There is a yellow focusing ring which you can rotate and the focusing range is absolutely identical to the classical series and of course, the biggest advantage compared to the Ledzilla, you have more light.

Ed: Now, in the bigger lights, the studio lights, they take a bit more time to set up?

Easy open - easy clean series 1200.

Roman: The Dedolight PanAura 7 daylight version is our most powerful fixture in terms of power consumption.

Here we use two 400 Watt daylight lamps which can be boosted up to 575 Watts. The result is 2 x 575 Watts equals 1150 Watt. I mean especially now with the increase of the sensitivity of sensors, we face the fact that people don’t look for more Watts but for more creative tools.

Ed: That’s it, so really you’ve placed yourself in the position that you are a camera light supplier – you’re not going to light up a football field, you just want to light up scenes so that they look beautiful?

Roman: We want to light up scenes and our slogan is “We want to be the ones that offer light shaping tools, lighting control.” We think that today it has become more important to light creatively, instead of illuminating correctly. People use modern technology in a more creative and intuitive way. Image makers today care more about visionary lighting, they try to create interesting images and not only to make a correct exposure. So when it comes to creative lighting, then you have to light accurately and you often need to light accentuatedly. Light is a great helper in terms of image creation.

And for that, light sources have to be controllable. With our instruments we try to offer as much control as possible. We offer dimming, focusing, shaping, soft effects, colour effects; we offer power and still our lights are small, lightweight, compact and easy to operate.

Ed: The DLED 2.0 - the bigger Ledzilla.

And that’s where Dedolight shines?

Roman: Page 35

Right.

NZVN

JVC at IBC We are here at the JVC stand with John Kelly.

Ed: Right, we’re here to talk about some things new and really there’s not a lot new from JVC this year since NAB, apart from some monitors?

John: Well yes, although there are some significant developments on the camera side as well …

Ed: Since NAB? John: Well this is an update to the current GYHM600 and 650 series.

I think the key thing to understand about those cameras is they’re very much an upgradeable and scalable system; we’re continuously adding features to those cameras, so in effect, it’s like having a new product or a new release. We’ve recently upgraded to the latest version of HM600 and 650 and that’s adding to the already very powerful comprehensive range of streaming capabilities. So for example, we can now stream at standard definition data rates, we’ve got greater control over bit rate and resolution of streaming, so it’s really adding, as I say, to the already powerful functionality of the 600 and HM650 – and that’s happened since NAB. Ed: This camera is renowned for its streaming capability, that’s one of the main reasons the BBC went and bought a whole lot of them?

John: That is absolutely true, although I think it’s also fair to say that many customers have found the basic handling of the camera – the weight, the balance, the ergonomics of it – really excellent as well. So whilst the streaming capabilities and the dual codec capabilities are all completely unique to that particular product, what we also find equally important is the basics that a camera operator needs in terms of weight, balance and handling.

Ed: But it is through the internet connectivity or the Ethernet connectivity that you are able to upgrade these cameras yourself. So if you’re a freelancer, how do you go about getting these upgrades?

John: The upgrade is freely available on the JVC website; you simply download it, you can put it on an SD memory card, upload the firmware on your camera.

Really it’s a little bit like having a computer – it’s upgradeable and that’s what gives the camera its power and its scalability.

Ed: So I know in New Zealand the freelancers tend to choose cameras that are similar to the broadcaster, and in New Zealand, I’d have to say, that the cameras that they choose are larger shoulder mount versions. So what is it about the 650; it’s not a shoulder mount camera, it’s a handheld one, how is it that it’s acceptable to freelancers as a broadcast camera?

John: Well obviously there’s a range of cameras one can use within any broadcast environment, and that goes from a relatively compact handheld such as the GY-HM650 through to larger traditional shoulder mount cameras. So most customers, and certainly most broadcasters, obviously have a mix and a range of products, the 650 in particular very accurately meets the needs of that handheld category. Of course, they will continue to use larger traditional two-thirds inch shoulder mount cameras, but there’s a requirement for different levels within the market.

Ed: I would imagine that it’s much easier for a freelancer to be more flexible to move around with less volume of kit with this camera, as opposed to a full shoulder mount?

John: Yes that’s exactly correct. What one also finds of course is that historically, in order to get the image quality required, it was necessary to have a

traditional two-thirds inch camera.

Such are the advances in sensor technology in particular, and processing and encoding, one can now actually get picture quality which would have been unimaginable in the past, you know five years ago, in a handheld form factor.

In a sense, that’s also democratising the market, because the same camera that a broadcaster might purchase is indeed the same camera in terms of affordability, that an entry level production customer, somebody starting out in the industry, a corporate user, an education user … they can get access to the same technology, whereas before this was a $20 or $30 or $40,000 product.

Ed: And of course, it’s got all the other features, the audio capability, everything else that a broadcast camera requires?

John: Absolutely yes. You see all of those key controls, manual control of the lens, manual control of the colour settings, gain, shutter and so forth, so everything is as a professional and broadcast camera operator would expect. So you’re really not having those compromises that one may have had in days gone by with camera technology.

Ed: No I suppose some people would see it as a disadvantage that this camera has a fixed lens, because some freelancers like to have a variety of lenses in their kit for different functions, but the trade-off is that you have to carry around more stuff and I guess there’s been a lot of research into the best fields of view that you can get in choosing the lens for this camera?

John: Yes, and again rather like sensor technology, lens technology is also evolving rapidly.

The lens in the HM600 and 650 is the latest generation Fujinon lens, 23x zoom, so that does give you the ability to work over a very wide range of environments and shooting requirements and it’s also very wide as well. So again, in such a compact package, it’s still

Page 36

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giving you the high degree of flexibility that you might need.

Ed: And of course the big test of this is that the BBC have bought truckloads of them. Now you’ve had interest from broadcasters in other parts of the world too?

John: Yes that’s correct.

We’re having many interesting conversations with many different broadcasters.

Of course each circumstance and requirement is different; they all move at a slightly different pace. It’s great for us to have excellent and well known references and that puts us in a very good position in that regard, and certainly overall we’re very happy with the progress that we’re making with the introduction of the HM650 and we’re very confident about its future over the next year or two.

Ed: Right, okay, that’s the camera, now monitors.

I know you’ve got some improved monitors?

John: Indeed we do. JVC is historically very well known for production grade monitors; we’ve been market leading in this sector for many years now, and really our proposition has always been around an excellent balance of price and performance, with a very good feature set, comprehensive inputs, comprehensive monitor setup control, but at an affordable price – and that continues to be our proposition. So we have, in the production monitor range, fundamentally two key ranges, what we call the DT-E Series which is our entry level, relatively affordable range, and then we have our higher range DT-V Series, which adds in features such as waveform monitors, vectorscopes and 3G input support. In addition to those, we are also showcasing some new large format monitors this year, so we have a new 42 and 47 inch professional display rated for 24/7 operation, with full IPS panels, which is the highest quality panel technology, so your off-axis viewing is very good. In a broadcast control room, perhaps a multiview output from a production mixer, these products are ideal for those applications and they’re coming at a very affordable price point as we always try to provide.

Ed: It seems to me that there is a move now more in that direction – that there are multiviewers, and people are taking the opportunity that arrives with higher quality monitors to have multiviewers. Rather than have a whole bank of small monitors, they get a couple of big ones and then split the screen. So you have to have a pretty good monitor to be able to do that successfully?

John: Yes indeed, certainly we see that trend very widely. It’s true that there are cost benefits to

doing so from traditionally buying a monitor stack, with 10, 12, 20 or more monitors, so there’s certainly an economic case for doing that.

Of course, there continues to be the case that, in addition to a multiviewer type output, you still need quality graded monitoring for programme and preview type outputs, so the demand for this remains as well. But we certainly see the multiviewer trend happening, for sure.

Ed: And one very large monitor that’s here and there’s quite a crowd around it – 4K? John: Yes that’s right – I mean obviously there’s a great deal of talk generally about 4K at the moment.

I think it’s still a medium to long-term proposition, but the technology is evolving and I think a key part of that which has been lacking a little bit in the chain, has been monitoring solutions. For example, JVC were a very early innovator in having a 4K handheld camcorder, a model called GY-HMQ10, but honestly speaking, having an affordable monitor to display 4K was simply not practical and that of course does inhibit the adoption of any technology if there isn’t a means to view it. It was similar for 3D in many ways. So the 4K monitor is a product that we’re showcasing here – it’s just a demonstration, we hope to be able to introduce it in Europe shortly. Obviously it’s an 84 inch professional grade display, HDMI input, we’re running it here on the show floor, running directly from our HMQ10 camera, and it’s certainly giving you a spectacular image quality – it’s of course four times the resolution of HD and there’s no doubt there will be a growing future market NZVN for 4K and we intend to be part of that of course.

Page 38

Ross at IBC We are here at Ross Video Production Technology and we actually have a real “Ross” with us, David Ross, son of the founder.

Ed: David, does expectations of you?

dad

have

high

David: Hah, he didn’t at the start, but as I got older I guess I picked up a little bit of steam, so my father is extremely pleased with what we’ve been able to accomplish with Ross Video.

Since I started with the company after graduating from university in computer engineering in 1991, Ross Video has grown 50 times over. if you had an investment that you put in at the start and then 22 years later you got back a 50 times return, you’d probably be pretty happy with that, so I think my father enjoyed that.

He retired back around 2004 actually, getting close to 10 years now.

Ed: But I’m sure he keeps an eye on you doesn’t he?

David: Well he’s a member of the board of directors, but I’m chairman of the board, I’m president, I’m CEO and I’m also the majority owner, having roughly 90% of the shares of the company and the last 10% of the ownership of the company is the employees and other family members. So we’ve done, since quite some time ago, a complete transition from the previous generation ownership from my father to me.

Ed: But I’m sure if he said something that he didn’t like about what you were doing, you’d listen to him wouldn’t you?

David: You know sometimes I did, but there’s been a lot of very passionate discussions over the years as you would expect in any sort of father-son situation and I think you could describe it as I was a nice guy, but I still wasn’t a pushover when I believed that what I was asking for was right and in the long-term interests of the growth of the company.

Ed:

Right answer.

David:

Thank you.

Ed: Now, we’ve got that over, onto the product. With that sort of growth, you must have been coming out with new products all the time. I mean, I’ve always been impressed by Carbonite – are there any improvements in that area?

David: There have been some massive improvements in Carbonite in many, many ways, even since NAB. You’re not the only person who has been impressed with Carbonite, because since we introduced it two years ago at NAB, we have now sold over 2,000 Carbonite systems, most of them 2 MEs. We’re selling Carbonites roughly at the rate of 1,000 a year, which makes us undeniably the No 1 mid-sized switcher manufacturer on the planet; and between that and large production switchers where we have Carbonite, we now have Tritium, we have Vision QMD-X, as well as Vision 3G. I believe that in the mid to large size market, Ross Video by numbers and volume is the No 1 switcher manufacturer in the world today. Quite a bold claim, but I would like to see whether or not the other guys are selling well in excess of 1,000 switchers a year, and from what my market experience is, I don’t see it.

Ed: So what are your customers saying about it? Do they tell you that it’s a wonderful product, or are they not telling you anything, so you know it’s just working?

David: Carbonite is actually one of the best designed, most tested products we’ve ever had in the company’s history, so in the process of selling 2,000 switchers, it’s actually been remarkably smooth with only basic operational questions coming up from time to time. We don’t have a lot of problems in the field with Carbonite. I think if we did, it would drown us, so that’s why we’re so obsessive about quality in a product that’s moving into the marketplace at this rate.

Ed:

So what have you done to make it even better?

David: Carbonite is a 1 or a 2 ME production switcher, and new for IBC, we’re adding MiniMEs which are basically miniature MEs with 2 keyer MEs, which is pretty much the number of keyers we had in the Synergy series, a generation before, and we’re putting four of those MiniMEs into the system and making it – the way a lot of the other guys are describing it – effectively a 6 ME production switcher, which is kinda cool as a software upgrade. So all customers who currently have those 2,000 systems out there, they’re going to be in the next software release, getting the upgrade with MiniMEs for free, and I think they’re going to be pretty happy about that.

Now what these MEs are doing is quite unique as well.

Not only are they like MEs, but they can be placed before the normal MEs inside the Carbonite; they can be placed after as downstream, so you can do things like pre-key a chroma keyer, such as for a virtual set, and then cut it as it’s a regular camera with its composited source. You can create multiple programme outputs, for example, with different branding or languages or things like that downstream and treat them as four downstream keyers, or mix and match in between. The other thing you can do, which is really cool, is something called multiscreen. These can now be combined for onset monitors for example, or live presentations. So if you have, say, three projectors side by side for a massive display, this will be able to

Page 39

take a camera and blend it across all three cameras with edge blending out of the outputs. This is basically like some of the image processors that you’re seeing out there right now. It’s taking that and putting it into Carbonite as a standard feature, just like we took multiviewers which were very expensive external devices and made it free inside of Carbonite; now we’re putting output processing such as multiple displays, or say you have a quad monitor you know in a square, four monitors and you need bezel compensation on that to be able to make the whole thing look right. It will do that as well, easily set up right from the control panel.

That’s a standard and that’s part of the features of MiniMEs. Now another interesting thing about Carbonite is that we have reduced the price by 10-20% across the board – because we’ve been doing really well with the volumes in Carbonite and we just want to pass that along to the customers.

Ed: Well it’s about keeping the customers happy isn’t it? You always have to keep your eye on that.

David: We’re No 1 and we intend to stay that way.

So there’s a great story for what’s going on that’s new in Carbonite – and we’re not done.

Ed:

You’re not done – okay. Moving on …

David: Ed:

Have you seen the Carbonite eXtreme?

No.

David: Okay, one of the things I’d like to be able to say is, not only did we do the price reductions and so forth and add the MiniMEs in Carbonite, the Carbonite eXtreme also gets all the MiniMEs and the edge processing and the blending and the bezel compensation and so forth, that are in the standard Carbonites. So for things like churches and productions that require a lot of output management and onset monitors and things like that, Carbonite eXtreme with the edge blending and so forth and the MiniMEs is extremely powerful. In fact, that turns the Carbonite eXtreme from the dual 2 ME switcher to dual 6 ME switcher inside the production. So that’s a 144x144 12 ME production switcher now that you can have up to two control panels connected to. It’s pretty cool.

Ed: Enough switchers?

to

confuse

anybody

–

that

many

David: Well you know we try to make it easy in the end. A major highlight of the show here at IBC is that Ross is introducing Inception News. It’s exactly what you might think – we are launching a newsroom system for Ross Video that is in the same category of iNews or ENPS or any of the other newsroom system competitors. So Ross is now a major player in this marketplace. If you understand a little bit of what we had before, Inception started out in the marketplace as a social media connection programme that allowed you to manage your Twitter feeds and Facebook feeds and things like that coming into a facility, and then manage the way that you send out Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and many other types of social media outputs. Once we focused on that, we returned to our original goal which we started about three years ago in Research & Development, to fully flesh it out as a newsroom system. Some of the things that are unique about Inception are the fact that it has, by design, social media as an integral part of the way that the system works and operates. It’s not a bolt-on, it’s not an afterthought, it’s part of the entire design and the workflow. So that allows you to create your stories, not in a rundown basis, but understand that at the most granular level they’re stories that can be repurposed for Twitter, for Facebook and YouTube and things like that, and have timed releases as well when you’re going through the news. Or at the same time, organising them in a completely standard way that people are used to in a news rundown, and as you step through and reorganise the rundown, you can manage when, say, you do a Tweet, coming next in two minutes, we’ll be showing you this. Or in Facebook, this is another viewpoint of exactly the same story, and then being able to take all of your Facebook and your Twitter information as well as your regular news and tie that in with attributions as to where all that information came from inside your newsroom system, so you don’t say “why did we send out that Tweet and when?” and “how did we actually get that information?” All that is now stored inside Inception as a single product.

Ed: So this is really something that, because you’ve started afresh, you were able to build that in right from the start, rather than the ones who began this in the broadcast area, and have got to add those features to their systems, with perhaps unfortunate consequences?

David: I mean, with any piece of software that is 10 or 15 years old, you can get into challenges with new technologies going forward and the way you store the data in databases and the way you move information across the web and so forth.

We have an advantage that the technologies that Inception News are based upon are using modern platforms, modern databases, and a modern web-based user interface as well, which means that to install a seat in Inception, it’s as easy as plugging in a web browser and logging in. So you don’t even need an application to make it work; which means it also works remotely, it works on tablets, it works on Macs, it works on Linux machines and it works on PCs. Ed: So you can do collaborative newsroom control … basically you can have people doing little bits and pieces and adding it into the stream?

David: Oh absolutely, and the full approval processes as well. Another nice

Carbonite in action.

Page 40

feature that we’ve put into Inception is the full Assignment Desk function. So you’ve got the calendars and the news and who is doing what story and everything else, so it also has built-in the ability to manage your reporters in the creation of the stories as well.

Ed: And this is something that you can just plug into any news system, you don’t have to have Ross switchers or anything else by Ross in your production system, it’s standalone?

David: Absolutely. It’s a standalone news system, it runs MOSS it connects obviously to OverDrive, but you would likely just as easily connect into Mozart and the CGs you know with the ActiveX plugins and so on works just as well with our product as it would with Vizrt or with a Chyron CG plugin as well. We didn’t just guess as to what a newsroom system should be like, because we’ve been doing OverDrive now for close to 10 years and we’ve installed over 300 OverDrive systems worldwide at this point.

Our people are experts in every newsroom system that there is, and our customers are every single broadcaster you can imagine. Over the last three years we’ve been going back and forth doing Beta testing, getting customer input, getting trainer input, and our engineers are experts many times over in newsroom systems. This is sort of like a next generation newsroom system the way everybody would like it be … and it’s priced right because it’s from Ross.

Ed: Okay David, now one of the products we’ve talked about in the past has been DashBoard and I can’t see a price there on this product?

David: Ed:

And you make your money how?

David: Ed:

DashBoard is free!

We make it up in volume.

Ed: Now one of the things that I do remember about DashBoard is that there is a healthy community behind it and I understand there are other communities within the Ross family, but the DashBoard community … they can come up with their own arrangement of the buttons on a screen, publish that and let other people use that particular arrangement, but you’re saying also that they can write code to affect what that button does?

David: Absolutely. Behind every button and even generally running in a DashBoard environment, you can write JavaScript which is this common programming language that you can have variables, you can have timing, you can send data over Ethernet, receive data over Intranet, Internet, you can parse things, so you can actually use this to control devices that DashBoard doesn’t even control. So if you wanted to send a message to a third party piece of equipment when you press a button at a certain time, you could actually do that inside DashBoard which is pretty cool considering DashBoard is free. The other thing that we’re doing is we’re writing our own applications that we are making available to the community and some of them are free and some of them we are going to charge for. Some of the free ones are cool, like being able to score things like tennis, hockey, soccer, cricket – things like that.

We actually wrote a cricket app for example …

Ed:

Yeah, okay, you’re obviously Canadian.

David:

us to do is take user interface elements from any one of our products and combine them into new user specific arrangements. So if you want to have a control panel that turns on a keyer card to bring in a key, while at the same time switching a router path, while at the same time feeding a chroma key into it from a production switcher and then triggering a graphics element on the CG, you can do that in DashBoard and you can do it for free. It’s as easy as dragging buttons and clicking on things.

And we’re very bad at math.

Ed: Yes, but I’m sure there’s a real reason there somewhere?

David: Yes, seriously, the real reason is the fact that DashBoard is designed to work with products that are made by Ross, so things such as our routers, our servers, our terminal equipment in OpenGear, our OpenGear partner products as well, our graphics, our Carbonite switchers, our Vision switchers and even our robotics are all tied in now with DashBoard. It’s a lot about people want to buy products from Ross, not just because the products individually are very good and competitive and have a nice set of features, but I think more our strategy is how they all work together. With DashBoard PanelBuilder, one of the things that allows

It looks very sensible to me.

David: Exactly and you know I was really hoping that I’d understand cricket after they wrote the app; I still don’t completely get it, but I’m Canadian! But anyway, it sounds like it’s a really fun game. So we wrote these apps and they are going to be used to drive the scoring information into XPression which can then display that on the big screen.

Ed: Okay, so very, very flexible and if somebody is not currently a Ross user, they’re not in the Ross community, can they go into the Ross community as a guest and have a look to see what people are doing and get some understanding of what’s capable in the community?

David: If you wanted to sign up with the Ross community, you just send in your email or you sign up

Page 42

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and you can be brought in and actually chat and find out what’s going on.

A Ross community discussion.

To be honest, we haven’t put up a throw on your noticeboard with all the code just yet, so people could pass it to each other and talk about it. We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff that’s been sent to us so far; it is only in the last three months that we’ve actually hired a fulltime DashBoard product manager, so he’s going to be all over making sure that the full DashBoard community continues to grow. One of the things that he’s doing as well is we wrote a DashBoard app for legislative control systems – for parliaments, for committee rooms, that sort of thing, and just to give you an idea of the sophistication of what somebody can do with DashBoard, it’s a touchscreen interface with thumbnails of the faces and where they sit inside of the parliament or the legislature. You touch that and it automatically moves one of several robotic cameras that are available to the right preset position.

It actually streams that from the camera into the user interface which is also really quite cool, so you can see the motion right inside of DashBoard, and then it knows who the name of the legislature person is, or the senator or whatever else, and takes that out of a database and sends it to XPression and once XPression is ready it can actually take that to the production switcher and tell the production switcher to turn on the right keyer to take that to air as a group and then tie that in with a whole bunch of other parts of the system.

So that is an example of the power of what a user can do with DashBoard. I mean this isn’t just pressing a button and a light comes on.

Ed:

Page 44

A good way to end today’s story.

NZVN

Sennheiser at IBC Day one at IBC and we are at Sennheiser with Kai Lange.

Kai: I’m really proud to introduce to you our new Esfera system. It’s Portuguese and it has the new name of Esfera, meaning “ambient”, and that’s all the secret behind this system. What you have is a system that has two components – the microphone and the processing unit. The microphone is quite small as you see. We have modified MKH 8040 capsules inside with cardioid pattern in the suspension. It comes along with a windshield and everything so you’re finished, off you go. It comes out with the 5-pin XLR, so standard microphone cable; you can use it of course also with two canons. Afterwards, you go with this microphone signal either on an analogue input into this processing unit, or if you prefer an AES Net, for example, in broadcast studios you have always AES via fibreoptics and so on and so on … you can go with the microphone signal via the AES signal, directly into the AES3 input from this box. This box converts the microphone signal of both cardioid mix into a real 5.1 signal. You have three AES3 outputs, so it’s no more format changing has to be done, so you can really go with your digital output into your mixing console and you have a rear ambient noise.

Ed: Now is the box called Esfera as well or is it a different name?

Kai: It’s the system which has this name Esfera, so the box has the sign Esfera, but we have two different product names – so SPM 8000 is the microphone as a whole and SPB is the processing unit.

Ed: Now could you plug two other microphones into the same box and make up your own surround sound?

Kai: You could of course – it’s a standard microphone signal, but the algorithm in the processing unit is

Kai with the Esfera package.

especially made for those capsules. The capsules have a special cardioid pattern and a special frequency response and this goes into this algorithm which converts on detail what has to be placed where in the surround output. In production, when they’re choosing the microphones for this, they match them, so you have a matched pair of mics as a set.

Ed: It’s not going to stop audio people tinkering though and playing around with their own microphones is it?

Kai: Perhaps they could try, but I think they won’t get the best result with this system, so it doesn’t make sense to my eyes.

Ed: Ah yes, but you’re German!

Kai: Okay.

Ed: So why do you have your two microphones crossing like that … it looks as though they’ve got their fingers crossed?

Kai: Yes it’s like, you know, doesn’t want to have their fingers crossed that’s the best audio signal, but it gives you the best expression. It’s the X-Y technique and it gives you the best stereo expression from this point.

So that’s the whole thing about the system – you want to have a surround signal from this point where you just record, especially on camera systems for example. You put this microphone on a camera system and cameras have four inputs for example, one is for the left mic, one is booming and you have two for this thing, and afterwards you can …

Interesting mic arrangement.

Ed: So you don’t actually have to have it connected to the box at the same time, you can record the signal into your camera system as long as you’ve got four channels, or you would only use two channels if you had this – and then you could play that back through the Esfera box into your editing platform and then you would have your mix?

Page 45

interference. Let me show you our HMD/HME 26 Mark II series. The first generation of these headsets was very well received by our professional customers, and this new Mark II series includes valuable customer feedback and ideas, making the second generation even better. You can choose between models with a dynamic microphone or a pre-polarised condenser microphone. There are also special models such as this one here – it is fitted with active noise reduction and is ideal for very noisy environments.

With this, the commentator or cameraman standing in the crowd will still be able to hear and communicate clearly.

Ed: So these are really comms headsets as opposed to production headsets?

Dorit: These headsets are ideal for both uses in radio and TV production, for OB vans, for commentators, you name it. Let me show you some of the improvements…

Ed: Oh I like this little “coily” bit here. It’s a simple little stretchy bit?

Esfera controlled by laptop here.

Kai: Yes, you can use it on live recording for example, so you can use it in a live operation or in postproduction.

So imagine a lot of guys for documentary for example, they don’t want to carry round this 19 inch box …

Ed: No, I’d rather not and probably it’s only mains powered isn’t it?

Kai: Yes that’s it, so you just take your microphone with you and do your recordings and afterwards in postproduction you can decide what you want to have.

This is the special thing also about it … we have a web interface which is not on the final version right now because you see the optic is not into the final version; we will ship this system at the beginning of next year, so there are some adjustments to do, but it works so far. What you can do in postproduction or what else, you see we have very clear optics on the front of the 19 inch unit. You have to adjust the microphone knob for analogue input, then you plug in the 48 Volts and if you’re going via the AES3 signal in, well it’s very easy and then the user can decide out of four presets. And you can store your presets via the best interface.

Ed: This is all Ethernet controlled I guess?

Dorit: Actually this is a simple yet very effective element for absorbing structure-borne noise from the cable. This little coily bit is one of the things we added to the series. Another new feature is the softer padding for the ear cushions and headband. Also, the headset construction is more stable for a secure fit. For this, we increased the opening angle of the split headband and slightly decreased the swivelling angle of the ear cup for single-sided listening. See, this ear cup folds back if you want to listen to your surroundings during production. Decreasing this angle also adds to a more secure fit. If we take a look at the microphone boom you will see that this flexible gooseneck part is quite

Kai: It is, Ethernet yes – we have the Ethernet connection on the back and just plug it to your computer. It’s very ease of use. So I want to have preset 1 now, it’s on and I can adjust my 5.1 signal.

Ed: You still have to have a set of ears to listen and make that final judgment?

Kai: Yes, of course. You should have the speakers of my colleague for example in your studio …

Ed: Oh you’re just saying that because he’s right there!

NZVN In the headphone area on the Sennheiser stand we meet Dorit Mueller.

Dorit: Hi, I’m Dorit Mueller, the product manager for broadcast headsets.

Ed: So tell me, what makes a broadcast headset as opposed to something you can buy in a corner shop?

Dorit: Quality is what comes to mind first. You need excellent headphones which also shield off ambient noise, and you need a microphone that transmits in broadcast quality. You will want a headset that is as rugged as it’s comfortable to wear, a headset that is insensitive to handling noise and electronic Page 46

Dorit in headphones.

Ed: And I guess it’s also that you’re getting feedback from your customers saying “wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that” and with a system like this you can continually do those little upgrades. Is this a retro upgrade – if you already had one of these systems, will these upgrades work?

Sven: Of course, it’s a firmware update and it’s very easily done via PC or Mac. The update can be run by any user, the system does not need to be returned for service. The free Sennheiser Wireless Systems Manager software, which is used for controlling and monitoring our wireless systems, will manage the update.

Ed: Well that’s what you get when you buy a quality product?

Sven: Ed:

short, which ensures that the mic will stay in its position once adjusted. Of course the boom can be turned through 180 degrees and either be worn on the left or right-hand side.

Ed: Is it very easy to replace the ear cushions?

Dorit: Absolutely.

Ed: I’m thinking that you might want to not put somebody else’s … after you’ve seen their ears.

Dorit: Well, we have hygiene covers in our portfolio but you could also easily take these pads off and replace them with your own set of cushions. The headset design is modular so it’s easy to replace the cushions, the headband padding, the cable …

Ed: The connector is screwed in rather than moulded.

But they’re all black – oh no, there’s a silver one.

Dorit: That is the model with NoiseGard active noise reduction and it has its own special cable with a control unit. It’s quite impressive if you put on this headset and switch on NoiseGard. The noise is reduced immediately, which means less hearing stress and better communication, safer communication. The headset series is completed by these monitoring headphones, the HD 26 PRO. All models are shipping now.

Ed:

That’s always good to hear.

NZVN

Absolutely.

And on the software side, related to Digital 9000?

Sven: We’re also showing the latest version of our Wireless Systems Manager software for Mac and PC here at IBC. The Wireless Systems Manager (WSM) is a control platform for our wireless microphone systems – also for Digital 9000 – and our IEM systems. With this software you can set up, control and monitor wireless systems, their frequencies, their gain and the like. You can do walk tests and will graphically see the coverage you have.

The latest WSM version includes a full Graphical User Interface for planning your frequencies. Using an onsite frequency scan and the parameters of your connected wireless systems, the WSM suggests and coordinates all frequencies. The new user interfaces makes this task much easier and provides a better overview. The software can be downloaded free of charge from our website. By the way, with the WSM platform you can work from several laptops in a production, so various people can check the RF situation and the systems. Of course, you can also assign specific user rights.

Ed: It takes the “hit and miss” out of getting the right frequency?

Sven: Definitely. The Wireless Systems Manager helps you to find free frequencies and assists you in monitoring your Sennheiser wireless systems.

You have everything you need on one screen, and can even work from remote locations.

NZVN

With more from Sennheiser, we are with Sven Boetcher.

Ed: Sven, you’ve been saving the best till last?

Sven: Well, I have saved the best digital wireless system till last! You will probably know the Digital 9000 Series, and I would like to show you a new software upgrade for it that will be available soon. The upgrade will include a new monitoring function that is very interesting for theatres – and any other user of large systems. The monitoring upgrade means that you no longer have to plug your headphones into one receiver and then the next when you want to check your channels. Now you simply connect your headphones to one of the daisychained receivers and select the channel you want to monitor by a push of a button. So the software replaces a mixer or a customised unit which you would have needed before.

Sven with the Digital 9000.

Page 48

Breakfast in the Rain It was a very cold and wet day as dawn broke at PlaceMakers in Auckland. I was with Leigh Fraser from TVNZ and Leigh’s been a cameraman for TVNZ Breakfast for quite some time now.

Ed: I have to say at this point – and Leigh you can’t change this – that the experience shows in the production values that Breakfast is providing. Tell us how you do it Leigh?

Leigh: How do we do it … the first thing we do is wake up to see what the weather’s going to be like, because we work in some appalling conditions – sometimes horizontal rain and snow. That’s the first thing we look at …

Ed: But they give you a jacket don’t they?

Leigh: Yes, good jacket.

Leigh manages a smile in the rain - just.

Page 50

a

very

But how do we do it … well, there is a great team on Breakfast. We have a great email chain that alerts the Camera person and the Live operator what the cross involves. Anybody that has an interest in the live cross… even other Cameramen and Live operators that have worked on Breakfast in the past and may have knowledge of the location or input are on the list. We then swap ideas and suggestions about the best and most innovative way we’re going to cover it. It is

called a total team effort!! The Live operator will come out and have a look at the scene for us to see what we’re up against, they’ll get back to me and tell me what they think I need, because the first I’ll see of the location is when I turn up at 4.30 in the morning. So we rely a lot on the Live operators to tell us what we’re up against.

Ed:

It’s a huge location team isn’t it?

Leigh: No, it’s not. There are two of us. There is a Live truck operator and there’s me.

Ed: And there’s some young guy who stands in front of the camera and goes “blah, blah, blah”?

Leigh: Yeah, okay, there’s three then.

Occasionally, if we have an assistant available, he will be rostered on to an early Breakfast shift, and that’s part of the training protocol that we have. Whenever that happens, we try and get those assistants behind the camera. I’ll stand beside them, but it’s just part of the training that they do, which is really good – live TV training, you can’t get better than that.

Ed: Well it harks back apprenticeships doesn’t it?

to

the

old

days

of

Leigh: Yes it does, and I’m a great believer and I’m really keen to get these young guys out …

Ed:

And girls?

Leigh: Young “people” out, young assistants out and get them actually doing something behind the camera.

Ed: Do you actually let Sam have any input into the look of the show?

Leigh: Absolutely.

You know Sam has some fantastic ideas. He has done a lot of live TV over the years. We’ll sit around and have a quick chat the day before if we can, or via email or phone or whatever so everybody has an input as to how we cover it. Sam is very skilled on a technical level as well. He’s across editing, camerawork – he’s got his own little camera – so yes, we all talk the same language, and it makes it

Haley Hadfield with a full smile even though it’s bucketing down.

so much easier. Some things are technically a little difficult to do and we have to say no to that, but “no” is not a word that we use very often. We’ll give it a go.

Sometimes things don’t go as planned, but 9 times out of 10 it goes to air and it looks good.

Ed: Okay, now let’s run through some of the gear that you’ve got. Your main camera of choice at the moment is?

Leigh: The Sony PMW-500 XDCAM is what we use.

Each News cameraman who works on Breakfast will use their camera that is part of their kit.

We do have a spare SX that is semi-retired in the truck, so if the live guys come across something or get sent somewhere ahead of the Cameraman … or whatever, they have the option that they can actually set up a camera themselves … camera, tripod, lights in the truck.

So that’s a backup which works well.

Ed: And the well for you?

500

works

Leigh: The 500 is a fantastic camera. We’ve got 14 of them on the road now and they just keep going and going and going. They put out fantastic pictures and the conditions we use the cameras in, they just don’t let us down.

Ed: And you’re not recording to anything in the camera are you – you’re live recording to the truck?

Sam relaxed while interviewing the big fella.

Page 51

Leigh: Not normally to the truck but we are live

recording at the studio. Recently I did a job on a tug in Auckland Harbour and so I recorded the live crosses as well and recorded vision as I went round the harbour, because that’s good library vision for us, but generally we have the option to record in the truck, or we know that they’re doing a backup recording back at HQ. Ed:

So you don’t record onto the camera at all?

Leigh: No. It would mean that you’re just consuming your batteries unnecessarily. If we wanted a backup recording, we’ve got the option of doing it in the truck because obviously there power consumption is not a problem or, as I said, doing it back at work.

Sometimes it’s just the confidence to know that it’s been recorded. As an example, that helicopter accident down at the Viaduct. I actually recorded that in the camera as well as it being recorded at work, because of the type of event that I was there for.

Ed: So you’ve got that flexibility, but I guess, if you only relied on it being recorded back at base, if your transmission went down, you haven’t got anything?

Leigh: The chances of that happening are very, very low, but yes, you are right.

Anything can happen.

have got Smartphones so they’ve got the option to take a picture and email it to me. I look at it, if you take this situation, I might want to light the big stack of timber behind me if it was still dark, so I might say “yeah, I’ll take a 2K.” Unfortunately, we can’t carry everything in the car at the same time, because we’ve only got small cars.

Ed: Now the lighting question brings me onto something that you obviously face starting your first cross at just after 6.00am and then going to 8.30am and every season of the year … light levels change all the time and I guess, can even change within one short sequence?

Leigh: Yes they do. During the winter, we would like tungsten colour for every cross and not daylight colour until 7.30am. Now we’re coming into summer, it’s the first day of spring now, a bit of a bad day today, but now I would expect the 6.08am cross to be daylight.

Ed: You say “daylight” but it’s not actually the same daylight at 6.08am as it is at 8.30am?

Ed: I’ve been sitting there in the morning and Peter has said “we can’t get Sam at the moment so I’m going to do the weather.”

Leigh: It’s live TV, sometimes things happen. You may have a problem with the signal getting out, you do a recce and something may have changed the next day at 4.30 in the morning.

You don’t know. That is a very rare occasion, but it’s live TV and things happen.

Ed: And you’ve got a good connection between the camera and the truck?

Leigh: Yes, the GigaWave gear is fantastic. Our safe working limit is 100 metres from the truck depending on the environment. We have the option of putting receivers on the end of a cable to further extend it.

We’re also using Hytera radio telephones for our coms and IFB and they’ve got a range of about 4-5k, so we’re pretty good for coverage.

Ed:

The talent keeps dry.

Lighting?

Leigh: We carry three battery operated Comer LED panels in the truck and each Cameraman has their kit available in their own cars. But in saying that, you’re pretty governed by time as to how much you can set up. As a rule we only have 20 minutes to light, audio and complete all our technical checks and often relocate … time goes very quickly. The scene we’ve got here this morning at Placemakers, Hayley has chosen not to put up too many lights, because of the number of people around who could trip over gear. So sometimes you have to cut your cloth for where you are, and on this one we’ve gone for safety – there’s a bit of wind around and too many people walking around to trip over lights. There are only two operational people there, so you just have to be a bit careful … lots of people with big umbrellas and not watching where they are going.

Ed: And you’ve got the option of bringing in extra lights – I know you were talking about having a blonde on set?

Leigh: Yes. As I said, we rely on the live assistants to tell us what we’re in for. All our live guys

Leigh: No. Colour temperature changes and, as we all know, it changes very quickly in the morning.

Sometimes we may be asked to be set up five minutes before the cross by the director and the colour temperature can change in that five minutes and you don’t have a chance to rebalance.

Ed: But hang on, who’s the director – I thought it was you?

Leigh: No, the director in the studio. They may say “right, hold that shot, don’t move, we may come to you very quickly, stand by” so for five minutes you’re standing by, you can’t balance. The light temperature doesn’t change that much, in a perfect world, you may look at it and say “oh the colour temperature’s just not right” but also …

Ed: If the director said “leave it like that” you leave it like that?

Leigh: Yes, you leave it like that, you don’t change it. At any moment, things can change, talent can walk away from the light, so they’re out of the colour temperature range which you’ve balanced for – it’s live TV and you’re dealing with people who aren’t used to

Page 52

being on TV. For example, here today, we’ve got a whole lot of builders. You may ask them to stay there and hammer that bit of wood in and one minute before you go on air they’ll move out of the light …

Ed:

Smoko time?

Leigh: It happens. We are not on a set here, we are going to somebody else’s home, place of work, and they are carrying on as they would normally do.

Ed:

So this is really “reality television”?

Leigh: This is live TV at its best; you cannot get better than that. A lot can go wrong and a lot can go right.

Ed: And that brings me to the current “climate of interest” in large sensor cameras. I’ve seen a number of reality shows that have used large sensor cameras, is this something that you have considered for Breakfast?

Leigh: Having just gone to the PMWs, I cannot see us changing for News for some time, but it’s not a question I can really answer because I may not be privy to what’s down the track. I expect to have our PMWs on the road for several years to come, so it’s not something that’s going to face us straight away. We do have small HD Sony cameras in our satellite trucks that are capable of a live cross if we need to, but it’s not something we can put a transmitter on and they’re not practical for what we want to do.

Ed: Now is there any equipment that you would like?

For example, 4G on the transmission side – is this something that you can see being of value in this situation?

Leigh: 4G, and what it enables us to do, is going to be interesting. I’ve just come back from overseas and I’ve seen some amazing stuff over there where they’ve been using 4G.

Leigh: Your shoot is live all the time, so in the old days when we would go to a press conference, the parts in between questions you’d know wouldn’t be used, you’d get cutaways and spin around. Broadcasting live to the Net takes that option out of it now. It very much changes the way you shoot things, not so many cutaways these days.

Ed:

Ed:

Yes, San Francisco has superb data coverage.

Leigh: Australia as well. I was in Australia before then and they use 4G a lot there. I don’t see that our live truck is going to disappear, but there are crosses that we may be able to do just with somebody down the barrel using 4G, but a lot depends on how 4G stacks up here and what sort of results it’s going to give us.

Overseas the Uplink backpacks are used where the boxes have got 4-5-6 or 7 bonded SIM cards in them.

They deliver fairly good results so I’m interested to see what sort of option that offers us here.

Ed: I notice that, on the live truck, you’ve got a big transmission mast with a camera on the top of it?

Leigh: Yes. We have installed a Sony PTZ camera … it offers us a wide shot of a scene. It’s not super sharp, it’s shooting through a plastic dome, but it is just one more option of shot that we can get, and it works really well.

Ed: Now one of the other areas that obviously is becoming more and more important in the whole television News workflow is that, not only are you providing live television, but you’re providing web material?

Leigh: We’re supplying it for our website at <onenews.co.nz> The last major assignment I supplied for the Net live was the Fonterra press conference. We can go live to the Net, or can go live on TV – for us there’s no difference. Supplying to the Net is a big thing that we do now.

We are a multi-platform Broadcaster … anywhere … anytime and a variety of delivery options.

Ed:

Is there any difference in the way you shoot it?

So are people watching it on their Smartphones?

Leigh: Yes, absolutely.

It’s a really growing market; we’ve got a very proactive web team and they’re keen to take anything.

Ed: But surely then, you’ve got to shoot according to what the end result is going to be? You can’t be going into fine detail at a distance, if it’s coming out on a Smartphone, you’ve got to think “well, are they actually going to see that resolution, are they going to be disturbed if I’m handholding this?”

Leigh: I shoot for 16x9 TV; that is my prime market. As to what goes on the website, they take what we can supply for them. We shoot for a TV screen, not a Smartphone.

Ed:

Oh, that’s good to know.

Leigh: Well our main market is what we do – we’re shooting for TV. We can’t shoot for Smartphone.

Ed: Now, the event today, you could Breakfast is bending over forwards to help?

say that

Leigh: “Bending over forwards” as Sir Peter Leitch would say, yes, bending over forwards. He wouldn’t be shy in saying it too. Yes. We are at PlaceMakers in Cook Street in the city and it’s the start of Prostate Awareness Month. We do this event every year; it’s a cause that TVNZ can give a bit of support to, by doing what we’re doing. It’s good because it gives us the ability of having a presence at something that wouldn’t normally get the publicity. We’ve gone to schools, we’ve gone to wee towns where people just would not have a live presence and Breakfast can do that.

Everybody is buzzing because they’ve had their chance to get on the box. It’s just fantastic for them and for us to be able to do it.

Page 53

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We’ve moved location. We’re now in the dry, in the live truck with Tate Dooner.

Ed:

Tate, you like staying dry do you?

Tate: Yes, I like to check the inside of the truck to make sure it’s okay while we’re out on shoots.

Ed: The people out in the field there, standing in the rain, if they get something wrong, can you fix it here?

Tate: It happens …

depends

Ed: No, the correct anything wrong” Tate.

on

the

answer

situation

on

is “they never

what get

Tate: Well if something fails, then I have to run out and quickly fix it if I can. But I can see it from here if something’s going wrong, so that does help.

Ed: It’s not a big truck, you’ve not got too many buttons to play with, but you’ve got a bit of backup

boundaries of what we can achieve. You can really get some really good content out of 5 or 6 crosses in a morning.

Ed: How far out of Auckland do you physically go with this truck?

Tate: With this truck we can probably only go to Pukekohe and maybe as far north as Orewa, so it’s sort of that whole Auckland geographic area. It all depends on the location though – as long as you can see the Sky Tower or the Waiatarua mountains it’s okay.

Ed: So what do you do if Breakfast wants to come out of Whangarei for example?

Tate: Well we’ve got fibre links up there that we can use, or we take the satellite truck, which can get up from basically anywhere that you can see the sky, but you can’t get out of it in the middle of town, because there’s buildings in the way. Sometimes we do take this truck out of Auckland if we want to do multicam things, because the satellite truck is only single SDI in, so it’s just one input.

Ed: So could you feed from this truck to the satellite truck?

Tate: This has got straight SDIHDI out from this truck, so we can go out of this one into the satellite truck and we can have up to five inputs to switch between.

Leigh: We sent Live 1 to the Wellington earthquake, where we had the option to utilise either the Wellington News Gigawave receivers that are installed in downtown Wellington … or patching Live 1 into an SNG truck – our satellite truck – and that then gives us the option to go live with several cameras via the SNG. Quite often, if there’s a major Breakfast event of more than one camera required for the show, we’ll take both the SNG and Live 1 ( which is what we’re sitting in now ) for the ability to do multi camera coverage.

Tate in his element.

here. You’ve got an SX tape deck and an XDCAM disc player. What do you record to if you have to record something in the truck?

Tate: We probably could record onto these decks if we needed to, but we normally don’t.

Ed: So it really is just a staging post to send the stuff to air. How do you check that you’re actually getting a signal to the studio?

Tate: The Master Control Operator will tell us if they can see us or not, but the main thing is that, if this little light is green, it means that you are good to go and things are going out. We also have an off-air monitor – that’s the key to say that “yes, we are live,” because we can see it coming back to us off-air. That is really handy, and when you can’t get off-air because of the location, it does get quite tricky.

Ed: One of the things that I’ve enjoyed about Breakfast is that you don’t set up in one location always; you can actually pick up the truck and go and set up in a new location and you’re ready to go between the crosses?

Tate: We tend to try not to move the truck if we can avoid it, but if we do need to move it, we always recce to make sure it’s good to move and, on the day before, we always check that we can get out from that location. It’s good, because it challenges us to push the

Ed: So Tate, what do you have to do to get ready for the cross – I mean, the camera’s live and they know what they’re doing out there, but do you actually have to do anything or are you just watching?

Tate: I’m more monitoring to make sure all the gear is functioning as normal. 99% of the time, it goes without question, it doesn’t fail … most of the time it’s like a battery running out or going out of range; it’s more checking that the camera back is in range, because that can be a problem. I was out at MOTAT a little while ago and they turned the overhead power lines on and it sucked all the RF out of the camera back and it was about five seconds before we went to air.

Leigh: That’s an example Grant when you said that Peter Williams read the weather on one cross recently. As far as live TV is concerned, we are under the control of everybody else out there and there’s all sorts of things that can go wrong beyond our control.

Tate: It’s things that you would not be expecting, like power lines being turned on above you, that happen to be on the same megahertz band as the RF and it just sucked it completely out of the sky. I didn’t know what happened but I just grabbed a cable and ran it out.

There’s only so much you can do in five seconds.

Ed: Tate:

Page 55

Life in the “live” lane eh?

Exactly.

NZVN

ARRI Cameras at IBC To tell us about ARRI cameras, we have Marcus Duerr.

Ed: Now Marcus, you’re a bit of a camera specialist, and I was most impressed yesterday listening to the workshop where you talked about the new camera ( which we’ll keep until later ) but in the meantime, the overall impression I gained from hearing more of the ARRI story is that, as well as this huge pedigree of German engineering that’s come from the motion picture cameras, and you’ve continued that with the ALEXA, giving it that robust status, the quality of the engineering, you know that it’s going to last … that you’ve gone down this path of one sensor and RAW files. This seems to be of great interest to the cinema photographers, that they want RAW files and they’re not so interested in the size or shape of the sensor.

First of all, just tell me – ARRIRAW, why is it so popular?

Marcus: ARRIRAW is so popular because (a) it is uncompressed RAW and (b) it is not the format which is popular, it is the result of the format which is popular.

So it transports the exceptional image quality from the sensor in a way that you don’t lose anything on the way from the sensor to your hard disc. Also, the workflow to handle ARRIRAW, even though it’s an uncompressed file, the handling is very, very easy, so you don’t need any kind of tricks and treats – you just can handle it in a straightforward manner.

Ed: Now there’s something about debayering and … well I really don’t know what “debayering” means. Can you explain?

Marcus: Ed:

Explain debayering in one sentence …?

Oh you can have two.

Marcus with a kitted ALEXA.

Marcus: throat …

Okay, I have two … coughs and clears

Ed: Have another drink. This is day one people – he’s going to be a wreck on Tuesday.

Marcus: Debayering in two sentences … the sensor has a pixel structure which does not only have RGB pixels, it has RGB plus a second green pixel and if you imagine that as an image, you won’t have a regular coloured image. So what you need to do is you need to take the pixels from the sensor which are RGB plus a second green pixel – you need to combine that to a regular RGB pixel structure and that is what you call debayering.

Ed:

Aaaah and the ALEXA is very good at that?

Marcus: It is. Debayering is one part of the story.

It’s not only debayering, there is a lot of other stuff that you do between the photos arriving on the pixel and then at the end writing a bit on the hard disc and there’s a lot of stuff done in between that.

Ed:

Technical magic in there eh?

Marcus:

Yes, absolutely.

Ed: And now the sensor … there are other companies out there talking about 4K and 4K is the future etc, etc, etc. ARRI is not going 4K, you’re sticking with one size sensor and it comes out, if you measure it the same way, as – what is it, 2.8K? Marcus: Actually the whole of the sensor is 3.4K, but what we are using for the ALEXA, for the AMIRA is 2.8K bayer size of the sensor and use that to create a 2K or an HD image size. But talking about the sensor resolution; the sensor resolution is one thing, it’s only one parameter which is then at the end resulting in an image. What we think is that the sensor – the spatial resolution of the sensor is not that important as other companies are putting it at. What is important is the image quality you see at the end. This is influenced by a lot of different parameters. Just to take one important example, dynamic range of the image in the example of the ALEXA, the 14 plus stops of dynamic range. They

The left side of the AMIRA. Page 56

are at least as important as the resolution, if not more and that is something we also showcase in our Black Box here.

We compare a 4K image with a high resolution Dolby monitor image and you gain your own impression as to what you think is the better image if you just look at it.

Marcus:

Ed: And I guess the proof of that is that something like 85% of US TV productions are being shot on the ALEXA. Okay, now on the ALEXA, you’ve got three choices of recording media, but it’s all on-board; whereas with other cameras, they require some sort of third party off-board recorder – you can handle everything on-board?

Marcus:

Marcus: Right, the ALEXA can record on a Codex capture drive internally, on the SXS card internally and now also on CFast 2.0 cards internally.

Marcus: Okay, the top three features are ProRes 444 at 120 frames a second if you use the XR capture

Yes, it’s a tool for conversion.

Ed: So you can convert the files and then use them for a production?

Marcus: Ed:

Yes.

Aaaah okay, not just the dailies?

Not just the dailies, no.

Ed: Now, still on the ALEXA, I know since whenever, any change in software has always been free – that if you buy an ALEXA camera, there’s a firmware upgrade, then that is provided free of charge. And now there’s a version 9. Are there any sort of significant features in the version 9?

Ed: And it’s all in the one case?

Marcus: It’s all in the one housing of the ALEXA XT. Ed: Aaaah, so some of the earlier versions of the ALEXA …

Marcus: The earlier versions of ALEXA included an SXS slot and for SSD based recording you had to add a Codex capture drive or another brand capture drive and record that externally.

Now with the ALEXA XT lineup of cameras that’s all included inside the camera.

Ed: Now just going back one little piece on the RAW. It was mentioned in the presentation that ARRIRAW is the best archive format. Can you explain?

The right side.

Marcus: It’s the best format for archive because it’s an uncompressed format, it is not a proprietary format, it is a non-encrypted format in that way. Perhaps ARRI would not be active in 10 years, or any company that’s doing a RAW format is not there in 10 years, but with ARRIRAW, you still have access to the files. With other files which are proprietary, if the company would not be there anymore, you wouldn’t have access to the files, or if the technology wouldn’t be there anymore you would have problems to access the files. With ARRIRAW, this is not the case, that is why we’re saying ARRIRAW is the perfect format for archiving.

Ed: Now one of the downsides of shooting in RAW is that what you see at the time, if you don’t make any changes to it, is pretty bland and there’s no intensity in the image, so you have introduced a converter – an ARRIRAW version 3 converter for the dailies?

Marcus: The ARRIRAW just is the Bayer data from where a Log C image can be created if you mean that.

Again, the debayering is a part of the process which is important for the image quality and also the transformation from Log C into Rec 709 is another aspect.

Ed: But this is a piece of software which is just for the dailies or just for viewing or offline editing, no?

drives or the new CFast 2.0 cards. The second feature is ProRes prerecording where we’re using part of the media as a buffer to continuously record the footage, and then when you push the “record” button the camera starts to record and it takes some seconds from the previously recorded material, so a time machine; and then the third feature is DNxHD 444.

So if you have a DNxHD licence, you get DNxHD 444 for free and this is a good time to buy a DNxHD licence.

Now there are a number of other features there, including self-healing metadata which allows you ... if the power drops out, or you pull the card out while you’re recording, the footage is fine, but the metadata is damaged, so you can’t record on that card anymore.

Now, if camera analyse on this card.

you put a card like that in the camera, or the wakes up and finds a card like that, it will the footage and then repair the metadata based analysis and then you can still record on the

Ed: Fantastic. Right, now we’ll get on to a new camera, and this has been eagerly anticipated.

Marcus: The new camera is the ARRI AMIRA, our new documentary style camera.

Ed: It certainly looks very nice and to me at least, one of the big features that was shown is that it goes on your shoulder?

Page 57

Marcus: The big features of the new ARRI AMIRA are, on the one side, it includes the very well-known ALEXA image quality, all the benefits you have from ALEXA with the 14 stops of dynamic range, with the subtle highlight handling, with the exceptional skin tones, with the low noise level, with the natural colour separation, colour rendering – that all is included in the AMIRA and even more all these qualities go up to 200 frames per second.

So no limitations in image quality; you have from 0.75 to 200 frames per second same image quality.

Ed: The only difference is it’s not recording RAW? Marcus: That is not the only difference.

It is recording ProRes – ProRes in all flavours, on a CFast 2.0 card, the new cards introduced from SanDisk which allow high data rates and allow these high frame rates being recorded onto the card.

Ed: It also allows standard television lenses to be used?

Marcus: Yes, there are a lot of features for AMIRA in terms of single user operation, in terms of shoulder balance.

There is the new multi viewfinder which combines an OLED eyepiece with an LED foldaway display – all that combined in one viewfinder. It includes quick access switches; it includes dovetails on top and bottom of the camera to bring the camera in perfect balance for the shoulder operation.

It also includes a complete audio section with four channels of audio input and also four audio recording channels with all the functions you need there, Phantom power line-in, digital audio and all that stuff.

Ed: And the good thing is that, because it’s targeted at documentary making, it also has a 50i capability?

Marcus: It doesn’t only support “p” frame rates, it also supports the “i” frame rates like 50i, like 59, 94i all that stuff you need for typical TV work.

Ed: And in terms of the sensor – the same as the ALEXA? Marcus: The same sensor as the ALEXA, only the next version which allows higher frame rate, but same sensor, same image size as ALEXA. Ed: So it still can be used as a cinema camera, but it also can be used as a broadcast camera?

Marcus: It can be used in whatever way you want to use it for, we’re not restricting that, but it is a 16x9 camera and it does not record ARRIRAW, it does not allow 4x3, it does not allow anamorphic de-squeeze and it doesn’t support plus functionality like lens remote control systems and that kind of stuff.

Ed: I’m sure it’s going to be a big success and hopefully we’ll see it about the middle of next year, is that right?

Marcus: It’s going to be hopefully available end of Q1, beginning of Q2 next year. That’s our plan and we hope it’s going to be a big success, yes.

NZVN

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