SEPTEMBER 2016
Vol 228
Atomise presents Avid at Auckland Show Well, no excuses if any of you Aucklanders missed this event because you all got an invite in our last issue. We’re at the Atomise / Avid presentation in Auckland with Richard Kelly and Ren Middleton from Avid. Ed: Well Richard, we’ve just been blown away by a presentation from Dan telling us about his editing on The Hobbit. You must be very proud to have been involved with WingNut Films and all of the major projects that they’ve done? Richard: Absolutely. It’s a relationship I am extremely proud of. I started on Lord of the Rings and have worked on everything up to their current project. It’s just an awesome environment to work in with such passionate people pushing the technology as hard as they can to deliver the result that they feel necessary. Ed: They could have gone anywhere in the world; they came to New Zealand and Peter Jackson could have brought in anybody in the world to look after his Avids and the whole workflow, but he chose you? Richard: He did and it was fantastic having the opportunity to pitch for a proposal to provide a system. Ed: So it wasn’t a given … he didn’t just say “well Richard’s doing it.” You actually had to stack up against competition?
Richard and Ren.
Richard: I certainly had to do a proposal that went through to the decision makers. They looked very kindly on our proposal and I did have a reasonable amount of support from the production company too. Ed: Now your involvement goes a bit beyond Avid, because I understand that the Avid was used as a compiler for the edit decisions and something else was used for the final output, but there were lots of other elements involved and that’s where your installation enabled that workflow to happen? Richard: At the time, it was one of the key reasons we went for the ISIS 7000. Bear in mind, this was quite a
long time ago. The ISIS 7000 was a breakthrough product at that time and, if you look at it today, it still stacks up incredibly well; it’s still one of the most powerful systems, but the ability for us to have so many network links out, to have so many sites collaborating was a key– I think we have 7 discreet sites collaborating on the single storage and they might be 20 kilometres apart. Ed: Dan talked about that, about having the main action happening in Miramar, but you needed something in the Wellington Town Hall and it was all fibre linked and everything worked? Richard: Yes it was absolutely a fantastic use of the system. We had the opportunity to try and see how far we could push the technology. Obviously, a lot of testing went into it, we made sure we had the right connectivity and the right infrastructure to do it, but really it was like “can we do this?” … well yes, we’ll give it a shot and it worked beautifully. We were delivering the same performance to the editor at the Town Hall as what he was getting in his office in Miramar. Ed: One of the questions I asked Dan was about the security of the footage – that not only did the ISIS mirror the material that was coming in, but you also had further redundancy? Richard: Yes, the 7000 itself is an enterprise level system with no single point of failure and, in terms of data security on that unit, it’s incredibly robust. We then had an Apace Octopa system that daily mirrored all the files and kept them on a second storage in a completely separate building. So if the worst had happened and we’d had a building failure for any reason, we could keep working. We actually pushed that further in testing than the vendors had expected and we were able to get 4 systems editing at our main editorial base from the disaster recovery storage at its remote location. So we were very, very confident that we had a really robust disaster recovery plan because, with a major feature film, you cannot afford downtime. We worked very, very hard to come up with a proposal for systems to make it work. That learning went on to things we’ve done for other customers. Ed:
And future customers too I hope?
Richard:
Absolutely.
Ed: Now the ISIS 7000 – this basically was the brains of the whole operation. Everything went into that – all your audio, all your visual effects, all the raw footage, all the metadata … this was where it all ended up. There was no other repository? Richard: All of the storage for editorial was on the ISIS, so the Avid storage was absolutely everything from an editorial perspective.
Ed: That’s pretty impressive. What was the part that Media Composer played in all of this? Richard: Media Composer was the edit product used in the editorial department to bring the film to life. It’s an extremely robust product that handles incredibly complex scenes, movies, very well; allows the editors to be able to track all of those shots, all that information that needs to be going in and out to different departments. It’s not all about just cutting pictures together; it’s about managing the information, managing that metadata, which is a massive part of a feature film. When you think about a feature film, the output from your Media Composer that you’ve been working in isn’t what goes to the theatre. It’s effectively output from a database of what all the shots are that goes out and gets conformed. So that handover has to be incredibly accurate and reliable. Ed: So do you use a Media Composer yourself for your racing videos? Richard: I do indeed use Media Composer for all my racing videos. Ed: Do we have a chance to see your editing capabilities? Richard: I don’t regard myself as an editor. use the product, I can teach the product … Ed:
I can
Is there anything online Richard?
Richard: There’s quite a bit online. I have a YouTube channel which has a lot of my editing, although it’s more green screen and putting in metadata rather than chopping up edits in my case, although I’ve done a few wedding videos. Ed: Now I’ve got some pictures of the timeline or parts of the timeline that Dan used, and I notice all of it couldn’t actually fit on the screen. There was a whole lot more below. Dan did say that there was no other editing product that he could have used to do this?
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Richard: Yes, that’s right. Media Composer is good at cutting pictures together, but its main core strength – the reason you see it on virtually every feature film, is that you can manage so many tracks, so much information and know exactly where you are. Ed: It’s got to be good. After Dan’s talk, Evan Boyd gave a presentation on “cloud collaboration” with Media Composer. I asked Ren Middleton for his synopsis. Q1. I see cloud collaboration for Media Composer really a “no-brainer” for News departments in broadcast but are there smaller applications?
That’s a busy timeline.
Ren: My word there are, we have brilliant and affordable production packages that can include ISIS or Nexis storage, Media Composer cloud, MediaCentral etc. and a bunch of services. These are specifically aimed at production houses and offer remote editing, browser based access to your media for logging or review and approval etc. You could even be on a shoot with your IOS or Android device and check out previous scenes you've shot for the purposes of continuity and the like. It really broadens the scope and capability of your productions. You could even be shooting at a remote location and cut up some rushes and send them back to the facility. There is a multitude of use cases for production. Q2. Is the process written in a format that would be familiar to MC users or do they need to learn a new language? Ren: Yep, the MediaCentral web interface is role based ( dependant on your log in credentials ) and is simple to use with a lot of commonality in terminology and button functions etc. If you cut a simple sequence in MediaCentral you can then open that up in Media Composer, totally compatible. Q3. Is this an “all or nothing” deal or are their price levels related to numbers using it or some other variable? Ren: As mentioned, there are cost effective bundles that start small and can grow to as large as you like. Plus we have great education pricing. The starting point is to ensure you purchase Avid Storage ( ISIS or Nexis) as this forms the foundation of our solutions. Then you grow it from there. Q4. I guess that you could share audio data this way but there is a separate cloud service for Protools, correct? Ren: We handle Protools Cloud a little differently and that comes as part of the standard Protools offering. This enables amazing collaboration with producers and artists with one another around the city, country or the world. The demo you saw was real between Tokyo and Auckland where we had separate guys working on different tracks all coming together in the final session … pretty cool eh! Also at the Avid event, I spoke with Joshua Brown from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, head office in Te Awamutu. Ed: Joshua, tell me about your organisation. understand 30,000 students, but not all in one place?
I
Joshua: Yes, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa has over 80 classrooms around the country – we’re pretty much in every town in New Zealand. The head office is in Te Awamutu because that’s where the organisation started helping youth who didn’t fit mainstream education. It is the second largest tertiary institution in New Zealand. Ed: Wow, but spread over the whole country. Right, so as an ex-schoolteacher myself, I know what problem students are all about, so what do you do … you’re not just entertaining them or keeping them off the street are you? Joshua: No, we live our values, we care about our students or tauira enough to remember their names and we provide outstanding programmes – over 60 different programmes from language to sports, business to computing; the programmes are delivered in classrooms face to face, in the evenings, part-time, at homes – there’s a huge variety and most of them are free. We’re huge, for example, we might have 5-6000 computing students across the country. Ed: But I imagine if you’re offering so many programmes, a lot of these have to be online and your tutors or teachers on the site are there just basically facilitating the connections – is that correct? Joshua: We do have online support, but I think because of our values, there’s a lot of “face to face” and home based. Almost a third, or 10,000 students don’t ever come to class. We visit them in their homes because that’s what they prefer. But it’s a person, a kaitiaki visiting, it’s not just online. They have support of resources and facts and that. Ed: Okay, so how does Atomise and Avid fit into the whole scheme of what you do? Joshua: We have a small team in a shed in Te Awamutu, 11 people including contractors and we scale and shrink as needed. We hired cabins as our edit suites, installed air conditioning and they work great. We create resources for students and the organisation’s serious about its video, its photography and its print resource. Rather than doing Microsoft Word documents or having amateur video, they’ve decided to bring in professionals, add enterprise systems and really invest in professional level quality and for that, Richard Kelly’s the man, he’s the best, so who wouldn’t work with Richard? Ed: Aaah okay, so it’s really that knowledge of the whole television production and distribution workflow that has been important to you?
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Joshua: Yes, we had 2 options after Apple killed Final Cut – Avid or Premiere. We already use Photoshop and After Effects and if we had only 1 or 2 people editing, working Premiere would be a good option, it’s cheap, it’s fast and it’s improved significantly in the past 3 years. Our problem is that we have 3 full-time and sometimes up to 5 editors. Then you add producers and assistants and so sharing and reliability becomes the challenge. I Morgan Samuel, Joshua Brown and Steve Cox from Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. need something that just works every time you open Joshua: Yes, we’ve got 6 Media Composer licences, it. I need bins that can be locked and editors who have 3 Pro Tools, Resolve, Motion Graphics all running off worked in a proven, shared environment. Avid Isis Storage. Richard was really instrumental in I’m not confident in Adobe’s sharing capabilities yet, getting us into shared storage. We’d used Media they may get there soon. I can’t find any editor who Composer with direct-attached but that proved to be a has worked in a large shared Premiere environment. nightmare – I don’t recommend it at all. If you have And though Premiere adds functions and features to more than 3 collaborative editors, there isn’t another their software more rapidly than Avid, I don’t think their sensible shared option that’s proven. software is as stable. Ed: So you have seen the presentation today – we’ve Sure Avid’s interface is clunkier, it’s not as easy to learn just been through Collaborative Cloud Storage and at as Premiere – but it’s reliable. the start of it Richard said “now you need to listen to Ed: And that’s using Media Composer? this.” I imagine for your operation, where you will be
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having professionals around the country delivering you media that you’ve asked them to do, this must be an ideal workflow for you? Joshua: I think it solves the technology problem but not the people problem. Managing people remotely I find difficult and so I prefer to hire people who may have been in industry in Auckland and Wellington who want to come for a different change in pace to Te Awamutu. I’d rather have an editor sitting next to me where we can communicate and talk, rather than message over chat. I can’t solve the people problem with cloud technology – Avid have provided the chance to, but being able to talk with someone is really important. Take a viewing for instance, you could do a remote viewing or send a link, but a viewing’s a sales pitch, and unless you really sell it to them face-to-face and answer a client’s questions immediately, you’ll have lots of problems and comments written as emails, and that’s dangerous. It adds time and complexity and allows misunderstandings to arise. Ed: Perhaps your system needs to evolve to that level? Joshua: It could be. We’ve had a serious look but I think, at present, the cost is something that I would avoid. We have a really good offline / online workflow, so I would look at just doing something at the 800K H.264 proxy set in a Drop Box file, package an entire project up for 3 or 4 gig and Drop Box it, save the money and put it into improving the production value. We don’t need instant collaboration or turnarounds so we’re not there yet. Ed: Well obviously Richard’s got a bit more work to do hasn’t he? Joshua: It’s the same for Pro Tools – Drop Box is easy, so we’ll continue to use it to share files, they’re small. We don’t jointly work on things in real-time. Instead, you send someone a Pro Tools session, you get it back at the end of the day to review and that works for us. I think the Pro Tools cloud collaboration would be useful when we’re under pressure, that would be beneficial to say have a remote Tools operator doing a dialogue pass, while another person is working sound effects or music. Under time pressure you make mistakes with Drop Box sending, reviewing and re-importing that cloud collaboration would mitigate. Under pressure, it can get complex managing which version is correct. Ed: I guess it’s got to work for you. You’ve got to see how the other people in your organisation are going to make it work, and you’ve got to have the situation where your current system isn’t doing what you want it to do? Joshua: Yes well we have an ISIS, so we’ve got the shared storage and it works beautifully, I love it. The cloud collaboration isn’t needed yet. And I like to collaborate with people we’ve worked with before. We have people who are remote in, say, Auckland or Wellington, but we know them really well, we’ve worked with them, we have a shorthand way to communicate, we know what their skills and weaknesses are, they know what our skills and weaknesses are, but we’re not into real time collaboration, we don’t need that yet. Our deadlines aren’t so quick to turnaround. Ed: It sounds as though you’re building up the infrastructure that will enable you to take this on in the future if it’s necessary? Joshua: Yes, we have world class infrastructure, world class. We’ve got the same infrastructure without
Inspecting the rack.
the redundancy that Peter Jackson needs, or the same infrastructure as Sky or TVNZ, so yes it’s world class facilities because we’re serious about making good video for students. If you came to have a meal at my house, I would take care to provide the very best meal, table setting and environment for you as possible. With our resources, we really care about what gets served to our students – and Te Wananga o Aotearoa has really invested in that. I’m disappointed when I see other institutions presenting sloppy videos, recorded on webcams with amateur audio and ugly PowerPoint diagrams served up to students. We’re not there yet fully, but we’re working to having all of our video resources be top shelf. Ed: And that’s where Atomise has really come to the fore and provided you with that infrastructure so you can develop at your own pace? Joshua: Richard is the man! I would be less confident of our shared Avid storage without Richard Kelly. As the geek of the facility, when I run into a problem – there’s only so much that my team or Creative Cow forums can help me. I don’t want to go searching on Google for hours, I want to make a phone call to Richard, who has the experience of hundreds of set-ups and I want it solved. There hasn’t been anything that has stumped me, that Richard can’t solve in under 2 minutes on the phone. So it’s not just Avid Media Composer and Isis – it’s Richard’s support and experience that really lets us sleep at night because that’s a combination that works. NZVN
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Hire’em before Buying’em We’re at the Auckland location of NZ Camera Hire and we are with Michael Zahn. Ed: Michael, it’s been just over 2 years since we last caught up with you and the state of the industry as you experience it. I guess a rental business is one where you do get to see the variety in the industry, because you do offer quite a range of equipment from a little handycam for somebody who might want to do a cousin’s wedding, right up to full production cameras and equipment for television broadcast? Michael: NZ Camera Hire does supply all kinds of different cameras and has a big selection. A lot of other rental places are more specialised I think … they try to capture the big drama market so they have all the fancy top of the line cameras. But there’s also a lot of competition in that field because there are only so many productions that shoot on ALEXAs, AMIRAs and RED cameras. Ed: But you must be doing something right, because you’re still here? Michael: Well my decision was to spread my wings a bit further and get a wider variety of cameras but only one or two of each. There are a lot of people who have small productions and they can’t afford the big production cameras, so they need something smaller and easier to handle. A lot of corporate jobs that we used to shoot ourselves, now the company decides that they can do it themselves, but they may not invest in the equipment. They may have someone on their staff who knows a little bit about shooting and editing, so they then go out and hire a camera and they do their own filming. So right from the beginning I decided to have a bigger variety of cameras and therefore I can supply the corporate, music video, faith or the wedding market, but also the market for commercials and the bigger budget productions with high end cameras. Ed: I guess where you differ from others in the field is that you actually do production work yourself – you are shooting and providing material for a range of clients. You’re getting to use many of the cameras that you have on offer, so you’re able to give your customers first-hand experience on those cameras? Michael: Indeed yes, I’m still a working DOP and I am going out there with all kinds of different cameras depending on job requirements. Knowing your cameras, knowing what they can deliver, gives me the ability to also suggest the right camera for the right production. A lot of people have those fancy ideas; they read about cameras, such as the FS7 or the C300, and they want to shoot on this camera because it is the latest. However, you might be shooting reality television, so maybe you should actually look at the camera that is going to be used and whether everything
can be kept in focus and your camera operator doesn’t have to constantly pull focus. Unfortunately with a lot of productions, it’s like “oh no, it has to be the latest,” so I’m still battling those kinds of misperceptions. Even though I try to give the right advice, it’s still a bit of a battle out there. Ed: Yes, I thought I was going to have to ask another question before I could get Michael emotional about this subject, because it’s one that we both bang on about, and have done for years … there’s all these lovely toys out there, but I think you said once that somebody buys a camera and then it doesn’t matter what production they’re doing, they use the same camera for all those productions. That might have been okay in the past when there were big 3 tube cameras and that was the best and that’s what you used, but these days, with the variety, that’s no longer the case? Michael: I would definitely suggest that if you shoot a reality programme, you use a camera with a two-third inch sensor in it, the old ENG style camera like a Sony PMW-350 with a good broadcast lens, where you can quickly zoom in and you know that the person in the back is in focus, but also, when you zoom out, the person in front is in focus. And on the other hand if you shoot something where you do want to do something more creative, you use a different camera … you use one with a Super 35mm sensor where you do get the shallow depth of field because you want the background out of focus.
Michael with a lens or twenty.
But a lot of people do buy their own cameras because they’re a lot more affordable than they used to be, but then they’re stuck with that one camera and they shoot the nice corporate shoot with it, but they also shoot the reality stuff and the football game with it and whatever else. I’ve even seen them shoot stage events with Super 35mm sensor cameras, and you see someone in the foreground dancing and the rest of the stage is out of focus because yes, your shallow depth of field doesn’t allow you to keep it all in focus. Ed: But that’s “a look” – that’s what they tell me when you see this and you say “but hang on, that’s not
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quite right.” after.”
They say “oh, that’s the look we were
Michael: That might be someone’s look because they think it’s fancy and it’s very creative, but to be honest, watching Filthy Rich and seeing some of the overly done shallow depth of field … I mean yes, it’s all very fancy shooting on Master Primes at T 1.3, but I actually like to see who that person in the foreground is talking to in the background, rather than having them out of focus and constantly having focus shifts. Don’t get me wrong, I like shallow depth of field but I also know when it’s overused. Ed: Now talking of cameras, you’ve had a look at the ARRI range, but currently you don’t have any AMIRAs or ALEXAs or any ARRI cameras – the reason for that?
Ed: up?
Michael: Other new items that I have purchased are camera stabilising systems because there’s quite a lot of interest in camera gimbals and not everyone can afford a Steadicam. I have one that can be used for bigger cameras like the F5 or the FS7 – even a RED camera or an ALEXA Mini would fit on it – and that’s the Letus Helix …remember Letus – the great Letus lens adapters? Ed:
Ed:
Ed: So that’s going to make a big difference to your Sony camera images, having that quality glass?
Ed:
Ed: Obviously there’s a choice in high quality lenses – we’ve got Cooke and Leica – but you went with the ARRIs and Zeiss’? Michael: At this stage, I went with the ARRIs and Zeiss’ because they were available and affordable. The market changes on a regular basis – who knows, maybe in the future I need to invest in some Leicas. I hear that they are reasonably popular, but then they’re also quite expensive, so if I do get a longer production where someone might be interested in some Leicas or some Cookes then yes, I would definitely look into investing in some glass like that. Ed: Okay, so in your new cameras – as you say, the Sony FS7, the F5, but you still reckon that there’s a place for that 3 chip camera, the standard ENG type camera, and that in your range is covered by? Michael: It’s covered by the very, very popular PMW -350, then I’ve got the PMW-400 and also I’ve got the PDW-700 disc camera, and it’s still being used.
Oh yes.
Michael: The same company now makes gimbals as well and they do have quite a good reputation. The one I have can take bigger and heavier cameras as well as medium sized DSLR’s.
Michael: I don’t have any because most of my clients aren’t in the market for those cameras. They’re more shooting in the Sony or Canon range, so that’s why I’ve decided not to go down the ARRI line of cameras. The same with RED. But because I do have the Sony F5 and FS7 and I do have the adapters for the FS7 to use PL glass, so I have invested in a big range of high quality glass like the Ultra Primes, Zeiss SuperSpeeds and the High Speeds right up to your zooms, so I do have a big variety there in high quality PL glass.
Michael: Quality glass always makes a difference. If you use a cheap lens you will see the results.
Any other new toys you’ve got in your rental line-
Is this a gyro stabilised one?
Michael: Yes. There are 3 gyro motors on it and it is steady as and you can also have a fourth axis, so it can actually be used with a Steadicam or Glidecam arm to make it even smoother. It’s a nice little unit and it’s bottom mounted so you don’t need a support stand like some of the other units out there. And the other 3 axis gimbal I got is the little DJI Osmo which has a built-in 4K camera, can do up to 120 frames per second and is a great little handheld unit. It actually works quite well too. And drones – have you got into that area?
Michael: I think I’d be rather careful with drones because they can be a bit dangerous, and hiring out a drone … I don’t want to be at the end of some phone call where I get an insurance company or someone else saying that I didn’t take all the precautions, having the right insurance or having the right people operating the drone. So no, I don’t want to go down the drone way – not as a dry hire from my company. Ed: A very wise decision. Now Michael, I’m sure one of the big worries of any rental company is when somebody comes along, they look as though they know what they’re doing, they look as though they’re in the business, they come to you with a really great rental offer – they want a fancy camera, lots of lenses, all the bits and pieces and they want it for a couple of weeks, and wow it looks like you can afford a European holiday on this one hire. But something doesn’t quite smell right. Has that situation’s occurred for you? Michael: That situation has occurred indeed and yes, one of my rather nice cameras and lenses has gone for a long trip overseas, never to be seen again unfortunately. But yes, it took a while to get it all sorted and, during that process, I was talking to a lot of
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other rental houses, obviously to warn them of the dangers out there. For the future, I have decided, for instance, to take bonds and hold onto passports of people that I don’t know, if I have no previous hire connection with them or if they can’t prove that they have hired within New Zealand. Ed: So that’s it … first of all you’d ask if they’ve got some proof of New Zealand identity and some local … Michael: New Zealand trade reference, yes. Have they dealt with any other rental houses, do they have a proper bank connection … I mean, when you apply for credit usually, you have to fill in all those applications. A lot of my customers kind of walk in off the street so to say. So for most of the camera equipment in the lower end I take the standard driver’s licence, credit card, car registration details. And now I have even gone to the extent of taking photos of clients that I haven’t dealt with before, and for higher end hires, like the F5 or an expensive set of lenses, I have now also decided to take bonds and hold onto passports, just in case they want to take them for a long, one-way trip. Ed: I understand if they give you a photocopy of the passport page, that can be a bit dodgy too? Michael: I would not rely on a photocopy of a passport … I would demand to have the real thing in my hand while the equipment is out. So if they do want to travel, then they can’t. They should not be able to. Ed: But driving licences, credit cards – those can be stolen, copied, whatever. You can buy them in Thailand I understand for not very much at all. So in other words, the trade reference is really, really important – that you find somebody who knows them, or that you can, without a shadow of a doubt, prove a bank account, an address, some sort or residency in New Zealand, so you know where to get them?
danger, because I’ve fallen into the trap where I have taken someone’s credit card only to find out that it had been stolen. So nowadays, either EFTPOS payment from a New Zealand account – so if it doesn’t go through my EFTPOS terminal, then I know there’s something not going right … Ed: Because you can even make that for a deposit can’t you, to make sure that there is a connection to a bank? Michael: Yes, because the bank would obviously need some details of the person and I’m not sure if any visitor can just come here and open a bank account. I think there are certain details that they want to know of before you have a proper New Zealand bank account. Ed: So I guess, as well as you taking your own precautions, it’s really important that any concerns you might have you share within your rental community and, if somebody’s wanting to have a little rental business, then it’s a case of well, talk to you guys and try and share information? Michael: Absolutely. I think it’s very important that we all talk to each other, especially if there is someone going around and, as it has been shown in the past, they do try to approach several businesses at the same time, and try to make a big ( so to say ) purchase in New Zealand and then take off overseas. So yes, it is absolutely important that we all talk to each other and keep that communication open. Ed: Finally, there’s been a small addition to the Zahn household and your time is now spent a little bit as “father” … have you been taking lots of home videos now that you have a little daughter? Michael: I have taken a few home videos indeed, but to be honest the easiest home video is actually the iPhone because it’s always in my pocket! I haven’t really used one of my fancy video cameras to do that.
Michael: Absolutely yes, a trade reference is very important. If they have dealt with other rental houses, then yes I’d know that they obviously have some trust going with someone else. Driver’s licences … I’m not sure how difficult they are to get, or how easy? Ed: Very easy in Thailand I understand.
Ed: Tsk, tsk, you’ve got to think of their 21st birthday and embarrassing her with some of those nappy pictures?
Michael: Oh, okay. Ed: Any licence or identity for any country you want.
Ed: Oh well, if you want to rent an iPhone, come and talk to Michael.
Michael: Any country – right, where do I want to travel next! But anyway, credit cards are also a
Michael: Yes, yes, but the iPhone is actually quite good for that kind of thing.
Michael: needs.
Page 12
By all means, anything your production NZVN
FACE Up! We’re here in the studio of FACE TV with its spiritual and earthly leader, Gerard Smith. FACE is the home of Gerard’s flagship programme “The Beat Goes On” which, all reports point to, is getting better and better as the months go on. Ed: Now viewership Gerard?
I’m sure your is growing
Gerard: Yes the last survey showed that it was up to 9 million. Ed: Wow, that’s more than Kim Jong-un gets for his breakfast show? Gerard: Yes – we were My son, Patrick, being interviewed by Gerard on set. surprised actually because there are only 4½ million people in the country! We Gerard: Thank you Grant – that was a great plug. The Beat Goes On every Monday night at 8 o’clock. think people voted for us twice. Ed: As long as it’s going up. Now you proudly say that The Beat Goes On is the longest running talk show on TV in New Zealand ever and that you’re nearly up to 350 episodes I understand?
Ed: … or you can record it and watch it at your leisure?
Gerard: That’s right, we’re 6 weeks away from 350 shows, so I thought that warranted a visit from Grant Cummuskey and a feature in the greatest video magazine in the world.
Ed:
Gerard: Grant?
Yes, exactly.
I hope you’re doing that
Absolutely.
Gerard: Religiously? I received an email where the person said he watched religiously I was hoping I could put you in the same category.
Ed: Oh I’m very pleased that you say that Gerard, because you’ve just done a very wonderful thing and interviewed my son who’s running for local council. His presentation was faultless I would say, and I put that down to the quality of the interviewing. Gerard: Oh no, I think it’s in the genes, you know, like father like son. Ed: Well, I can’t argue with that. Now in terms of your operation here, as I say your technology’s improving but what about the reach … how are people getting to see FACE TV? Gerard: We haven’t got a great budget for huge $3 million promotions like a lot of the other stations have got, so I think in the end that the niches we’re developing, whether it be The Hot Rod Show or The Travel Show – if you’re interested in these types of programmes sooner or later you find them. We are fortunate to be on the Sky network which is great in the sense that we’re in 850,000 homes and people are flicking up and down the channels all the time and they ultimately find us. Once they do of course, they never switch again. We’re in a great position on Sky, right next to Sky News, 2 or 3 stations away from CNN and Fox News. This is a fantastic position for us. Ed: And the great thing about Sky is, with Sky HDI, you can look through the schedule and if you do find The Hot Rod Show at 2am, you can set it to record along with all your other great programmes but especially, The Beat Goes On. Page 13
A choice of three camera angles.
Ed:
But The Beat Goes On would be the No 1?
Gerard: Oh I see what you mean, how could I forget that. Thank you Grant. Also a new kid’s show starting very soon which is going to be great. Ed:
A kids show – who are you getting to front that?
Gerard: It’s called The Treehouse. It’s all in the can. I can’t remember their names but the two young presenters were great. As you can see I wasn’t the producer on that one. Ed: Because you’re personally not doing all these shows, is this an opportunity for independent producers? They’ve got an idea, they’ve got a plan and they put together a package to use FACE as their delivery mechanism? Gerard:
Exactly.
We deal with 2 different types of people in the sense that there are producers out there who want to record and edit their own shows and we just broadcast them; there are other types who say “look, I want you to look after the recording and the editing.” Ed: And I guess everything in between, so if you can do part of the production yourself great, but otherwise you can use all the facilities. Gerard: You might record it yourself and have it edited here. Ed: And you’ve got an idea for Auckland Council better communicating to the people of Auckland I understand?
Standing next to the rack is Hans Versluys, Programme Manager.
Ed: Indeed. But for those who don’t get Sky, are there other options such as streaming? Gerard: Not streaming, just “on demand” in the sense that we have a main interview every week that always goes up on YouTube. So go to <thebeatgoeson.co.nz> and you just go to where it says “watch” and there’s always something new there.
Gerard: Yes after talking to all the politicians up for election I would like to do a show next year called called Grassroots Auckland. Not at the mayoral and the councillor level, but at the local ward level. What the community is doing. We’re a community station, we should be reflecting what’s happening in our community. Ed: And each community doing and explaining what it does for its own members?
Ed: Gerard, I understand that this rack is actually the latest incarnation of what was once Triangle Television?
Gerard: Yes, what did it set out to achieve, did it happen etc.
Gerard: Yes it is – which then became FACE and so the whole operation has shifted from Grey Lynn across to Beach Road in a much reduced size.
Ed: Could this be interesting television for people who are not in that particular community?
Ed: Your shows are a mixture of local and overseas – how do you decide the mix?
Gerard: Well it’s like everything – we play a hot rod show, now to the hot rod fans out there, they love it, but not everybody, say, is into hot rods, and the same with politics. Not everybody’s into politics but for those who are really interested in what’s happening in their community, this could be exactly what they’re looking for.
Gerard: Most of the overseas shows are in a filler capacity until we can replace them with New Zealand shows … that’s our mission.
Ed: And I imagine other communities could learn from what one particular community did to solve one of its problems, as they might have the same problem?
Ed:
Gerard:
There were so many things on the racks that were outdated, but the way things are today, it’s quite compressed compared to what used to be needed to deliver a TV channel.
So what are your top shows at the moment?
Gerard: All sorts, Property Success, The Global Health Show with Liz Gunn, The Travel Show with Gerard Murphy, and The Hot Rod Show with Doug Bell.
Ed:
Do they communicate with each other …
It’s pretty important isn’t it Gerard?
Gerard: We’ve yet to find out while going where no station has gone before. NZVN
Page 14
Sound Devices on a Visit We’re at Sound Techniques and as a very special treat we have Gabriel Benitez from Sound Devices USA. He’s here to have a look at our market and of course, he’s come to Sound Techniques because they’re the ones selling and supporting Sound Devices products in New Zealand. Ed: Talking of “support” Stephen, obviously you’re “Mr Sound” New Zealand and if there are ever any technical sound questions that people have with equipment, they come to you, but with the arrival of the PIX Video Devices, how has your knowledge there been developed?
Stephen and Gabriel.
Stephen: People who are interested in the Video Devices products, who know of Sound Devices because they’ve seen it on set being used by the sound department, have come along to us to ask us more about it. As soon as Sound Devices announced that they were making video product, of course we took an interest, because we’re keen to preserve not only their reputation in New Zealand, but also ours, as being people who can support equipment. Obviously, video has not been in our natural territory, so there has been a bit of a learning curve. Ed: And honestly there’s a lot of the technology in there that has been developed from the audio side, so it’s just a little bit of extra learning, and that’s where you’re partnering rather well with the people at DVT? Stephen: Yes we are partnering with DVT. We don’t sell cameras, and especially the newer range of Video Devices products, the PIX-E series, really requires a camera to be matched with them. So yes, we’re working in combination with them to find opportunities for the PIX products, but also before, even without contacting them, we’ve had DOPs and independent operators, people who own cameras, video assist and DIT personnel who know of us because they’ve sat over the shoulder of a sound recordist on set, come along to us unannounced and they know that we stand by the stuff that we sell. Ed: Now Gabriel, is that particularly important to you that you have some representative in the country of sale who can support your product because it’s not really a box product? Gabriel:
What product are we talking about?
Ed: Any of your Sound Devices products – they are not products that you could hand to just anybody, that they could open the box, follow the instruction book there and be up and running? Gabriel: Yes, absolutely. Support is primarily the thing that we look for, so I think for a product to successfully sell in any territory, you need a couple of ingredients. One is to have local distribution that caters to the market, that’s correct for that product that can provide the support for that product. The support can
mean many things, it can mean stock, it can mean technical knowledge, it can mean … Ed: How to use it in the best possible way? Gabriel: Right – you know, recommend the product, and then also have complementary brands to accompany the product. In the world of production sound, if you look around the store, the different items that are here, they all complement Sound Devices in a synergetic way, in a symbiotic way, the same way Sound Devices complement the other audio brands that are in the store. So if a person comes in and wants to put a bag together, they go to Sound Techniques and Stephen can recommend this bag, this boom, this mic, this accessory, this recorder etc, etc and so for any product – be it audio or video – there needs to be that type of support, that type of product knowledge. Ed: And knowing which bits to put together and that they do work. If you plug brand X into your Sound Devices, it’s going to enhance …? Gabriel: It’s going to work, yes absolutely. I think those are the key ingredients for success – I may be missing a couple of things … Ed: Well I know one area that is very difficult for you and many other suppliers to say – it’s actually important for your distributor to have some competition product, because when the customer comes in to have a look at yours or others, they’ve got the opportunity to compare products right in front of them. They can look at brand X, brand Y, brand Z and make an educated decision based on their needs – whether it be price, whether it be quality, whether it be the size, the ergonomics, the colour even, that gives them that chance to make an educated choice, so they’re not going to go away at the end of the day thinking “well that’s all he had so I bought it”? Gabriel: Right – I mean, standing in the shoes of the manufacturer, competition drives us to be better, so it’s always healthy. But at the end of the day, the most important person comes out ahead, and that’s the customer. The customer is the greatest beneficiary of the strong competition because they get to pick and choose. Ed: And you’ve obviously done it well because Sound Devices is growing market share still?
Page 16
Gabriel: Yes. We’re lucky, we have a very strong, passionate customer base and, at the end of the world, you find Sound Devices users very proud of the recorder that they have, and we’re very lucky to have such a strong passionate customer base ourselves. Ed: So what are you doing here at Sound Techniques tonight? Gabriel: In the production sound market, the users form a very supportive and strong community, and in every market there is a production sound mixer community that develops and basically they’re key people, influential people and they’re out working jobs, doing sound for this, for that, whether it’s an interview or a documentary, a movie, a TV show, a soap opera … whatever it is, they’re out there working and so the community of production sound mixers is all over the world and what I’m doing here is getting close to those individuals. You know, Stephen has a very strong history in production sound and now he has the resources to support that community, he has our brand, so what we’re doing tonight here is bringing in those users and showing off some equipment, shooting the breeze a little bit trying to get to hear their … Ed: … stories, because feedback for you must be really important and shows that, if people are prepared to talk to you and tell you what they might not like, what they would like to see added, or what’s really great, it’s showing that they have a passion for your products, that they’re willing to actually come out and say something? Gabriel: Yes, they’re taking the time to give you that info, and customer feedback is important for us, considering that you’ll never make everyone happy and
not every idea will make it into a product, but I think that the day you stop listening is the day you lose that connection. Ed: Is that the value to you of having a distributor such as Sound Techniques, because you could sell some of this product over the internet and people could order it and have a courier deliver it, but obviously they’ll be unhappy because they’re not using it correctly. Is that always a concern? Gabriel: Selling stuff online directly is an approach, but I don’t know if it gets what you want it to. Going back to the type of support that we were talking about, someone goes online and accesses a product. They need to figure out how to make that product integrate with the other items they might have. No one goes out and buys a Sound Devices recorder on its own, they need to buy batteries, they need to buy a microphone, they need to buy cables, a microphone mount, and so if they know where to go for all those, then they may go bargain hunting online, but it might take them a lot of time to figure out the right information that they need. If you’re just starting out in this industry, you may find better deals online but you may not necessarily get what you need and so it’s best to stick with a company that knows and, at the end of the day, the added value of having a dealer is not only being able to give you the right points and the right guidance, but also the right support. I mean products do break – Sound Devices are very reliable but they’re not bulletproof, so if something were to happen, you need that type of support. You know for a production sound mixer to be down, or a recorder, those are days that that person
Page 17
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isn’t working. So if you think about, this local support is something that you can never get by buying something online.
Ed:
Ed: And you agree with that Stephen, even though you have a little website you run yourself?
So even if you did buy it on the internet, realised that, to build their customer base, they actually provide realistic customer support, Gabriel was saying, if something fails, well who going to run to?
Stephen: …
We have a very limited e-commerce thing
Ed: So you don’t have Sound Devices product on your e-commerce website? Stephen: We don’t have Sound Devices product on our e-commerce site, but what is interesting is watching how internet sales have evolved. People who started off selling solely on the internet now have quite solid customer-focused sources of information – people you can call, people you can talk to.
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And they’re not in Pakistan?
Stephen: No, they’re not in Pakistan – not like Telcos – they’re providing local support.
Ed:
Who are you going to call?
Stephen: Ed:
they’ve need to and as are you
Yeah that’s right … Ghostbusters, perhaps?
No, no, no, no …
Stephen:
Oh, recommend Sound Techniques?
Ed: ( sigh ) Sometimes I wonder if anybody really listens to me. NZVN
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LEDs – the Real Oil Last month we heard from Dedo Weigert about lighting colour that included much information about colours that LEDs can produce. Now, Chris McKenzie from PLS tells us what’s behind a good LED. I want to talk about LEDs because there’s a lot of snake oil out there and LEDs are the best example of “you get what you pay for.” You buy a cheap LED, you’re going to get a cheap LED; you buy the $2 one that flashes on your wrist, it’s probably not going to be working by the end of the night; you buy the $200 one off Trade Me, it’s probably not going to be working by the end of your shoot – or half of it’s not going to be working by the end of your shoot. You can buy the $10,000 one and it may not be working by the end of your shoot, but we don’t sell those ones! For the uninitiated – and I know there’s a lot of you here who understand the technology – an LED is a silicon diode; it’s exactly the same as that lump of silicon that’s sitting in your computer humming away, processing all the noughts and ones that you’re punching at it. The particular property of an LED is that on that diode junction, by putting some foreign material into the diode junction, it takes some of the energy that’s travelling through the diode and turns it into light and if you didn’t do fifth form physics, there’s no point in me going any further. It’s simply about dumping energy into an object, into a molecule, and that molecule wants to return to its zero energy state and by doping the particular things that return to the zero energy state, it gives you a calibrated output of light. It can be heat, it can be infrared, ultraviolet, radio waves, so we like the light, you know we all depend on light and dark. So LEDs are cool – yes and no. If you get an LED fitting, it’s cool on the front; if it’s not hot on the back, give it back. A LED is still that silicon device and you all know about all those howling fans in your computers. They’re there to suck the heat out of the junctions of those silicon devices in your computer. And we have to do that with LEDs as well; we have to remove the heat out of the back of the junction of the LED. Normally it’s done by mounting the LED onto a metallic substrate and that, depending on how many LEDs, the more LEDs you try and crush in the more heat you need to remove. If you get a roll of strip LEDs like these, which you’ve all seen in the $2 shop, and if you’re going to put them under your table or under your sink, or under your bedhead or whatever – they need to be mounted on a piece of aluminium strip, otherwise in 3 years’ time you’re going to have a whole bunch of missing teeth as 1 LED of the 3 will have failed, because it’s overheated.
Normally it’s done by heatsinks; cheap units are done by fans – you pay $3,000 for a fitting and they put a $50 muffin fan in it. I don’t know how many people have had muffin fans in your computer, your power supply, your iPhone charger, your whatever – it’s got a fan in it; either they choke to death with all the cat fluff under the bed or just choke to death from old age.
Chris McKenzie
So you’ve got a light source that will last 25,000 hours and a muffin fan that’s maybe good for a couple of thousand. So there’s all the peripheral stuff that lets you down; it’s the power supplies that let you down … the LEDs can let you down as well. And again, because they’re a silicon device and if you haven’t seen how all silicon things are made – they’re made up in a wafer, layers of silicon that are all micro lithographically etched and the 3 good ones in the middle of that wafer of about 5,000 LEDs or 5,000 silicon chips are the Intel – whatever the top spec’d price is for this at the moment. The ones as they go out, go into your Casio watches and they go further out, they go into your oven timers and all this other shit that we surround ourselves with processors. So it’s very variable and LEDs were exactly the same – I mean, Dedo Wiegert told me when he started making his LED fittings he was buying batches of 10,000 LEDs and getting 180 that he could use, because the failure rate out of the batching of LEDs was that great. It’s getting better, it has got better. So there are multiple ways of making light out of LEDs. You can take a whole bunch of simple, single chip LEDs, stick them on a substrate, wire them up appropriately, give them a power supply – you can dim them up and down or do what you want to do with them. Good LEDs have a very high colour rendering. There are 2 measurements … we still talk about colour rendering which is a traditional lighting measurement. The LED industry has tried to get away from it, but they haven’t succeeded because white LEDs are not white LEDs; white LEDs are a blue LED, with a little dollop of phosphor sat on top of it. The phosphor takes the blue light and turns it into a spectrum of white light that we expect to see.
So you have to get the heat out of the back of the LED. So when we do the silly stuff that we do of jamming all of these LEDs into a very tight space, like when we assemble lighting panels, we have to have methods of removing that heat. Page 21
When you look at a rainbow, that’s a spectrum of white light, all of those colours in that spectrum. If you miss some of those phosphors, and you break it out with a prism, there’ll be gaps in that rainbow. And that’s a problem for us as image makers, because my red shirt, or green blue shirt … if those colours are missing out of the light source that we throw onto these materials, there’s nothing reflected off. Everything we see is by reflected light, it’s reflected off the colours of everything around us.
It would be impossible to video, because it’s in the single spectrum and so cheap LEDs don’t necessarily give us the full spectrum. One of the steps that has been taken to increase the colour spectrum is what Kino Flo are doing here, where they’re taking cool white and warm white – so tungsten and daylight LEDs. But they’re also scattering a few red and a few green and a few blue and they’re filling in those little gaps and then homogenising it all with a diffuser. It’s a very inefficient way of doing it, but it gives you a very high colour rendering LED. So we’re starting to talk about TLCI, which is Television Lighting Consistency Index. This was invented by a guy who was an ex-camera scientist from the BBC, Alan Roberts, a very clever guy who now works for the EBU. He decided that we needed to figure this out because you guys who shoot with a multitude of sensors that are out there, know that every camera you put up reacts differently to light. It has a different range, it has a different roll off at a certain point, it sees some colours better than others.
“screw you all, take that and sort it out yourselves – fix it in post if you have to” because Kodak, Fuji, everybody else used to publish all the colour imagery for their film and so it was easy for a lighting manufacturer to say “oh yeah” or Kodak to say “stick this filter on for this lamp, you’ll get the result you want.” But the man from Oakley wouldn’t tell; the man from GoPro, the man from ARRI, the man from Blackmagic, etc, etc. None of them will divulge any of this highly technical knowledge about their cameras and colours. They think that’s a very close to the chest secret. It makes it difficult for all of us who are trying to make images; you need to now know how a camera will perform in a given lighting situation. If you had a favourite film stock, you knew what you got with it every time; provided it was processed correctly, printed correctly, you could mess with it as much as you wanted to. You know as you change your camera now, and perhaps even between cameras of the same manufacturer, you’re going to possibly get a different result. So anyway, we need to understand what we’re doing with light, so that we’re presenting the best image. What we’ve got to do with light is to get it all sorted and mangled and messed in the way we like before it hits that front element, because once it’s gone through the front element, yes, you can fix it in post, but if you’re really good at what you’re doing, you should be doing it before it hits that front element. So one of the advances to the white LED problem is to take the phosphor and cast it up into a large sheet. So rather than having a millimetre square of phosphor, we’ve now got 300mm x 200mm of phosphor. So now you’ve got millions and millions of molecules of phosphor in here.
Frieder Hochheim who owns Kino Flo spent 2 years tearing his hair out trying to make algorithms for his LED fittings to match the 25 system sensors that were being used in Hollywood. He finally gave up and said
So in this fitting, in the AREA 48 fitting – and there’s several other fixtures around that do the same thing – they have the whole bunch of royal blue LEDs in behind that panel. I can’t show them to you, because if I did it
But if that colour of light is not present … and I don’t know how many of you have stood under a pure sodium yellow streetlight – shit what colour was my car? Because that’s monochromatic – it’s one line of yellow, the rest of the spectrum that our eyes are tuned to is missing. The worst one used to be in the early days of Pak’nSave – I used to go crazy walking into Pak’n’Save, because they had high pressure sodium, which was very yellow and very minimal blue … you’d walk into there and you’d go “oh shit” and then your brain’s going “no, it’s fine light, it’s white light.”
Page 22
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would knock the back of your retina off – it’s so bright, extraordinarily bright. There’s a safety switch in there that if you take the front panel out, it shuts the LEDs off. You know, you’d have instantaneous 48 blue spots burnt into your retina. So this is getting back TLCI, CRI up to a 95, 96 – 100 is perfect daylight or tungsten. 80, 75 is what you’re getting in a lot of the “trade me” bids out there. Most of these guys now are up to 94 to 97 which is more than acceptable for what we’re trying to do. So as a brief overview of LED … what manufacturers are now doing is taking more and more LEDs and clustering them together, taking what we’re looking at in that fixture there and maybe putting 10 of those into a cluster, and then sticking an optical lens, because that is native 120 degrees beam angle, that’s what’s coming off the top of the LED or off the top of phosphor. You know we don’t that often want to go out with 120 degree beam angle fitting because we’re only looking at the 45 degrees down the middle of the frame, so we’re wasting all that light out the edges. So we want to get it back into where we can use it, gather it up, and so there’s lots of very clever optical systems to do that and condense it. NZVN
Planck curve.
Page 24
News from ARRI We’re gathering at the local ARRI lighting supplier PLS and we have quite a group to talk to. The big news is that Stefan Sedlmeier has moved on from ARRI in Au/ NZ and has been replaced by Brett Smith. Now many of you will know Brett Smith from his incarnations with other companies, and we will shortly talk to him about what his plans are for Australia and New Zealand in the coming decades. But first, from ARRI Asia-Pacific, the General Manager for lighting, Bertrand Dauphant. Bertrand: I am based in Hong Kong, which is the head office for the Asia-Pacific region. My colleague, Nancy Liu, product manager, is here with me on this New Zealand visit. In Hong Kong, we have a complete team including service, camera and lighting, and marketing departments. We have the stock to serve the whole Asia-Pacific area and we have a project department who look after broadcast, designing television studios and turnkey solutions for the region. We also have factory-trained lighting engineers in all our branch offices, including Ray Adia in the Sydney office looking after Australia and New Zealand. Ed:
Who looks after the Pacific Islands?
Bertrand: Well that’s Brett who is going to look after the Pacific Islands. I’m entrusting him to look after them well. We know we have potential growth in Fiji and Papua New Guinea, we’re talking about that … Ed:
You don’t want to go to PNG.
Bertrand: And “connections”. Ed:
some
islands
with
French
Don’t mention colonies around here.
Bertrand: No, no. But New Caledonia is definitely a market that I would like Brett to look at. Ed:
And I think a conference in Tahiti is called for?
Bertrand: Yes, and Brett wants to go to Tahiti but I asked him to come to Auckland first in winter … I think it’s a good start for him. Ed:
So what are the major Asian markets for you?
Bertrand: From Hong Kong, we service China, Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and we are on the way to opening a Japanese branch in Tokyo. We have colleagues based in Singapore as well as Brett and his team in Australia. ARRI in Asia-Pacific has more than 60 employees and we are the growing region of ARRI internationally.
because of the Kung Fu movies – all made with ARRI film cameras at the time – and ARRI lighting has been in Hong Kong and China since the 60’s. So 8 years ago, we opened ARRI Hong Kong to serve the Asia-Pacific market. Ed: Now I must say it’s very generous of you to have such a presence in China, because the Chinese seem to be very flattering to your brand in that they appear to copy a lot of ARRI products – except cameras. Going round the stands at NAB and IBC, I’ve seen many lights that are blue and they’re on silver stands and they look very similar – but on closer inspection, they’re not the same? Bertrand: They are not quite the same. “Blue and silver” are just the colours that the Chinese associate with motion picture lighting. If you manufacture a light in China and you make it any other colour it’s not going to sell; in blue and silver it’s fantastic. I think that is their recognition of our good work. China is a market where it’s important for us to be, not to leave this place to the copy market. I’m joking really because copying is a big problem for us and we are fighting back legally by all means. However, we are extremely successful in China because the Chinese market’s also changing. Ten years ago, people did not understand the difference between an ARRI and a Chimera, and a knock-off grey and blue product. Now people understand the difference, so we have large rental houses in China who are 100% equipped in ARRI and they don’t buy any Chinese product … the Chinese product, in fact, is selling much more on the export market. Europe is a big market for Chinese copies; US is a big market for Chinese copies, but Chinese mainland high end motion picture broadcasters don’t choose Chinese copies, they use ARRI product. Ed: We’ve certainly seen in our broadcast news the development of the Chinese motion picture industry and that it’s very important for them to break into the US market. They’re obviously looking to the high end, not only in the camera field, but also in lighting, to make their end product acceptable to US technical standards? Bertrand: We are currently working on a project in China where our client is building 60 motion picture stages. It’s a company called the Wanda Group who
Ed: Historically, has ARRI been mainly in Australia and New Zealand and China is an emerging market for you? Bertrand: No, we have been in China for a long time. ARRI was selling in China way before we opened a subsidiary there. ARRI is a 100 year old company next year and we are celebrating our 100th anniversary with parties everywhere … I’m not sure about Auckland, but certainly in Sydney. Maybe Brett will organise something for you in Tahiti. China is an old market for us. Hong Kong was first
Chris, Bertrand, Ruthie, Nancy and Brett at the PLS showroom. Page 25
bought legendary studios last year. They own AMC Cinema in the USA and bought the Hoyts Group in Australia last year. In the next 2 years, Wanda is planning to operate the 60 stages. It’s a massive place in Qingdao – where they make the beer too. They took a German supplier for the light, that makes sense, but for us, the Chinese market is not an anecdotic market. We foresee that China will be as big as the Hollywood market in the next 5 years. It’s as fast as that. Ed: Right, now Nancy – your place in the scheme of things. Are we going to see you more in our region from now on, or are you going to be only in Hong Kong? Nancy: Well I am in Auckland now but I am based in Beijing, and I’m taking care of the whole Asia-Pacific region for lighting product. I’ve been travelling from Singapore to New Zealand here and I’m so happy to be here to hear feedback from our different markets. Ed: It’s much nicer in summer – this is not the best time weather-wise to come to New Zealand. At least we have nice clear air, but it’s a lot warmer in summer, so do come back then. Nancy:
I would be happy to come again.
Ed: Excellent. So your background – were you educated in sales or in the production business? Nancy: I studied optical electronics for my master’s degree and, before ARRI, I worked for Osram China, so I was always in the lighting industry. Ed: So you’re from the technical side of it – you understand ballasts and everything that goes on in the background?
Nancy: Yes, all the light sources and the fixtures – I’m interested in that aspect of our products. Ed: It’s reassuring to know that there is much technical expertise available to ARRI customers. Now Brett, we come to you. This is a big change for you – coming into a high tech company? Brett: Yes, and on 2 sides of it too – both cameras and lighting. To start my job by bringing Nancy and Bertrand to New Zealand is incredibly exciting because support is something that everyone talks about but often it’s lip service. ARRI is very, very strong on training and very strong on support but our view is that support isn’t just when something breaks and needs to be repaired. We’ve got that in Australia at a very high level, and also local support for lighting through PLS – certainly there’s frontline support and spare parts and all of that, but to have Nancy come to Australia and New Zealand as our product manager and do presentations using her expertise from previous jobs and her engineering skills to describe how LED lighting actually works – as opposed to LED being just a phrase – is great. It allows gaffers and lighting directors across the spectrum to understand the evolution of tungsten HMI and LED and how they all have applications, but the most exciting thing about LED is that it’s evolving to fill applications that, traditionally, people think tungsten and HMI would only fill, and that’s either light output or light integrity. Ed: You sound as though you’re learning a lot as you go, because in your previous job, you had a whole range of products that you were selling, and they were basic products – filters, bags, some simple lights.
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Basically it was “box” selling. Now you’ve come into high end product lines that, as you say, really do require that extra support? Brett: Yes. In the last 3 weeks, I started in Munich with camera products training, and then we went to lighting systems training in Hong Kong, and I put something together very quickly in my mind and that was, “why would people buy an ARRI camera over another camera?” and, “why do 90% of dramas in our region shoot with ARRI ALEXAs or ALEXA Minis?” Ed: So you’ve come into this not knowing the answer, and asking those questions that, well, the customers ask too … why should we buy an ARRI, and why not brand X? Brett: The answers are coming in. One of them was look management and, with cameras, the look that ARRI gives is what DOPs, cinematographers love and request. Producers know that, if they’re shooting on an ARRI, there is an expectation, not just in postproduction and taking the word of the DOP in choosing an ARRI camera, but because the software we have in our look management allows people on set to do non-destructive emulation of final output. Great features you couldn’t do with film cameras or television studio cameras, we do: we’re morphing all our expertise in film as well as digital into one package. Look management of course involves colour, so when it came to our lighting training in Hong Kong, Nancy gave us a great example, explaining that “you can’t shoot what’s not there.” In short she said that early LED lighting was random in its spectrum. People would say it was green, like fluorescent when it first came out, but peaking was only half the problem, the other issue being colours that simply weren’t there. If you look at early LEDs and compare their colour spectrum to benchmark tungsten lighting, you find that colours like magentas and yellows weren’t there at all. Ed: But this was before the time ARRI produced LEDs and they didn’t because they hadn’t yet conquered that full spectrum, correct? Brett: Yes. Now we have full spectrum LED fixtures. ARRI’s SkyPanel and L-Series are developed using RGB and W white LEDs. It was only by developing a light with the 4 LED sources that you could offer the full colour spectrum, as close as possible to the benchmark tungsten light source. The success of SkyPanel and L-Series has been in providing the full colour spectrum that the ALEXA, the AMIRA, and the ALEXA Mini cameras reproduce so well. So yes, it’s a range of LED products that ARRI have that are all highest CRI possible and able to replicate all colours in the spectrum. There are no gaps. Ed: So again this comes down to the support … the local support where, if you are purchasing or renting a camera, you want to know the right light source to go with it and that’s where having that local support is most important, that they’re actually knowledgeable? Brett: That’s right, and it’s why the right kind of LED can now sit comfortably alongside HMI and tungsten lighting on set. I’ve had discussions with cameramen who’ve said “I thought it was me”. They’d do a two shot with a simple 1x1 on-camera LED panel and maybe a second LED source on a stand, and they’d be trying to balance skin tones or foreground-background but just
couldn’t get it right. They’d blame the camera, they’d blame other aspects of the environment, but it would most likely be that the lighting was so imperfect in its spectrum balance that some colours that make up skin tone just weren’t reflecting to the sensor. That’s where education of camera operators as well as lighting directors is so important. And that’s why we’re here, because people misunderstand LED as being a single solution, and also something they can learn about in 2 hours. They’ve spent a lifetime learning about tungsten and HMI; there’s no reason why they should know all about LED in a couple of hours, and that it should be the answer to all their lighting prayers. There’s a few starting points that Nancy and Bertrand’s presentations include that at least let lighting / camera operators understand what LED light is comprised of, after which they can make informed choices and make the most out of their complete shooting workflow, from camera to edited footage. Ed: But Nancy and Bertrand are not going to be here every day … is there an educational path that you’re going to follow with lighting and cameras in New Zealand? Brett: Funny you should ask. The ARRI Academy commenced in January 2016 and very quickly we’re building a portfolio of training seminars which can be used by distributors, as well as local ARRI offices plus our staff in Munich, who will travel around the region training end users. But most importantly they’ll also “train the trainers.” And this is the educational path you refer to where the knowledge remains after the experts depart: our goal is to have local camera and lighting trainers in New Zealand and Australia who will work with our Academy syllabuses to offer a regular regional schedule. We’ve already booked some of our Munich experts for Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, to train on specific areas that include LED lighting, lighting in general, as well as camera stabilisers, cameras plus look management and workflow. So yes, the ARRI Academy is the answer to that question. Ed: Fantastic. Well hopefully we’ll see you and other ARRI people here more often? Brett:
Yes you will, Grant. Thank you so much. NZVN
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