OCTOBER 2015
Vol 218
IBC2015 Amsterdam I have to begin this issue by sharing a photo taken on the Vitec stand of me with Sandra Bullock – well, she looks like her to me and I’d never get this close to the real thing. One year I posed with a chap in a gorilla suit so Sandra is a definite improvement. It’s nearly twice as far to Amsterdam as it is to Las Vegas. The hotels are smaller and more expensive but the show is the reason I go – not the opportunity for an evening of canal cruising with two fishnet stockinged escorts whilst enlivened by hits of “white rhino.” Once again, IBC did not disappoint. Because I conduct fewer interviews at IBC than at NAB, I have time to attend some conferences. You can find some of the keynote addresses on the IBC website http://site-73.bcvp0rtal.com/category/videos/ ibc2015-conference-keynotes Try “The Future is Now – Broadcasting in an age of Challenge” which was presented by people from the BBC, Google, the Scripps Institute ( a serious USA player – look them up ) and a Middle Eastern broadcaster. A key comment I picked up was “now we have to build technology to provide what our customers want rather than provide content to fit new technology.” Yes, there was a lot of talk including some who bemoaned the lowering of standards to anything less than hi-def broadcast as well as others who saw the future in the new “small screen” of mobile phones – the portal to instant information, veracity unassured. However, the overall mood was positive that there was still a future for broadcast ( it’s growing in the Middle East ) alongside internet and mobile, both of which have yet to find sustainable models for generating revenue.
Even the future of Netflix was challenged by studios planning to retain their content for their own streaming services. “How long will people be interested in watching back catalogue material for the most part?” was asked. But, we are interested in the technology, right? Well, there was plenty in all categories – nothing that I would say was a great leap forward but many small, significant advancements. Here are some you may be interested in available from our supporters. Read on and enjoy. ED
Canon Cameras We are at Canon for Protel with Paul Atkinson. Ed: Paul, we’ve just had a short stand tour, looking at what’s new for Canon. There is not a huge amount new, but it’s pretty significant. Obviously, there are a lot of C300 users out there, so releasing a MKII may disappoint a few, but for potential C300 Mark II users, you’ve made some really super changes. Just run us through some of those please. Paul: Many of the improvements have been made as a direct result of C300 users’ feedback. If we look at the sensor, it’s still the same size, so it’s still a super 35mm CMOS sensor. We have changed the autofocus system, so it’s still the dual pixel CMOS autofocus system, but it now covers 80% of the sensor instead of just the middle 20-25%. C300 users often said “well, I really wish I could do something higher than 8 bit.” Well now you can – you can do 10 bit, or12 bit in full HD; 10 bit or12 bit 2K, 10 bit 4K; and we can record 4K internally, which was another request. The C300 MKII can also continue to record 4K externally as a RAW – again, combining if you like, the best bits of C500 with the best bits of C300. Ed: So is the Mark II just a firmware upgrade? Paul: No, no, no. It’s got a new sensor, new processor the DIGIC DV5, and there are two of them, the monitor and monitor connection is new, the viewfinder is improved. Internally it is a very different beast with a larger body. There’s also a much more modular approach to it. The menu and Custom Picture options have been changed as have the colour space and colour matrix options within the CP menu. Ed: It’s got a designated handle I understand? Paul: The top handle on the C300 was something that didn’t really cause us problems as such, but some people experienced a little bit of loosening of the fastening point shall we say. Ed: Well I’m sure this is the case with any camera … you stick a big lens on it, you carry it around, you bounce it around a bit, that point of connection between the lens and the camera is going to suffer? Paul: It’s going to weaken. With the new design, it even goes down into the structure of the camera itself, it’s a much stronger frame. The new bracket that comes with the camera becomes a very firm fixing point for the top handle, but it also allows you to fix, for instance, an optional accessory that allows you to put a standard 15mm rod clamp onto the camera. You can
Paul with the C300 Mark II.
buy an accessory that has just the microphone connections, not the monitor. This has been asked for “could we have a separate one?” So now you can get that too. Ed: Because people don’t want to carry around all the fruit all of the time, they’ll want to minimise? Paul: In certain applications they wouldn’t want the monitor, they’re happy to use the viewfinder. Again, some people in the past have said “well, I’d use the viewfinder more, but I haven’t got a waveform monitor.” Now you have. So there are lots of things that we’ve worked on to try and make this exactly what the customers have asked for – and we think we’ve got pretty close. Ed: So really, this is more than just an upgrade? It is quite a different beast? Paul: Yes. There’s a lot of stuff in there that a C300 user will be familiar with, but there is a lot of new stuff going on as well. Ed: Now you say it will record internally to 4K … obviously there’s some sort of compression there? Paul: The recording medium now for 4K, 2K or full HD is CFAST 2.0 cards. The compression is H.264 and it’s using our XF-AVC codec. We’re still wrapping that in the MXF wrapper though. The upshot of that is, if you can already natively import your footage into your nonlinear systems, as with the C300 and the XF series, it’s still an MXF file, with a Canon wrapper, it’ll go straight in again. The other main difference is the bit rate; 4K you are looking at a maximum of 410Mbps. You can also record a 2K or Full HD Proxy file at up to 35Mbps, which is an 8 bit signal, to SD card simultaneously. You really can cover a lot of different options with this camera.
Go to https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews/ for more news.
As the man said … read on and enjoy! Page 2
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to say, but that’s its name, so that’s what we have to call it. It’s a very good system that’s been carried over from DSLR autofocus systems – very fast, very accurate autofocus system. The AF system is great for people like documentary makers, people who are doing Indies, single shooters – things like that – that use the C300 Mark II. Some people, however, would still prefer to have full control of their focus. They’re able to use the dual pixel technology with this focus assist system. This will work with any EF lens with a focus motor and it gives you an indication of whether you’re in focus or back focus, forward focus, and where you need to go, which way to move the lens. You have to see it to understand it; I think you’ll find the images are available fairly freely to see that on the website.
The inside strength of the Mark II shown here.
Ed: So it really is a totally new camera and worth another look. Now you’ve made these huge improvements in the C300 – where does that leave the C500? Paul: The C500’s still out there; it’s still being used in a lot of productions. Some people just want the C300-like simplicity if you will, with the ability just to do a 4K RAW output. If they only want to record 4K RAW, they will be happy with a C500. Ed: Can you do RAW off-board on a C300 Mark II? Paul: You could do RAW on a C300 Mark II if you wanted to, that’s no problem. And it’s worked in the same way as the C500. So again, if you already have an external recorder, it should still work with the C300 Mark II. Ed: Now on the stand, you’ve got a demo with a movie that was shot on the C300 Mark II and you’re really showing off its dynamic range here? Paul: The dynamic range is now 15 stops dynamic range with the C300 Mark II. It also has a new log curve – Canon Log2 with a base ISO of 800. It also has Canon Log and the Wide DR options as well, and each of those offers up to 15 stops of dynamic range at a lower base ISO of 400. The movie that we’re showing here is called Trick Shot and it was the promo movie that we had made for the C300 Mark II and if you do get a chance to see it, it really does demonstrate very well the capabilities of that camera in some quite tricky lighting conditions, retaining shadow and highlight detail across the full 15 stops.
Ed: From what I saw, it’s very intuitive and it’s very quick? Paul: Yes it is, it’s very quick and it’s using the dual pixel autofocus technology as a manual focus aid. The other thing you can do, is you can select the point that is being focused on throughout 80% of that sensor, using the joystick on the handle. Ed: So it’s not a case, like with a standard DSLR where you move it to the little box, you set your focus and you hold the button down and you move the frame to where you want to frame it and then you go. With this system, you move the pointer around on the screen until you pick the point, and then “click”? Paul: That’s exactly right Grant. Then if you wanted to go back to the centre, you move it back to the centre yourself. So for things like composition, especially when you’re putting people onto a proper framing composition on one of the nodal points, you can just leave your point of focus on one of the nodal points that you’re using for that particular shot, and just leave it there until you change shots. Ed: Now of course, Canon are not just renowned for the C series – you also have a wonderful little range of handheld video cameras. These have been very successful in the News gathering market I understand? Paul: That’s right. We’ve got the XA series and the XF series. Again it would depend on the market, but the XF205 is becoming much more popular now
Ed: And you are showing that off on your new monitors? Paul: Yes. We’ve got one of the first chances for people to see the new high dynamic range 4K reference monitor. I believe it’s the first time in Europe. It brings out just how much you can do with that wide and high dynamic range combination. Very, very vivid images; extremely deep colour saturation; and obviously very high contrast as well. Ed: And on another stand we saw an improved focus assist for the C300 Mark II which really does seem to be a big step up? Paul: I mentioned earlier that we’ve increased the dual pixel CMOS autofocus to 80% of the sensor. That’s quite a mouthful Page 3
within News gathering and documentary. It’s a small lightweight camera; it’s got an incredible zoom lens on it that we discussed when we spoke last year. We have 20X optical zoom. This year we’ve added the capability to do live internet streaming through IP. This means that you can get footage back to the Newsroom very quickly and then you can again with the original system have recorded an MP4 file simultaneously, where we could email that almost back to start the News process – now we can actually connect via a third party device or through software on a laptop, and send material straight back to the Newsroom. Ed: Is that an adjustable bitrate stream or fixed? Paul: It’s very much a fixed bitrate stream with three options; 9Mbps or 4 Mbps at 1280 x 720 with 1.5Mbps at 640 x 360 available via the software option. Ed: The reason I bring up the point of News gathering is that I’ve recently seen television programmes on the CI channel or Discovery – one of those ones – where your little camera was used in a slightly covert situation. The subject didn’t know that they were being recorded for television, because this guy looked as though he was the person’s cousin with a little handycam and he was videoing this for the family, and they got away with it – yet the quality of the pictures was brilliant. My point here is – is this still a situation where you have to overcome the ingrained belief by broadcasters that, unless the camera is big, heavy and goes on the shoulder, it’s not a proper broadcast camera? Paul: I think that thought is less common these days. I think people have begun to realise that, although the large shoulder-mount camera still obviously has its place, in certain situations, that look is going to bring unwanted attention to you. Ed: Like on the streets of Tokyo? Paul: Well not necessarily the streets of Tokyo, but if you think in particular of some of the war zones that people find themselves in. Media has never had as much access into conflict as before and unfortunately, a big camera with a big crew can incur big costs. It also incurs a lot of danger. This is kind of “off topic” here, but if you think about it, if you’re going in with a big camera you’re quite obviously a journalist. Does this make you more susceptible to kidnap because you work for a big rich News organisation? If you’re not wanting to advertise the fact that you’re going into an area as a journalist, something like the XA20 can be quite easily taken as being just an enthusiast’s video camera, yet it still gives you the quality of the image that’s required for the final output. I personally think there’s a market for both types of camera. As you know, we do concentrate on the smaller more portable cameras – the biggest camera in the range is the XF305 which, despite its age, is still a remarkably popular camera. There are an awful lot of them out there and they’re still being used as a good general workhorse day in, day out. Ed: And it’s probably better for the broadcasters to use that sort of camera than the journalist’s iPhone? Paul: Again you’re finding the journalists are becoming their own camera ops now. Is it costs – yes, it possibly is. If you look at the XF205, that’s a camera that can be used by a seasoned professional and experienced camera operator in fully manual mode. When necessary, it can be switched to automatic and the less experienced camera operator can still get a viable result. Ed: And last on the list was a very specialised camera which won’t be on the shelves any day soon, but shows the capabilities that Canon has in low light? Paul: I think it’s fair to say that we’ve had a bit of a reputation which really came to light through the
A demo of the ME20F-SH low light camera.
Cinema EOS range about the low light capabilities of our cameras. We’ve taken that slightly further with the ME20F-SH. This is a very specialised camera with a maximum ISO of around about 4 million equivalent in decibel terms. Actually, when we were preparing the material for that, the people who write the manuals and our marketing material phoned me up and said “can you correct the typo, because you seem to have put 4 million ISO” and I said “it’s not a typo!” In Lux terms, you can come down to .0005 Lux. This is pretty much a cloudy night with a little bit of moon behind that cloud. The upshot is that you can see in almost complete darkness in full colour. As you said Grant, the camera is going to be quite specialised. It’s not going to be something that you can just walk into a shop and buy. Ed: But we would hope that the R&D that went into developing it will have a flow on effect into the range as the years go by? Paul: I think it’s fair to say that most major manufacturers like ourselves will always try and utilise that technology for the greater good, as well as for the specialised applications, but it is going to be a very specialised camera. You’ve seen the results for yourself, especially things like the Northern Lights … it’s giving people a capability that’s just not available anywhere else. Ed: Well thank you for your time Paul. Protel a New Zealand reseller advises they have already supplied several C300 MK11 cameras and the customers are delighted with their purchase; more are to be supplied in the next shipment in October. Why not call Protel to discuss your camera requirements. NZVN
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Lupo Lighting To introduce the Lupo story from IBC, we have David Barnard from Gencom. Ed: Now David, what’s important for Gencom now is that there has been a merger of two of the Lupolux / Lupolight companies? David: Yes that’s right. Lupolux and Lupolight have been separated for a number of years and they each have their own special area of expertise. They have come back together as one company and we’re very excited that now we can offer a full range of the LED Fresnels as well as the LED flat panels, plus the traditional HMI fluorescent lights that they’ve been known for, for many years. So now, by combining the panels and the Fresnels, we feel we can provide a really good range, a complete solution for a variety of shooting applications.
David Barnard in front of the Lupo stand at IBC.
Ed: And in a very short time, these have been picked up by some major people in New Zealand I understand? David: Yes that’s right. TVNZ has adopted them for a number of their News gathering applications, a number of their stringers have been using them as well, and they’ve been preaching the gospel for us, so we’re very thankful to them for that.
Ed: So what is it that the stringers particularly like about the product? David: Well they’re very lightweight, they’re costeffective, the quality of the light is very even … Ed:
It’s a good bang for the buck?
David: It’s a good bang for the buck – they’re battery operated and very energy-effective.
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We are now talking with the people at Lupo – the “lux” and the “light” have gone and we have Carlo Lupo who is going to tell us about the full range. Ed: Carlo, first of all, the panels, this is new for us in the Lupo range, but not new for you? Carlo: No, it’s not new for me and even for the market. We have manufactured this kind of LED panel for many years. The most important feature is the colour rendering index. We have been the first worldwide to have a colour rendering index higher than 94 and so the colour is perfectly balanced without green cast. We have a complete range that is with fixed colour temperature or variable colour temperature. That means we can change the colour from tungsten to daylight continuously with all the colour temperatures in the middle. They can work with an AC adapter or with V-Mount batteries for many hours, so they are very suitable for TV studios and ENG operation. You can go outside with the small batteries. There is a low cost version with a fewer number of LEDs and there is a high luminous output version with a larger number that then increases the power. They are very lightweight because they are made of nylon with carbon fibre. Ed: Aaaah so it’s not metal, it’s a nylon carbon fibre combination?
Carlo on the Lupo stand.
Carlo: Ed:
It’s very sturdy and resistant.
And it’s not going to melt?
Carlo: No absolutely not because firstly, LEDs are quite cold generally and, secondly, this material goes to 150 degrees. Ed: But it also looks well ventilated, lots of holes in it to let the air through? Carlo: Yes there is the air to keep it cool. Along with the panels, we have bags with space for the panel and space for the accessories. Ed: Do you have your own accessories for this or are you subcontracting the accessories to another company? Carlo: No, we have our own accessories that we mount; reflector plate and the barn doors, the diffuser filters and it is all manufactured by us in Italy. Ed:
It’s one complete package?
Carlo:
Yes, exactly.
Ed: Okay, so that’s the 1x1 panel – do you have plans to make bigger panels? Carlo: No, because usually the light is enough and you can make them in a multiple … Ed: You just put more of them up – fair enough. Now in the Fresnels? Carlo: In addition to the existing range of the 650 and 1000 Watt, we have the dual colour versions. This is the same Fresnel but with the possibility to vary the colour temperature from tungsten to daylight and the new super powerful model DAYLED is equivalent to 2000 tungsten, so it’s impressive. Ed: And again, the casing is all nylon carbon fibre, so low weight, but sturdy. So these also come in a kit with a bag? Carlo: With a bag and V-mount adapter. These are Fresnels which can be powered with batteries. This is important because they are very lightweight and you can move them quickly and easily, differently to the competitor’s Fresnels which are very heavy and difficult to transport. Ed: But you’re not stopping there, you’re also doing fluoro panels? Carlo: Yes we make a complete range of fluorescent lights for TV studios and video. They are Page 7
engineered all the recent products of Cartoni. The father now is 95 and unfortunately is in poor health, but he is really a presence in the hearts of the people in the company. We just came out here at IBC with an unbelievable range of new products. We have decided to concentrate in one world, one family, one focus – the Focus range which is the ENG tripod range running from 8 kilo maximum payload up to 22 kilo. We have 4 products, Focus 8, Focus 12, Focus 18 and Focus 22. These 4 products are now covering the whole range of needs served for the customers in terms of payload, and from 0-8, from 0-12, from 6-18 and from 3-22. More than this I think Cartoni couldn’t really develop. Panels on and off.
very powerful with a beautiful diffusion light and they are supplied complete with barn doors and bulbs included. Additionally, they also have accessories like honeycomb grids, filter holders and padded bags and so on. Ed: There are some big broadcasters around the world who are purchasing Lupo lights? Carlo:
Oh yes.
NZVN
We have decided to really understand first of all what the market requirements are … we had so many products, we had so many names, the market says “let’s concentrate on a few products, standard products and one single name”. And which was the best name – Focus – so Focus is the new Cartoni brand name. Ed: I’ve been through the factory myself and I can assure you that the passion that I saw there from the staff in putting together the tripods and the heads – it was a pleasure to see.
Cartoni Support For Gencom we are at Cartoni with Luciano Belluzzo. Ed:
We just also redesigned the image of our fluid heads. We put on a new logo, which is really attractive, and this shows how Cartoni is slowly, but progressively, changing from the past. We just became more open to the market.
This is a very special time for Cartoni?
Luciano: Yes it is. Cartoni has been in business for 80 years now. The story is unbelievable. Everything started from the grandfather of Elisabetta and her sister, the current owners, and going through the father and her father was the guy who really designed and
Luciano: I tell you something. You are the first one to know and all the readers they will know. You know Isabel and Jacques they are two entrepreneurs. Jacques is also a director. They have made a film, a movie about the family story. There are 18 minutes of Cartoni history – history from the very beginning, so we are talking about 1935 up to now, and it’s a really touching history, because you are seeing the history of Cartoni, of the founders, the history of the people who have been starting working with the founders up to now. Now they are almost going to be retired and they are still working with a smile on their faces. That makes Cartoni different from other manufacturers. We are a family company. We know we are small, we know we have to grow, but we still keep our values – ethical values, moral values – which makes Cartoni different.
Elisabetta Cartoni with Luciano. Page 9
Ed: How I see that being expressed is with product support. I know of stories where something happens to a tripod, it gets run over
by a truck or something, and even though your factory is in Italy, the support and the repairs, everything is done in a reasonably quick time and in a perfect way. You don’t get that with the mass market manufacturers of tripods? Luciano: As a family company, we keep very close and friendly contacts with our dealers. We believe that we have dealers who are coming with the same history as the company. So companies that have been growing up and distributing broadcast equipment materials share the same values as us. Ed: Because Gencom has been supplying Cartoni tripods to the New Zealand market since whenever? Luciano: Yes, many years, in New Zealand and even in Australia. I am so happy when we have a correspondence and we talk in the night with David on the Skype because there are 12 hours difference and even though there aren’t so many technical problems, or commercial problems, everything is dealt with and managed in a friendly way and this is transferred to the end user.
with the salesman or the distributor because we feel better. Direct contact makes things easier.
The end user finds Cartoni and the Cartoni partner to be really user-friendly people. People who are there to help you to make your best movie, your best pictures, that makes the difference. Also, because we are manufacturing, as you know, everything from the biggest parts to the small particulars, we are quick in delivery, so if a customer needs some spare parts, in two days, the spare parts have been gone by DHL or TNT with an express package. That makes the difference. Of course, we are not a huge company, a big group which is highly complicated. We are very easy people. I’m talking with the end user, I’m talking
Ed: Now, for the big boys, there’s a very large Cartoni tripod here, the MAGNUM?
Ed:
Because that’s all you do – tripods and heads?
Luciano: We only do tripods, heads and pedestals – and pedestals which are also one of the master, the best, the fast moving item for us, for TV studios and OB vans.
Luciano: Yes, the MAGNUM goes up to 95 kilo weight, so it’s a very strong head, but still highly performing and all the OB van manufacturers are now testing it and we made very good contacts with them. We are expecting good results next year, customers’ feedback is very positive and they really appreciate our product. I’m pleased to tell you that a quite big famous company like GEARHOUSE BROADCAST has decided to use Cartoni MAGNUM system in all their branches. They also exhibited here in their booth at Amsterdam a couple of MAGNUM systems. This is a fantastic opportunity for Cartoni to supply such a worldwide recognised company in OB vans and TV Studio supplies. It’s a special segment of the market but high, high value products. Ed: And it’s something that, if you happen to have a 3D rig, it’s the sort of weight that this would hold perfectly? Luciano: What we’re going to do in the future is to put, in each of our heads, the place for the encoder so the operator can be far away from the camera, they can move the camera remotely. That’s the future. We don’t make electronics … electronics is something for somebody else, but we are just allowing the people to use our heads also for the electronic and remote control applications. We are small, but we never stop, we never sleep in the night. We are always thinking what to do about the future. NZVN
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Avid For Atomise, we are at the Avid stand with Richard Kelly and Ren Middleton. Ed: Richard, I know you’ve been very busy in Auckland recently, with your Auckland man, doing a big installation which I’m sure we’re going to hear more about in the months to come, but we’re here at IBC to have a look at what’s new and hot from Avid. What’s excited you so far? Richard: It’s great, there’s certainly a lot of momentum with Avid with their new purchase of Orad completing their suite of products. This year I guess, is all about adding capability to the Avid suite of applications and the platform itself.
Ren and Richard.
Ed: So in the past, have you had to incorporate Orad into installations that you’ve done, or have you left that up to the client? Richard: For me personally, it’s been up to the client at this point. I haven’t really chased that sort of level of product. Ed:
So you’ve got to learn something new now?
Richard: Well hopefully, I’ll get to learn something new – I like learning new things. I’m wondering how far we could push this product. I was talking to Ren about this yesterday and whether we could use it for virtual sets or TV and film pickups for example. I’m interested in learning a bit about this – it was quite impressive. Ed: Ren, is it a case that this is only for the big boys or could some of the smaller installations benefit from including Orad into their mix? Ren: Orad has a broad range of products, everything from relatively inexpensive character generators for your smaller television stations, Education facility, or House of Worship etc., but they also have products for broader production companies and even Stadiums. For instance we have different products to control things like video walls in the background of studio sets or big screens at stadiums and the like. Then we go all the way up through to very high end virtual reality and augmented reality, to really push and achieve the very highest production levels. So there’s a raft of products. There’s already integration with Media Composer and iNews and integration will only get tighter between traditional Avid and Orad products. Ed: So this is going to be of benefit to a major Avid user because of the integration? Ren: Yes. Orad is very capable and world leading in a lot of areas, but also they already had existing integration with a lot of Avid products. We’ve already developed some more integration – things like, if you have clips that you want to play within graphics, we can pull those clips out of the ISIS environment. We have tight integration with iNEWS, so from a template
window within an iNEWS system, a journalist can type titles within the same interface and associate that with the news story that will then be presented on-air when the story is played out for instance. So, as mentioned, we’ve got some nice integration points that will only get tighter. Ed: Now there is an iNEWS story here that has been around for some years, but really has now I believe come of age and shown its true potential, with media now being widely distributed … take The Paul Henry Show for example, on TV, on the internet and by radio. iNEWS makes this work really, really well? Ren: Well iNEWS is part of the MediaCentral Platform so from one single interface, you can do all of your scripting for News in a newsroom computer system, plus you can add vision – you can cut video on this same web based interface. Then if you want to send that to social media from the same interface you can, and that will take the scripting information and the video information and then publish that to Facebook or Twitter and things like that. So it’s a very powerful integrated system with iNEWS and the whole MediaCentral Platform. We can even build workflows to and from Radio systems. Ed: Alright – so what else has excited you from Avid that you’ve seen so far Richard? Richard: I guess the thing that’s excited me is actually what arrived in my office the day before I left – the ISIS | 1000. I believe Atomise has received the first unit that has arrived in Australasia and Richard Tomlinson called me up the first time he went into the office after I left and said “by the way, I’ve opened it up, I’ve set it up and it’s running.” He’s never seen one before, he just took out the pamphlet and set it up cold. It took about 2530 minutes, so that’s very cool. I’m looking forward to seeing our new demo toy when we get back. We’re doing a launch function for that in October in Auckland, so hopefully you’ll come along and join us for that Grant. Ed:
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Exactly. So who’s going to have the first one?
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Auckland ISIS | 1000 / Atomise Auckland Launch Event 21 October 4-6pm (drinks and nibbles after our presentation) Snapdragon Bar, Viaduct Harbour RSVP to theo@atomise.co.nz
Avid Certified Techical Training Courses Atomise Limited is a certified Avid Learning Partner delivering Avid Certified Support Representative technical level training. Avid Certification helps professionals attain and demonstrate the skills and credentials they need to increase their value, competency, and efficiency in the highly competitive media industry. Held in our Wellngton training room, our next courses are: MC400 - ACSR Edit Support 9-11 November 2015 (self study is required prior to classroom time) WG422/425 ACSR ISIS 5500/7500 16-20 November 2015 WG433 ACSR Interplay Support 7-11 December 2015 Contact us for more info and to book a place on these courses. Prerequisite skills may be required for some courses.
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Richard: Well that’s a very good question. We’ve got five quotes out there for 1000s at the moment. Ed:
So the first one who sends you a cheque gets it?
Richard: The first one who sends a cheque gets it, yes. This is actually our demo unit. Atomise has built up quite a demo and training environment just recently, so something that’s just happened is I’ve been certified to be a technical instructor. Ed: I knew that finally you’d be certified Richard – good to know the system works. Richard: That’s right – certifiable, yeah! We now have a training room downstairs at our Wellington office with ISIS 5500, ISIS | 1000, Interplay and MediaCentral | UX. So we’ve got a very nice environment for tests and training – it’s quite a meaty rack of equipment. Ed:
There’s nothing like a meaty rack eh Ren?
Ren: Yes, I love a meaty rack … reminds me of dinner last night. I think the other thing with ISIS | 1000 and we’re really excited about it, is because it’s priced very, very well. But it’s also not just for Media Composer users – so Adobe users or Final Cut Pro users can all connect to this one system and it makes it a very powerful solution for some of those users who need a combined editing platform. Ed: Which adds to the evidence of Avid getting more open with the television industry. It’s not a closed shop anymore where you have to buy Avid hardware, you have to only have Avid software or it has to be certified … there is now an openness that you can use other nonlinear editing systems with an ISIS system and a range of other Avid material, and it all works together. Ren: Correct and that’s part of our strategy. I think Avid used to be known as a fairly closed shop, but we have around 400 active partners that we work with – we have the MediaCentral Platform and the whole idea of it is openness. We have the MediaCentral connectivity tool kit containing many different API’s and ways of connecting with third party products so we’re very, very open.
Ed:
Is that good for you at Atomise Richard?
Richard: It’s very good, it’s great and it gives us a chance to do what we do best which is storage solutions and helping people set up workflows. We can expand what we do for people who don’t necessarily use Media Composer. Obviously Media Composer is a core competency for what we do and now we can really branch out and offer people who may choose not to use Media Composer, but may want to take advantage of the benefits of having Atomise supporting their storage solution with the experience that we have. To that end, we’ve actually got another staff member joining us in Auckland in a couple of weeks’ time, who is an incredibly respected engineer and trainer. So my expectation is that we’re going to be doing an awful lot in that market and around that space. Ed: And I guess it’s a case that, if the facility decides they want to use something other than Media Composer, they can always have a Media Composer in there and learn to use it and maybe find “okay, we will migrate at some future date”? Richard: We can certainly make that very easy for anybody. With many operations, a lot of people have a large selection of tools and when you’ve got such an open storage platform with ISIS, it’s a great opportunity to try several different products. One may suit a workflow better than another, but in the end, we can give a very, very tight, very, very managed performance-wise capability at a low price point now. Ed: Anything else that they’ve announced here of interest? Richard: It’s not announced here, it was announced at NAB, but it’s just coming to shipping time, and that’s the DNxIO which is the replacement video IO box for the Nitrus DX. It’s a fully featured video IO, so it covers all the video formats in terms of SD through to HD and it’s also 4K native. It incorporates natively the Avid DNx codecs which allows it to have the performance required for challenging 4K workflows. Ed: So why is this an improvement over what was there before – is it just the 4K capability? Richard:
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The 4K capability and of course it increases the performance. The Nitrus DX was around for a long period of time and it was a very solid box. The technology, in terms of how the boxes actually work and the capability of the host computers, has changed. It was just time for a refresh to bring that up to date for more current workflows. Obviously, we’ve got some really challenging workflows with high bandwidth 4K now, so it’s really great to have a heavily integrated solution that we can plug in and we know it’s going to work every single time. That’s one of the reasons people buy Avid branded hardware, is we know that every time you turn the button on, it is NZVN going to do the job.
Windows 10 Upgrade? Stuart Barnaby at DVT has been my “go to” computer support person for many years. So he should be – he sold it to me. Ed: Stuart, I keep getting these little messages on my Windows 7 editing machine saying “Free upgrade to Windows 10”. Is this a good idea? Stuart: It’s a great idea. Over the years, we’ve found with different operating systems coming out from different vendors – and this applies to Apple as much as it does to Windows – that there are certain operating systems that work more stably and more reliably with different versions of the creative applications that we’re using, whether it’s Final Cut or Adobe Premiere or DaVinci Resolve, etc. What we’ve found in the last few years is that things are generally improving much quicker than they were in the past. Everyone knows that Windows 7 64 bit is a very stable platform to run on, but so equally is Windows 8.1 Pro – that is a very stable and reliable platform now for running all our creative applications. Microsoft have obviously done a lot of work with Windows 10, a lot more testing than they probably have done in the past. Why is Windows 8.1 Pro the last stable release? Because they cocked up Windows 8. It wasn’t properly tested to the extent that it perhaps should have been. Windows 10 has really only just come out in the last short period of time. We’ve run Windows 10 on a number of machines with a range of our creative applications, and we’ve found it to be remarkably reliable – in fact, virtually no different from Windows 8.1 Pro running the same applications. We haven’t seen any performance changes, but we’re not really expecting terribly much – same memory, same CPU, same hard drives under the hood, just a different operating system. But yes, Windows 10 so far looks very good. If you’re working in a production environment, I’d still pause for a wee while to see how things settle down, but so far so good, it looks really, really good. Ed: Now you were saying earlier that it’s especially true for new applications from other vendors that when they write these new applications, they will optimise them for the latest operating system – in other words Windows 10 – so, going forward it might not give you any improvement in performance for the current applications that you have, but certainly with new applications, there should be a big difference? Stuart: Oh absolutely. One of the key things that software vendors first do when a new operating system comes out – certainly the pre-release stuff with Windows 10 – is that everyone from Avid, Adobe, Autodesk, will test their products on the preview version of Windows 10. Their primary goal, I guess, when Windows 10 is released, is that they get any remaining issues sorted out as quickly as possible. But then what the software vendors have an opportunity to do is to optimise their software moving forward on that new platform. They know there’s a lot of pressure coming from users to make sure that their software is working the best it can on the latest operating systems and so it seems to me that most software vendors first test for the latest operating system, so that they can then say to their customers “well, if you’ve got a problem, upgrade to the latest stuff then we’ll consider your
problems.” That seems to be how they work and probably would be the way I would do it as well. That means that, if you are still running Windows 7, which is now two generations old, as time goes by, the software vendors will become less and less interested in you and more and more interested in making sure that Windows 10 and perhaps 8.1 Pro is stable. I might also add that Apple have now done the same thing with Yosemite. Yosemite now seems to be a really solid reliable robust platform for running all of our creative applications on as well. So it seems to me that in the next month or two, we’ll have both Yosemite on the Apple platform and Windows 10 on the Windows platform being the prominent platforms for running our creative applications. Ed:
And if you’re still running XP?
Stuart: Haha – too late. You’re probably not doing commercial work anyway. Ed: Now of course if you’re a little bit worried about this, is there any way that you can install Windows 10 but keep your 7 there? Stuart: Yes, If you’ve upgraded a PC to Windows 10 — not performed a clean install, but an upgrade — you’ll have an easy option that lets you revert to the last version of Windows. To access this, open the Start menu and select Settings. Click the “Update & security” icon and select “Recovery.” You should see a “Go back to Windows 7″ or “Go back to Windows 8.1″ option. But with most Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines it pops up the little Windows icon down in the taskbar saying you qualify for a free upgrade for Windows 10, we’ll schedule this for you, it automatically downloads the Windows 10 upgrade in the background. I’ve done this on a number of machines and it has worked flawlessly, both one on a Mac running Boot Camp – a 5K Retina iMac running Boot Camp – and we’ve done it here on our HP workstations as well without any issues at all. It’s been great. So it certainly seems to be a very smooth process to move forward. I would think very carefully before upgrading any operating system and there’s lots of people you can talk to like us, to get advice about your applications, so yeah, give us a call first would be my suggestion. DVT NZVN 09-525-0788.
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Datavideo For Protel, we’re at Datavideo and we have Valentijn Diemel from The Netherlands. Valentijn: Since NAB, Datavideo have developed two new converters – the DAC-90 which is an audio de -embedder. You can choose up to 16 SDI audio channels to de-embed and put them on Mini XLR outputs, so you can de-embed all four groups of channels and have them as a Mini XLR on the back. It will come with two pigtail connector cables ( these are little converter plugs ) from Mini XLR to regular XLR. Ed: Who would be the big users of this product? Valentijn: I think this will be used in field-side recording when somebody uses an on-camera microphone and later wants to de-embed this and send it to audio mixing. Next to that, we have his bigger brother the audio embedder, which does exactly the opposite, but it also has support for unbalanced audio as an input and you can embed it as two channels on SDI. This is done the other way around, after audio mixing or maybe some other source that you want – an unbalanced source that you want to use on your SDI channel. Ed: Now what I’ve noticed here, and I’ve probably seen this before, but there’s a very nifty rack that all of these products fit into, since they’re now all the same size and I know my DAC-10 wouldn’t fit into this? Valentijn: DAC-10 is something that was created before we went with a universal converter design. Ed:
Oh yes, its many years old, but it still works fine.
Valentijn: Well our products just keep on working. We have made all our converters in the same form factor now which gives us the possibility to mount them in a rack. We have an 8 converter rack mount with a central power distributor, so you have one time DC in 12 Volt and there are 8 power connections on the front and 8 on the back. So no matter what direction you mount your converter in, you could always access the power supply without running cables to your rack. Ed:
That’s very neat.
Valentijn: Yes, it’s very nice. What we also have more of is remote production. With our SE-1200 6 channel remote control switcher, we can now control it from a laptop with a network wire. So a single network connection from your laptop into the wall outlet. The RMC-180 which is controlling our dome cameras is connected to the laptop through USB and you have HDMI out from the laptop to a different monitor which runs the multi-viewer. So you have camera control, recorder control, switcher control and a multi-viewer all through one single RJ45 cable, which gives you the possibility to control anything in your setup remotely. So if you are running several different classrooms, you can operate them from one location without pulling all the wires like RS232 and SDI and everything. You can just use your regular network connection which is already there in most buildings.
Valentijn with a nice rack.
We also have our IP video decoder and IP video encoder, that’s the NVS-25 encoder and NVD-20 or 25 decoder, which are now able to find each other over the internet using a simple free software solution called DVS-100. This connects both units over the internet, so it’s possible that you run the encoder somewhere in your home and you run the decoder somewhere else, maybe in New Zealand for instance, and over the internet, these units can find each other. What we also have is DVS-100 Pro which is the professional solution and that is basically your own YouTube version. You can livestream your broadcast, people can tune in, you have video on demand for a pre-recorded broadcast; you can also use pay per view if you want to make some profit out of it. Ed: I’m continually amazed every time I come and do these interviews at Datavideo that, not only do you have new products, but they’re actually really clever new products – and it’s not just one, it’s a number of them. You must have a huge R&D department or is it just Jack? Valentijn: It is just Jack! No, we have quite a large R&D department and one of the things that Datavideo is excellent in is taking existing solutions and making them smarter and more affordable or by using them in a smarter way. Ed: Okay, what’s next … we saw this HDR-10 with Shuttle control at NAB in a prototype form, but now you’re shipping this field recorder? Valentijn: Yes. This is a really small field site replay recorder. There is always a 30 second cache running and, at any time, you can say “okay, now is an interesting point starting” and, whenever it’s finished, you can trim it, you can remove or replace the mark in and mark out positions and then you end up with a nice replay clip. Ed: And of course, it’s recorded the timecode of the whole recording, so if you decide that you want another 3 seconds on that, you can go back to the original and away you go? Valentijn: Yes. Ed:
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So very useful for, I guess, a small OB van?
Valentijn: A small OB van and the thing I saw recently, I was watching a documentary about flight attendants and when they study to be attendants they train in a recreated airplane and they serve people. So you have 4 cameras installed around the plane, you have 4 of these HDR-10s to capture and replay exciting moments, or moments that went wrong. Ed: Without having to go through all of the footage from 4 cameras? Valentijn: Or without buying a really expensive ISO replay recorder … they are terribly expensive. This is a shipping product now. Ed: I know that your little remotely mounted cameras have really come of age and now you’ve gone away from the basic black? Valentijn: A lot of people asked for white cameras. Why? In conference halls, the ceiling is white; in churches, the ceiling is white often. If you have a black dome camera, to quote a Dutch saying “It’s a needle in your eye” because it’s always there. If you look at it it’s really nice, it could easily be an iCamera from Apple because it’s just a nice bright white colour. So in the future we are considering having the option of white as a shipping product. Ed:
Okay, anything new in the mixer field?
Valentijn: No, apart from the SE-700 which you saw at NAB, we have nothing new in the mixer field. We are working on some new mixers – the SE-2800 which is our biggest at the moment, 8 or 12 input HD mixer. We are updating it, we are making sure that it’s up to spec with the other line of mixers, so we need to think about maybe a built-in title interface, like we have on the 2200 series. Ed:
And another little box?
Valentijn: Well obviously, it’s converter sized, because it just can fit in the housing. This is the DVP-100 – we call it DV Prompter Pro. It creates a little Wi-Fi network so you can connect regular iPads or Android tablets to it. So you have a ring of tablets and these tablets all run the same script as teleprompters. We have the teleprompter solutions in here and you see it’s running the script, but the one for the other camera is running the same script – maybe the director wants to have the script as well. The configuration of this goes on a laptop and the one running the scripts can also edit in real time the scripts and they will directly be distributed to all the tablets connected. Ed:
That’s a clever solution?
Valentijn: Yes, that’s a true professional teleprompter solution, which is quite unique, because we are running it on just iPads you know. How much does a regular teleprompter set you back – $3000-$5000? Ed:
And then to have to sync all your teleprompters?
Valentijn: So you need the server to sync them all – I mean DV Prompter Pro installed on your iPad or Android Tablet, the software price is $958.00NZ+GST, and you then have a prompter network solution. Ed:
It’s shiny and white.
But wait, there’s more?
Valentijn: Yes for a considerable amount of time the industry has needed power distributors for camera power, we have look-back monitors you mount on the camera, we have intercoms that go to your camera, we have all sorts of data-cables constantly lying over your studio floor. We had several different types of multicables, but they weren’t all satisfactory. We have now created the CCU-100 which basically packs your coms, packs your data distribution, packs your power Page 18
your intercom belt pack. It’s a really nice solution and for $10,040.00NZ+GST you get the four AD-2 units and four RMC-240 camera break out units excluding the cables. So you have a full 4 camera solution with only 4 cables over the floor. Ed: Wow. So is this something that would be a good retrofit for an existing studio? Valentijn: Well it’s more or less made for studios that want to upgrade their performance. They want to get rid of all the cables and don’t want to invest in something like optic fibre which is really expensive. This is the perfect solution in between for smaller studios, maybe OB vans … you don’t want to have fibre lying around over the streets, because whenever a car drives over your fibre, it’s bye-bye fibre and you need to buy a new cable. Ed: And how long can you run this cable – what’s the maximum length?
The DV Prompter Pro from Datavideo.
distribution, your look-back, tally signals, all into one cable. It’s a proprietary design from Datavideo; it’s a 17 wire cable, which is really flexible so this can go onto your studio floor, it’s no thicker than one centimetre. It can run up to 100 metre to your camera and, fitted on the camera, we have the AD-2 breakout box which breaks out all the signal cables to your camera and to
Vitec Litepanels For Protel, we are at Vitec with Dan Muchmore. Ed: Dan has just stumbled into this interview and he’s been named the man to tell us about Litepanels? Dan: I shouldn’t be so keen should I? Ed: No – you’ll learn. Dan: From April at NAB and going into this show, we launched a couple of new products, the first one being the Caliber. It’s a daylight, 3-light kit designed very much for the independent content creator market – so YouTubers for example. It comes as a 3 light set, 3 sets of mouldable tripods, gels, diffusers, all in the same kit. Ed: That’s probably a bit confusing for people who are used to Litepanels because it’s not a light “panel” is it. It’s actually quite “spotty”? Dan: It is – in fact it’s very spotty. We have full control on the spread, but it is moving us away from a studio market into the independent market where they don’t need a full Fresnel or a full 1x1 panel itself. In terms of power supply, you can choose mains or battery operated from double A’s.
Valentijn: 100 metre. Actually, it gave us a lot of headaches to create it to run 100 metre, because 100 is the maximum limit for SDI, but we made it with ultralow oxygen, copper. Ed: Thank you Valentijn and for all readers don’t forget to call Protel for additional information on NZVN Datavideo products in New Zealand.
take the focus on that Caliber and dial it up to match – for instance, as in China when they brought out a Dedo kit, they meet the same beam angle then they see the intensity value unit to unit. That’s a really great way of comparison. It’s unfortunate because so many people that we talk to, they want to know “hey, what’s this equivalent to?” and if you think about lighting directors or gaffers, the tendency is that nobody uses light raw. The reality is that hard light is an effect light, so if you’re doing a period piece, you’re going to have hard light. Otherwise, you’re going to put diffusion on it; you’re going to take it down on a rheostat; you’re going to add colour to it. Ed: So in this case, it was equivalent to what – 250? Dan: Yes, a 250 Dedo is how they compared it in Beijing at the rental company. It’s a great product – just the availability of being able to adjust the spread with a small either static power or battery operated light. This will run on 6 AA batteries, and it’s a fantastic
Ed: Wow – now that’s handy. Dan: It also has a P-Tap on there to take the power off as well. Ed: So obviously, with that sort of power consumption, it must be LED? Dan: That’s correct. All our lights are LED. Ed: Dan, can you expand more about the beam angle? Dan: In making comparisons in light output from different manufacturers, people forget to actually look at the beam angle. Some may be at 70 degrees; some may be at 54 degrees. In a good comparison, you can Page 19
bicolour options. As part of the Astra family, we now have 8 different models. All these units come supplied without the modules, so there are optional modules for DMX over RJ45, DMX over XLR5, or Bluetooth. This Astra here has a Bluetooth module in the back. The Bluetooth module allows you to control the light either individually or gang lights together. Ed:
They look fairly rugged?
Dan: They’re almost indestructible. Pat’s famous demo is to drop them on the floor at the trade shows – not this nice soft floor but … Ed: A bit of concrete? Dan: A bit of concrete – he loves it. It gets a bit wearing after a while, hearing the thing crashing all the time. So that’s the EP there – daylight. Ed: And there’s even an on-camera light from Litepanels? Dan: This is brand new for IBC. We’ve not had an onboard Light for a little while now, so this is using the same LED technology that we have in the Astra. It’s IP65 full waterproof … as you see from the box we have a light submerged in water. The IP65 has an aluminium cast casing, bicolour, so we have the intensity and then the colour temperature as well, so daylight through to tungsten. I think it’s equivalent to a 250. Ed: And this is really for a larger style camera, because I imagine the power consumption is beyond a handycam on this? Dan: Yes, I would say for the ENG size onwards. There’s a P-Tap on it to take from battery power so you can take it straight off the power supply as well.
kit for people who just want to carry something in the boot, because you’ve got 3 points of lighting that are spreadable. You can put doors on it; somebody says “it would be nice if it was soft” you can run into the restroom and get a piece of paper towel and wrap it around with clothes pins and now you’ve got a softbox. That’s the reality of how lighting directors and gaffers like to work. Sometimes we’re called “dumpster divers” for a reason! Ed:
Now Dan, onto the traditional panels?
Dan: In September last year we launched the Astra which is our new 1x1 bicolour panel. It was 4X more powerful than the original 1x1 that we brought out many, many years before. Then in April for NAB, we brought out an additional 2 members of the family. So with the Astra 1x1, we’ve then got the EP and ED range, which allows us to have a half strength Astra or single strength Astra in mono or bicolour, so daylight or
On-camera light kit.
Ed: And Protel have the Caliber 3-Light Kit, Astra 1x1 E Daylight, and Astra 1x1 EP Bi-Colour in stock so you NZVN can take a look at them in New Zealand.
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Sachtler Bags We are at Sachtler for Protel with Florian Fraas. Florian: Yes, here we are with the Sachtler bags. As you can see … Ed:
They’re all black?
Florian: They’re all black, yes, they’re coming from the Petrol bag side and we developed them into the Sachtler brand. They’re all black now, with a red touch, which are the traditional Sachtler colours. There are quite a few new features that make them better than the previous Petrol bags. We improved the zippers so they are now much more robust. Ed: I can see that, and one of the things I really look for in a bag is a decent sized zipper. These are good solid German zippers. Florian: Thank you very much. One thing that’s also new, especially on the Doctor Bags, are the grips. They used to be very hard to open but now they go a bit better and the surface feels soft. Ed:
Oh yes, that’s a good feel to a handle.
Florian: It feels pretty soft, it’s really nice to hold. What we’ve also improved is the shape of the strap and the padding of the strap. This shape, together with these little inlets here, actually prevents the bag from going off your shoulder. Usually, you stand there all the time shifting it up on your shoulders, so the way that it’s twisted now makes it much more stable on the shoulders. You don’t have to push it up every few seconds. Ed: So it’s got little ridges on it which helps prevent it sliding on your shoulder. They’re not big ridges that will massage your shoulder or leave marks on it, but they will certainly reduce slippage. Florian: Another thing – obviously the inside is now red as a traditional Sachtler colour. We have a little security strap inside the bag that you can move around on the sliders, so you can then secure your camera or … Ed:
Whatever you want to put in there?
Florian:
Yes.
Ed: But as we can see in here, this connection is actually on a slider and you can move it up and down so depending on where the centre point of your camera is, you can put the strap there, tie it down and it’s not going to wiggle around. Florian: Other than that, it still has the same features as the Petrol bags – seven layers of protection, ballistic nylon, very, very tough base so if you drop it from, I think, up to one metre, it should protect your camera. It’s very shock resistant. Ed: It’s definitely got some hard ribbing in there, which provides that stability? Florian: thin. Ed:
That’s one of the seven layers. It’s not just
It’s not a soft bag?
Florian shows off the shoulder ribs.
Bag-5. It’s very easy to open it up and just drop the camera in from the top. You don’t have to mess around. One thing that we introduced is the LED, so you have a little LED light inside your bag for when you operate at night, or somewhere where it’s not very well lit, you can just open it up, switch on the light and then you find your little screw that you’re looking for – because it’s always the little things that disappear during a shoot. So we have this whole range from the Dr Bags to the classical camcorder bags. They are very traditional, but very well liked … the same soft grips, you open it from the top, with the same features. What people really like is the trolley system. Most of our bags – I think all of them – have a little system here … if it becomes too heavy, you can put it on a trolley … Ed: And it clips in! The actual base has protective feet but then, inside that, there are also clips so you can put it on the Sachtler trolley and it just clips into place so it’s not going to fall off?
Florian: It’s somewhere between a flight case and a soft, because the protection and the way the different materials are put together, it really can absorb some pretty hefty shocks. It’s not just keeping dust away, it’s really protecting your gear. It’s really, really sturdy.
Florian: That’s especially good for the bigger Dr Bags, for the Dr Bag-5, if you have it fully loaded with a heavy camera and batteries, you can just put it on the trolley and then you don’t have to carry this heavy and expensive load around.
Ed: There is a whole range including quite a few backpacks. What’s the most popular item?
Ed: Then also, for the audio people, there’s an audio mixer bag which, I guess, takes the standard audio mixers that are available at this moment?
Florian: Very popular are the Doctor Bags that I’ve just showed you. For instance, in the Dr Bag-4 which is a bit bigger than this one, you can fit in a well rigged FS7, or even bigger for the AMIRA, you could use a Dr
Florian: Yes. We have it in different sizes. This is the smaller one, the mixer bag; then we have the lightweight audio bag in large – so depending on which
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Florian: So you don’t have to open it up to operate it from the top. You have your transparent protection, you have your slide-ins from the side … it looks like a Russian winter thing. Ed: Well I know lots of soundies actually like working in the rain, so this will be a big boon for them? Florian: They’re very popular in the US and have a lot of space. You can change the height for your specific system. That’s the small one; the large one has even more space for your larger systems. You can have here all your little goodies that you need; you have an extra secured space with the same system that you have in the Dr Bag. It’s very flexible.
Soundie comfort for those hands in the rain.
kind of device you’re using. It’s very versatile. You can add your devices, you have clip-ons for your transmitters that you can take off. You have it in the front. Here you have the insert so you can operate during rain. Ed:
That’s handy.
Ed: A very, very well thought out and robust range of hand carry bags, backpacks, tripod bags and audio bags from Sachtler, all available from Protel New Zealand. NZVN
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EDIUS for Editing We are at Grass Valley with the EDIUS team for AVW and Mike Symes and we’re going to hear from Konstantinos Koutsantonis – Kostas for short. Ed: Kostas, what have been the major improvements in EDIUS in the last year? Kostas: The first thing is the new user interface in version 8 – it’s using vector graphics which means that it’s resolution free, and we can install it on a tablet for example. You can of course also install EDIUS on a desktop and use HD monitors and over the course of EDIUS 8 we will extend to 4K monitors as well. The software is also more responsive and takes less time to load. Generally speaking, it’s faster than ever. Ed: Do you need a particularly fast computer to run EDIUS? Kostas: No, that’s the whole point of EDIUS. You can install it on a Windows tablet, you can install it on your laptop, you can install it on a workstation, depending on your needs. As you can see on the website, the specifications are quite low, because of the fact that EDIUS 8 is CPU-accelerated. You can install it on almost any kind of computer, as most PCs are Intel CPU-based. Ed: And in terms of the feature set, pretty well all of the editing platforms these days have got everything in them, so there’s no need to go to a particular brand. EDIUS offers everything that those other brands would offer and more I would imagine? Kostas: Well, as a guy who worked in the past with different vendors, I would say that there are 3 things on EDIUS that I would definitely prefer using instead of some other brands. The first thing is the real time performance. There is no other software at this moment in the market that can perform in real time and work natively with all file formats in the market. So we are talking from a simple SD signal right up to 4K. Now EDIUS is able to handle this all in real time and work natively, without the need to conform or render. The second thing is that EDIUS traditionally is a very stable platform. If you ever worked with Adobe Premiere, you would have to agree that it’s not a particularly stable platform. But EDIUS traditionally, since version 1, has been very stable software that you could do work with. And the third thing is that there are no subscription schemes, so you buy it once, you own it. You don’t have to pay monthly charges just to keep on working with EDIUS. So for a guy who now owns maybe a 7 version, he can upgrade for $199, and he can keep the product for himself. He can use it for as many years as he wants. Ed: The main area of improvement I see necessary is in codecs. Camera manufacturers come out with a new codec and suddenly your software’s not able to cope with it. Do EDIUS provide free upgrades in codecs through the life of a product and then some? Kostas: Yes, you can be sure that any new version 8 update for the next two years will be free of charge. Grass Valley EDIUS is typically the first editing software to support new video formats and that’s because engineering is based in Japan and they work very closely with all the major camera manufacturers. So for example, when the new Canon XF codec and new Canon XF camera were released, at the same time Grass Valley issued a press release saying that they were supporting these new products. You will never find a video format support that is not supported by EDIUS, and this is what makes EDIUS special. Ed: Now of course, the big push from Adobe with their Creative Suite is that it is a suite – along with Premiere, you get Photoshop, you get After Effects, you
get all of these other additions which a lot of people need. They certainly need a Photoshop type product – does EDIUS offer anything similar? Kostas: Well EDIUS does offer more than just editing. For example, with EDIUS version 8 we do have a new application called GV Browser. It’s like a personal media asset management system that you can use to organise all your video, audio and stills footage, you can add metadata in batch mode and much more. Ed: So it’s similar to Adobe Bridge? Kostas: Exactly, but GV Browser is significantly faster. So it makes it much easier to find and organise your content, and speeds up your editing workflow. There is also a dedicated After Effects Bridge you can use for different types of third party plug-ins, like Magic Bullet Looks from Red Giant. New with EDIUS 8.1, which will be released in October, is a plug-in bridge that supports the OpenFX standard. You will be able to use this to integrate Sapphire plug-ins from Genarts, and the Boris Continuum Collection. Over time we shall be able to integrate more and more third-party plug-ins using this OFX bridge. Ed: Does EDIUS natively have any motion capability – is there any manipulation of graphic size or photo manipulation within EDIUS itself? Kostas: Well at the moment, EDIUS is coming with a full list of video filters, audio filters, transitions you can use. There are all the major filters you can have … for example, you can do photo correction, picture-inpicture. There is a great tool called Layouter – you can do almost everything in three dimensions. Ed: So within EDIUS, you do have a basic motion feature so you can manipulate still images or moving images? Kostas: Exactly. As soon as you place a video clip on the timeline, the Layouter gives you the chance to fully manipulate the video clip concerning size, rotation, cropping etc. You can add key frames in order to better control all these properties over time. You can save all these presets as custom ones. You can make new ones. We’re expecting a new feature called Auto Tracking – this is something that everyone coming from
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After Effects is going to really like. You can add a video filter called Mask so you can mask a shape and then you will be able to apply an Auto Tracking feature that will follow the shape that you want automatically. Ed: This is coming to EDIUS? Kostas: Yes it’s already been announced. But the good point about all these new features that are going to come into future versions of EDIUS 8 – they are going to be free of charge. You won’t have to pay again, you don’t have to pay any monthly fees. Ed: And it’s working well on Windows 10? Kostas: Yes. As a matter of fact EDIUS 8.1 will officially support Windows 10. Ed: Wow, okay – now the last one. Audio manipulation – is there any feature within EDIUS that allows you to do, like again in Premiere, you have a sound product? Kostas: Yes of course. We do have dedicated audio filters you can use, like graphic equaliser, panpot and balance filters – all this stuff. The really nice thing is you can now add almost any VST plug-in, so you can master your audio using third party plug-ins from EDIUS without the need to change products. You just assign the folder that the VST is registered to and then, after restarting EDIUS, you can have it as a native audio filter inside. As a new feature, Grass Valley will
The EDIUS timeline is very familiar.
be releasing a new Fairlight jog shuttle at InterBEE in November. This external unit will enable you to make adjustments manually while, at the same time, this jog and fader will interact with the timeline and the audio mixer that EDIUS actually has. So it makes things easier when you want to manually adjust the volume levels, or you are doing things like voiceover and things like that. It’s really a nice feature because it gives you the “hands on” you might want as an audio editor, let’s say, more than a video editor, and it’s really handy. Ed: So perhaps, if you don’t like what the others are doing, here’s a chance to have a look at EDIUS and see
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if it’s right for you. Is there a free trial download available on the web? Kostas: Indeed, there is a website dedicated to EDIUS from Grass Valley called … www-en.ediusworld.com – there you can find lots of information about EDIUS including video tutorials, datasheets, product specs and case studies. There are some short movies that show EDIUS 8 functionality and, of course, you can go to the download sections and download the free trial for 30 days and draw your own conclusions. Ed: And we just have to say that, even though EDIUS is not a major player in New Zealand apart from in Christchurch where Mike has been very hot in selling your product – in other parts of the world, EDIUS is right up there?
Kostas: Indeed and it’s because EDIUS is a really fast editor. Its uniqueness is based on the fact that you can edit anything anywhere and I really mean that – more than as an editor, less than a demonstrator. Also, it’s a really easy to use piece of software and I think it’s the best possible editing solution you can find if you want to make money. It does the same things that other editors do, but in less time. You don’t have to go to After Effects to adjust the layout or the preview. So based on the facts that we can see today, I would definitely say that EDIUS is the best editor you can now have for your production workflow. Ed:
You don’t have to sell your soul for ownership?
Kostas:
No exactly, that’s the point.
NZVN
Today's multi codec, multi format pre-requisite mandate for postproduction has been addressed by Grass Valley EDIUS. Simply put, it really does edit anything and faster and better than any other platform. Our clients find ingesting faster than they could imagine. They can personalise their interface edit with native output for instant confidence monitoring and output to any format or codecs they want. EDIUS also supports 3rd party add-ons such as Vistitle, Pluraleyes, After Effects etc etc. We also offer full training and help from a fully qualified EDIUS Tutor. This can be face to face or via remote Computer control. All this for under 1K. So you get the World’s most powerful and versatile NLE system with support, with no monthly or yearly fees, and additional support as required, by negotiation. So you require a specific EDIUS option or a Turnkey solution – we can do that also. EDIUS also offers a Multi seat option for schools, Polytechs, Broadcasters etc at pricing unmatched by any other Pro NLE provider. Free 30 day trial. http://www..grassvalley.com/products/edius_pro_8 Mike Symes AUDIO VIDEO AGENCIES Authorised Dealers for SONY,GRASS VALLEY EDIUS, VEGAS etc (03) 358-9480 or 0274 368-088 Email mikesymes@xtra.co.nz Page 25
BB&S Lighting For PLS, we are with Peter Plesner, the owner and founder of BB&S. Ed: Peter, BB&S is a small part of your logo on the wall here. Is Pipeline System the new name for the company? Peter: No it’s not the new name of the company, we are still Brother, Brother & Sons from Denmark. In shortening that to BB&S, it’s a bit easier to say on the phone in the morning. Ed: It’s like Kentucky Fried Chicken I guess? Peter: Yes, like that. Pipeline System is a new range of product for us. We’ve worked with the very well-known AREA-48 and remote phosphor technologies for more than 3 years now. There are more than 6000 of those units out there in the street being used on a daily basis and the feedback we got from all the DoPs and from the world TV networks is that the colour rendition, the true nature of the colour, the softness of the light, is really what they need for a lot of shots and this product has more or less saved them on the set in many situations. So we reckon to move on with this technology. Ed: There are a few people copying it out there now and I’ve seen them at this show? Peter: Well there are other larger manufacturers who are also leaning towards the technology. I wouldn’t call it “copying”, but we don’t worry too much about it. We have now introduced something very thin, slim, really neat pipes – extruded pipes with a remote phosphor, so that’s going to give you the same colour rendition, the same very nice colour reproduction as the AREA-48. It’s now in a tube format, so it’s easier to hide on the set. Also, for a lot of studios that have low ceiling situations, it’s great with pipes because they take up less space in the ceiling and also, on the set, it’s very lightweight. Even with the larger 4 footers, the weight is just under 5 kilos, so it’s also something you can boom in. It’s easy to handle, quick to set up and easy to work with. We’re doing a variety of housings for these tubes – some with reflectors, some without reflectors or you can use them as practicals – you know Sci-fi look on the set. Ed:
Because you can actually put them into the shot?
Peter: You can put them into the shot and they look pretty cool – they really do. They are slim, you mostly see the illuminated surface and nothing else, so it’s really a very Sci-fi look. We’ve created some different products, especially the reporter kit that is shipping at this point. We’ve created a specific kit for bloggers and Skype and correspondents because they have been missed out for many years, and they actually go on live television in many situations – such as in a certain hotel room that does not look too great. So in this situation, we can provide them with a small case that’s easy to travel with and connects to everything in the world and they can really look good. Ed: Can these pipes be bent at all – can you turn them into shapes? Peter: No, we can’t bend them like neons, they are straight, but they come in different lengths – 1, 2, 3 and 4 feet – so of course, you can make rings or you can make any kind of shape …
Peter with the signature “Pipeline” range.
Ed:
Square – you could make a square?
Peter: A square or even round like a big umbrella. There are a lot of different variations possible with this. There’s no larger limitation to what you can actually do with it. Of course, you can hide it anywhere and that’s also the beauty of it. It’s not getting warm so you can easily hold it for hours in your hand. It’s ruggedised, it will not break. Ed:
So you could use them as lightsabres?
Peter: You could use them as lightsabres. We did consider simulating a fight here because I was in a fencing school from 13 years old to 16 but I’m not that sharp anymore! Ed: Now we’ve just inspected this pipeline more closely and it’s actually a semicircle on an aluminium backing with slots so that you can mount this in any position you like, balance it any way you like and a nice little simple connector with a place to put a … what is that? Peter: This is the adapter, so you connect this to any DV battery or Gold-Mount or V-lock battery. Ed: And do you have a battery mount that also clips on the back? Peter: Yes, for the smaller DV, but not for the Vlock because it’s a really large battery. But of course, some V-lock mounts have 4 or 5 D-Taps off in the side, and you can just use a D-Tap. So you can connect a ton of tubes. Ed: For example, your 1 foot tube there, at full power, what’s the Wattage of that? Peter: The power draws just under 10 Watt per foot, so it’s very little actually. Even in a big 4-bank enclosure, you’re running around 150 Watt and it is really powerful. That is new technology. This is something you’re going to find you’ll work with for many, many years. It’s not something that’s going to break – it’s not going to fall apart or anything. Of course, you can buy a lot of LED strips and you can make your own tubes and you can do whatever, or buy cheap ones from China. The colour is going to be bad, you’re not going to be happy with it. A lot of companies are selling these. We just believe in making the product ready for people to use on the set, anticipating that they don’t have time to build their own. Some people choose to do that, and I really respect that, but we make ours ready to go you know.
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Lightweight - Head weighs just 950g Colour-temp from 3000ºK to 5600ºK 3000ºK CRI is 93, 5600ºK CRI is 84 50,000 hour life 100 – 240V, 66W Battery range 12-20V Full range dimmer Integrated Soft light Diffusor Black Out function Operates on V-Lock batteries Integrated Beltpack for remote controller and battery plate Molded Transport case plate
The BBS Lighting FLYER is a ready-to-go lighting kit. The FLYER is designed to be lightweight, mobile and compact without compromising the high quality that BBS Lighting has become known for. Phone: 09 302 4100 www.kelpls.co.nz
Email: info@kelpls.co.nz
Website:
Ed: Now with these panels, where you put four in there, if something happened to one of them – say it was hit by a bullet or something – you can easily replace that strip? Peter:
Yes, you can easily replace it.
Ed: Alright, but then what happens to the colour temperature. Over a period of time, I imagine the colour temperature of these is going to change? Peter: No, the colour temperature is going to remain very steady. Over 30-50,000 hours, there’s going to be a deviation within just under one percent, so it’s nothing really. This is really truthfully staying at the same colour temperature even when you dim it. A lot of the colour changing units available in the market today have the problem – it can look great, it can do 32 or 56 or 43 in the middle, but once you dim it, it does change the colour temperature because the relation between all the colours behind the diffuser is not worked out properly for a lot of these products. Why worry about the colour temperature, get another tube that has the correct colour temperature you need and then that’s it. You don’t have to deal with that on the set and “is it green or is it not green”?
The lengths and colours.
This is right on the curve where it’s supposed to be. It’s not going to be green, it’s not going to be magenta, so you don’t need all the “plus / minus” green, whatever, that everyone else is trying to sell to people. Because colour is how the camera conceives it and, with digital cameras, you will also find very big differences on the look – the difference between a Sony F65, the difference to an ALEXA camera. They do cheat in the software behind the chip because there are colours that the camera cannot see and so they are adding those colours artificially. This is why it’s hard to combine a lot of different lights today, but in terms of combining our 32 with a tungsten light, it really works. Combining our 56 with an HMI light source or a daylight light source, it works. So you can use it with the existing technology as an add-on. It’s not something where you have to be scared that the last fill in of the day was just a small shot from here and, in postproduction, they were trying for a week to get rid of bad fillers. That’s not going to be the situation here. We’re supplying these tubes in 3200 Kelvin, 4300 Kelvin, or 5600 Kelvin and in terms of Television Lighting Consistency Index, they are all plus 95. It’s a very clean product. It’s the same colour
structure as the AREA-48, so they can also be mixed really well together. Ed:
So it’s not fluoro, what is it?
Peter: It is LED, but all white LEDs are blue LEDs and then you add some phosphor on top. Here we have the blue LEDs inside the tube, so the blue LEDs are igniting the phosphor that is extruded into the tube. So in that way, it’s actually the whole surface that is illuminating here. Ed: Okay, so it’s not actually the colour temperature of the LED, it’s the phosphor and that’s where LED panels can fail in that the LED colour temperature changes, but in this case the phosphor panel that’s the outside of the tube is consistent … and there’s a lot of “yeses” coming from Peter. Peter: Of course, even with this phosphor panel, it will also eventually wear out, but it’s over a very long lifespan where I’m by far retired at that point, so I’m not going to worry too much about it. Ed:
Bring it back to the next guy?
Peter: Exactly. But rather than build a cheap product, we prefer to build proper products that will last. You can buy a new camera every month, because there’s a new one every month and six months later, the older 4K camera you just bought is worth basically nothing. With lighting, it’s not the same story. You can keep those lights for years and years and years and they are also going to work with the next and the next and the next camera generation. But the quality of light, the higher the pixilation gets in these cameras, you see every little bad pimple on your skin – you see everything these days, because it’s so high res. So for that reason, I don’t get why people would buy really cheap lighting to throw on a face and then make a close-up of a face where you see everything, and you see all the flaws in the light, because they will be reproduced on the skin, because the skin does have a lot of colours in it depending on where you’re from. I remember back in the old days in rock ’n roll lighting, with coloured persons, you were not allowed to use greens on stage for a band because that would look strange, so every kind of skin tone reacts differently. So if you don’t have a rich enough mix, you cannot find the LUT, but with this technology it’s really easy. Ed: That’s it. There’s no point in buying a fancy camera and going for those really 4K close-ups unless you’ve got the lighting to match? Peter: No, exactly and I think people are starting to understand that more and more and we hear that more and more that it’s so easy, you don’t have to deal with it a lot, even when setting it up it’s easy lit. You take the luminaire to 30% it looks great, and you don’t have trouble in postproduction after. Well it might be an initial investment that you have to make, but you’re going to win it very quickly not only on the power saving, but in any direction.
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Ed: Now Peter, tell me more about these panels. Of course, the critical thing is how even is this light when you’ve got these pipes in here. You would think that there would be dark and light areas, but you say it is a very even throw? Peter: Yes, it is a very even throw. The beam angle in the longitude of the tube is 90 degrees total beam angle, so there is sort of spill light in the last 10 degrees, so a fade off. Actually, totally, you will say the field would be 110, but within the 90 degrees, it is really very, very even all the way over. Ed:
But at the edges – what’s your angle horizontally?
Peter: The other edge is very stable as well, but of course, it’s cut off by the side. Ed: This is why you have 1 foot to 4 foot lengths, but you’re still going to have a set that’s wider than 4 foot. So what sort of angle are you looking at there? Peter: The outgoing angle is 160 the other way, so that makes 110 by 160. Ed: And that compares traditional fluoro kits?
very
favourably
with
Peter: It does yes. It’s very much the same type of illumination angles. Ed: And I guess you could put the same accessories on these kits, such as your egg crates and your barn doors and everything else? Peter: Yes, honeycombs, SNAPGRIDs and diffuser boxes – they’ve all got to be available accessories for it.
Ed: Do they have to be BB&S accessories or are there some industry standards that you can use? Peter: We work a lot with Stefan from DoPchoice, so he would make accessories for this one – the standard honeycombs, the plastic honeycombs, yes we’ll supply those as well. Personally, I like the SNAPGRIDs more because they’re a bit deeper, a bit bigger squares, but you know, the plastic things break and I would suggest the SNAPGRIDs but in a studio install, there’s a very big price difference from a SNAPGRID to a standard honeycomb. So in a studio install I would maybe just go with the honeycomb, but on the road, I would definitely choose the SNAPGRID. Ed: So we can look forward to more and more from BB&S? Peter: Yeah, yeah it’ll come, it’ll come. Before the summer, there will be more products in different directions also. We used to be a product development company and that is still where the heart is. Ed:
But now you’ve got your own name on it?
Peter: Yes, now we’ve got our own name on it and of course, we also realise that more marketing, more sales are needed. People love the products but they also need to know where to get them. Ed: Well in New Zealand we know – Chris McKenzie and the team from PLS. Peter: Oh yes, Chris McKenzie, PLS, yes and send him my regards. NZVN
Chimera Softboxes We are at Chimera for PLS with Bob Winters, President. Ed: Well, another president – you’re not competing with Donald Trump though are you? Bob: No, I certainly hope not. Ed: Now Chimera is a company that has been around a long, long time? Bob: Yes, 35 years. Ed: And in all those days, fitting some pretty big and I guess, intense lights? Bob: And we still do. We started off in the photographic world; 15-20 years ago we jumped into the cinema world where they started seeing the need to soften up the lights. Obviously, as cameras got better, there was more need to soften lights, even with the newer LED products.
Bob with his “Liberty” look.
Ed: Because now it’s not so much about the intensity of the light, but it’s about the look of the light? Bob: It’s going from softening the light, controlling the light, and now in some cases, we’re making a smaller light source into a bigger light source with some of the new LEDs that have more power. So there are all sorts of options that we try to fit and try to help people … just another tool to help modify light. Ed: So really, you‘re an accessory provider and hugely dependent on the manufacturers coming up with a new light and asking you to make a softbox to fit it?
Bob: Exactly. We are definitely making accessories. I think one of the things with Chimera being around for 35 years now, we are a staple – especially in the cinema industry, our name is likened to Kleenex. Ed: That’s a brand of toilet paper isn’t it? Bob: Coke … call it Coke! We are fortunate to have everyone want to have our name associated with their lights. When they make a new light, a company will ask us “will you make a product for it?” And, you know, it’s our duty in R&D to figure out “okay, is this light going to be popular in the market; is it worth our R&D and time to fit the applications?” – because it’s now not just
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developing a speed ring for the light and then they use the existing banks. In a lot of cases, we’re developing a completely custom application to fit the light. Ed: So why is it important for it to be custom … surely it’s just a wraparound black cloth material that spreads out a bit and controls the light. Why is it so precise? Bob: It’s really how it applies or fits to the light, because each light, as you’ve noticed in our booth, is a different size. It really has to do with the back of the light fixture that we’re customising the fit, and then how the softbox attaches to the light. Some of them will attach to existing barn doors; some of them have their own frame that drops into the accessory frame channel. Each light is unique in manufacture, and we’re trying to fit within how they’ve manufactured a light so it’s easy for the customer just to attach it to the light. As the lights become more powerful, one of the things they want to use Chimera for is to make a bigger light source out of the existing light – so for example, the new ARRI S60 which is roughly 1 foot by 2 foot, our bank that we’re putting on it is a 2 foot by 3 foot or our medium size. Roughly, we’re almost doubling the size of the light surface for the consumer, so giving it a bigger wraparound lighting effect. Along with that, what we’ve been able to do is to keep the front panel, whenever possible, to our existing sizes – small, extra small, medium, large – so the customer, if they do already have existing Chimera accessories, can go ahead and continue to use their grids that they may have for an older bank that was set up for an HMI setup or something like that. But they can use the grid, so they’re not having to buy a completely new system each time they get a new light. Ed: There must be some flexibility in a softbox, especially with Velcro, that you can tighten it up or give yourself a little bit more room, but what are the downsides in having an ill-fitting softbox? Bob: There’s not as much flexibility as you would think. You could make it a bungee cord thing and it doesn’t look real good. I think one of the things about our product is it always looks good on the set. It looks like it fits, it doesn’t look like it’s just sort of gaffer taped onto the unit. Ed: I have seen softboxes made out of cardboard boxes? Bob: Well, that’s where the premise came from. You know, old foam core in the photography days and the founders of Chimera figured out a way coming from a combination of photography and backpack tent outdoors type of activities to create a box that could be portable. That’s really where the softbox was originally developed. So you’re not too far off – some people still do makeshift stuff. Ours is an easy on/off type of application that you can change out fairly quickly. Ed: And we’ve got some very little kits here. This is a specialty application? Bob: Again, some of the established LED manufacturers are making smaller units, either oncamera or portable off-camera units, so we have a series of new boxes using sort of the same material as our universal 1x1 application that fits right onto these things, comes on and off and folds up – you can literally put it in your back pocket for some flexibility, but it softens and controls the light. If you want to keep that from spilling all over the place, some of these newer ones have pretty good beam angles on them, so it helps control the light and where you want to focus it.
Note the small “Stars and Stripes”.
Ed: Now I see a very little American flag there. Obviously this is something you’re proud of, but does it mean that this product is actually made in America? Bob: Absolutely. Everything is handcrafted in Boulder, Colorado. We’re very proud of that fact – for 35 years everything has been made in the US. Even though it costs us a little bit more, I think the quality and the control of our quality is unsurpassed and is something really in the cinema world that is required. I’ve seen stuff sitting on sets and in photo studios that’s been 25 years old, and to us, it’s a badge of honour that we wear. And in the rental business, it’s something that allows that rental house to make more money. It’s more turns on that unit; it’s more times that they get it rented out versus some of the inferior quality products that break. The other nice thing is that our customer service can help you with any poles. In case a pole broke or, in a lot of cases in the rental houses, they come back and they’re missing a pole or something. We’re in Boulder, Colorado, we have a very good customer service department that can help replace those poles. We do a lot of repairs on our units – rental houses have people that they rent to being tough on it. All of our corners are reinforced so the poles don’t pop through. But you know, still even in the best cases, they get dragged on the ground and over time they wear out. We can replace those corners. We do a lot of things, and again we’ve been around for 35 years, so we’re not going anywhere. Ed: By “pole” you mean a wire? Bob: Well it’s a wire – this one’s a little different because of the shape of the back and it’s so wide out here that you have to go to a pole to get the formation. But if you feel back up here, there’s a thicker pole and this is where it sometimes will pop through. Ed: And I know from other accessory manufacturers that have kept their manufacturing in-house and locally, it means that they can much more quickly respond to changes in the market and when a manufacturer brings out a product, they’ve got the accessory on day 1? Bob: Exactly, yes. So we’ll be shipping with the ARRI product when they ship. And you’re exactly right, we’re almost “just in time”. We keep a good amount of stock in Boulder, but at the same time, if a guy calls up, we have the ability to sew one unit in-house if we absolutely had to. We don’t do it on a regular basis, but we do have the ability to do that. We can keep more goods in raw materials and then be able to produce on demand. We don’t have to hold a huge amount of stock, so we’re not at any one time waiting for a lot of the raw materials to come in hand. So we’re very flexible in our production schedule. NZVN
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Aladdin Lighting We are here for PLS at Aladdin and we are speaking with André Kurtz on behalf of Mr Kim because Mr Kim’s homeland is South Korea and André, although he’s Swiss-German, has pretty good English. Ed: Now Aladdin – obviously a Korean company with a lot of nous because there’s some pretty clever product here on the stand and I guess the shining example, if one could use that pun, is the Flex Panel. What’s a Flex Panel Andre? André: Actually we call it the Bi-Flex. It’s a flexible LED source and, as the name says, it’s a bi-flex or it’s a bi-colour flexible light. You can change the colour temperature on the dimmer unit, so you can go from tungsten 3000 Kelvin up to daylight 6000 Kelvin. Ed: Is it variable or just one or the other? André: It’s variable, so you can go by steps through the colour temperatures. It indicates the colour temperature on the display or the intensity of the dimmer, the brightness. Ed: And the real value I would see in a portable situation, is this is incredibly light and robust. You could kick this over, nothing’s going to break because the LEDs are so formed into a flexible panel and you can bend this, twist it, do anything to it and it’s going to keep going? André: Exactly. So it’s very well made, it’s completely waterproofed. The biggest advantage on it is that it’s very thin, it’s a few millimetres thick, so you can carry a lot of lights and you have the dimmer externally. The panel is waterproof so you can put it out in the rain. The dimmer unit has to be protected. You have two possibilities to power the dimmer unit either by AC or DC. You can mount the battery plate to the back of the unit, like a V-Mount plate or a Gold Mount plate, so you’re completely free running. The power consumption is 50 Watt 12 Volt, so with a regular camera battery, it’s going to run for about 2 hours. Ed: That’s at full power – obviously longer if you wind it down? André: Yes at full power, and it depends on the size of your camera battery of course. We have accessories like a stand mount, goes onto a 16mm stand, and we have softboxes and diffusers to shape the light. Ed: Now is this only bi-colour, or can you get the cheaper version single colour? André: Actually, about 2 years ago, we started with the first units that were either pure daylight or pure tungsten versions. That’s version 2 now and it’s
Mr Kim and André.
available in either bi-colour, pure daylight or pure tungsten. The advantage of the pure daylight or tungsten is you have about 20% more light output. With the bi-colour unit, it gets a little bit less. Ed: And you can obviously put this together into some very large panels? André: That’s going to be the new version we’re working on. It’s the next generation – we do a 60cm long and 120cm long. So you could put them together to a very big large light source, with a tremendous light output. So the biggest light we have here is 3 x 200 Watt in LED … at 600 Watt LED that’s very powerful. Ed: Right, if you don’t want such big ones, you have an on-camera light?
Aladdin’s very flexible LED panel - front and back view. Page 31
The first flexible Bi-Colour LED panel for professional use featuring outstanding light quality with a CRI and TLCI of
Aladdin Bi-Flex (Bi-Colour)
over 97. The cinematographer’s choice for a small, lightweight and powerful lighting tool, perfect for inside narrow spaces such as elevators, vehicles etc. For Professional use in television, movies and photographic production. It’s an extremely portable interview light.
Aladdin NoteLite
3220K to 5600 K Dims 5% - 100% High CRI 95 Diffuser included Integrated Battery Built-in ¼” screw Aircraft Aluminium Runs 2hrs on Battery
This high quality bi-colour light comes with an integrated battery that charges via USB. Slim & very light weight.
Phone: 09 302 4100
Dims 5% - 100% CRI & TLCI: 97 12V to 15V – 50W Mains or Battery Flicker Free 30 x 30cm square 5mm thin 140° Beam Angle Passive cooling 390g Velcro’d Corners Splash / Rain Proof Kit Includes: Dimmer 16mm Mount 5m ext. Cable Diffusor 100 to 240V PSU
Aladdin EyeLite
CRI 95 Integrated Battery Mini size Charge with USB Built-in ¼” screw
The EyeLite series comes in two modes; 3000K or 5600K . It’s designed to be a small yet useful eye reflection light. Holders, stands and clamps available.
Email: info@kelpls.co.nz Website: www.kelpls.co.nz
André: We have very small LED lights for oncamera use. This starts with the Eye Lite which is a small light source with a built-in battery that runs up to 2 hours, charge over USB, built-in dimmer. We have 2 versions – daylight is the blue one and the tungsten is the red version. It’s very lightweight, can be mounted with magnetic holders and charged over USB so you can use your iPhone charger to charge the Eye Lite. Ed: But you can also put it onto your iPhone and use it as an external light?
adapter on an Anton Bauer plug. It runs from 12 to 24 Volt – that’s the GenieLite. Ed: Now Aladdin – how long have they been in business as a lighting company? André: Since about three years we start to sell internationally. One of the owners is a sales guy in Korea, the other one is a lighting guy from the television industry and they sell a lot of lights in Korea. They are also a distributor for Dedolight in Korea, so they have a very deep knowledge about lighting. They have great ideas for little practical lights, for little onboard lights and especially the Flexlite is like a top seller on the market. Ed: Right. I’ve interviewed a number of people on LED technology over the years and one thing I’ve come to discover is that a lot depends on where these LEDs are made and which bin they come from. It’s a major part of the cost and it determines the quality of the light output of any LED arrangement, so do these LEDs come from Bin X or from somewhere along the Planck curve?
André: Yes, as a little external light. Then for bigger cameras, a little bigger light. It’s very slim – the A Lite. The A Lite is a bi-colour version with internal battery, same thing, charges over USB, runs for about 2 hours and you can change colour and you can dim it, daylight, tungsten. It comes with a little diffuser, because when you look like this into it, it’s very harsh and when you put the little diffuser it’s a little bit more comfortable and it’s very lightweight – maybe 100 gram. Ed:
André: The LEDs have a very high colour rendition, so I don’t have a bin number for the LEDs here, but it’s a very new technology of LEDs. It’s not that they’re small diodes, it’s like an SMD LEDs, directly onto the print, with a very big surface for the phosphor application. Our CRI measurement is about 98 on the tungsten, so we are in the best quality, you can’t go higher actually in colour and quality on the LED.
And it’s in a good sturdy aluminium case?
André: Yes, made from aircraft aluminium, so for a VJ or a cameraman for interviews and things – a perfect match. Ed: Now I see a new version of the sun-gun and that impressed me because, even though it’s got a fan in it, it’s a very quiet fan and this is something that can be used in a handheld situation because it’s got its battery in its handle. You could mount it on a camera, but you could certainly stick it on top of a tripod if you’re not going to hold it? André: It’s a very simply designed light, in a square box, very practical. You have a dimmer on the back and you can change colour temperature, daylight to tungsten. You have a little barn door to shape the light. On one hand, you can mount it to your studio camera as an eye light, or you have the handle. The GenieLite. An old concept with a modern makeover. The handle we have has a built-in battery, so you can power the light with the battery and it has a switch on it; or you are able to power the battery to an As a multiple LED source, you also have a continuous quality from light to light. In spotlights, you have a lot of different peaks in green or different lights from light source to light source, more complicated. But in the multi-surface LED panel we have a very stable quality. Pretty much all our resources are either in daylight and tungsten CRI over 95. Also TLCI measurement was over 90, so we have a very high quality. When you look at the lights and see how they build in the aluminium case, how the cable and plugs are made, we come from the field and we know what the end user needs on their quality standard, that the product will survive in a rental house.
Ed: And if it survives there, it will survive anywhere. André: Exactly. NZVN Page 33
ARRI Cameras On the camera side with ARRI at IBC, we have our dear friend Markus Duerr. Ed: Now Markus you’re the AMIRA specialist and we’re certainly going to start off with that, but then we’ll move onto some other cameras in the ARRI range. AMIRA – it’s certainly had a success in New Zealand in the rental market, but it hasn’t really captured the freelancers. I understand though that in Europe and other areas of the world, the AMIRA is the freelancers’ camera of choice. Can you explain why? Markus: It is very much so. That’s what we see when we look at our customer base and the customer data. We see that we have, in some regions, 40% new customers who are pretty much freelancers or small production companies – it’s sometimes hard to differentiate. It’s not the cheapest camera on the market, so for a freelancer, it might be a pretty large investment, but it also pays off at the end for them. On the one hand, because of the higher valued camera with the better image quality and the more reliable camera, they get a higher production value to their customers, so they can sell the higher camera also to their customers. On the other hand they get a camera which is very reliable, so they don’t have times when the camera is not working. Ed: So there’s no down time? Markus: No down time, right. That is a very attractive situation for the freelancers, so that’s why we see big success in the freelance area for the AMIRA, which is in our camera product portfolio, the most fitting camera for freelancers – much more than the ALEXA. The ALEXA Mini is probably also applicable, but the AMIRA is a very universal camera. It can be used for pretty much every production type – it is the perfect camera for all its ergonomics and everything. Ed: This isn’t just for cinema type or documentary type activities is it? The AMIRA, with its high definition ability, is a great documentary camera, but it can also be used for a whole variety of commercials or whatever a freelancer could do? Markus: We see the AMIRA now being established in the market, being used for very different types of production. So certainly for documentaries, it’s the perfect camera, but in the same way, we see corporate videos, we see music videos, we see sports – I do not mean live sports but the kind of sports reportage and TV shows, even TV serials if they are lower budget. It’s a very versatile, very universally used camera. Ed: Any changes since NAB in accessories or the software that’s available for it? Markus: We are introducing here SUP 3.0 which is the latest software for the AMIRA and this has a couple of exciting features. One of them is that you can record in MPEG2 at 50 megabit for that higher level, that’s 50 megabit in an MXF container. That technically sounds complicated; you can say simply it is XDCAM compatible, so that provides for freelancers who have clients who are in the TV broadcast space or in certain postproduction spaces which require a format which is comparable to XDCAM, because that is how they set up their postproduction workflow. If they can record that format in the camera, it’s a huge benefit to them. Ed: So that’s on the internal recording in the camera? Markus: That’s internal recording in the camera and it’s also a low data recording at 50 megabit, so you save a lot of space on your card. If the image quality is still the most important part for that certain production, then you can record with 50 megabit and you have more recording time on your card.
Marcus and his pet AMIRA.
Ed: Well that is a big change, and again it’s a case of not having to go out and buy a new camera; it’s a case of just an upgrade? Markus: Exactly. It makes it more flexible for exactly these kinds of owners who sometimes, for “bread and butter” jobs, need MPEG2 at 50 megabit and for their kind of higher quality jobs they use the ProRes codec and then they have that huge benefit all in one camera. Ed: Is it a significant cost to implement this new codec? Markus: for free.
This is for free. It’s SUP 3.0 and it comes
Ed: Markus, I have to keep asking the question, because there are people out there who still don’t quite get it. They think that well, you get anything, you’ve got to pay for it. But once you’ve got an ARRI, a lot of these updates are for free? Markus: That’s why we say we have a very futureproof camera, because we continuously develop new functionality for the camera and we very easily can do that because our hardware architecture is FPGA based and you can re-programme these FPGAs in a very flexible way that allows us to put features into the camera which we have not designed when we designed the hardware for the camera. So that gives us the chance to keep the camera in our customers’ hands and to futureproof it – just like offering them a new camera. Ed:
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Anything else on the AMIRA?
Markus: Yes there is much more – there is ProRes 4444 XQ, so that’s just the opposite of MPEG2. It’s a very high quality codec – something between ProRes 4444 and ARRIRAW and that is now also available in the AMIRA. Then we have multi-cam functionality – you can remotely control the camera with the Sony RCP1500 which is the remote control panel you typically use for system cameras. You connect that to the camera through an Ethernet connection and it can fully remote control the camera and access its camera image parameters. That is interesting for people who want to use the camera in a multi-camera environment. Ed: Could you actually mix it in with – dare I say it – Sony cameras and it would act like a Sony camera? Markus: It would act like a Sony camera in terms of the RCP operator. So he would operate the camera from the RCP standpoint like he would operate a Sony camera. Ed: But the picture would be better? Markus: The picture should be better, that’s for sure. There are also a lot of little improvements implemented on the usability side, so status bars, user buttons, such kinds of things which are not the big news on the feature list, but which are sometimes a big help for the operator. They sound really small, but operators love them and they get that function then. We get a lot of feedback from operators as to what they think we could do better and we look at every input we get and then judge it as to how to do that, and then implement it. Ed: But you could choose, as an operator, which of these you implement surely? Markus: Of course, you don’t have to use the functions. These are things where the camera has a lot of functions to make the operator’s life easier, which is always a good thing to do. Ed: Okay, anything physical, any material changes? Markus: There’s a new audio slot here which is new in that camera. This is an extension to the camera; you put it at the back end of the camera and you can put an audio receiver into that slot. If you want to connect a mixer or a microphone to record direct to the camera, you put that standardised receiver into the Unislot and any receivers according to that standard can fit in here. It’s only connected by one cable to the camera and that’s all. It replaces the battery plate. On top of that, it has included a buffer battery, so with that thing connected, we can change batteries without powering down the camera, and you have like 2 minutes or so time to change the battery. Ed: Wow, that’s the first time I’ve seen that in any manufacturer? Markus: There are battery manufacturers who do things like that …
Ed:
What, have buffer batteries in the recorder slot?
Markus: Not in the recorder slot, but just buffer batteries as an extension – like a battery plate, the buffer battery, but they are generally pretty large, so having that included in that slot makes a lot of sense. Ed: Okay … and? Markus: Little things like better design for the knobs accessing and controlling the camera functions. Ed: But this is in the latest version, so if you’ve already bought your AMIRA, you can’t change the knobs surely? Markus: You could if you would bring it into service and ask them to do that. They could change the knobs as well. Ed: So if it’s going for service anyway, you could have a knob upgrade? Markus: That’s our service policy; once a camera gets into service, the camera gets all the technical updates which happened in between to the new cameras. So they are all getting updated accordingly. Ed:
Not for free though surely?
Markus: It depends what it is. If it’s kind of a useful thing, then it’s often for free, yes. Now we move on to the ALEXA Mini. There’s been a lot of interest in this around the world and to talk to us about it we have Michael Jonas. Ed:
Michael, this has been a great success for ARRI?
Michael: Actually it’s an overwhelming success. The Mini has been out for 4 months now and we’re doing very well. Demand is very strong. Page 36
hardware platforms. In that way, we get a lot of synergy and the improvements for AMIRA we can move to the Mini. They are different hardware platforms, but there’s a lot of synergy that we can use going forward. The user interface system is the same, the viewfinder is the same, so improvements in the viewfinder and other small things, we can just take over and implement them. Ed: So since the Mini came out, you say you’re now on version 3 of the software – so what have been the big improvements there? Michael: Well we released with version 2.5, that’s just to be on a par with the versioning of the AMIRA. So version 3 is really compared to version 1 of AMIRA system build numbers internally. Version 3 right now is the second back fix release. The current software version for the ALEXA Mini is 2.6; 3.0 will be available in 3 weeks, so early October probably. With 3.0, we get features that have been designed for the AMIRA like the time lapse recording functionality, but also a couple of back fixes because there are some issues that we were struggling with – the camera’s pretty new, it’s like 3 months old and there is lots of feedback that we get from the field, corrections. The way we build cameras is that we always talk and listen to our customers and when things do not work the way our customers expect them to, everything is built in a way so we can adjust the software and adjust the internals in order to adapt so that we have happy customers. This is why we have SUP 11 on the ALEXA. It kept improving over time and we are adding features over time. It’s going to happen here; it’s going to happen for AMIRA as well. Ed: So, other improvements in version 3? Michael and friend with the ALEXA Mini.
Ed: Are people finding new and exciting ways to use them … is that what you’re discovering? Michael: Yes. The Mini is designed to be an addition to our camera set. If you look at the traditional drama team and camera kit, we were lacking a small camera that fits in tight spaces, a camera which can be moved easily, and used handheld. Ed: So you don’t have to use a DSLR anymore? Michael: Yes, or any other camera. The Mini has the same sensor as our larger cameras, the same image quality, the same colorimetry, the same dynamic range. It’s just a smaller package and therefore, in post, you don’t have to worry about matching other cameras. You have one look and very consistent recorded material. Ed: So basically, you’re taking the ALEXA, putting all of the important bits into a box and leaving the other adjustments I guess for external use? Michael: We had to compromise on certain things. Compared to AMIRA, we are lacking audio capabilities. We are lacking connectors obviously. Also the ruggedness of the camera … Ed: Well, you wouldn’t really compare it to an AMIRA would you – this is really an ALEXA comparison? Michael: It’s actually our new architecture. The ALEXA has been around for 5 years; with the AMIRA we have created a new platform for software and firmware. Ed: Aaaah, so really this is more a development of the AMIRA, using that technology, rather than a development from the ALEXA? Michael: The ALEXA is currently at SUP 11; AMIRA is getting SUP 3 and the same SUP levels between AMIRA and Mini is happening. We just created the software in a way that we can share a lot and compile it for both
Michael: Well version 3 is mostly for AMIRA so it added the 50 megabit MPEG and the time lapse recording. Ed: There is internal recording in the Mini, right? Michael: Yes but it has just a single slot. You don’t have extensive audio capabilities; it’s the same sensor – it’s actually a larger sensor than on the AMIRA because it’s a 4x3 sensor, not a 16x9, so this thing can do anamorphic, that’s what we show with 3.0, we have an anamorphic prototype. The real 4x3 mode is going to be released with 4.0 in November, potentially. It will do ARRIRAW, it does anamorphic, so it is a real companion to our large studio cameras. It will do ARRIRAW, Open Gate internally; you will be able to do a higher framerate with an external recorder. Ed: So in making a comparison between the ALEXA Mini and the ALEXA, even though the Mini is in many ways newer technology, it’s still a case of “this is a companion to a full size ALEXA, it’s not a replacement”? Michael: No, it’s not a replacement. It’s a complement of the set of tools. If you’re doing a large scale production, and you have an ALEXA 65 and an SXT and the Mini, every camera has special things that it can do best. If you’re using a large zoom on your camera, the size and form factor of the Mini doesn’t have any advantages anymore, because your camera set actually is heavy anyway because of the lens, because of the motors you need. And then the advantages of the Mini actually decrease and the ruggedness of the ALEXA and the medium like the Codex Mags and things like that become more important, so for a standard tripod based “A” camera, the ALEXA is de facto the best choice. Ed: I would say for rig operators, the Mini would be ideal? Michael: Yes, and if you’re doing car rigs, if you have special purposes, if you use it on a drone, you can use the Mini on a drone.
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a perfect choice. Then of course, it replaces the ALEXA for these cases, but the natural history cameramen who used ALEXA before, they actually struggle quite a bit by carrying all the equipment to the field.
Ed:
That’s a bit of an insurance choice though surely?
Michael: No there are a lot of people doing this. I would say, a good portion of the customers we have use drones or they use handheld gimbals, which is also a new option that hasn’t been present before in these types of productions. On the other hand, if you are, for example, a natural history cameraman and you can only afford to have one camera and you have to stick your camera in your backpack and you want the best image, that camera is
That is changed with the Mini as well. We have natural history people who use the Mini in the field successfully, like in arctic regions, in the jungle, wherever you have to go and you have to go lean with the small package, the Mini is a good choice. Or, if you’re a low budget production and you cannot afford to have multiple cameras, but you have a requirement to use a gimbal, a handheld gimbal, or small kit, because kit becomes less expensive if the camera is getting smaller, so you don’t use a big arm, you can use a small arm. You don’t have to carry a lot of counterweights with you – hundreds of kilos. Ed:
It reduces your whole kit immensely?
Michael: If you want to use a five metre arm and a full size ALEXA compared to the Mini, it’s literally 100 kilos of counterweight that you spare. If you cannot afford to have the full kit, if you cannot afford to have multiple cameras, then the Mini is also a good choice for low budget production. Ed: But still maintaining the quality? Michael: And still maintaining the quality, yes.
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