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Adobe for DVTMy one reader request for “whatdo we want to see at NAB 2012”was Adobe CS6 so, for DVT, weare starting at the Adobe standwith Reg Santo Tomas fromAdobe Systems and StuartBarnaby from DVT.

Ed: What’s new for CS6 and, asa CS4 user myself, Reg, I’m keento know why I should upgrade toCS6 when CS4 seems to beworking very well for me?

Reg: Sure. Even between CS4and CS5, CS5.5, we’ve addedmore support for different formatsand there’s been a lot of features.But in CS6 there’s actually quite abit more.

One of the things you’re going tosee here is the Hover Scrubber.Basically, you can view your clipsin your project panel via iconmode, and actually you can viewthis as a full screen, roll yourmouse over it and you can get amoving preview of your clips. Thismakes it very easy to go through all your clips that youimported, especially when you’re talking about file basedworkflows which are becoming more and more common –certainly away from tape right. You get a lot of mediathat’s all the same name, I’m sure you guys have seen it.You don’t know what they look like, you don’t knowwhich one it is, this helps you go through it easy. Youcan even select these and play in and out points directlyfrom your project panel without opening it up in a sourcemonitor, and put it directly to your timeline.

Ed: So this is like Adobe Bridge but with moving clips?

Reg: Yes, it’s just working internally within Premiere,which is nice. You can customise your controls here, soyou can say what kind of transport/transfer controls youwant with a button editor. If you have a certain workflowthat you like, you can add things like the loop, you canremove it, add it back on …

Ed: That’s a Liquid feature Stuart?

Stuart: It looks very similar doesn’t it.

NAB 2012 - PART ONE

MAY 2012 Vol 180

Stuart and Reg looking at Adobe CS6.

You know, looking back on it from the safety of my nest in Godzone, I think I enjoyed this year’s NAB experience more thanmany in the past. After 16 years, I’ve figured out how to get the information I’m after out of the stand jockeys in the short-est possible time and to know when to cut them off for the next question. If I’d just let them talk, I’d still be there.

Having said all that, there were plenty of interesting developments to report on and some personal vindications, the mostnotable being the rise of 4K and the sidelining of 3D. To find out more, read on and enjoy. Ed

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corrector on the video track. So if I open up the effectscontrol panel …

Ed: So in fact you’re using one of the video tracks asan effect track, and it’s not actually a picture, it’s justan effect that’s gone on there and you can then editthat effect, cut up that effect and edit individual bits ofthat effect?

Reg: And so what we’ve also added is what we call“continuous playback” which allows you to playback andedit without stopping playback. You see the clip isplaying back there, I’m going to make an adjustment inreal time without any rendering and you see youreffects are applied. And they’re applied to every singleclip below that adjustment layer. It’s a huge timesaver.

Another feature we’ve added … we had this feature in5.5 in After Effects but we’ve now adapted it inPremiere. So it’s called the Warp Stabilizer. One of thecommon issues that you get with a lot of your footage isyou get shaky footage, because you don’t always havethe luxury of having a Steadicam with you. So you cansee that footage is quite shaky there, I will turn it on –there’s your shaky footage, apply the Warp Stabilizer …just a few frames here in this demo, but you can seehow much more steady that is.

Ed: And that’s unrendered?

Reg: Right. And another feature that we added is arolling shutter repair. The reason this is important is alot of our users shoot with DSLRs, so what you’re goingto get is there’s motion when you’re moving from sideto side with bent vertical lines because of the CMOS, sothat’s called a rolling shutter.

So you basically just add this effect called the RollingShutter Repair and you can see it straighten that outand you’re no longer going to see the shifting with thatvideo.

Stuart: All of the CMOS cameras suffer from rollingshutter. It’s when the frame turns like a parallelogramwhenever you pan the camera. Now Adobe has built-ina new filter that takes this footage and straightens itback up on your panning shots. It’s an importantfeature for anyone using any of the CMOS basedcameras.

Ed: You’d have to do a pretty quick pan to see itthough wouldn’t you?

Stuart: You’d be surprised. Every panning shot hasgot it to some degree or other and this new tool allowsyou to try it out on a shot by shot basis. Put it on andyou’ll see it pretty clearly, even on slower movingpanning shots as well.

Reg: It’s especially easy to see it with vertical objects,like let’s say you are panning with buildings or objectswhere there’s clear vertical lines, they will basicallywarp and tilt to the side.

Ed: I must say from my own experience with using aCMOS video camera for a number of years, I havenever seen this effect and I’m certain that clients havenever seen anything, but perhaps I don’t do many pans.And wait, there’s more?

Reg: There is quite a bit more. So what we’re going toshow here is our new multicam support. In CS5.5 wesupport four channels of multicam and we can do atleast nine now in CS6. I actually don’t know what ourupper limit is; I don’t really think actually that we doknow. I’m going to create a multicam sequence here;you can synchronise your multicam sequence by “in”points, “out” points or timecode.

What I’m actually going to show you here is I’m goingto create a new sequence that’s completely not

Reg: What we also now have available is full screenplayback. So it’s a nicer preview of your project.

Ed: What about having a third monitor? This issomething that I find tricky with CS4 that, from mycomputer, I’ve got two outputs for two monitors, so I’mworking on two monitors, but to have a third viewingmonitor … I can’t do it unless I have someone else’scard stuck in there?

Reg: We support that.

Ed: Oh okay, so what have you done with CS6?

Reg: We pretty much rewrote our transmit for sendingout to multiple monitors. So if you go into Premiere,Preferences, Playback – you’ll see all the devicesconnected to it. So if you have three monitors, youknow your SDI out, if you’re going to use IO cards, youcan select as many as you need, as many outputs asyou have, we’ll send it out.

Ed: That’s a welcome addition Stuart?

Stuart: Absolutely, it’s fantastic.

Ed: But you do need an extra IO card?

Stuart: Well that’s right if you want to get a propervideo output which comes in the form of an HDMI or HD-SDI, then you just add any of the many Matrox / AJA /Blackmagic products to give you the output.

Ed: So my problem is if I have to use my littleBlackmagic card to use my viewing monitor, I have touse the Blackmagic presets which in fact don’t includeHDV, but this is no longer the case?

Reg: Again, we’ve rewritten our transmit with all thirdparties, so now we use our player, we don’t useBlackmagic’s, AJA’s player any more, they work withinour player, with our presets.

Ed: I could say “about time” but anyway I won’t.We’ll move on … Reg, next?

Reg: Okay, one of the things we also added now hereis the adjustment layer. If you’ve used Photo Shop orAfter Effects you’re pretty familiar with how adjustmentlayers work. The problem that adjustment layers willsolve is, generally, let’s say you have a whole sequencewhere you want to do a colour correction. You have, inprevious versions, two options – you can either add theeffects one at a time to each clip, or you can nest yoursequence into another sequence, add the effect, butthen you can no longer edit your sequence, right.

What you can do now is simply add an adjustment layeron top and everything below it will apply whatevereffect you add.

There’s actually something even better than that … solet’s do a search for colour, now add a 3-way colour

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matching. So I’ll say I’m going to make a “DVwhatever”. I’m going to drag this multicam sequencehere – and here’s a new feature in CS6 – it will nowchange your sequence settings to match your clipsautomatically if you want it to. It’s very easy, so nowyou can work natively with your clips without having tofigure out exactly what the right settings are to make itwork. You can now double click the multicam sequenceand you can see here’s the seven different shots I wastalking about, and so to simply edit that, you wouldopen up your multicamera monitor. Once you haveyour multicamera monitor open, you can use yourkeyboard shortcut to say “shot 1” “shot 5” “shot 7” asit’s playing back; and as it’s playing back, it’s creatingedit points for you, for all those different cameraangles.

What we’ve always had in Premiere is a dynamic linkwith After Effects and obviously the big advantage thereis basically you don’t have to export out your clip, openAfter Effects, do your effects there, bring it back intoPremiere, realise you don’t really like what you’ve done,then you have to re-import it back. So that’s acommon problem when you’re using things like Avid orFinal Cut, because they don’t have that integration.With Premiere, we have dynamic workflow, so thereforeyou can just simply right click this, open this up in AfterEffects and whatever changes you make dynamically inAfter Effects will simply show up in Premiere.

Ed: Super. Is it only After Effects or does it work withsomething like Encore as well?

Reg: Yes, it does work with Encore as well.

Ed: Have there been any improvements in Encore?

Reg: Encore I think is unchanged from the previousversion.

Ed: Bugger! But you’ll show me something else cool?

Reg: I’ll show you something really cool. What wehave changed is that we’ve added some more things inour Production Premium suite including SpeedGradewhich is a professional quality colour correction tool thatyou know some of those guys over there may be able totalk to you about, but this is basically a Єuro 40,000 tool that’s now going to be free in the ProductionPremium.

Stuart: Adobe purchased the IRIDAS company lastyear and so now they’ve incorporated the high endgrading tools from SpeedGrade as part of the CS6Production Premium bundleas well and MasterCollection. So that’s a veryexciting addition.

Reg: So one more changesince you used CS4 is thatwe’ve upgraded AdobeMedia Encoder and sobesides the fact that we nowsupport more formats thatwe can export to as far asthe different flavours … letme open up our export here,and you can see all the newdifferent formats that wesupport for exporting. Evensomething like MXF OP1a orsomething like DPX if youwant to do that as well,which is really nice. Whatyou can also now do inAdobe Media Encoder thatyou couldn’t do in previousto 5.5, is it has a batch

watch folder. What that means is if you tell MediaEncoder that there’s a folder where you’re going to dropfiles in, it will automatically output all the variousflavours of that file that you want … a YouTube version,Facebook version, a DVD version, a Blu-ray version – allworking and batching outside of Premiere so you cancontinue to work in Premiere.

Ed: Very cool and looking at the timeline here, I see alittle camera has now appeared as a tool on the Playmonitor, so you can take a snapshot of the timeline andthat’ll turn into a bitmap?

Reg: I believe that was a CS5 feature …

Ed: Humpf … okay.

Reg: It was something highly requested by our users.

Ed: So Stuart, you see some big improvements herewith the upgrade?

Stuart: Absolutely – significantly far more flexibleon the media formats that it supports, so it does ARRIRAW, RED RAW, even the new Sony F65 RAW, so it’sreally becoming the “Swiss Army Knife” of our industry,the ability to support so many formats on the way in, tobe able to edit in those formats natively; also with theenhanced Media Encoder you have to export in far moreflexible formats as well and of course with the additionof Watch Folders to the Adobe Media Encoder, it willwork well for some automated workflows that peoplehave, where they need to multi-purpose the files thatthey’re creating at the end of the day as well. Plus thecreative features that they’ve put inside the productthat Reg has gone over as well, it is just a phenomenalupdate.

Ed: But Stuart, I’ve missed the upgrade path bystaying with 4 and not going to 5 – is there anything Ican do?

Stuart: Yes absolutely. You can still upgrade fromCS4 to CS6, so that’s still available. You can still dothat until the end of this calendar year.

Ed: Whoa – at a good price?

Stuart: At a very good price, of course. Just callDVT.

Ed: Now there’s one more thing Reg is going to tell usabout …

Reg: This is from the Steve Job’s playbook the onemore thing that I’ve just imported here is a 5K EPICRED file. So if you look at the properties here, this is

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Digital Video Technologies (NZ) Ltd | Phone: 09 525 0788 | Email: sales@dvt.co.nz | 45 Fairfax Avenue, Penrose, Aucklandwww.dvt.co.nz

PRODUCTION | POST | VISUAL EFFECTS

Offi cial Adobe CS6 Video Launch EventJoin DVT and Adobe for the offi cial Adobe CS6 Video Launch Event presented by Jon Barrie from Adobe. Get a closeup look at some of the over 800 new features of Creative Suite 6.

Adobe CS6 Production Premium software offers a sleek, fresh editing environment in Adobe Premiere Pro; 3D tracking and extruded text and shapes in Adobe After Effects; new Content-Aware tools in Adobe Photoshop Extended; and faster editing in Adobe Audition. Plus all new additions are Adobe Prelude for logging and ingest and Adobe SpeedGrade for color grading and fi nishing.

Tuesday 29th May | 6pmVenue: DVT 45 Fairfax Ave, Penrose, Auckland. Email sales@dvt.co.nz to book your place

Blackmagicfor DVT

At the Blackmagic stand forDVT.

Ed: Yet another of thesuppliers that you supportreally well, Blackmagic havegrown to such a size thatthey’ve overtaken the GrassValley booth here at NABwhich is something to be saidfor a little Australian companybased in Melbourne. They’vedone particularly well, andthey’re not to be outdone thisyear?

Stuart: Absolutely. GrantPetty the owner of Black-magic is a man on a mission,that’s for sure and now ofcourse he’s looking at the world in 2½K. You know thenew digital cinema camera that they’re launching hereat the show has really taken everybody by surprise.

Everyone looked at Blackmagic as a production toolcompany with the switchers that they’re doing, and as apostproduction company with all the original DeckLinkproduct that they came out with, and of course thehuge range of products that have come out after that,

but of course now they’re really putting their stampfirmly on the production market as well, with the newBlackmagic digital cinema camera.

Ed: Now in the old days, one would say this is not thecore business of a company like this. To go from theirbox technology, or their card technology to a camera, isa totally different ballpark, but in the digital age, it’s notsuch a longshot?

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5000 lines of resolution by 2160 and I dropped it inPremiere; I simply play it back and you see it’s playingback without dropping frames.

Ed: But is that to do with Premiere or is that to dowith the computer you’re using?

Reg: It’s Premiere.

Stuart: It’s impressive, it’s on a MacBook Pro.

Ed: Will it work on a PC as well?

Stuart: Well if it’s faster than a MacBook Pro, ofcourse, yes.

Reg: The answer is “yes”.

Ed: But of course, as part of this CS package, AfterEffects is there and everybody knows After Effects, theycontinue to make it better?

Stuart: Absolutely and this year with CS6, they’vebrought out some wonderful new features, one of whichis a new 3D Tracker, which allows you to take anyhandheld video camera shot and track the shot to allowyou to composite other elements into it. So if you hada shot that was panning and tilting and you wanted toput a logo on the side of a truck or something forexample, even though that shot is panning and tilting,you can put the logo on the side of the truck, and asthe shot pans and tilts, the logo will stay in exactly theright spot on the side of the truck.

Ed: And realign itself to the new angle?

Stuart: Absolutely, so you can blend that in, whichis fantastic. So 3D Tracker is a high end tool that we’reused to using in the higher end visual effects market.One of the other new features they’ve put in isextrudable 3D text which is pretty cool and tocomplement that, they now have a workflow where youcan take any bitmap image into Illustrator, convert itfrom a bitmap image into a vector graphic, which is onethat you can manipulate without the pixels getting allyucky looking. You can then bring that into After

Effects – logos are a great example of where you mightwant to use this. You could take somebody’s logo thatthey’ve sent you as a JPEG file, open it in Illustrator,convert it to a vector graphic, bring that into AfterEffects, you can then extrude that into 3D, change thecolours of the logo, so you can make a really nice 3Dlogo. And obviously if you combine that with the 3DTracker, you can then make that logo in 3D track overthe top of a moving panning shot. But wait, there’smore …

Ed: Have your paper towels handy.

Stuart: They’ve now got a ray tracing renderer inAfter Effects, which means that they can set up lightsources and render objects and cast shadows andreflections and things.

Ed: Wow, that’s normally only available on the bigSmoky products?

Stuart: That’s right, so they’ve done a pretty goodjob at bringing in some of these key elements thatpeople want to use, particularly in the motion graphicsenvironment and putting that together.

Ed: So that features 2D as well as 3D I imagine, butare there any other 2D features?

Stuart: Heaps, so come to our Adobe CS6 VideoLaunch Event to find out more …

Ed: And of course Photo Shop will have a few tweaksas well?

Stuart: Yes, Photo Shop has got some wonderfulnew features. They’ve got a new cropping mode whichis really good for us in the video industry. You canbasically open any size image at all, and you can say Iwant to crop it to 16x9 or I want to crop it to 2Kresolution and it just opens a window that you can useto easily change that. And in combination with thecontent aware scale, fill and patch as well as other toolsthat they’ve added in, it makes a great product formanipulating still images for the video world.

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NZVN

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Stuart: Well that’s right. Blackmagic is a companywhose business is founded on coming out with cuttingedge technology at remarkable new price points …

Ed: But it’s digital technology, it’s all aboutprocessing, it’s all on cards?

Stuart: That’s right, it’s digital technology, it’s allabout processing, so just uses the EF mount lenses onthe front end, digital signal processing on the back, butof course they’ve integrated the hard drive recorderinside it as well, so it will record directly touncompressed or ProRes or DNxHD directly onto anSSD card, which is what the market wants, and they’vegot an LCD screen on it for operational control as well.So they’ve done a really good job of putting the keyelements together. To glue a lens to an image sensorto a recording device in a small integrated package, andthey’ve made mounting holes on the camera so thatyou can add the rest of the kit around it – rails,recorders, battery systems – all that sort of stuff can behooked up around that fundamental core. But youdon’t have to worry about using off-board recordersbecause they’ve integrated that directly into theproduct.

Ed: And it’s at that high level so you don’t need tohave a higher level off-board recorder?

Stuart: Yes that’s right. The recording isuncompressed so you can’t argue with that.Uncompressed on an SSD is going to blow through yourcard pretty quickly, but if you want to be a bit morepractical about it, you could use a high quality codec

like ProRes or DNxHD toextend the amount ofrecording time that you’regoing to be able to get onthose SSD cards.

Ed: But I’m sure it has theIOs to allow you to have anextended record time?

Stuart: Oh yes, lookyou don’t really need it,because the camera’s goteverything you need Iguess, but if you want torun outboard recorders, it’sgot HDMI and HD-SDIoutputs, so you can certainlydo all of that if you want to.

Ed: And it’s a small formfactor?

Stuart: A very smallform factor, I meanobviously they’ve just takenthe elements that you needin a camera and said wellwhat’s the point in making itany bigger than it reallyneeds to be, so they’ve

worked hard to integrate it down. It’s carved out of asolid piece of aluminium which is a trend that we’veseen in this market over the last 18 months, so it’s verypractical, very robust. It’s not a video camera though,it’s really a digital cinema camera, because it onlyshoots the low frame rate progressive modes, so 24p,25p and 30p. It doesn’t do 1080 50i or 60i …

Ed: But it’s an important point to make Stuart,because I’m sure there are some people out there whoare still confused because they don’t see a differencebetween video and cinematography?

Stuart: Well it is – I think there’s such a lovelywide range of product available from all the vendorsthat we represent, that each product, depending on theapplication has its place. There’s always one that’susually better for the job than others, if you actuallyanalyse and figure out who your audience is, how you’regoing to do your postproduction, how you’re going to doyour shoot, what budgets you’ve got in mind. Forexample it might not be the best choice for a reality TVshow. You can’t be running around trying to focus avery shallow depth of field lens when you’re chasingpeople into the back of ambulances or down the localhighway. So you’ve got to have the right camera forthe job.

Ed: That’s the unusual products that they’ve broughtout, but in the normal line of Blackmagic?

Stuart: Yes, Blackmagic’s acquired a companycalled Teranex who do very high quality standardsconverters. These are products that will take inputformat, whether it’s standard definition, 720 or 1080 inany flavour of frame rate, and convert it to any otherframe rate and frame size on the way out. Theseproducts were $80,000 last year; $20,000 last month;now bundled under Blackmagic’s umbrella, down to just$2,000! An extremely high quality standards converter,very versatile – so if you’ve got applications where youwant to convert one format to another, these arewonderful products for that job.

Ed: And that’s the thing isn’t it – that your nonlinear

editing system these days can do various conversions

on the timeline, but we must stress, these are software

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conversions and sometimes they’re not up to the

standard of a hardware converter?

Stuart: Well that’s right, and also there’s theprocessing time available as well, so for broadcastapplications this is a no brainer. People may choose toproduce everything at a higher quality like 1080 50i,but then they know, well look, we just really need to beable to deliver it on Freeview at 1080 50p … or you canuse a standards converter like this just to simplyconvert it on the way out; or if you just want to monitorit – what is my high definition timeline going to look likein standard definition, when it is converted at the end ofthe day? You can be editing on an HD timeline,outputting HD into a Teranex 2D processor and lookingat it on an old PAL tele to make sure it’s going to lookokay. So it’s got some interesting applications.

Ed: And there are two versions of this – there’s theTeranex 2D and the 3D; basically 3D’s twice the price ofthe other, but it has two ins, two outs, whereas the 2Dis one in, one out. And it’s all 444 or 422 the interlaceup-down conversion. Everything in there includingThunderbolt?

Stuart: Including Thunderbolt, yes.

Ed: Now the HyperDeck Studio has been aroundbefore hasn’t it?

Stuart: Absolutely, the HyperDeck Studio has beena great product. They’ve now got full DNxHD andProRes support or uncompressed, so it’s basically a 1Urack mount unit with two SSD drive slots. You feed avideo signal in and hit the record button and it willrecord in any of the high definition formats, in any ofthose different formats as well, you know,uncompressed ProRes or DNxHD. Now at the showthey’ve launched a new product called the HyperDeckStudio Pro. This is a new product above that one. Itactually has got four inputs and can record fourcameras simultaneously. It can also record 4K as well,so you can use it in either of those two modes. So thefour camera recording has got some pretty interestingopportunities. If you’re doing a vision switch whereyou’re bringing eight cameras back through a visionmixer to do a live switch, but you also want to do anISO or isolated record of each of those separatecameras, with just two of these HyperDeck Studio Prosyou could record eight cameras simultaneously.

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Ed: And they’re two grand a pop?

Stuart: Two grand each, yes, so a very, very costeffective way of recording multiple cameras.

Ed: We’re talking US dollars here by the way.

Stuart: Yes. Also you could use this as a play-outdevice, so if you had an application at a museum or anyof those sorts of applications where you want a multi-camera playback, or if you’re doing a live switch butalso wanted to have logos or other video clips playingthat you can switch to from time to time; or you coulduse it as a multi-stream playback device as well.

A four-channel SDI-to-HDMI® multiviewer. Small and easy-to-use this device lets users monitor up to four SDI inputs on a single HDMI display in quadrant view, or toggle to a full-screen view at the touch of a button. Inputs can be 3G, HD or SD, and all controls are on the unit itself; no computer is required. Matrox MicroQuad ensures a crisp, artifact-free monitoring experience, thanks to it’s state-of-the-art 10-bit scaling engine with advanced fi ltering and de-interlacing.

Matrox MicroQuad

Blackmagic Ultra Studio Express

Blackmagic Design HyperDeck Studio Pro

Blackmagic Designs UltraStudio Express is a new capture and playback solution featuring 3 Gb/s SDI, HDMI and analog connections with high-speed Thunderbolt technology. UltraStudio Express is extremely portable, as the compact design is powered by its Thunderbolt connection and can be operated from a computer’s battery or power source

A powerful new model of SSD recorder with 4 channels of 3 Gb/s SDI in and out, built-in high-speed Thunderbolt I/O technology, and full HDMI and analogue in and out – including standard XLR connectors for audio and timecode. Dramatically higher processing power and quality allows full 4K playback from a single SSD disk using Apple ProRes compression four times the resolution of regular HD 1080 res video.

Blackmagic Design announced two new Battery Converters that feature a built in rechargeable battery and a super tough aluminum design. Battery Converters include the latest 3 Gb/s SDI technology for the highest broadcast quality conversion and are available in two models, Battery Converter SDI to HDMI and Battery Converter HDMI to SDI.

A revolutionary digital cinema camera design with a super wide 13 stops of dynamic range, high resolution 2.5K sensor, built in high bandwidth SSD recorder, open fi le format support, colour correction with full version of DaVinci Resolve and a built in LCD with metadata entry, all in an attractive compact design.

Extremely high quality processing converters, including up and down conversion, SD/HD cross conversion, and SD/HD standards conversion. Features include cadence detect and remove, noise reduction, adjustable scaling, aspect ratio conversion, smart aspect, timecode conversion, subtitle conversion, 16 channel audio, test signals and more. Also includes 3D camera align, 3D dual stream standards conversion, 3D format conversions and incredibly realistic 3D simulation.

Blackmagic Battery Converters

BLACKMAGIC DESIGN

Blackmagic DesignTeranex 2D/3D

Digital Video Technologies (NZ) Ltd | Phone: 09 525 0788 | Email: sales@dvt.co.nz | 45 Fairfax Avenue, Penrose, Aucklandwww.dvt.co.nz

New and exciting offers from Blackmagic Design, Matrox and AJA.

FOURCHANNEL

AJA T-tap

AJA’s T-tap is a very small new bus-powered device that takes advantage of Thunderbolt connectivity for high-quality 10-bit SD, HD and 2K output through SDI and HDMI connections. This new adapter enables a simple, unobtrusive means of getting professional video and audio out of any Thunderbolt™-enabled Mac system.

AJA Ki Pro Quad

The Ki Pro Quad is a new solid-state portable video recorder at NAB Show 2012. Ki Pro Quad is capable of capturing high-quality edit-ready fi les in formats including 4K (4096 x 2160), Quad HD (3840 x 2160), 2K (2048 x 1080), and HD (1920 x 1080), for the fastest path from camera-to-editorial with 10-bit 4:4:4 and 10-bit 4:2:2 colour support.

The Ki Pro Rack uses the same SSD modules as the Ki Pro with recording capacities scaling up to 500GB. Ki Pro Rack simplifi es the acquisition-to-edit workfl ow by creating high-quality Apple ProRes 422 or Avid DNxHD fi les which can be used directly in most standard professional editing systems – no need to import or transcode fi les.

AJA Ki Pro Rack

PRODUCTION | POST | VISUAL EFFECTS

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TVNZ 7 only has a couple of months left but we're still challenging the government to change their decision to close the only PublicService TV channel for all Kiwis. If anything we're getting more motivated. So what's happening?

Firstly, the online petition has recently shot up around the 9,000 mark and is climbing. Please help us get it over the mythical10,000 figure by emailing your friends and contacts. Or you can just ring them and talk about it, it's old-fashioned but it stillworks. The main thing is to remind people about the tragedy that is about to befall us - the death of Public Service TV in NZ.

The big news is that Save TVNZ 7 is setting up a series of public meetings to talk about why Public Service TV is so importantto New Zealand. We're forming committees to organise the meetings in Auckland, Wellington, Nelson, Christchurch and Dunedinand we're looking for people to help organise and publicise these meetings. We also want to setup meetings in other towns andcities around the country too. So if you're able to help please email us at savetvnz7@gmail.com and we'll put you in touch with theright people.

Recent exciting news (sorry to be so frothy) came when Labour MP Clare Curran announced she is about to introduce a PrivateMembers Bill to save TVNZ 7. Although the bill is a long shot, it is a great way to publicise this important issue and garner supportfrom all the political parties (even National). Please keep reminding your local MP and List MPs of your concerns about theimminent closure of TVNZ 7 and what it means to you, your family and friends.

It's been a busy few weeks in the media with many columns and articles written in favour of TVNZ 7 and Public Service TV. Hereare links to a few goodies:

Why We Must Try to Save TVNZ 7 by Paul Norris

The Death of Pakeha TV by Paul Casserly

TVNZ 7. Is It Worth Saving? by Clare Curran MP

Finally, as our campaign rounds into the home straight (yes, it is depressing) Save TVNZ 7 needs more publicity. So please doyour bit to talk about the demise of our last Public Service TV station and the end of a broadcasting era when TVNZ 7finishes in June. Whether you're an All Black, a talkback caller or gossiping at the local playgroup - the more we talk about TVNZ7, the more others will realise what's happening. Who knows. We might still stop this terrible decision and keep Public Service TValive in NZ.

Many thanks

Myles Thomas - Save TVNZ 7 savetvnz7@gmail.com

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Ed: DaVinci – we’ve talked about DaVinci before, butthey’re continuing to develop it?

Stuart: Absolutely, so at the show they’re

launching version 9 of their software which includes

directly into it as well, that allows you to track objects

off 2D images in 3D, so that you can grade particular

parts of the image much easier by doing that selection

off that, plus a range of other GPU enhancements, a

slicker user interface – they’ve done a really

good job at continuing to innovate with

DaVinci Resolve.

They still run a software only version of itwith noise reduction features and stereo-

scopic capabilities that you can buy for

$1,000 and they still offer the product free

as well if you’re just doing HD. So a very

capable high end grading tool that anybody

can put their hands on and use. It’s a

phenomenal product.

Ed: Now we’re going to talk about gradingat some later date, aren’t we Stuart?

Stuart: Absolutely, grading is – you

know with Adobe they’ve now got a highend grading tool bolted on to their product.

Apple did that years ago when they bought

the Color product and bolted that into their

bundle. Adobe have now done that with the

IRIDAS SpeedGrade product, but if you

want to use DaVinci you’ve got such great

choice now in the market. DaVinci Resolve

is a high end colour grading solution, again available for

not too much money, so really you’ve got your pick ofgrading tools available to you now.

Page 12

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extra format support – most notably the F65 camera is

now supported natively in DaVinci Resolve and also it’s

got extra creative capabilities like a 3D tracker pulled

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Chrosziel for PanavisionAt the Chrosziel booth, we haveSebastian Merkel from Schneider Optics

Ed: But Chrosziel?

Sebastian: Chrosziel has a newVariLock, follow focus, DV studio rig. Wehad a VariLock follow focus before, but itcould fix the direction only in one way.This time, we now have the possibility tofix it in both directions.

Ed: Right, so you can lock a focal pointat one place and add another, so you canvery easily get focus between two fixeddistances?

Sebastian: The limitation we had beforewas, I think, a maximum of 180degrees; now, as you can see, we can …

Ed: About 2 degrees?

Sebastian: … limit to the minimum,exactly.

Ed: And I see there’s a big sign here

“All matte boxes are not created equal”

… how can you justify that claim?

Sebastian: I like it very much. It is to show thatChrosziel matte boxes are different. They are of thehighest quality; in comparison to other matte boxesthey are light.

Ed: Is that the carbon fibre?

Sebastian: It’s not carbon fibre, it’s a specialpolystyrene housing, but we have chosen a carbon fibredesign, which is very well accepted in the market –people like it very much. The difference of the materialof this housing now to the old one is that it is harder,it’s more flexible, so if it falls down on the floor togetherwith the camera and the lens, it doesn’t break so easilyany more. That is why it’s not equal to other matteboxes.

On the next camera, which is an ARRI ALEXA outfitted

with a Chrosziel QuickLock plate, the so called “Vari-

Tubes” which can change the length in and out, it has

the new studio rig follow focus with the same featuresas the small follow focus.

Ed: So this is not available on all matte boxarrangements?

Sebastian: No, that’s an extra. The follow focus isalways an extra. We still have the regular follow focuswith no end stops, but if you need this, you can alsojust change the hand wheel. If you have the regularfollow focus, you can take the former hand wheel offand put the new hand wheel on, so there’s no need tobuy the whole follow focus.

Ed: Very flexible. Now there was something I doremember about the side flags on Chrosziel?

Sebastian: Our side flags can be taken on and off byusing a special pivot mechanism which can be added tothe matte box and you can fold them together and youcan open them and fix them with a screw. So that’s, Ithink, something which is pretty neat … and you canadjust them by opening them and closing themtogether.

Ed: But are you still keeping up with the cameramanufacturers? I know this was a feature that Jϋrgen

used to tell me, that you used to getthose early designs.

So, for example with the new Canons,have you got matte boxes that will fit theCanon 300?

Sebastian: Yes, fit the C300, will fit the

new C500, which is body-wise basically

the same as the C300.

We also, if you have time later on and

you go to the Panasonic booth, you see

the brand new mock-up of a new 4K

camera of Panasonic in a glass case. We

fitted out this camera with a Chrosziel

bridge plate 90mm, a follow focus and a

matte box.

So when a camera manufacturer

announces a new camera, we always try

to get the technical data as early as

possible in advance and, in most cases,

we can manage to be ready with the

accessories when the camera goes to the

market.

Page 13

Sebastian Merkel.

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Ed: And it seems to go the other way too, that thecamera manufacturers are obviously wanting to showoff their cameras to their best and they put your matteboxes on them?

Sebastian: Yes, for example what we did last year( and we are still very proud of this ), Sony approachedus to make them a special deck recorder adapter for theSony F3. We met them in Japan in 2010 and they gaveus all the data and we manufactured this adapter forthem within two months and you can see that here alsoat the show on plenty of Sony’s F3 cameras with theSRR1 recorder on it.

Ed: It’s good to play nicely with the big boys eh?

Sebastian: Absolutely. It’s very important for us as asmall company. For us it’s an opener you know – wecan go in and out, we know most of the importantpeople there and, yes, it’s very nice.

Ed: It’s good that you both have confidence in eachother?

inside of your office building, and things of that nature.From a service standpoint, the legs are made out ofaluminium, so you’ve got very low maintenance onthere. This whole system at a US$650 sales priceroughly, it’s maintenance-free. You don’t have to worryabout leaking fluid, the drags are easy to turn.

Ed: And this is it, on such a basic tripod, to have lev-els of drag and counterbalance is amazing?

Randy: You’ve got five steps of counterbalance – 1,2, 3, 4, 5 and then your zero – and it’s a phenomenalpiece of equipment, I mean for the entry level individu-al.

Ed: And it comes with a bag?

Randy: Absolutely.

Ed: So Sachtler has never come in at this low pricepoint, and never had the sort of, as you say, “entry lev-el” product. One would expect with some manufactur-ers that it would just be a rebranded Chinese product,but …?

Randy: No, it’s not rebranded, it’s a brand new

product and the head itself is made out of a proprietary

composite material and you just can’t get anything

that’s lighter or more stable for the price point on the

market right now.

Ed: And it’s fully made by Sachtler?

Randy: Absolutely.

Page 14

Randy Frisch with the Ace.

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Sachtler for PanavisionWe are with Randy Frisch, service manager for Sachtler.

Ed: And we are looking at the Sachtler Ace series, isthat right?

Randy: Absolutely, this is the Ace. It’s got an SAdrag system on it which is a proprietary composite ma-terial that we’re utilising for a drag system on the insidehere.

Ed: So it’s not fluid?

Randy: It’s not fluid, no. It’s got three steps ofdrag – zero through 3 – and basically you’ve got yourcounterbalance as well, which is something that you’reseeing with the FSB series. So what we’ve done iswe’ve taken the FSB head and kind of miniaturised itone step down for the entry level consumer. The per-son who is just starting off can turn around and say“okay, I want to get into the marketplace, I want agood reliable piece of equipment that I can take aroundand not have to worry about anything.” It’s still lightenough to go from one place to the next and every-thing’s included with a sales price of like US$600 for thecomplete system. That’s the head, the tripod and themid-level spreader. Now the good thing about these isthe feet. They’re not removable rubber feet, they actu-ally screw in, and by screwing them in, you’ve now gotthe spike on the bottom for in the outdoors – you canpush them in, you can do your corporate videos on the

NZVN

Page

Datavideo forProtel

We are now on the Data-video Technologies standwith Ken Brooke.

Ed: Ken’s just met twogirls on the Datavideo Standthat he could actually pickup in Vegas …

Ken: Hmmm. Yes I hopeyour readers understand thethings I do to add humour toyour magazine Grant?

Ed: … and we’ve movedon to have a look at the newSE-600. Now this is quite asimple little mixer Ken, butit looks as though it’s quitepowerful. It’s got a lot ofbuttons?

Ken: Yes all the rightbuttons a great product.The Datavideo SE-600 is aneight input SD videoswitcher, with built in dualchannel audio mixer. It has a Multi-View output displayi.e each input, as well as Program and Preview can bedisplayed on a connected computer monitor. Otherfeatures include audio peak-meter, clock and dual logostore. There is also available an Optional Digital OutputBoard: 2 x DV25 (IEEE-1394) and 2 x SDI. The flexibleoutputs make it easy to connect to external devicessuch as large screens, recorders, streaming and more –all at the same time. Go to http://www.datavideo.info/en/Mixer%20-%20Switchers/SE-600

The SE-600 is designed to meet the demands ofworking in worship, education, or conducting a liveoutside broadcast or shooting inside a production studioin standard definition.

Ed: And that’s it, if you’ve got good compositecameras and you’re going to stream to air, or projectoror you’re wanting to train or learn how these things allgo together, well there you go?

Ken: Some of the New Zealand schools who havestreaming TV stations would find this useful and alsochurches because it’s very cost effective and you canuse your composite gear.

There’s also available a portable unit called the HS-600which has a full intercom system built into it as well asfull monitoring. Details at http://www.datavideo.info/en/Mobile%20Video%20Studios/HS-600

Ed: Is it mains only, oh no, I guess the portable one( the HS-600 ) must be batteries? It’s got its owncoms?

Ken: The HS-600 can be powered from a 12v DC carbattery if required, and is supplied with an externalpower supply. See the HS-600 also has the belt packsand headsets and the cabling for the intercom as part ofthe package.

Ed: Now of course there’s lots more Datavideo mixersavailable in different flavours, but the other product inthat line that Datavideo are famous for, is their videoswitchers and, not to be outdone, there’s another newmodel out, the SE-2800?

Ken: Yes, the SE-2800 is designed for the eventmarket or an activity that needs more than 3 camerasto produce the programme. Check out http://www.datavideo.info/specs/Datavideo_SE-2800.pdf

The SE-2800 is available configured to suit your cameraequipment i.e part of the 12 inputs can be reconfigured.The maximum number of inputs for a certain inputformat: 12HD-SDI,12 SD-SDI, 6 CVBS, 3 HDMI. TheSE-2800 is also suitable for mobile or OB Van use andcan be powered from 12Volt.

Now Grant is very distracted at the moment, he’slooking at a video. Shall I tell your wife what you’rewatching?

Ed: Call Protel for all your Datavideo Equipmentrequirements ph 0800PROTEL. NZVN

Page 15

Ken Brooke tries his luck on the Datavideo Stand.

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Vinten for ProtelWe are now with Vinten and we have Bob Low who isgoing to tell us about Vinten Blue.

Page 16

Bob Low with the Blue 5.

Bob: The new product from Vinten is the Vinten Blue 5which is a new addition to the Vinten Blue line. It ismade to support cameras in the 5.5 to 12Kg range andit has the Vinten Vision technology of perfect balance,infinite counterbalance and infinite fluid adjustment.From the Vinten line, it also has a two stage tripod – analuminium two stage posi-lock tripod, so it’s a niceaddition to the Vision Blue line.

Ed: So this is a lighter tripod or …?

Bob: Actually it has a little bit more capacity than theoriginal Vision Blue; it’s one step up, which is the nextaddition to a full line of Vision Blue – eventually therewill be a full line of Vision Blue systems.

Ed: Now there’s a range of legs for this, or is therejust one set of legs for one head?

Bob: At the moment it comes packaged with the oneset of legs, which is aluminium, mid-level, floorspreader, two stage, 75mm.

Ed: And what’s special about the Blue Line, becausethey’re not all the Blue Line are they?

Bob: The Blue line fits into more the business,corporate, education and industrial, less expensive partof the market.

Ed: And so you compare that to – what’s theupmarket line?

Bob: That would be the regular Vision AS product,which is a full line of products. The Vinten AS rangehas the options of interchangeable legs, carbon fibreand aluminium, floor spreader, mid-level spreader, all

Digital Rapids for ProtelFor Protel, we are at Digital Rapids and we have JackyLaw.

Ed: We have something here which you call aportable streaming device, is that right Jacky?

Jacky: Yes, it’s called TouchStream. If you havelive webcast events that happen in different locationsand you want to take an encoder and live broadcast,this is the box you need. It’s lightweight, it’s easy touse and you don’t need a keyboard or mouse to work it.

Ken: Basically, you set up your IP number you want tostream to, set your input and away you go. And theneat thing about this is it works with Digital RapidsBroadcast Manager software remotely, which means atelevision station can remote control from the TV stationif it is a direct dedicated link and bring in a feed as alive channel. I’m getting one into New Zealand forpeople to look at.

with the patented and rather famous infinite adjust-ment, which gives you perfect balance.

Ed: Any difference in the head mechanism itself?

Bob: No, the actual technology inside the head is allpretty similar for the three product lines. I think theVision Blue would use a little bit more industrial plasticstyle, which keeps the price down a little bit. The VisionAS has more of the aluminium parts.

Check out all the details at

http://www.vinten.com/en/product/vision-blue5

Ken: The new Vinten Vision Blue 5 has won its firstaward only days after its official launch at NAB. TheBCPVA ( British Columbia Professional VideographersAssociation ) presented the Vision Blue 5 with its 2012Video Innovation Award.

Call 0800Protel and talk to Ken (Auck) or Glenn(Wgtn) about your Vinten tripod requirements.

NZVN

AUCKLAND

3 City Road Tel +64 9 379 8288PO Box 6049 Fax +64 9 379 0290Auckland 1010 Freephone 0800 PROTELNew Zealand

WELLINGTON

15 Walter Street Tel +64 4 801 9494PO Box 6049 (Auckland) Fax +64 4 384 2112Wellington 6011 Freephone 0800 PROTELNew Zealand

Professional Television & Audio Systems | www.protel.co.nz

Datavideo HS-600 Datavideo HS-600 is an affordable lightweight Standard Definition studio in a box. It is a go-anywhere product, ideal for corporate, AV and the worship markets. It is also an excellent broadcast training tool.

I Complete integrated solution with six Composite Video, one DVI-D input and one DVI-I input (res. 1024x768, 60Hz)

I Autoswitchable 4:3 & 16:9 inputs

I Three composite video and multiple auxiliaryoutput, with Optional Digital Output Board: 2 x DV25 (IEEE-1394) and 2 x SDI.

I Dual Picture-in-Picture function

I 17 inch high quality TFT LED multi-view screen

I Built in RS-232 & GPI control interface

I Hot key functions for quick access

Vinten Vision blue5 The new Vision blue5 pan and tilt head is the latest addition to the ‘Vision blue’ range of lightweight, compact and refined pan and tilt heads for today’s professional ENG and corporate user who has come to expect uncompromising performance from the premium quality of a Vinten system.

I Perfect counterbalance

I Infinite adjustment of counterbalance and drag

I Genuine broadcast quality

I A trustworthy Vinten tripod system which is effortless to use

Digital Rapids Touchstream Digital Rapids’ TouchStream portable encoding and streaming appliances offer a broad range of advantages over competing portable and appliance-style solutions:

I Unparalleled ease of use

I Superior quality

I Self-contained portability

I Format flexibility

I Live and file-based output

I Flexible features

I Quiet operation

I Comprehensive input choices

I Easy upgradeability

I Affordability

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Ed: So we might have another “Beer and Pizza Night”soon?

Ken: Definitely, we will have another Beer and PizzaNight and we will have a bit of technology there toshow. You can also select the format you want tostream in, different codecs to suit – so you could set itto encode for the iPhone or Androids or H.264 orSilverlight. So you can actually select one of thoseformats or you can select a few of them and streammultiple?

Jacky: Yes it is possible to stream 2 or 3 formatsat once, but the Touchstream is lightweight, it’s small insize, so it has limited pulse power, but it is good if yougo to remote locations. It’s easy to operate, ratherthan taking a whole rack mount server going there.

Ken: A broadcaster or a Telco could typically have afew of these positioned up and down the country and sothe filmmakers could just come in and feed their signalsstraight back to the broadcaster. Councils could livestream their meetings.

Ed: And that’s it, depending on how much timeyou’ve got, as to what resolution you can get those twominutes or three hours sent? And TouchStream is agood name for it, because yes, there’s nice clearbuttons on there which lead you through the menu andyou set it up right on the screen in front of you. Go tohttp://www.digital-rapids.com/Products/IndividualProducts/TouchStream.aspx

Ken: The Touchscreen is a nicely engineered productand we look forward to showing it to the New Zealandmarket.

For all your streaming requirementscall 0800Protel

SSDs are still expensive and the capacities are still quitesmall.

Ed: Yes, but then if you put a spinning disc on a shelffor a number of years, I believe that, quite often, itdoesn’t start up again?

James: Yes, the SSD is going to be the wayforward once the capacities get bigger. At the moment,the SSD is used more just for the speed, so that youcan get the editing done faster. With the single drivewith the SSD, you can actually edit uncompressed HDfootage, and then you’ll find with our T2 you can edituncompressed 2K footage.

Ed: And that’s it, with a single drive, spinning disc,you don’t have the data rate?

James: Exactly, so with the single disc hard driveversion, it’s 170 megabytes a second limit.

Ken: So the beauty of all of the T1 and T2 is they’vegot removable drives or SSD, and two Thunderboltports for daisy chaining drives and other products. Youdon’t normally get both in this small form factor. Go tohttp://www.caldigit.com/

Ed: And here’s another CalDigit drive with an AJA IObeside it?

James: The second drive is called the CalDigit T2;two hard drives or SSDs can go inside it and it can beconfigured into a RAID configuration using softwareRAID. There may be hardware RAID versions comingalong in the future. On this one, in a RAID zero settingwith two SSDs, you get extreme speeds of 630megabytes a second, allowing you to edituncompressed 2K footage. The hard drive version hasactually improved a bit in the speed performance,compared to our old unit, the BR2. On this T2 you canactually get speed of 350 megabytes a second.

Page 18

James King.

CalDigit for ProtelWe are now with CalDigit and we have James King.

Ed: As Ken says James, there are a lot of newThunderbolt drives here; do you only look after “Apple-ites”?

James: No, no, we support all different kinds ofcomputers, so eSATA, USB3, USB2, FireWire 400, 800and now the Thunderbolt’s latest release.

Ed: I’m pleased.

James: Us too. So the first Thunderbolt productthat we’ve released is called the T1, a single drivesolution. It takes both hard disc drives and SSDs. TheSSD supports Intel inside, so it’s 480 gigabytes and itcan support speeds of up to 430 megabytes a second.The one we’re displaying at the moment is actuallyrunning at around 480 megabytes a second. The drivesare modular, so you can take them out, archive themand slot in a new hard drive. It also has twoThunderbolt ports, so it can support daisy chaining.The hard drive version of the T1 now supports a 4terabyte drive, so it’s really maxed out there in actualcapacity usage, and it’s been tested and works daisychain with all products we’re currently displaying – withMotuo, AJA, Blackmagic Design and Matrox Thunderboltproducts.

Ed: Just explain to me SSD – and do you reckon SSDis better for archiving long term?

James: We’re using the SSD, the solid state discinside, so rather than having the spinning discs, it’sactually a solid chip it’s burning data on. I would saythat for archiving, hard drive is still the way forward, as

NZVN

CalDigit T1 and T2 include revolutionary I/O technology that adds a new level of flexibility to post-production workflow. Derived from a close collaboration between Intel and Apple, this exciting new interface not only sets new standards in speed, but allows creative professionals to streamline their productions like never before.

CalDigit T2 RaidMax Capacity: 8TB | Max Speed: 630MB/sDrive Module: SSD or HDD | Interface: Dual Thunderbolt Ports

The CalDigit T2 is an extremely fast dual drive. It is enabled with 2 Thunderbolt ports and removable drive design, perfect for RAID 0,1 and JBOD capability. The T1 and T2 drive modules are also interchangeable and both units are capable of handling SSD and HDD drives.

I Supports SSD’s & 3.5” HDD’s

I Daisy chain multiple devices

I Speeds up to 630 MB/s

I Supports up to 8TB capacity

I Grounded power supply

I Automatic event notification

I Perform drive benchmark tests

I Perform drive storage calculations

CalDigit T1 DriveMax Capacity: 4TB | Max Speed: 470MB/sDrive Module: SSD or HDD | Interface: Dual Thunderbolt Ports

The CalDigit T1 is the world’s first removable and fastest Thunderbolt single drive solution with two Thunderbolt ports. It is perfect for audio/visual professionals seeking a sleek, fast and portable storage unit.

I Supports SSD’s & 3.5” HDD’s

I Daisy chain multiple devices

I Speeds up to 470 MB/s (SSD)

I Speeds up to 170 MB/s (HDD)

I Grounded power supply

I Heat dissipating design

AUCKLAND

3 City Road Tel +64 9 379 8288PO Box 6049 Fax +64 9 379 0290Auckland 1010 Freephone 0800 PROTELNew Zealand

WELLINGTON

15 Walter Street Tel +64 4 801 9494PO Box 6049 (Auckland) Fax +64 4 384 2112Wellington 6011 Freephone 0800 PROTELNew Zealand

Professional Television & Audio Systems | www.protel.co.nz

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Ed: That’s when it’s RAID?

James: Yes, in a RAID zero configuration. Thehard drives on this one also support the 4 terabytehard drives, so their maximum capacity is now up to 8terabytes and of course, with it being daisy chainable,you can now get up to 48 terabytes of storage, just bydaisy chaining six devices together.

Ed: And on the back – lots of connections?

James: On the back there are two Thunderboltports, so you can do the daisy chaining and you’vealso got the option to be able to swap out the drivemodules. One of the cool things is that they actuallyuse the same brackets for the drive modulesthemselves, so if you’re using this in a RAID oneconfiguration, you can take one of the drives out andactually put it into the T1 and you would be able toaccess the data from there.

Then what we’ve actually done is we’ve developedsome of our software, so you’ve got a GUI for Apple,you can see the status of our drives, you can see howhealthy they are; then for the hard drive version, it willtell you the temperatures, but it’s not necessary withthe SSDs. It tells you the volume size and you can setup all kinds of notification, so it can tell you when yourdrives are reaching their maximum capacity. Whenthere is a problem with the drive, it will give you anotification by email if you want to set up, or a pop-upwill come up on the screen to tell you that the capacityis nearly reached and you should replace the driveswith a new module. Other cool things that you can dowith them – you can set the SMARTs on the drivesthemselves to make logs, so if there is ever an issue,you can just send the log files across to the CalDigitsupport team and they’ll be able to see where theissue was caused and be able to fix it a lot faster foryou. We’ve also included the disc benchmark test, soyou can see the actual write and read speeds of thedisc you’re using at the time; and it will also tell youwhether it’s capable of doing the HD, the

uncompressed footage, with a simpleeasy to show read / write view.

As well as this, there’s also the at Jamesis saying Ken, sort of points to the factthat you might pay a premium for aproduct such as CalDigit as opposed to ageneric little RAID box from a localcomputer store, but what you get is thatassurance that it’s going to survive, lastlonger, and also you can monitor theperformance and so see problemscoming before they actually happen?

Ken: Yes well put, and that’s a definiteadvantage.

The fact that CalDigit actually pre-testtheir drives before they ship to us aswell, ensures we receive a qualityengineered product, and we’ve had verygood performance and reliability out ofGTech products.

Ed: And you’ve got the support fromthem as well?

Ken: Yes we get support from CalDigitdirectly and in turn we are better able tosupport our customers in New Zealand.

The iPhone application is calledThunderview – just do a search forCalDigit and you will find it, it’s veryuseful. NZVN

Page 20

Call 0800Protel for your storage requirements.

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Kino Flo for PLSWe are here at Kino Flo with ScottStueckle pronounced “Stickle” inAmerica.

Ed: I’ll call you “Scott”.

Scott: Just call me Scott, thathasn’t changed.

Ed: Now Scott, I’ve seen youdemonstrating this Celeb 200 and you’vehad a busy time showing people how itworks?

Scott: Yes, we have four newproducts, and the Celeb is one of thosethat’s really been popular at the show.We have been working with directors ofphotography and lighting designers( after we designed the initial unit ) forabout a year on set, whether it’s featurefilm, commercial production or TVbroadcast settings, so that we coulddecide which features we had in theoriginal design we wanted to keep, andwhich features we would cull. And we’venow come up with the Celeb 200. Thefeatures of the Celeb 200 that make itlike every other Kino Flo would be thatit’s a soft light first thing. We make soft light, that’swhat we’re known for, that’s what we won an AcademyAward for and that’s what we do better than anybodyelse. So again, like all other lights, you’re going to seethe Celeb across all platforms … you’re going to see it inphoto studios, video studios, broadcast studios andespecially commercial and feature film production sets,and that’s because it’s soft, colour correct, flicker-free,no green and it has a lot of versatility built into it. Noweach one of our fixtures, as you may know, from the4x4 Bank down to the Mini-Flos to the large VistaBeam600, you know big lights – they all have a lot ofversatility, but it’s different versatile features built intothem, depending on the type of tool that it is. TheCeleb is definitely an interview type of tool. It’sdefinitely a 2 foot, let’s say 8 foot lighting zone. You’retalking about glamour lighting; you’re talking aboutinterviews; you’re talking about maybe little small10x10 or 12x12 portable chroma-key setups thatpeople do a head and shoulders on; you’re talkingabout table top … all those things that you mightassociate with say a Kino Flo 2x4 Bank or with a Diva-Lite which is the world’s best-selling fluorescent now forlocation work.

This Celeb 200 might be better compared to the Diva-Lite 400 and the Diva-Lite 200 in terms of its real worldapplication. So if somebody demonstrated it to you,what you would notice in addition to having a soft light,is that it’s also a controllable light and a dimmable light.You can also change your Kelvin temperature. We callit variable colour temperature, not bi-colour.

What we did was to create from 2700 Kelvin to 5500Kelvin, a range of white, and any place you control itanywhere in between there, you can just preset andlock in any kind of a colour temperature you want. Youdon’t have to go back and re-meter your light level,because it’s programmed to give you the same lightlevel across all the different colour settings. Now ofcourse, like any LED, and like Kino Flo fluorescents, anytime you dim it, you don’t have to worry about Kelvinshift the way you do with tungsten light. You know,you dim tungsten light one stop and you’ve got to putsome gel on or something, which is fine, tungsten’s a

Scott Stueckle lit by his own Celeb.

very beautiful light source, but that’s one of thefeatures of a tungsten light that people are happy to nothave with a Celeb. You can change your Kelvintemperature, not have your light level change; changeyour light levels, not have the Kelvin temperaturechange. That’s a great feature of it. So again, thevariable colour temperature is one feature you wouldn’thave, let’s say, on a Diva-Lite. Now another feature ofthe Celeb is, because they are LEDs and cool off likeLEDs, you have a nice long life fixture, in other words,the light output’s going to last for a long time. Theindustry has rated these types of LEDs at like 50,000hours. We’re not convinced by worldwide experiencewhether or not the lumen levels and the Kelvintemperature settings that we have, the tolerances thatwe’ve set in the fixture, will stay stable over that50,000 hours. We believe there’ll be a shift at somepoint; we know it’s going to last a lot longer than say atungsten or HMI, it’s going to last longer than afluorescent – maybe four times as long as a fluorescenttube – but we’re not sure yet where that lands. As wefind that out as we do testing over the next year or two,we’ll let people have a better measure of really what theLED life is in terms of practical lights. Towards thatend, we have designed a fixture unlike anybody else’s,where the platen where we have the LEDs built into,that platen can be removed from the fixture easily by atechnician and it can be upgraded.

Let’s say, for example, in our new LED series, we havesome kind of new technology – an LED device thatsome manufacturer’s come up with a brighter, morecolour correct, less expensive LED light source. We gookay listen, we don’t use less LEDs, so we can come upwith a new white source LED source and put it on thisplaten, put an array of these LEDs onto this platen andpeople can upgrade.

Ed: To me it’s like changing the tyres on your car –the rest of the car’s fine, the controls are there, but youput new tyres on and suddenly you’ve got a new car?

Scott: You’re right, that that’s the approach, butagain, getting back to my original statement, this is notsomething new, that’s what Kino Flo’s always beenabout, all the energy efficiency and all the product

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design from everything from the electronics all the wayto the light quality is very much a Kino Flo product. Youcan change out the lamps in a Kino Flo you still havethe fixture, you still have the head cable, you still havethe electronics. Same with this – as issues arise withthe LEDs, you don’t have to throw out the fixture, youcan basically repair or replace the entire platen, andagain, getting back to the platen design, if there isdamage to the fixture, you don’t have to send the wholefixture back and get a whole new set of LEDs or a wholenew fixture, the way the other manufacturers havedone it. Basically, if there’s damage, you can slide thatplaten out and because those LEDs are circuited inmodules, you can just replace those particular damagedLEDs. And again, if you damage a few of the LEDs theentire fixture’s still working.

Getting back to other Kino Flo products, let’s say youhave a 4x4 Bank and you’re shooting a talent and she’sthere in a scene, and you lose a tube, somebody hits itwith a C-stand, boom – you still have three tubesoperating, you move the fixture and you can get theshot done at least. Other LEDs, you knock it out, youlose the whole LED, you’re done, you’ve got to bringanother fixture in. And if you want to get it fixed, youcan’t get it fixed, you have to buy a new fixture – it’sjust a big problem. And that’s what we want to makesure people know about Kino Flo is that we haven’tstopped making lights the way you’ve come to expectlights from Kino Flo.

Ed: That’s talking to customers and supplying theproduct and the service that your customers expect?

Scott: Right, exactly. Because the name is KinoFlo, so we’ve had people bringing in their LED ideas tous in the past, and there always seem to be dropouts inthe design process where they’re willing to settle for“good enough”. We’ll point out some feature issuesthat need to be improved, they go – well we don’t wantto advance to that because that’s just a little bit tooexpensive; we’d rather do it 80% and promote it andsay it’s 100%. And that’s pretty much the LED marketnow. LED is another lighting tool in a kit of lightingtools; it has a certain range that it works very well, butyou know you can’t get away from the fact that you stillneed tungsten lights, you still need HMIs, you still needKino Flos.

Ed: And that brings me to what I thought was the keything of the Celeb, apart from it being LED, was thisvariable colour temperature, because one of the rules inlighting is you don’t mix your lights?

Scott: When you say “you don’t mix light” youmean you don’t mix different colour temperatures, oryou don’t mix different product …

Ed: Well you tend not to mix different technologiesbecause, I guess, you don’t have the same Kelvintemperatures from each of those?

Scott: That’s an argument that started 25 yearsago when we designed the first Kino Flo. It was thatyou couldn’t use them with other light sources – andwhat we designed from the very beginning was a lightsource that wasn’t a fluorescent. We said no, this is not– you keep calling it fluorescent, but yes it’s fluorescentbased technology, this is a thing called a Kino Flobecause it does mix with other light sources seamlessly,side by side without filtration. It should be aprofessional lighting tool regardless of what yourmaterials are – whether or not you’re pumping a lot ofwattage through a hot filament and producing a whitelight through on a tungsten source, or using a gasdischarge lamp like an HMI or a Kino Flo. Whatever thetalent or whatever the DP or the gaffer or whatever thelighting person is, whatever they’re using, all thosetools should work side by side to give you at least thesame colour, the same lighting quality and again someof those might be Fresnel, so they gave you a hardbrittle sunlight look which is great; and then others aresoft like Kino Flo and they have their place, but theyshould still work side by side seamlessly. That has notchanged with the Celeb. But we don’t have to go andtell people, yes that’s good enough, just white balanceyour camera, just shoot with Kino Flos, just shoot withthe Celeb and if they’re all LEDs you can fix it in thecamera. No, no, no this is to solve problems, not havesomebody trying to fix problems with the Kino Flo. KinoFlos solve problems on the set; LEDs that I see in themarketplace now and other lights, they basically createproblems that have to be solved by the technicians.

Ed: Okay, so why do you need such a wide range ofcolour temperature out of one light?

Scott: The range is just to match to the big areasof what you’ll see on the set. Let’s say it’s a magic hourshot and you have daylight changing Kelvintemperature every hour as the sun goes down. Youneed to be able to balance to that. Let’s say one guylooks on the monitor, he goes “you know what, the KinoFlo Celeb on the fill side, I don’t want it to match thetungsten fill on the key; I want it to be cooler; take herfrom 32 down to 45 or take it down …” – they can makea really quick adjustment. You’re right, you could dothe same thing by putting a gel on another fixture; I’mjust saying the ability to do, tweak it until it’s right onthe monitor or looks good to the eye, then that’s areally nice feature.

Ed: So it’s really an artistic light?

Scott: Absolutely … it has to be artistic, becauseyou can talk to people technically all you want, you canshow them all the spectral readouts, how it matchesspectral sensitivity curve of film and all the HDcameras, and you can show them the graph, you canshow other LEDs where they drop out of the spectrum …

Ed: But what does it look like?

Scott: That’s right, the DP is like “dude, my nextjob is based on the last job I just had. Is this going tocause me a problem or is it going to make me lookgood?” Kino Flos will always make the DP and thegaffer and the usual, look good. How we get there isreally not that interesting to me; the fact is, once we’rethere, now we can really start talking about what thecreative process is and how Kino Flo can play a part inthat creative process. We want to be a part of theprocess of making the image; we don’t want to be a

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Phone (09) 3024100 Email: info@kelpls.co.nz Website: www.kelpls.co.nz

More LEDs from Dedolight

Diffuser includedV Lock & NP-F battery mount on board

Mains power supply includedRemotable dimmer included

From $1700 plus GST

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part of the process that’s the problem, which is what wesee a lot on the set.

Ed: So okay, that’s one out of four!

Scott: That’s one.

Ed: And we’ve got a new Barfly?

Scott: Yes, the new Barfly is a revised Barfly – it’sa dimming version of the original Barfly and it also haselectronics that are built-in. So the original Barfly kindof changed the way a lot of people used location lights,because they’re able to take a lot of light and put it intoa very small punchy package of soft light. What it hasin common with the original Barfly design, is it has anice soft but high lumen package of light in a smallenvelope, so you can hide it away on a bookshelf – thattype of thing. So now what we’ve done, is we’ve added

Scott: Absolutely. And when you say “green” wemean “green” in terms of environmentally friendly not“green” in terms of the colour spectrum.

Ed: I know – it’s been a catchphrase shall we say withlighting.

Scott: We recoil a little bit when people ask us ifour lights are “green”. We say they’re energy efficient,they’re not green. After 25 years of leading theindustry and taking green out of fluorescents andmaking them useable on almost 90-95% of all featurefilms shot in the world, because they don’t have green,we really don’t want to go back to that discussion again“are they green?” They’re not green, but they areenergy efficient.

Ed: Okay, that’s two, the third?

Scott: That’s two man, that’s two because theBarfly is considered one family.

Ed: So going up in the world?

Scott: This is about as far up as you can get. Thisis the Imara S10. It puts out as much light as a 6000Watt space light with silk on it. Let’s say you’re on aset and you have like a nice large 3K tungsten softlight. It’s the same amount of light as that … however,using a combination of our existing technology from theParaBeams and the VistaBeams, we created a reflectoron here and used our 55 Watt compact lamps – 10 ofthem – to produce a nice soft even spread of light; assoft as our big fat T12 tubes, like the Image 85, buttwice as bright as an Image 85. So it gives you let’ssay at 20 feet around 30 foot candles of light. Thatmeans for lighting designers that’s a spec they wanted,because if you’re doing large area lighting or you’redoing a space lighting environment, or you had to putthem up for an audience for a television show, that is areally good soft light lumen level hit at for those typesof applications. We’re doing a lot of these now as spacelights – these are replacing space lights; these aremuch better than an LED option. An LED option toproduce this much light output, would cost you close to$50,000. The lumens per dollar, the lumens per Watton an Imara S10 is right now the most efficient lightsource in the industry.

So it’s great, it’s been taking off, I’m surprised at howfast it took off, because we do have another two biglights – we have the Image 85 and the VistaBeam 600which have been very well received and been verypopular. This thing is about a year old and as soon aspeople see it and compare it side by side with any otherfixture, we love it when they do that, because theyshow this next to all these other lights out there andthey go “wow, we’ll take it” – the price is good, lumensper dollar is good, it has dimming, it has switching, ithas DMX remote control and it has a power factorcorrection.

So for 3000 Watts of equivalent tungsten soft light, thisis under 5 amps of power. I could put three of these ina 15 amp circuit in a house in the US at 120 Volt.That’s a lot of light, especially putting daylight tubes inthere; you want to balance the light coming through awindow, this can do it, and usually this is more lightthan they need. It comes with 60 and 90 degree HexcelHoneycomb Louvers, very nice, it gives you a nice softeven …

Ed: That was a question I had, about the honeycomb… you have two different honeycombs?

Scott: Oh I’m sorry, let’s go back to the Celeb.You probably saw on the Celeb that we had aHoneycomb focusing louver, but it’s made of plastic.It’s a different kind, it’s poly ethelene cells, it looks likea Honeycomb, but if you get up close you’ll go “hey it’s

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electronics onto the fixture – instead of having a remoteballast with a head cable and a head that can be movedaround, but is tethered to the ballast by a head cable,all the electronics are built into a nicely trim lightweightfixture. We have a Barfly 200D and a Barfly 400D – the“D” stands for “dimming”. In addition to dimming,we’ve added universal voltage, so you’re in Japan, youneed to shoot at 100 Volt, no problem; if the localvoltage drops at 90, 80, not a problem. Let’s say you’rein Australia or somewhere in Asia or Europe and you’reup to 230-240 you can still handle that kind of power.There is a power factor correction on these too, justmeaning it gives you even more efficiency. So thisparticular fixture here, it‘s in the Barfly 200 and theBarfly 400. The Barfly 200 is less than an amp ofpower and the Barfly 400 is like 2 amps.

So you’re talking about a Barfly 400 putting out asmuch light as a 1K soft light and using about 2 amps ofpower in a 120 Volt market. It takes what Kino Flo’salways done with fluorescents by making them energyefficient and then making them even more energyefficient to give you that much more latitude in how youuse the light around the world.

Ed: So you can be “green” with a Kino Flo as well aswith an LED?

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a Honeycomb, but it’s madeof small circles.” That is anice lightweight costefficient and artistic way ofcreating the same thing wedo with our metal ones. Themetal ones are a beautifulway of controlling the lightlevels, but because they’reextruded aluminium they’rea little bit more expensive.It’s just a more expensiveprocess. So as we movethrough our lines ofproducts, we will eventuallytry and make some of bothavailable to people. I thinkwhat we’ve found is whenpeople compare them sideby side, the cost differenceis so much better for theplastic version and it’s aheat resistant plastic, so it’salmost like “well this isperfect, this is what wewant.”

Ed: Because you’re not getting any heat out of the

front anyway, are you – it’s all going out the back?

Scott: No, but if you were on a set, let’s say

somebody set up next to a light that was a hot light …

Ed: Aaah somebody else’s light?

Scott: That’s a reality on a set, there’s a lot of hotstuff on a set, so it’s a reality that if you take a Kino Flo

like a Diva-Lite and you turn it upside down, you closethe barn doors, you turn it full up, you’re in a hotenvironment, let’s say in India shooting on locationwhere there’s no air conditioning – that’s going to gethot, that’s going to turn into a little can or oven – and ithas to be able to handle that kind of heat too. Andthat’s it.

Ed: In a nutshell. NZVN

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Dedolight for PLSAt Dedolight, Mr Weigert is

busy so we are talking to

Tamer Avci from Istanbul,

Turkey.

Ed: Tamer, you are actually

the Dedolight agent in

Istanbul?

Tamer: That’s true, yes.

We have been working for 5 or

6 years together and now we

have set up Dedolight Turkey.

We are supplying Dedolight

products in Turkey and also inthe region, Syria, Northern Iraq

and so on.

Ed: And they’re popular –

people appreciate the quality?

Tamer: Yes for sure,

actually it’s a German brand

and the Turkish people really

like German brands. I thinkworldwide they are really

successful. All of us know that

they are really reliable.

Ed: So it sells itself?

Tamer: Yes it does sell itself.

Ed: Oh no, no, the correct answer is “It’s very difficult

and I work very hard at it.”

Tamer: Laughs … But you have to make a lot of

effort actually. You have to know your product and

your customers.

Tamar Avci with one of the new Dedolight LED lamps.

Ed: Okay, so I guess you’re very, very happy withthis move into LED, even though Dedo himself is a littlebit sceptical about LED, he certainly seems to beproducing the best LED lights around. We were shownthe new range today, starting with a “number 2” … nowwhat did the “2” stand for?

Tamer: On the LED range, 2, 4, 9 and 12, the “2” isstanding for 20 Watts, the “4” is standing for 40 Watts,

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and then we have the “9” which is like 90 Watts, thenwe go to “12” which is 4 times 40 LED means 160Watts, but the power consumption is around 200 Watts.

Ed: But it’s not all about power consumption is it …we were told all about that today, that you don’t buythe car with the highest gas consumption. The 20 Wattmeans that’s what it uses, but in fact the light output iswhat’s critical, the number of lumens that you get out?

Tamer: Yes, that’s true and also the lumens givesyou the light output of a light source, and lux gives youthe value at a certain distance. So you have to takeinto consideration all these aspects, because the opticssystem of Dedolight is so special. At some distances, itgives you really better advantages than the othermanufacturers, especially at high distances when theygo into the spot position, because the double asphericsystem and internal Dedolight optics system is sospecial, they don’t use the Fresnel lenses. We have ourown lenses.

Ed: Now the good thing about these is that they’re allfocusing lights … it’s a very elegant design, one ring andthe barrel moves in both directions, going from a veryfine spot to an amazing flood and it’s a very even floodfrom what I’ve seen?

Tamer: Yes, and you don’t lose the colourtemperature in between the lit area, so all the area is litin even colour temperature and also at the sameintensity, more or less, as much as it can be. So in thelong shot, as I said, it’s really a very useful product andnowadays LEDs are really changing pretty quick, so youhave to be in the forefront of it to know what’s going onor what’s going to happen. Dedolight is really investinga lot into it, doing all the tests.

Ed: Were you impressed that Dedolight isn’t putting afan on any of these smaller lights that might be goingon top of a camera … do you see that as a good move?

Tamer: Actually a fan is really something thatcannot be acceptable in the professional broadcastsector, especially for the audio guys. It doesn’t matterhow good it is, if you have a fan, because it createsnoise and that’s something that we never want to have.You have to find a way to cool the lamp so that it canrun for hours. That’s one of the most important parts inour professional broadcast industry in terms of lighting.

Ed: That’s why these smaller Dedolights are actuallyquite large, but there’s a lot of fins there for releasingthe heat that comes out the back rather than out thefront?

Tamer: Yes, that’s true. In order to move the heatfrom somewhere to another, you need to have morespace. That’s why, even they look pretty small,according to our idea it’s a bit big actually. If we couldhave a chance to make it smaller, you know, we like todo it that way.

Ed: Ah but then it gets hot and we know whathappens to LEDs when they get too hot?

Tamer: Yes, they don’t like to be hot actually, theylose power, they lose the lamp life, it’s very importantfor them. But for halogens it’s like you know you canrun them at 600 degrees and they are fine. But for theLEDs you have to keep them relatively cool.

Ed: Okay, so that’s the general range and they lookvery nice in their black and yellow, but for the peoplewho are into specialist television, those people who areusing the Phantom high speed camera, there is aspecial lamp source for that.

Now I imagine this can plug into pretty well any lamp,but there’s something special about the source and thatis …?

Tamer: The Red Baron you mean? Actually that’sthe Ballast for our 1200 Watt HMI lamp light head and itruns regularly in 50 Hz without any flicker. In differentfrequencies, you would not get any flicker, but when itcomes to some kind of Phantom cameras which run ona rolling shutter, everything just flickers. So in order toprevent it, the Dedo team has made a special designthat you can run the Ballast for a period of time.

Ed: 8 seconds it is …

Tamer: Yes, which would be quite enough for ahigh speed shot and it just turns into DC and so nevergives you the flicker.

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Ed: But what’s really clever about it is that, if you runDC through one of these lamps, it tends to burn oneside of the bulb’s electrodes more than the other, sowhen you take the next shot, what happens?

Tamer: When you take the next shot, it justchanges the polarity, so you use both sides of the lampin the same time, so you don’t cut one part of the lampat all.

Ed: On another note, I guess the really good thing fora dealership is that you’re not stuck with a whole lot ofaccessories for the old lights, because …?

Tamer: Because you can use them in the new LEDproducts as well. There is still a line of products in needof accessories – one is for the Classic Series, one for the400 Series, so with the 2.0 or 2. up to 1 we will see itlater, but with the 2.0 and 4.0 you can use theaccessories that you have from your Classical Dedolightor 200 Dedolight range products. And also for the 9.0you can use your 400 series Dedolight accessories. Soyou don’t need to buy additional items or you don’tneed to throw away your previous items; you will stillbe able to use them.

Ed: If only every manufacturer was like that huh?

Tamer: Yes, I mean this is a good idea for aconsumer I think …

Ed: And keeping that customer?

Tamer: Yes, for sure. NZVN

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Autocue for QuintoWe are at Autocue with Richard Satchell from Autocueand Alan McIlwaine from Quinto.

Ed: Richard, you’ve been the subject of theseinterviews a number of times, so you know there’s nomucking around, you get straight into it … what’s new?

Ed: What was that Alan?

Alan: It’s popular in Australia.

Ed: But you haven’t sold any in New Zealand haveyou?

Alan: Not with the vanity monitor!

And to continue on we have Paddy Taylor from Autocue.

Ed: And Paddy I remem-ber you exciting me twoyears ago … muffledsniggers … thank you, whenyou showed me your server.Wow, that just blew meaway with what it could dofor the price, obviouslyyou’ve sold millions …?

Paddy: We’ve sold afew, definitely.

We’ve progressed to version3 of the software so we’vereally taken it up a notch.We’ve got advanced graphiccapability in the server now,so clocks, logos, tickers,another third straps – all oft h e m i n d e p e n d e n t l ycontrolled, transparencycontrol over chroma etc. Awhole host of new features,so scheduling built into thevideo server now, youschedule individual clipsplaylists, you can shareplaylists amongst videoports, new formats andcodecs so we can now ingesta Motion JPEG ProRes so

first coming to do ProRes in Linux … an important factorthat we’re a Linux system, so an appliance, you know,you turn it on, it goes into the interface, you can’t plugyour iPhone into it and have Quick Time updated andsuddenly you stop your system from working whenyou’ve got a Windows update or anything like that.

We now can support MXF OP-Atom, so we can actuallysimultaneously record to ProRes and to DNxHD. So oneinput from a tape device or from a camera, SDI out,SDI in, correcting two files, one ready for Final Cut Pro,one ready for Avid, and we’ll score a whole range ofother formats still which are perfect for EDIUS orAdobe, Sony Vegas workplace.

We’ve now got the ability to burn in timecode. You canchoose how you’re handling SD video – 4x3 or 16x9;we’ve got closed captioning support, both LTC and VITCtimecode, so you can have frame accuracy. You canmark and log events across all ports, adding metadata,tags … so for a sports application if you wanted to adddetailed descriptions of an event, like a goal, a freekick, penalty – that kind of thing, you can lock yourports together and mark those events across things, sowhen you do a replay, all ports, all camera angles aresync’d together for the replay and the director justchooses the output that he wants. So our product’sreally taken a huge step on and we’re doing a lot morenow with sort of smart workflows – sort of end to endproduction systems, integrated with or new jermautomation MAM systems, where the video server ispart of the workflow, but having an automation systemwhere we can be controlling third party CG, therouteing, the vision mixing, all the elements that go intoa complete channel, we can be the master controlsystem for that, either as an event automater, so just

Page 27

Richard Satchell points to the tally light.

Richard: What’s new … on the prompting side we’vegot a new range of accessories for the Master Seriesteleprompters. That includes a digital tallylight whichwill turn from red to green as the camera goes on air …

Ed: Is that exciting?

Richard: It’s incredible, yes, revolutionary.

Ed: What did it do before?

Richard: So the difference this time round is that …

Ed: It went from green to red?

Richard: No, we can display the camera number. Sopreviously it was just a straightforward camera light;we’ve added the ability to display the camera numberas you need to, for multiple camera studios. Kind ofalongside that we’ve added a new 22 inch talentfeedback monitor, which is HD-SDI for the first time,16x9 screen and a new mounting system to go withthat; and then thirdly, a digital clock, which isn’t at theshow itself, but will be available in the next 8 weeks,and similarly to the tally, that has a tally integrated intoit, so it displays the time, but it will also change fromred to green as required.

Ed: Isn’t it dangerous to give the talent feedback onwhat they’re doing … has that been asked for by talentor what?

Richard: Well in the US, it’s quite often referred toas a “vanity monitor” and I think that pretty much saysit all.

Ed: Oh, okay, so you don’t expect a big demand inthe UK for them?

Richard: It’s definitely more popular in the US thanit is in other regions, that’s for sure.

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looking after a News or a magazine type of show, ordoing the entire station automation.

Ed: Well that’s it, that was a question I was trying toget a word in by asking, was how many of these thingscan be going on at once? How many feeds can you betaking in, loading material into your server and howmany out and things being adjusted all at the sametime?

Paddy: The servers are typically two channel orfour channel systems. The key is they’re bi-directional,so you can have two ingest channels and then switchthem to be two output channels; or on a four portsystem, they could have three being set for recordingand one being set for playout. It’s an instant switch –you hit one button and the channel goes from ingest toplayback; but you can daisy chain multiple serverstogether …

Ed: But you can programme, so you can programmeyour server to playout a playlist for your channel whichmight be going 24 hours, but while you’re doing that,that’s one of your channels being used, so if you had atwo channel you would have to be feeding in materialas fast as you were sending it out in the second one.But if you had three, you could be loading that threetimes as fast?

Paddy: Yes, so you’re thinking about like an AB rolltype of operation …

Ed: So along with your ingest channels, you’re alsoconnected to the network so you can be sending files tothe server via the network which is separate from thoseingest channels?

Paddy: Yes, absolutely, so you can be using yourports to record the baseband video or playout basebandvideo and then any files that you’re bringing from postfrom an Avid or a Final Cut Pro etc, you could exportdirectly to the video server or have the video server setas your scratch discs and essentially, you’re doing filedelivery across the network, and those files are thenput into the media bin and can be played out of themedia bin.

Ed: But really for a smallchannel, having a two channelserver would be sailing closeto the wind, it’s much betterto have the flexibility of four,but for I imagine an eventtype situation, two channelswould be fine?

Paddy: Yes, absolutely.If you’re doing sort ofcorporate presentations orsimple replay type systemswhere you’ve only got onecamera feed for ingesting,then it’s ideal.

Obviously if you’re in a largebroadcast environment, youwant to mix between videosources, as you might do in amagazine or News or sportsshow, then in that situationyou need a four port, or youcould expand that intomultiple ports by addingservers and connecting themtogether.

Ed: Have you had manysales of your Autocue serverto broadcasters who are

looking for that tsunami recovery system?

Paddy: We got a lot of enquiries where peoplewant to have a replication of their main system, but ata much lower cost, so they’re quite prepared andunderstandably looking for a very high end, 24/7playout system, but feel for the disaster recoveryapplication that that’s probably too expensive and toocomplex. So they come to us looking for a much moreaffordable system that can sit there as a warm standbyso that if something fails, we can move forward to takeup the slack.

Ed: So does the broadcaster have to rewrite theirwhole playlist for your system as well as theirs, or doesyour system read their main system’s instructions?

Paddy: With our automation and MAM system, wesupport the vast majority of playlist formats, so it’s acase of just simply exporting it on to our system in itsoriginal format and then we can read that and populateour playout playlist against that list of files.

Ed: So Alan, a good system for Christchurch or theGold Coast?

Alan: A good system for anybody who wants to recordand playback video. We’ve just finished putting in asystem for the ABC for their London bureau, wherebythey can take in numerous feeds and record them and itbecomes a very cost effective operation for them.

Ed: Oh I hadn’t thought of that – so it’s actuallybased in London, or is it based in Australia?

Alan: It’s based in London. As you know, broadcastershave got a lot of bureaux in different cities throughoutthe world and they want to operate that as costeffectively as possible, so with more feeds coming in allthe time, a broadcast quality server located in theirregional offices, becomes a very useful tool for them.

Ed: Indeed. Now last time we looked at your server itwas a rack, but it’s got smaller?

Paddy: Yes, so we still do the full length 3U rackunits. They’re generally used for fixed installations.What we’re looking at here is a shorter unit – still 3Ubut it’s all solid state, so solid state system drives, solidstate video drives, designed for OB applications. NZVN

Page 28

Alan and Paddy.

Page

Marshall forQuinto

We are now at Marshall with

Rob Foster.

Rob: At NAB, we’re introducing

a couple of new camera top

monitors, in fact a new line, the

sizes are 5.6, 7 and 9 inch, that

come fixed with HDMI inputs

with loop through and then you

can add a module that will do

HD-SDI input with loop

through, or you can add an

output module that will

transcode your HDMI signal,

that allows you to output HD-

SDI.

There’s a choice of all sorts of

different battery mounts from

the small Sony, JVC, Canon and

Panasonic batteries; the

monitor has a built-in

Waveform, built-in audio levels

onscreen that allow you to view

any pair of audio channels from 1 up to 8; it includes a

built-in false colour filter, as well as peaking filter that

allows you to set up your camera correctly for a proper

shoot. You can also do pixel to pixel mode through the

Rob Foster.

menu system; you can adjust your backlight to get your

colours just right, which is a lot better adjustment than

just brightness and contrast on the front.

Ed: Now do all three sizes have the same resolution,

i.e the number of pixels?

Rob: The 5.6 inch is 800x480 and then the 7 and 9

inch are 1280x768 so high resolution screens for their

sizes.

Ed: So these are still higher resolution than the

camera’s LCD screen, but they’re still not up to that

standard of critical monitoring to really get that full

picture?

Rob: No, well it’s made for on-camera monitoring, so

when the cameraman is setting up his shoot, there’s

tools on the monitors to set up his camera correctly and

he wants to see the image he’s looking at and make

sure it’s focused properly.

Ed: I hear from cameramen that they have the LCD

screen on the camera, they have the LCD screen on

their off-board recorder, such as a PIX recorder, they

don’t need another LCD screen just to sort of, test the

picture, they want that reference monitor, that critical

monitor to see what picture they’re actually getting out

there and to be able to judge from that – especially the

focus. And you have something for that?

Rob: Yes. An ideal monitor is, like I mentioned, our

new 9 inch on-board camera monitor that has the

highest resolution screen; the colour reproduction is

perfect, so yes, the cameraman does get a great idea of

what he is filming.

Ed: And the resolution of that is?

Rob: 1280x768.

Ed: Are you going to cope with 4K?

Rob: Still under development, I’m not sure exactly

when, but it is something that we’re working on, yes.

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Ed: Do you think it’s going

to be a hard thing to do … is

it just a case of, you have to

make the viewing monitors

bigger?

Rob: It’s all the electronics

in the firmware inside the

monitor that’s the tricky

part.

Ed: But we should expect

it from Marshall at some

time to come?

Rob: Hopefully by the end

of 2012, yes, you’ll see

something from Marshall in

that realm.

Ed: Now branching out a

little bit from monitors into

cameras – this is something

new for you, but they’re not

television cameras, or are

they?

Rob: What they are, are high definition IP cameras thata lot of broadcast studios are using for city cams, trafficcams, anything that they’re going to put on air, theycould position them around the city that they’re locatedin.

Ed: And in Australia you’ve actually had some salesalready Alan?

Alan: Oh yes, we have contracts for the supply of themfor all the courts throughout New South Wales, andthat’s quite a few cameras, we’re probably looking at upto 50 cameras. It’s a very cost effective way forrecording courtroom proceedings.

Ed: So a little bit more about the camera itself?

Rob: We have two different styles, we have the PTCdome cameras as well as the box cameras, but all ofthe cameras have a built-in encoder that does H.264compression. So each camera, you can do a live HDfeed out or you’ve got the H.264 output that you canplug directly into your network and then stream it towhatever point you want to send it to.

Ed: And that’s an easy thing to handle Alan?

Alan: Oh yes, seamlessly we’ve put them in and so farevery single one of them is working, and working well.That’s a good record.

Ed: So there is a Marshall solution for once you’ve

taken your streamed picture from the camera, what can

you do with it?

Rob: What we’re introducing here at NAB is an encoder

box that allows you to do live streaming, which is

basically a plug and play type solution.

We’ve partnered with Stream View TV which is the CDN

and basically our box allows you to plug in your

content, whether it be HD, HDMI or composite,

whatever you’re looking to stream and plug it into the

box and plug the box into your network with your Cat5

cable.

The end user needs to register with Stream View, have

a Stream View TV account, register their box, and

basically you’ll plug it in, their servers on their end will

recognise your box, will communicate with your box to

set up the right uplink speed, depending on what kind

of broadband you have available to you, and then

you’re off, and you can stream to as many users as you

want.

They can dial in directly and view your content or they

can do pay per view type services and handle all the

credit card type of information to do it. NZVN

Page 31

Page

K-Tek for

Sound TechniquesWe are here with Brenda Parker from

K-Tek and Stephen Buckland from

Sound Techniques.

Ed: Brenda - poles – you’ve got

some wonderful boom poles, but also

lots of little things to connect things

to, which is what we all need?

Brenda: That is correct. Now our

poles are a thing of beauty and we’ve

been making them for 16 years. Well

we have now introduced the ultimate

Tadpole collection, which is our

beautiful boom poles shrunk down

with the mini ball head on top, and

with that you can put a GoPro, you

can put an iPhone or any kind of

small camera. You can extend your

reach over people’s heads or round

the corner …

Ed: Or down even, and take those shoe shots?

Brenda: Absolutely. It’s a beautiful product and

because of that, we needed to find an elegant way to

mount your iPhone to a Tadpole. So we came out with

the K-Tek tripod mount case, which has a tripod mount

with ¼” threads in two different spots.

It’s machined aluminium made in the USA, it’s not

going to break, it’s made of phenomenal quality and

you put that on the end of a Tadpole or on a tripod …

Ed: And they’ve let you use the Apple logo on it?

Brenda: No that’s actually the iPhone in our case –

it’s gorgeous.

Ed: Oh, through the hole?

Brenda: Yes, of course. So that’s a beautiful new

product that we have. For the audio customers, we

Brenda and Stephen coming to you through the Junior Norbert window.

have a new antenna mount for Shark Fins. We have an

elegant way to mount your RF antennas to a sound

cart. You have two options – we have a T Shark or we

have an L Shark and you can mount RF antennas – 6,

10, as many as you want and it‘s got mounting rings

which are adjustable. It’s a beautiful product from K-

Tek that we’re introducing this year at NAB 2012.

Ed: Now just going back to the poles for a moment,

I’m just clearing up the fact that the pole is standard,

but you can change the head with the ball head,

depending on the thread size that you want to use at

the end?

Brenda: Well you can take a standard boom pole

and you can get one of our accessories and you can

change the top of it to a mini ball head, but our

Tadpoles have a fixed ball head on top.

Ed: And the thread size is a ¼”, okay.

So the flexibility is that you can buy an

adapter which will change the thread size

if you so wanted to do that, but the ¼” is

the standard thread size for the smaller

cameras and the audio, the iPhone, etc,

etc.

And Stephen, there is a Norbert

development – the Junior Norbert, it’s

got an iPhone on it – because you can?

Stephen: Yes, what the Junior Norbert

is, is basically a small version of the

camera mount which would allow you to

do things like mount your iPhone if

you’re going to use that for cinema-

tography, or any sort of small form

camera, where you didn’t need the larger

Norbert and the multitude of attach-

ments that that will hold.

It’s still got about six slots on top for

holding bits and pieces and many threads

for attaching things to, so if your camera

fitted inside the form of it, it would work.NZVN

Page 32

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PIX Recorders forSound Techniques

We are at the home of PIX recorders, Sound Devices,and Paul Isaacs is going to give us the short version of…

Paul: PIX 240 v2 firmware which was just released andthe forthcoming PIX 260 the 21st century, rack mountreplacement for the VTR.

Ed: Now I have to say that amongst the journalists

there’s been a bit of talk about this, and they all said

it’s really good and why would you buy anything else.

So obviously Stephen’s going to sell bucket loads of

these … and they’ve only seen the old version, now

you’ve got an updated version?

Paul: It’s amazing what we can do with firmware right.It’s obvious that the PIX has got this wonderful800x480 pixel monitor and people have loved that forsort of assessing the quality of their image and stuff,but to make it a true monitor, to really replace thatseparate external monitor you have on your camera,you really want certain features like exposure assist andfocus assist. So now we have incorporated those intothe PIX monitor itself. We provide zebra stripes andfalse colour modes for expose assist and we providepeaking filter and 1:1 pixel mapping for focus assist.On top of that, we can now flip the display, so if you’reoperating your camera in a 3D rig or something likethat, or you’re operating your camera upside down, youcan flip the display; and we also now have the ability tocalibrate the look of the display, by adjusting chromagain, contrast and brightness. So they’re the monitorfunctions.

The other new key features are key markers and loopedplay which have been a really important request fromthe video assist world. They need to have the ability tovery quickly locate specific points in a recording andplayback to a director or whomever on set very quickly,without delay. So now we can lay cue markers duringrecord, or playback, and loop between them or searchthem. Very quick. A third very important feature ofversion 2 is the support of standard definition, so that’sthere now and we can down-convert from HD tostandard definition as well.

Ed: So these are all just firmware upgrades to thedevice and they bring it into their dealer, or do theydownload that from the Internet?

Paul: Just go to the website, just the standard way youdo with all Sound Devices’ products. It will take about5-10 minutes of your day and you’ll have pretty muchwhat seems to be like a brand new product, with thesefeatures.

Ed: And it costs them a lot to do this?

Paul: Free.

Ed: No?

Paul: Of course – the best things in life are free, right?

There’s one other feature, this other audio input mode,so I’ll just get that one in … that’s short and sweet isn’t

it?

Ed: I’ve never heard anything shorter or sweeter …

Paul: I’m improving my spiel over the years, right – I

used to garble a lot.

Ed: Aaaah, yes … but anyway, are they selling well

internationally?

Paul: The PIX 240 are really doing as good as we couldhave expected. I mean, they’ve exceeded ourexpectations.

Ed: So they’re going for the top of the line, they’renot going for the PIX 220 so much?

Paul: The 220 is still out there, but you know, it’slimited because of its connectivity and the fact that itdoesn’t have the SDI and the timecode over SDI …

Ed: But some people want that?

Paul: Yes, some people want the simplicity of justHDMI, but really it’s the 240 that’s cleaning up.

Stephen: And all those features that have beenupgraded in firmware, they all apply to the 220 as well?

Paul: Yes, absolutely. Now we’re going to head over tothe PIX 260 which, effectively, is a PIX 240 in a 2U half

Page 33

Paul Isaacs.

Page

rack footprint. This is our first rack mount product andit’s really considered to be like a 21st century VTR. Anybroadcasters who were wanting to transition from tape-based VTR to file-based, this is an excellent solution.But it also adds some really unique functions, which youdon’t particularly find in VTRs – it has a built-in RAID1system.

There’s two drive bays here in the front, behind this flip

down lid, LCD, which is a really nice mechanical design

there, keeps the drives out of the way, and they’re

recording to standard PIX SSD drives in their caddies,

so we can slot up to two of those drives in the front.

But we can also connect to other drives using the

eSATA ports on the rear of the device. So now we can

record simultaneously up to four drives.

Ed: And those eSATA connections can go to standard

fast hard drives?

Paul: Yes, absolutely, 4 terabyte drives, whatever,

we’ve got a whole approved list of drives on our

website. Now why would you want to record to four

drives simultaneously? Well when you’re dealing with

video, you’re dealing with a lot of data. You could

typically have terabytes at the end of a day’s recording

session. You don’t really want to be copying backups

for the director or dailies or postproduction, you just

want to be able to hand them over straightaway and

then they can just get on with their jobs, without having

to wait for those copies. So that’s No 1 key feature …

Ed: So just to clarify something – you say this is a 2Uhalf rack mount?

Paul: Yes, so you’re actually seeing two units side byside here.

Ed: But you don’t need two units do you?

Paul: No … well, you might do, because …

Ed: Well, can you buy one unit?

Paul: You can certainly buy one unit, that’s not aproblem, but typically in an OB truck or a venue, you’llhave multiple cameras, so you want to be able to recordmultiple cameras all in sync, or playback video streamsall in sync. Now we have the ability to synchronisethese devices either via RS 422 or via Ethernet, okay,so we can frame sync, playback and record.

Ed: Okay, but if you buy a PIX 260, what do you get?

Paul: The box – you just get the one.

Ed: Okay, so one unit is a half rack mount device …it’s mains powered, or I can see there’s a DC so you canactually take this out on a cart out in the field?

Paul: I think people are going to think of applications

that we haven’t even thought of for this device. We

have had it in the back of our mind that DC powered is

the key thing, it widens the scope. So let’s talk about

one of the other key new features. We’ve got Ethernet

here … this is not on the PIX 240 but it is on this rack

mount product.

I’ve already mentioned that it’s got machine control via

RS 422 – absolutely essential for any postproduction

facility, so you can run external controllers with this

device. We’ve also got a sync in port now, so you can

synchronise into a house sync, whether that’s NTSC or

PAL or tri-level and that’s very important for

synchronised playback and the 422 control. But this

Ethernet, it provides some key features – for starters

we have a built-in web server, so we can, by any

browser, control this remotely, or control a whole rack

of hundreds of these PIX 260s all in sync. We can

control playback so they all start playback

simultaneously, or record simultaneously; we can set

the parameters from each device simultaneously, so it’s

a really useful web browser. It can be run on an iPad,

an iPhone, what have you.

The other really important thing about the Ethernet is it

supports Dante Audio over Ethernet. I don’t know if

you’ve heard of Dante … as you know, over the years,

there have been a number of audio over IP protocols,

like CobraNet etc. Well we believe that Dante is going

to be the winner and a lot of other manufacturers also

agree with us, because a lot of other manufacturers are

now supporting Dante. It allows a large number of

channels over a single Cat-5, Cat-6 cable and using

standard hubs and switches. It’s all based on a 1

gigabit per second standard Ethernet connection. It’s

very low latency, as I said, it uses standard hubs and

switches and we can now connect between any Dante-

enabled device and route audio in any sort of

combination we like between devices.

So think of all the applications that are out there.

Maybe someone would like to use a Yamaha 01V96

desk with a Dante card in there, and just hook it up to

our Ethernet port here.

And then we have this beautiful mixing desk interface to

our PIX 260. You might just want to set up on a

network with 100 other PIX 260s – PIX 260s can be

allocated to groups, so we could configure maybe four

separate groups, so each group has 25 units in each

group and we could control each of those groups

individually. There’s a lot of flexibility.

Ed: Do you dream about this?

Paul: Probably … actually I have sleepless nights at the

moment.

Ed: Now tell me – Ethernet – I know

that there are some broadcast cameras

now with Ethernet out, so they actually

can supply the video signal over the

Ethernet, so this will accept a video in

via Ethernet?

Paul: Currently, no and it’s something

we’re not planning on at this stage.

Video in and out is by HD-SDI in and SDI

or HDMI in and out, so no video over

Ethernet.

Ed: Okay, so we’re limited with our

video in to HD-SDI or HDMI, but there

Page 34

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seems to be a lot of emphasis on audio in here. Why

would that be?

Paul: Well because we see this as an audio solution –perhaps this box could be used for recording liveconcerts, where they’re taking a video stream andmultiple mic sources all into this box, so there’s awhole range of applications – sports, theatreplayback …

Ed: That’s for recording, but you also say that thiscan be used as a converter?

Paul: Yes, because we have eight analogue line-inand line out, we have AES in and out, HDMI audio inand out, 16 channels of SDI audio in and out andEthernet, Dante 30 channels in and out which canconvert between any of those formats to anotherformat. So it’s a great little converter tool as well.

Ed: Phew … but wait, there’s more? What’s this?

Paul: It’s a very heavy mouse … no it’s actuallysomething called a PIX Dock which is simply a box totake our PIX SSD drive in its caddy, you slot that inand then, on the other side, you find this Thunderboltconnector.

So now we can transfer from our PIX caddy up to 6gigabits per second, to any Thunderbolt enabledcomputer.

Ed: Whoa …

Paul: That’s fast.

Ed: So it’s only Thunderbolt – you’re not doingeSATA?

Paul: Oh well … no, we’ve always had eSATA andFireWire and USB, that exists directly.

Ed: So this is just for Apple people?

Paul: So on the actual caddy itself you’ve got USB3,FireWire 800 and eSATA – okay …

Ed: Oh, so you can actually take it straight off that,you only need to have this box if you’ve got an Apple?

Paul: I’m sure we will see Thunderbolt surface in othersystems in the future, so there you go. NZVN

Page 35

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Avid withAtomise

We are at Avid with RichardKelly from Atomise Ltd.

Ed: R i cha rd , t he re ’ scertainly huge Avid news inthe broadcast area, and inthe high end postproduction,so let’s have a little taste ofthat and then we’ll comeback and talk about themidrange and what Avid’sdoing for the middleproduction community. Onthe big time stuff –Interplay, Clouds – phew?

Richard: Interplay, yes,i t ’ s a r e a l l y n i c edevelopment on the existingInterplay structure thatallows remote exchange ofmetadata, data as instreaming video for doingremote casts, especially for,for example, an ENGenvironment where you can have a reporter on theother side of the world and a very low bandwidthinternet connection or VPN connection and they canwork the same as if they were back in the newsroomback at base. So they’ve got access to all the mediaand all the metadata, all the bins that exist back atbase, as well as being able to do their edit. So they cantake new media that they’ve shot while they’re outthere on location and do a cut, bring in the resourcesthat already exist back at base ( as proxy of course) ,do their cut and then upload their finished story … all inthe field, but just like they’re back in the newsroom.That’s going to be a really great feature for thenetworks and for streamlining the ENG process.

Ed: Well I imagine also there are other possibilitieswith production facilities that might want to collaboratewith a production facility overseas. If you’ve both gotInterplay, you’ve both got access to each other’smaterial and I guess you could choose what materialyou could share?

Richard: That’s exactly right, so say you’ve got alocation – you’re going to be in L.A shooting somethingfor 3 weeks, you can effectively join your home base upwith your remote location, no matter how many remotelocations you’ve got, and have a very cohesive and verymanaged workflow. For example, in a VFX workflow orwhere you’re working with remote clients, you can havesome really tight management on who has got whatand who is doing what, which saves money.

Ed: It saves money, which is the beauty of it – and Iguess this would work very well for The Amazing Race?A New Zealander actually produces it I believe and hewins Emmy Awards?

Richard: I wasn’t aware they were using Interplaythere though?

Ed: No, but they should be using it shouldn’t they?

Richard: Yes absolutely, it’s the perfect tool foranybody who is on location.

Ed: I think this is going to open up a huge range ofpossibilities. People just have to think now how they

can use this new collaborative system, either withintheir own production facility with people on contractwho are overseas or whatever. I think it’s going to behuge.

Richard: It is going to be a really great tool. It justexpands what you can do with the existing product andyour existing workflows, but it brings a remote stationand the home base so close together, they are the

Page 36

Richard Kelly at the Avid stand.

Atomise LimitedAuthorised Reseller of Professional Editing Equipment

Visit www.atomise.co.nz; email atomise@atomise.co.nz or call Richard Kelly on 04 380 5010 / 021 86 33 94

for information & demos.

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Page

same thing. And that exchange of metadata, you knowif you’re exchanging a film cut, or a reality TV seriescut, or anything that is complex that reduces anydegree of manual management that’s required to knowwho’s got what – you can both see who’s got what. Onthe flip side of course it gives you an incredibly goodsecurity control over who has got what and how they’reusing it and what they’re using it for. So it works bothways … it opens up the workflow, but it also brings in areally tight integration of the Pepsi-Coke scenario. Youknow exactly who has got access to what, no matter ifthey’re offsite or onsite.

Ed: And to complement that, big developments inISIS ?

Richard: ISIS 7000 has now gone out to 24 chassisand with the new 64 terabyte crates with the i-4000drive sleds, we now can go to 1.53 petabytes of storageon a single system. Interplay is now going to be able tolook at up to 3 ISIS instances, so again we can use asingle product to bring a huge amount of data together,to manage that huge amount of data and make it veryfeasible for an operation of any size to have a very tightworkflow.

Ed: And the American economy, for a comparison, isnot yet up to a debt of a peta number of dollars is it?

Richard: A peta is a really large amount of data.

Ed: It’s even bigger than a tera?

Richard: It’s definitely bigger than a tera – it’s tera-fying.

Ed: Oh no. But the ISIS 7000 is not the only one?

Richard: We now have a new product in the range,the ISIS 2000. ISIS 2000 is not a real time editingsolution like the ISIS 7000 or the ISIS 5000 – it’s nearline storage and it comes in 240 terabyte chunks, sothat’s the base entry level point. What is there for youto do is, you’ve got your very fast real time productionstorage, but let’s say you’ve got 100 hours of mediathat you’ve ingested that you’ve got to move out of theway to let another show come in. You want to come inand keep it online, you want it to come back reallyquickly, let’s say you’re a News organisation or 60Minutes, and you’re building a big catalogue of data fora particular story; you can’t hold it all on your online

storage – the ISIS 2000, using the sametools as we’re used to with ISIS 5000and ISIS 7000, gives a fully integratedmethodology for managing near linestorage back to real time, real time backto near line. It’s a really nice productthat I think will be very well received inthe marketplace.

Ed: But at a much lower cost perterabyte I guess?

Richard: A much, much lower costper terabyte and the real beauty of thisone is, because there are lots of nearline storages out there, the real reasonbehind this one is the full integration.So if you’ve got an Interplay, it drops onthere, Interplay understands what’s onnear line, what’s in archive, what’s realtime, and allows you to bring mediabackwards and forwards. It’s a beautifulthing for someone who has already gotan ISIS 5000 or ISIS 000 installation.That would normally fit between yourproduction server and your LTO tape

system for example, and just be there as the middleground for stuff that you know you’re going to need,but you haven’t got the time to bring it back from tape.

Ed: Now another point they brought up at the pressconference was about insurance by Avid looking afteryou once you’ve bought some of their products. I guessthis is not only for the big boys, but it’s a bridge to thepostproduction side of the small producer?

Richard: One of the things that’s just beenannounced is a rebranding if you like, and also repricingof Avid support. For the last few years, we’ve hadsomething called “Avid Priority Support” and foranybody who has had hardware, that’s been the reallycritical one, because that’s an extended hardwarewarranty and you’ve always had to tack that on whenyou’ve bought the gear. Now what we’re seeing acrossthe range from the video side and the editing side, isthat first year of support is rolled in and the price hasn’tgone up. So it’s a very nice story for us and also thoserenewals have gotten a little bit cheaper as well. It hasbeen rebranded, so where we’ve seen Avid PrioritySupport up till now, it’s now going to be “Expert Plus”and “Expert Elite” on top of that.

Ed: How is that going to work – I mean, for yourcustomers, obviously the point of connection is you, butfor someone who is not an Atomise customer, what dothey do?

Richard: Become an Atomise customer and then wetake care of it all!

Ed: Yes, yes, yes but … alright …

Richard: Support cases usually go back through thedealer. That’s the way it would preferably work and thedealer would handle that contact back to Avid to sortout whatever issues there are. That just allows a bit ofmanagement and cohesiveness into the process. By allmeans, a user can directly submit a support request ifthey’re on that plan – it’s just most people in our regiontend to go through the dealer.

Ed: And that plan would possibly be an onlineservice?

Richard: It is an online service, there’s also a phonenumber – so for example if you’ve got the 24/7 plan,there’s a phone number you can call and an engineer in

Page 38

Apace for AtomiseWe are down the hall at another one of Richard Kelly’s

favourite vendors, and that is …?

Richard: We’re here at Apace with Dennis Bress,

President, CEO IEEI TV.

Dennis: Yes, and the website is <ieei.tv>

Ed: What’s that got to do with Apace?

Dennis: Well <ieei.tv> has been around since the

early days of Wang, IBM, DAC, Honeywell. With our

experience in storage – NAS and SAN, and deep archive

with LTO and also with optical disc, we took a close look

at this rich media market …

Ed: To shorten it up, you’re an Apace reseller in

America? Dennis Bress is “A Ok” and ready to go.

Page

the Asia-Pacific region, who has got pre-knowledge ofyour system, will answer the phone and be able toassist. Avid does it really well; one of the reasons I’mso dedicated to the Avid product range is they really doback-end it very well.

Ed: But if you’re an Atomise customer, it’s you?

Richard: Yes, then we escalate it back to Avid. Theservice I try to offer with Atomise is that we becomeyour point of contact; we not only want you to spendmoney with us and buy from us, we will own yourissues and make sure that your production is up andrunning.

Ed: Okay, so the Avid insurance is somethingobviously for everybody who is an Avid customer, butfor the small production, postproduction house is thereanything new from Avid, or was that covered recentlywith the launch of Media Composer 6?

Richard: Media Composer 6 really was the big newsfor post for a lot of people and the major MC6announcement was before show – we had that veryrecently; what we do have though is a really goodpromo that I think will appeal to quite a lot of peopleout there. It’s a cross-grade from Final Cut or MediaComposer to Symphony, the top end of the videoediting range that has the Media Composer interface. Itsits alongside DS at the top of Avid’s video editingrange and that’s US$999 for a cross-grade. That’s avery high end, very capable piece of software and if youcan run Media Composer version 6, you can runSymphony version 6 on your existing computer system.That will bring a few extra features that MediaComposer 6 doesn’t have. It has secondary colourcorrection and universal mastering and with that cross-grade from Final Cut, I think that’s going to be a reallyattractive thing for people out there. There are a lot ofpeople moving from Final Cut to Avid products at themoment and this just makes it an easier decision.

Ed: Because with Final Cut they would have hadsecondary colour correction anyway?

Richard: We had the promos a little while ago at thesame sort of price going to Media Composer; now we’vegot that promo going to Symphony, so I think it’s stillgoing to be a really good story and I think it will be verywell accepted in the market. The other thing that we’vegot is an even stronger academic offering coming outfrom Avid. So for any academic users out there, pleaseget in touch because there’s quite a large informationpack now that is available with a huge amount ofresource. It goes far beyond the very discountedpricing that Avid offers. There’s some really great stuffthat they’re doing and there is also a new Avid studentcommunity that’s out there on Facebook. NZVN

Dennis: Yes, so at the end of that process we hadto partner with someone who we thought had the bestset of tools by which to address the needs within therich media market and we found Apace Systems.

Ed: So what have you got to show us?

Dennis: Well what differentiates Apace from a lot ofthe other manufacturers is that the company President,Dr Lee Hu PhD, actually helped write the code for SCSIand fibre channel, so he concluded that Ethernet reallywas the Holy Grail in that an Ethernet based topologyallows for all of these different work groups tocommunicate and interoperate – whether you’re a Macor you’re a PC.

Here in the booth today is the vStor and the eStorwhich are our base server storage products. These areservers that are Ethernet based, from single GigE all theway up to 10 GigE SFP and CX4. And then on top ofthat we have our asset management, which is ourpostMAN and what we’re releasing here at this year’s2012 show is the postMAN 3 which we call PM3 Pro.

What PM3 Pro allows you to do, is to catalogue andindex all of your assets in a very powerful way to beable to add additional metadata to those particular files,in that later on down the road, you can then very easilyon any computer, with Ethernet or Internet access, beable to do searches for selected pieces of media andhave those results come up in proxy form. So thatnow, if I want to search for “Grant water-skiing” I cantype in “Grant water-skiing” and I can have 20 differentproxy files come up within seconds, and I could bemanaging and indexing hundreds of terabytes worth ofdata storage.

Ed: And you can be doing this on the Internet?

Dennis: Yes, that’s what’s very unique about ourdesign.

Ed: So you’ve got your own little Cloud?

Dennis: We have our own Cloud, so you’ll hear a lotof that.

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Ed: But it’s your Cloud and you’re looking after it –not somebody else?

Dennis: It’s a private media Cloud, which makes itvery exclusive and therefore a lot of these clients do notwant their information out to a third party …

Ed: Hey, funny that, that’s sort of come up before,but you’re the first one I’ve heard that’s addressed it?

Dennis: Yes, so we call it R2 and it’s an extension ofthe PM3 software that allows for indexing. So there’s alot of different applications that this technology canthen be applied to.

Ed: Not just in the television industry?

Dennis: Not just television. Some of our fastestgrowing clients right now are corporate … so you canimagine Boeing, for example. You have a lot of trainingmaterial that needs to get out to sales people and totechnical engineers, and instead of doing PowerPointand Word documents now, why not do a video? Sothey have their own internal video department now,because they can buy a couple of Macs and get thesoftware, they go out and record and they create aparticular sequence that tells a story about what it isthat they have to tell. Well how do they get thatinformation out to 400 different key engineers in a veryefficient way? Well in the old days, we used to burnDVDs right, and mail them out. Well guess what – asthey mailed out, there’s been an update that’s a verycritical update. So now we have to review version 2.Well now it’s just a single file that can be updated andthat file then is available via anyone who has anInternet connection with the secure login of vindicateduser access – user name and password. Pretty slick.

Ed: Very, very clever – lots of applications for that Ican see.

Dennis: What you’re seeing here specifically withRichard from Atomise, is feature film postproductionvideo work.

Ed: Okay, now file management, of course, is whereApace has been really, really strong, but you’veimproved it yet again?

Dennis: Yes absolutely. What we found is that wehave clients who have over 300 terabytes of Apacestorage. That’s a lot of spinning disc. In some cases,they’ve got 10 chassis and those 10 chassis are full.Well what the IT or administrative branch of thesebroadcast facilities is finding, is they’d like to be able tomigrate a terabyte’s worth of important data that’s onsay chassis 1 array 1, to a newer server that they just

bought, that’s the new “v” or “e” 4000 seriesthat is say 72 terabytes. Say it’s the 11th

server. So they want to be able to go throughand take a look at all of their Apace serversand make some decisions like I want to move 2terabytes from array 1 to the 11th server,because I want to free up space on server No 1because it’s for a very selective work group.We’ll think about that. How do I move 2terabytes of data from one server to anotherserver?

Ed: Slowly?

Dennis: It could be very slow and then,here’s the kicker … am I saying “copy” or“move” and if it’s a copy and move, there hasto be a “delete” in that equation. But whenyou mention the word “delete” within thesefacilities …

Ed: Everybody puckers up?

Dennis: Everybody puckers up … they say Idon’t want to hear that word “delete”. So whatDr Lee and the team at Apace have devised is

a software upgrade called “CFM” ( Cluster FileManager ) and what it does, is it has built-in policies bywhich, not only does it have accelerators for moving thedata from source to destination, but it also has what wecall the “validator” and it does bit sync validation of thespecific file. Remember we’re talking 2 terabytes; wecould be talking literally thousands of files, right? Okay,well if you have that type of process going on, you’dbetter make sure when you do the copy – and I stressit’s a “copy”, it’s not a “move”, it’s a copy from sourceto destination – after that copy’s performed, you do avalidator and it does bit sync validation to confirm100% that source is equal to destination. And then,after that, there is another menu screen that is veryspecific, that allows you as admin then, to say okay I’vemade the copy from source to destination, I’vevalidated source to destination, and now if I’m inclined,after clicking the waiver button, I can go ahead andmake the delete, and it will delete then from the source.So it’s a pretty powerful tool.

We’re not designing tools that we think the industry willwant – we’re listening to the industry and Richard fromAtomise is a great example. He’s a wealth ofinformation and you can benefit from listening to peoplelike Richard, to take that information in, and that’swhere Dr Lee and the engineering team really excel, isto be able to take those suggestions andrecommendations and build them into products.

CFM have some of those which are Global File Search;also the ability to mass move from source to destinationand have a single IP view, and that’s very important, tobe able to log in as an administrator and see all yourservers on tabs and be able to drill down accordingly toa single file. So it’s pretty powerful stuff and we’re veryhappy with the product – that’s CFM, Cluster FileManager.

Ed: Now Richard, we’re not putting you on the spothere, but with all these Apace people around listening,what are you actually doing with this product in NewZealand – anything big?

Richard: We’ve definitely got a major installation ofthe Apace products with Octopa and the vStor and thatis the disaster recovery system for The Hobbit which isobviously a very large production.

Ed: So where the buck stops is with the Apacesystem?

Richard: That’s right; it’s there to make sure that,no matter what happens to our primary storage, the

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production keeps on going. We’ve got to the pointwhere if anything was to happen to the primarystorage, we now know that we don’t even have to moveto the other building to keep working; we just simplyplug in, change IP addresses and keep going. It’sproven to be a product which is working far beyondwhatever our vision for it in the production was going tobe. So it’s working extremely well and we completelymirror the Isis 7000 production storage off to the Apacesystem, so we know we’ve got everything on a dailybasis.

Ed: And I guess that’s important for your clients toknow, to actually see this in operation at this level, toknow that they can be assured that it’s doing what it’ssupposed to do and more?

Richard: Well even better than that, when we did acomplete fail over test, it performed far higher than weexpected, higher than we’d spec’ed it to work, and thatprovided a degree of confidence beyond anything elsethat we could achieve. The idea in the implementationwas we’d have to move buildings and go to the disasterrecovery site to continue working. To be able to justsimply change over to Apace connector and change IPaddresses on the client station and simply keepworking, is a fantastic bonus.

Ed: Have you had a little bit of help here from AndyGorman ( Senior Software Engineer at Apace )?

Richard: Andy has been absolutely essential to whatwe’ve done. He’s tweaked the Octopa product to meetour exact requirements and I certainly couldn’t speakany higher of what Apace and Andy have done. Theyreally have lived up to what the initial promise was –they have provided exactly the system that we need tothe exact requirements that the client had and they’vechanged things for us, which is greatly appreciated.

Ed: But Richard, that’s what service is all about – Imean, you provide a service to your clients and yourvendor supplies service to you?

Richard: Absolutely, and in this case to be able toreach out and talk to exactly the person who canprovide that service with no layers to go through, andhave their immediate response has been fantastic.

Ed: Are you a “layer” Dennis?

Dennis: Yes – actually I was very fortunate to be onthe original install, which was fantastic, and we hadanother engineer, J.R, who has also been instrumentalin a part of the process.

Richard: Yes, we don’t want to forget J.R – J.R’sbeen great.

Dennis: But Richard iscorrect and that’s one uniqueattribute to the hierarchy ofApace – you don’t need to gothrough multiple layers, it’s bydesign. We want people likeRichard who are there with theclient, expected to perform at ahigh rate, to be able to havedirect access to the engineeringteam and the leaders of thoseteams, in order to solve thoseproblems immediately, andnow you’d have to say thisremote Internet connection andthe ability to log on and todiagnose code, has been verybeneficial, as opposed to theearly days, say 20 years ago,when we all had to get on airplanes. You had a service call,

you had to get an engineer who would get on a planeand have to fly.

Richard: Yes, that definitely has become a modelright across the range – providing that immediacy ofsupport and now being able to provide a virtualengineer onsite within minutes of an issue, rather thanmaybe hours or days due to travel. And in NewZealand, of course, that’s a really big thing. We are along way from anywhere and to have that resourceavailable is fantastic.

Ed: But we agree it’s a great place to be.

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Dennis, Lee Hu, Richard and Andy Gorman.

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Tiffen for A2ZWe are at Tiffen with Brett Smith.

Ed: In the Lowel section of your stand I see somelights that I’m very comfortable with. These are theTota-lights and I’m so glad you’re still selling them?

colour rendition index, which generally has to be above91 to be a similar spectrum to the sensitivity of thevideo camera; that’s actually to the colour spectrum.And so we have a mix of tungsten, fluorescent and now,after a lot of research to try to reduce the effects ofmulti-shadow, we’ve brought out a range of studio and

portable lights with LED. This is whateveryone wants; it’s not just a buzzword. We had a customer wanting tochange because all the lights look green.

With LED, because they wereenvironmentally sound, low powerconsumption … people bought themreally before they questioned whetherthey were still a good colour balance forCMOS chips and for colour cameras andso it’s interesting – now it’s almost likewe’ve come the other way round withLED. We’re now trying to introduce thetype of quality that people demandedfrom fluorescent and didn’t get … well,we’re now saying there is a difference.One LED panel against another isdifferent. It’s not where it’smanufactured, we’re not trying to sayEast versus West is different; what we’rejust trying to say is your reflectors, thechoice of your LEDs, your mounts, theoptions like DMX control make it into alight that people get an aesthetic beauty

from, but also has good functionality. So we’re in thegame with all the features we wanted to integrate intoan LED light.

Ed: But Lowel’s been around for a long, long time – Imean it’s got that history from the cinema in America …obviously it’s not going to “shit in its own nest” andmake a nasty light?

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Brett: They are still by far our biggest seller andwhen people say Lowel it has so many components, sohow do you decide? The answer is you buy a kit,because the kit then gives you an artistic lighting set inone box.

So you’ve got three different lights with different powerfactors and different form factors, 235 Watt, a 500 Wattand an 800 Watt – you mentioned, the Tota-light whichis a broad throw, you’ve got a focusable 500 Watt andyou’ve got, not a pin spot, but you’ve got a smallersculpting light. So you can do a three point key fill-inback or hair light in one kit and the pricing is US$1200,so it’s one of those systems that’s plug and play.Everything is provided and so they still sell hand overfist and, yes, they are tungsten.

Ed: Even, I see, spare bulbs and some stands inthere?

Brett: Yes, stands, cables, we’ve got black flags,we have flexi-shafts, we’ve got mounts to mount ondoors, scissors to hang on ceilings – all in the kit. Soyou get everything, every contingency that comes up inwalking into a room, to light one, two or three peopleall in a small kit.

Then we go up to the DV Creator 55 – that adds a Rifalight and the Rifa light is our famous soft light. So whatthat gives you then is the versatility to run interviewsjust with a single light, because the Rifa has a very softwrap effect, you can actually still sculpt the face with asingle light, but it also gives you that beautifulversatility of having four lights to do key, fill, backlightand background. So you’ve got just that extradimension that you can use to light a room. Theadvantage of that too, is that the Rifa light is nowfluorescent as well as tungsten. Now you might say“well hang on, fluorescent, that’s not the latesttechnology – LED is the latest technology.” We’reworking now with all three technologies, because theystill suit certain applications, whether it’s price, whetherit’s light output, whether it’s colour temperature, or

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Brett: No, and the whole idea of Lowel is not justto raise the average light in the room. It’s to sculptlight; it’s to create motivational lighting if you’ve got adrama scene; it’s to give you a depth of field fromsubject to foreground, background – and, you know,you’ve got to almost grab people one by one to tellthem that lighting isn’t just for the camera’s sake – it’sactually for the viewer’s sake, which is why whensomeone says “hey my camera’s got allthe sensitivity I need, why would I needa lighting kit” we say “well just to makeyour images look like what people expectto see.”

You have to enhance light, you just can’treproduce it; a camera isn’t like youreye, it doesn’t kind of fill in all the gaps.The lighting helps people do that. It’slike good audio. I think lighting andaudio are the two things that people say“what’s wrong with my images?” Wellit’s the sound, ironically, and it’s thelight. You put those in ( and a tripodbecause I used to work for Miller ) butyou stabilise, you enhance with audioand you add this kind of sculpt with lightand you’ve got a story.

Ed: We’re getting into the philosophyof television here Brett?

Brett: I know, I know, okay let’sget back to LEDs.

Ed: So there is a Lowel prime LED 400lamp?

Brett: And a 200, yes. So they’re new and, as Isaid, we’ve got DMX control, we’ve got dimming, theyare single colour temperature, but you can see by theLED array that, to get the 5600 or the 3200, we’veadded a little bit of both, but it’s not a blender. Wehave a blender in a little handheld light, which goesfrom 32 to 56; these are dedicated. They have thebroadest beam angle in the industry, so for studioapplications, you’re going to put two Lowels up againstthree of a competitor’s – and probably the key sellingpoint, is that you do have 40% greater throw, so thelight output is 40% greater than its competitor’s but thebeam angle is about 30 degrees wider. So you’re goingto get a greater coverage with less lighting. So forstudio applications, low ceilings, you’ve got the coolnessof the chip but you’ve also got less fixtures, and theyare hopefully about to take Asia by storm!

Ed: And in the Steadicam range, wow, this looks likea boom?

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Brett: It is. It’s called the Steadicam Tango and itconnects to a traditional Archer or Zephyr Steadicam orsled. So what you have is the operation of a Steadicamwhich is stabilising while you’re walking or on a segue,but with the additional boom range of a jib arm. And itextends up to 1.5 metres and especially for somethinglike corporate or educational video, this jib arm allowsyou to explore. Steadicam’s always been a moving

medium, so you can walk and talk with people, butyou’ve got a limited height range and movement. Nowyou’re actually able to go over dividers, go underneathtables, and it gives you the smoothest flexibility of anytype of stabiliser. It was an idea that, 30 years ago,Garrett Brown, the inventor of Steadicam had, but ofcourse the cameras were all too heavy and thematerials weren’t strong and light enough to build whatyou can today. The form factors of the new cameras,whether it’s Sony or Canon’s, they’re all in this blockshape that RED originated, yet perfect for the Tango.So you will see a lot of these now as they start to rollout. You’ve got the 2.4 metres height, that’s theadvantage.

Ed: But what’s the weight of the thing?

Brett: You’re going to have to see someone with iton, but, if you take the rig side away, it’s probablyabout 20 kilograms or 44 pounds. It’s not as much as

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you think, it’s quite light. That is the capacity of thissystem; it’s not going to take any more than that –maybe 22 kg.

Ed: Okay, so that’s for the big boys - for the smallerboys?

Brett: For the smaller boys, you probably knowthat the Steadicam range was traditionally cinema, sothe heavy duty cameras, 35mm film, 16mm as itmigrated down to broadcast, lightweight cameras 8-10kg, so we developed systems. We now have 11systems going from the Ultra2 US$66,000 down to thelightweight. You asked about the lightweight – we havethe Pilot which is a wedding video style. So you wouldsay Canon 5D, EX3, so you’ve got that 2.5-5 kgpayload; the Pilot allows you to wear a streamlinedvest, so you can actually put a jacket over it; you’ve gota lightweight arm, lightweight camera, but you’ve stillgot the stability and the gimbal and all the functionsand features of a big Steadicam in a smaller formfactor. It’s designed, as I say, for wedding orcorporate, where it’s plug and play, someone suddenlyneeds a Steadicam shot, it take minutes to set up,there’s no tool adjustment, so it’s very simple tooperate and very simple to get great images. We’venow got two models – an HDMI version to monitor, andwe also have an HD-SDI, because the Steadicam rangehas now gone all HD. Even the lightweight rigs have

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HD out and that doesn’t sound like much, but of course,when you’re trying to wire 3 gigabit through a coil spiraldown a tube, it’s a big thing to us and customers wantit, even though it is only a display device. They want tosee HD if they’re shooting HD and it’s quite a big sellingpoint for a lot of the customers.

We have the Pilot at the 4.5kg; we have the Scoutwhich goes up to 8kg and the Zephyr which is probablythe new “darling” of the corporate broadcast world,because for about US$11,000 you’ve got a 10kgcapacity, so you’ve got larger camcorders, down toCanon 5Ds that you can weight up and operate on asystem that has the integrity of the larger systems, butis still lightweight at a good price. And then, as I say,we work down to there. We also have the handheldMerlin and Smoothee which I think you’ve seen – andthey still continue to sell hand over fist. The Merlin 2has got a redesigned camera platform, redesigned instrength and hinge joint, but essentially is the sameprinciple as all the other Steadicams. The Smootheenow has mounts for GoPro, GoPro 3D, the iPhone 4,iPhone 3 and we added different mounts and again it’sselling extremely well to that market where people havegot 1080p in the palm of their hands. Now what they’relooking for is, again the audio, and the stabilisation andthe image quality, to create professional images with asystem; the Smoothee is how they achieve that. NZVN

Teradek for A2ZWe are at Teradek for A2Z and we have JonLandman.

Ed: How many years has Teradek been goingnow?

Jon: About four years and we make an H.264encoder as the guys at A2Z are well aware.They’re also familiar with the Cube but what’snew for the Cube at NAB is an OLED screen, soyou can now control the Cube or set up theCube without a laptop, or without an iPad,directly from the screen, from the Cube itself.It has a two hour battery built-in; it has an SDslot, so anything that goes through the Cubewill be written to the SDs and then FTP’d backto a site afterwards with the Bond if you’reusing the Bond. We’ve also got Memo WiFi, sothere are two antennae now. These are themain upgrades to the Cube 155 – it’s the “55”family. We’re going to continue to promote the150s, but we’re going to start shipping these inMay and the price is yet to be confirmed, but itwill be under US$2500.

Ed: Right. Just explain to me a bit more about thisMemo WiFi. What’s the value in that as opposed towhat you had before?

Jon: Well the Memo WiFi is a dual antenna system sowe’re going to get better reception with the dualantennas, and Memo deals with a multipath better, sohopefully you’re going to get a better WiFi experience.

Ed: Less likelihood of a dropout?

Jon: Yes.

Ed: Okay, so you talked about a bonding solution?

Jon: Now what we’re able to do is to take the output ofthe Cube via the USB connection and connect it to ourbonding solution, which is called the Teradek Bond. Itfits on top of the Cube. It bonds together five modems,aggregates the bandwidth and then sends those up intothe Cloud or to a TV station, to be sewed back togetherand then pushed to a decoder. This is a one-time cost,

Jon Landman.

no reoccurring fees, you supply your own modems, itcosts US$2500. The programme that aggregates thosebits is called Sputnik, which is a Linux basedapplication, which we supply you for free and you canput on your own Linux server, or host it in the Cloud.So those we are selling and shipping and doing verywell with.

Ed: So in fact if you had a very good relationship withyour telecom supplier, you could actually do this fromanywhere in the world and stream back to your stationanywhere else in the world?

Jon: In high def, yes.

Ed: That sort of takes a roaming cameraman to newpossibilities?

Jon: Exactly, and if you look on our website, you’ll seesome of the recent footage that we had, which wasbasically the F18 crash in the States. We had acameraman on his way home pull over to the side of the

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road, whip out his Bond, stick it on his camera, and golive to the station. These are inexpensive enough toput one in every cameraman’s kit. An encoder and aBond costs you about US$5K, which is actually less thanthe cost of the lens that he has. So, you know, wehave News organisations really thinking about puttingone of these in every cameraman’s kit. Our competitionin this area is basically a couple of companies. They areall rental systems that cost you about 2K a month. Weare 5K one time.

Ed: And really, the quality is there. I mean its H.264and it’s full …?

Jon: Yes, exactly and the cameraman actually has avisual … the faster the Cube lights are flashing, thehigher the bit rate. Look, number 2 is going slow. If Ipull it out, watch – we’re not going to lose video –watch.

No, he’s just pulled out modem 2 and the video feedcontinues unaffected.

Jon: And you should see that channel disappear here.It takes a few minutes to show, but look, the data rate… it’s trying to … it aggregates … so we’re lost, it’sgoing to go down to zero eventually, because we’repinging the software all the time. You can see it’s goingto turn down to zero and ( because this is an averagebitrate ), eventually it’s going to go down to zero andthat will go down to zero and then the latency …

Ed: So the buffering is really where it’s at, becauseyou can’t rely on wireless modems to give you 100%signal 100% of the time, but when you aggregate itover five …?

Jon: It’s not about the 100% of signal, it’s what’s thelatency of each modem. For example, I could havemodem company A that sends my signal to Africa andback before it hits my decoder, right?

Ed: That’s Telcos for you!

Jon: On the other hand, in San Francisco okay … I’llgive you an example. I had phenomenal 4G, I noticedthat on all of my modems I had under 100 millisecondsbetween the modem and Sputnik. My buffer wasalways full, because the modems were giving me thefull bitrate, very low latency, so I was able to look atthe statistics and then bring it down to 2 seconds in mybuffer here because it was always being filled up. So Ithen took my latency down to 2 seconds and I had 2seconds of latency.

Ed: How did that affect your video quality?

Jon: The same video quality, I’m not losing anypackets and in San Francisco, out of a single 4Gmodem, I’d get 3½ megs. So that’s like the most idealcircumstances.

Ed: So in fact, I guess to protect yourself, you haveas many different Telcos’ systems on there, so at leastone of them is going to be connected?

Jon: That’s exactly it. We have redundancy becausewe support multiple different carriers, and we haveredundancy because we’re load-balancing the videoamongst those. So I go to an area where there’sactually no signal of a particular carrier, I’ll take thatmodem out and put it in my pocket, put one in thatdoes work in that area.

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Jon: You can tell them this is real Bond footage. Nowyou’re going to see some other footage shortly …

Ed: Okay, so in using this system, you’re totallyindependent of I guess your camera’s frame rate andresolution, so you can have 720p, 1080i …?

Jon: It doesn’t matter. Teradek input is independentof the encoding rate, so I could have a 1080i signalcoming in from my camera, but I could only maybehave 2 megabits per second with the bonded signal, soI would say “okay, I’m going to do 720 at 2 megs.”

Ed: Jon, just tell me again about this Sputniksoftware – this is something that I guess you wouldhave on an iPad beside you …?

Jon: No, this is what sits on our Sputnik server in thesky. So you’ve got multiple modems right; they cut upall the video into different packets. They’re all going togo up over different modems and have differentlatencies, so you need to have a buffer somewhere thatwaits for all of those packets to come in and it realignsthem, puts them in the right packet order and thensends them to the decoder. We make that software –it’s called Sputnik, it’s something that we give away forfree, you can put it on a Dell PC with Linux on it, or youcan host it in the Cloud. So that software has aninterface and this is the interface, which gives you someinteresting statistics. It tells you what the modemspeed is out of each modem; it tells you what thelatency of each modem is; it tells you how full yourbuffer is. With those three items, you can decide howlow you can lower your buffer to decrease your latency.And obviously that modem there at 8 seconds is holdingeveryone else up, because modem 2 – let’s imagine it’sgot packet 2 – I can’t send packet 3 until I’ve sentpacket 2 to the decoder. So it’s got to sit there waitingfor packet 2 to come in before it can send … that’s whatlatency means.

Ed: So in that case do you call the cameraman andsay “pull modem 2”?

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Sennheiser for SyntecFor Syntec, we are at the Sennheiser stand with RobBlumenreder.

Ed: And Rob, Sennheiser is not disappointing; newproduct this year?

Rob: Yes we have. We have a new addition to theEvolution Wireless portable line and it’s called the SKP300. So a plug on transmitter isn’t anything new forSennheiser but in the Evolution Wireless line, the G3,we didn’t have a plug on that provided phantom power.So what the 300 series SKP plug on will do, is of courseit will make any microphone into a wireless transmitter,any wired microphone into a wireless if you’re pluggingin this transmitter, to the XLR3 and it also suppliesphantom power to a condenser microphone so if youwanted to have a wireless boom operation that makes itvery nice and easy for “run and gun” stuff.

So again, not new for Sennheiser, but new in the G3line and it’s a perfect complement for your kit for audiofor video. So that’s the first bit and that has a streetprice of US$525.

The next product is actually in the Neumann line. Thisis called the KK 204 and KK 205. These are capsulesdesigned specifically for the 2000 series. The 204 is acardioid condenser derived from the KMS 104 and the205 is derived from the KMS 105, a super cardioidcondenser.

Again, they are exclusively designed for 2000 series, sowhat that means is you can get that Neumann sound onour mid-range wireless. This is going to be very largein the US, particularly in the House of Worship market,

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Rob Blumenreder.

Page

anybody who is looking for the best possible sound thatthey can get out of their wireless system. They have astreet price in the United States of around US$999.

Ed: So is this new for Neumann … I mean, I associate

Neumann with studio mics, fixed position. These are

handheld, are these the first in the handheld series?

Rob: Actually not. These are the first in a lower price

point for Neumann – the capsule itself isn’t in the lower

price point, but the wireless, the Sennheiser is. There’s

been a partnership obviously with Sennheiser and

Neumann since 1991 and we have in our 3 and 5K

series which is our flagship, the Neumann KK104 and

105.

So this is kind of a “tip to the hat” on our flagship

wireless and bringing that down to a more professional

but mid-range for Senn-heiser option.

Ed: Now while I’ve got you, in the States of course

you’ve sorted out all your bandwidth …

Rob: Yeah – for now.

Ed: Oh, you mean it’s not sorted?

Rob: Well you know, there’s one thing for sure with the

government and that’s nothing’s for certain.

As Sennheiser moves along, we’re looking to find waysto do more with less and Sennheiser customers

recognise and understand that we are technology

leaders.

So we will be working over the next couple of years on

new technologies so that we can ensure that we are

providing our customers with the most appropriate

service for the changing environments around the

world, not just the US but also in all the European

markets and Asian markets. Everybody is different.

Ed: Trying to keep one step ahead of thegovernment?

Rob: Trying, but it’s a hard thing to do. Death andtaxes and …

Ed: And bandwidth?

Rob: And bandwidth regulation is going to be added to

that. NZVN

Page 48

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Ensemble Designs for GencomFor Gencom we are at Ensemble Designs and we have

Cindy Zuelsdorf.

Ed: Cindy, you’re going to tell us about a very hot

product that Nicki is very excited about, because

Gencom are selling the Ensemble product in New

Zealand and Australia. What are we starting with?

Cindy: We’re going to start with the BrightEye

Mitto scan converter right here. You can take any

images from a computer, maybe YouTube or Skype,

and output them to SDI video. So, looking at the back

here you’ll see this is where you would plug into from

your computer …

Ed: Which is a DVI or VGA input?

Cindy: Or it can be HDMI as well. So any of those

work – DVI, HDMI or VGA – and then the output can be

SDI, so serial digital video either SD, HD or 3 gigabit

per second (3 Gb/s) SDI. You can bring that SDI signal

into a production switcher, a vision mixer and switch a

show. A lot of our customers are broadcasters, folks

that want to use a Skype interview, for example, and

turn that Skype interview into something that looks

good enough to use in HD. They might even need to

adjust the audio with respect to the video, to keep the

lip sync intact. Skype video is notorious for having bad

lip sync due to the video processing being different from

the audio processing and the BrightEye Mitto scan

converter can adjust for that.

Ed: So with the scan converter you can adjust the

audio sync?

Cindy: Can I show you?

Ed: Yes, I’m sure.

Okay, so it’s really cool controls in adjusting the audio

delay, because as Cindy says, the video takes longer to

process and so it’s always delayed in relation to the

audio, so you want to delay the audio so it rematches

with the video. And the other side of it is the scan

frame looks as though it is infinitely adjustable; it’s just

a rectangle that you can drag to any sized shape you

like and that’s your new picture frame.

Cindy: There are also memory registers for that

frame. You can set up a particular configuration so you

always know that when you go to input 1, your

rectangular selection is pre-set to the correct size for

your Skype video; when you go to input 2 and then

recall register 2 the correct size and position is recalled

for that particular source.

Ed: So is that a crop or a resize frame?

Cindy: It’s cropping the picture, and then resizing

that selection so that it fills the whole screen.

Ed: And what we’re seeing now on the screen is a

split screen between the BrightEye Mitto scan converter

and Brand X. Brand X is looking very soft. I think if

this was a fabric softener comparison, Brand X would

win, but because it’s not, I think the Mitto is a better

product. What do you think Cindy?

Cindy: What a nice setup. Absolutely, we’re really

good at scaling and filtering and that’s what we aim to

show here. You’ve got all the detail, none of the flicker,

much sharper.

Ed: Very nice – it’s a much better picture.

Cindy: Here’s the BrightEye 72 and this is an SDI

to HDMI converter. Now there’s a million of them out

there right – but the difference about this one is that

you can also adjust things like proc levels, you can

adjust offsets, so all the things you want in a high end

monitor, we’ve actually built into the converter. That

means you could go out and get an off the shelf

consumer monitor and our BrightEye 72 converter and

boom – now you can adjust levels, you can see audio

meters, you can look at H & V shift, look at caption

decoding if that ever becomes interesting in New

Zealand, timecode burn in – all that nifty stuff.

Ed: Okay, another good little piece is that when you

have a monitor in your shot, displaying something, the

colour might be off on that monitor. It might look fine

to the person directly viewing the monitor, but once

you’ve seen the monitor through a camera, the colour

could be odd. So your BrightEye converter does what

…?

Cindy: The BrightEye 72 converter lets you colour

correct that monitor that’s in the shot or on the set, so

that it looks correct to the home viewer.

Ed: And it’s all for about US$1000?

Cindy: Yes, a great price. You can go out and use

that and combine it with a kind of off the shelf

consumer monitor and get your high end broadcast

functionality.

Ed: Beautiful. And now we’re moving on to?

Cindy: The BrightEye 57, test signal generator …

Ed: How do you come up with these numbers?

Cindy: Aren’t they fascinating?

Page 49

Cindy Zuelsdorf.

Page

Ed: Do engineers think of them or do

you have a focus group?

Cindy: Focus group, absolutely,

yeah, we rent a big kind of a condo for

the weekend …

Ed: I hope there’s lots of comforts?

Cindy: Yes – we bring in the good

food, the wine and we sit around and go

“57” – I dunno; “72” I dunno, what do

you think? Focus group, serious

marketing.

Ed: Cindy’s got the measure of this

interviewer! Alright enough of that, get

on with your job, come on…

Cindy: Do I have to?

Ed: Yes.

Cindy: Alright then. So this is our

very fabulous BrightEye 57 reference

generator that gets used in OB and

broadcast, fly-pack – those kinds of

places. It gives every kind of test signal

you need, so 30 plus test signals, every kind of bars,

split field bars, 75% bars, SMPTE bars – whatever kind

of bars you want – flat field 20, flat field 80, pulse and

bar – oh my gosh, I’ll stop …

Ed: This gal knows all the words.

Cindy: Pathological – that’s my favourite. You

know the “pathological” one?

Ed: Rather cautiously – No – lots of odd skin tones?

Cindy: Well kind of, it’s a kind of crazy purplish

colour. It’s got sequences of ones and zeros that can

fail a signal path in a TV station and so we generate this

test pattern that, if that can pass through your system,

you are good to go; and if it doesn’t, then we know that

there’s some issues in the path.

Ed: I’ll take your word for it.

Cindy: It’s absolutely true. You can also output

things like HD tri-level sync or your favourite Black

Burst – all those good signals that you need, some

embedded audio tone …

Ed: And it’s got a card slot?

Cindy: This nifty card slot lets you make your own

test signals. So if you want to have a test signal with

an animated logo that says “Grant” spinning around,

you could build that, put it on this nice secure digital

card, SD card, and then just load it into the front of the

unit. You can build your own custom test signals with

audio clips and video animations, if you want to. I’ll

show you an example.

So these are three of Cindy’s best, but there are more –

there are many more in the BrightEye stable and to find

out more about all of these you need to go to Gencom

and talk to the people there and find out what BrightEye

has got that provides a solution for what your problems

are – as long as they’re not focus groups!

Cindy: Well Grant you’re going to be the first I

invite to our next focus group.

Ed: I hope it’s an exotic location?

Cindy: New Zealand I was thinking, it seems so

exotic there.

Ed: That’s true. Okay, now Cindy’s got a big card?

Cindy: A big card, yes.

Ed: It’s a big card and she’s touching it with her

fingers instead of … oh dear, that’s a no-no, won’t put

that in the rack?

Cindy: I could.

Ed: Could you really … it would still work without …?

Cindy: Absolutely.

Ed: You’re not worried about static?

Cindy: I’m not worried about static. You know we

manufacture and test all of our equipment right at our

factory in Nevada City, California. At Ensemble Designs

we build it ourselves; it’s not built in China or

somewhere else, we build it ourselves and we’ve really

got the static under control. We build everything and

test it ourselves and it’s solid and reliable.

Ed: Okay, so what does this big card do?

Cindy: This big card is the Avenue Layering

Engine. It’s new here at NAB and it’s a small vision

Page 50

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Page

mixer – a little mix effect, if you will. It’s something

that you might use in an OB van; you might use it in a

fly-pack; you could use it for central casting; as a

presentation switcher and as a small master control. It

has two keyer layers and can do two keys and

background transitions, like mix effects do.

The interesting thing about it is that you can control it

from your automation, but you can also control it from

a Mac, a PC or an iPad. And so we’re finding that some

people like something a little different on the control

front and we aim to please, right.

Ed: That’s going to make the “Apple-ites” very happy.

Cindy: Well that’s okay, you can use your PC and

browse to it on any browser that you want to. You

don’t have to be an Apple-ite to enjoy this cool new

tool, huh?

Ed: So show me it working?

Cindy: Absolutely.

Well with a little bit of practice, I could see that one

could put together a TV programme with logos,

backgrounds, keys – all sorts of things, very simply

from your Tablet or your PC, using this card and it is an

Avenue Layering Engine.

Ed: So as a preview system, you’re saying what can

happen?

Cindy: It could be a preview system, it could

actually be used for switching a show live. It allows a

director, or a lighting director, to be mobile and move

about in different parts of the facility to switch the

show.

So you mentioned as a preview application, setting up a

live event, potentially a lighting director might take the

iPad, go to different locations in the facility, maybe

switch between all five cameras and check the lighting

and be sure it looks good.

Maybe there’s a presenter who is going to stand up on

stage and wants to switch his or her own show and not

have to have a director. Whereas in a TV station

they’re going to sit in a master control room, but still

with the iPad they’d be able to move around and do

some switching without having to be in one position.

It gives a little bit of freedom, a change.

Ed: Versatility is the word.

Cindy: Hey, versatility … a kind of change in the

workflow, it gives people the freedom to be in different

places and switch. NZVN

Page 52

Plura for GencomFor Gencom we are at Plura

with Ibrahim Karim, Director of

Operations, Plura Broadcast.

Ed: Ibrahim, tell us a few

technical things about what

Plura’s been doing in the year

since our last NAB visit?

Ibrahim: Well, we’ve intro-

duced a new product – the PRM

-224-3G Plura Reference

monitor is one of a kind. It can

display dual video with dual

waveform and vectorscope,

PBM-221S and PBM-221-3G,

21” Full HD resolution, PBM-

317S, 17” Full HD resolution,

PBM-209-3G, 9” 800x480

resolution and PBM-307-3G, 7”

with 1024x600 panel resolution.

All the above-mentioned items

come standard with the

unmatched PBM-S and PBM-3G

features respectively.

Ed: Is this to do with the

screen technology or back end technology?

Ibrahim: Both – we partner with an elite panel

manufacturer as well as our back end engine which

drives this panel with the extraordinary features set in

every monitor we offer.

Ed: So just to get this clear – any monitor that you

produce under 17 inch can’t be true HD in terms of its

number of pixels, because you can’t fit that number of

good pixels onto that smaller area?

Ibrahim: Yes, that’s true. That’s a limitation of the

technology for the manufacture of the panel itself. It’s

like the boundary of any technology.

Ibrahim Karim.

Ed: So I guess the choice of the panel technology thatyou make is so that it works in all conditions, whetherthey be very hot, very dry, very humid or very cold, butalso it’s got to be cost effective and, as you say, thereare some panels that are smaller and can still fit highdefinition on them, but at a much higher cost.

Ibrahim: Yes, that’s available.

Ed: So 21 inch really is the best “bang for yourbuck”?

Ibrahim: Well I think every monitor can and willmeet our customer’s expectation and budget.

Ed: But then, what’s behind it is the high end Pluratechnology isn’t it?

Page

Ibrahim: Yes, you can see it here. This is actually

the engine, the main part that drives the panel and

where we have our technology and our investment built

in.

Ed: So having a good panel is one thing, but having

good backroom stuff is also important?

Ibrahim: Yes, it’s quite important. It’s like building a

car with a great chassis, reliable engine with a greatdriver to finish the race. Our products comply with our

founding principles – Reliability, Affordability and

unmatched Functionality.

Ed: And then in the larger sizes you go right up to 55

inch?

Ibrahim: We actually offer up to 70”. We have

shipped quite few of these and in fact just shipped an

order for Gencom Singapore. Pretty impressive size.

Ed: Tell me, are any of your monitors 4K capable?

Ibrahim: No, not yet.

Ed: There’s no demand?

Ibrahim: Well there’s no demand. We have the

platform to build it, however it’s not economical to

build. We will keep monitoring it, and if we see any

traction or demand we will jump on it.

Ed: What’s this on the “Innovation Beyond

Expectations” section of the Plura stand?

Ibrahim: This is the new PRM-224-3G. It’s a new

reference monitor with10-bit panel for more accurate

and smoother colour transitions.

It features 3D LUT capability 17x17x17-8 points linear

interpolation, RJ-45 Ethernet, 100Mbps, LAN to serial

control, Powerful Audio Measurement Package,

Adjustable and User defined Gamma Control, Dual

display Mode with dual waveform and vector, Closed

Captioning and Teletext 801 / Subtitle OP-47.

Ed: All in one?

Ibrahim: Comprehensive products built to last. The

unit over here is the new MVM-124, 24” with built-in 4

CH multi-viewer.

Ed: And I’m pleased to see on the corner is an

analogue clock, but of course it’s digitally projected.

Ibrahim: Laughs … here is the newPBM-317S, 17” Full HD panel, a newadded member to the S-Series.

Ed: I guess it’s got to be anevolving process hasn’t it – you’vegot to listen to what your customersare asking you for, and you think yes,that makes sense and we’ll make thatand release it?

Ibrahim: Yes, it is an evolvingprocess; it’s driven by our customer’sdemand. We love to do things thatsatisfy our customer’s needs.

Ed: That’s why you’ve got no 3Dsolution?

Ibrahim: No, unfortunately it goesback to the economics factor, thedemand is not sustainable.

Ed: Oh. But a feather in your cap,you’ve signed up Hitachi to supplythem with something. What’s that?

Ibrahim: This is the viewfinder thatgoes on the Hitachi cameras. We areproud to announce our long term

agreement with Hitachi for supplying Plura 7” and 9”viewfinders. Hitachi is a prominent player in thecamera business and we are excited to work closelywith them.

Ed: It’s good to have the confidence in Plura to puttheir name on your monitor?

Ibrahim: Once again we stick with our foundingprinciples Affordability, Reliability & unmatchedFunctionality.

Ed: And it’s Plura quality?

Ibrahim: Yes.

Page 53

NZVN

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Hahnel for Focal HoldingsWe are at the Hahnel stand for Focal Holdings and wehave Mike Stango.

Ed: Hahnel has a nice little microphone and anothernew product … we’ll come back to the microphones,now Mike, what’s this item?

Mike: This is Hahnel’s Inspire unit. It’s really quite animaginative unit. In the past, most remotes have beenwhat we call “blind” remotes. Someone can hit thebutton and they hope that their camera fired. Theyreally don’t know.

Ed: Oh this is for the still camera market?

Mike: Still and it also has applications for video. Wehave a lot of customers here at the NAB show who areusing it as a monitor. With this particular Inspire setyou have a handheld display unit which will fire mycamera and also allow me to see both real timestreaming, real time video out of the camera, or it hasits own built-in camera. And I can choose between thewide-angle view or the real time.

Ed: Like the lens view?

Mike: Exactly, so it’s my choice. So what I can do withthis, is I can setup up to four different cameras,different locations, and by holding this wireless monitor,scroll through each of the four cameras and see whatthe camera would see as if I was standing behind thecamera. And if I like the image ( or when I like theimage ) I can depress the shutter release button hereon my monitor, and my camera will fire.

Ed: And so for a video camera, the video camerawould start rolling?

Mike: Yes. It depends on the On / Off button of thevideo camera, but as far as the streaming video as amonitor, it’s a complete wireless monitor for thecamera.

Ed: So when you say in terms of the button, I meanhow does it operate … is it a physical button press ordoes it use a lanc control or what?

Mike: We use a wired control. The difference would beon camera models where the normal shutter releasebutton also operates On / Off on the video, then ourHahnel Inspire will both start and stop the video andallow you to view. On some Digital SLRs the videobutton’s a completely separate button on the camera,unattached to the normal shutter button. In thatscenario, then the Inspire is used as a wireless remoteand monitor only, without triggering the On / Offfunction.

Ed: So this is really only for a DSLR where you havethat remote control trigger … you couldn’t use it on astandard video camera?

Mike: That’s true.

Ed: Except as a monitor?

Mike: Correct, except as a monitor. We’ve had filmdirectors who have four cameras rolling on a normalscenario and from their position, they can scroll usingthis Hahnel Inspire and see what their cameraman seeswirelessly and very inexpensively.

Ed: Because that’s using the camera on the uppermodule?

Mike: That’s correct.

Ed: Right – is this an expensive product?

Mike: No, it’s quite reasonable.

Ed: Together?

Mike: Together – as I said, it also includes all theconnecting cables.

Ed: Well, why wouldn’t you have one?

Mike: Agreed.

Ed: Right, so that’s the monitor, but along with thatwe have a very cool little microphone. Tell us aboutthat Mike?

Mike: Okay, this is Hahnel’s new microphone and it’s agreat looking product. What we have here is Hahnel’sventure into the video market for Digital SLRs and forvideo cameras. It uses a standard 3.5 mm plug, so it’sobviously applicable for many different models – butwhere it really stands out ( besides looks ) is its shockmounting system. As you can see, it has quite a uniqueshock mounting system, completely different toeverybody else’s in the marketplace and I like to thinkit’s really a very rugged system that can take someabuse and still keep the parameters of good soundquality. Hahnel’s invested a lot of time and energy intothe shape of the condenser house which you can seehere and our whole microphone is quite a bit shorterthan the other microphones on the market. Now let mejust say, this is not a shotgun mic and, as we know, ashotgun mic is great for somebody talking on a podium…

Ed: But it’s obviously directional?

Mike: Absolutely and it is bias-directional, but it willtake the majority of the sound in front of us, almost inan egg shape and still receive some edge sound. Whenwe go to the back of the unit – well, first up, it’soperating on two triple A batteries, which Hahnelincludes with the package …

Page 54

Mike Stango with the Hahnel Inspire.

Page

Ed: Batteries are included – fantastic.

Mike: They’re a rare company that doesthat actually … we’ll pop that in and weflip over to the back of the unit, we havethree very simple controls. We have agreen diode telling us we’re in the “On”position; we have a low cut out to cutdown some of the wind noise, if we’re ina high ambient wind noise position; andwe also have both a plus 10dB and aminus 10dB slide switch setting. So ifwe’re in a very quiet church and we wantto increase our sound capabilities, flip ofa switch, we can do that.

But Grant, where it really excels, peopleare getting such great video out of theDigital SLRs and the microphones thatare built into the cameras are absolutelyatrocious. You hear every little noise,even just holding and moving thecameras. If you add something like aHahnel MK100 microphone to theequation, it doesn’t take up a lot ofspace and you’ll hear instantly a reallybig difference – quite frankly, for not alot of money.

Ed: And that’s it, when you’ve got a DSLR and you’reholding this and trying to get audio, your fingermovements as you’re moving around on the camera,are amplified and picked up by those little microphones?

Mike: Absolutely and you have to spend a lot of time inpostproduction cleaning that up. If you can start offwith a much cleaner, much more acceptable audio track

from the very beginning, you’re more than halfwaythere.

Ed: And having the 10dB plus or minus switch, to methat’s a really strong positive?

Mike: Absolutely. It just gives you more versatility,covering the bases of whether I’m in a very quietenvironment or a very noisy environment. Thismicrophone will do the trick. NZVN

Page 56

Page

Vinpower Digital for Imaging TechnologyWe are with Ryan Swerdloff from Vinpower Digital.

Ed: We are looking at a very smart solvent printerand what makes this different from any other printerout there Ryan?

Ryan: There’s a number of factors that make itdifferent. The most important thing is we’ve created away to use solvent ink in a small profile printer.Solvent ink will adhere to just about any surface,whereas your typical inkjet needs a special inkjetcoating in order to adhere to the disc. This solvent inkwill adhere to silvered lacquered discs, white inkjetprintable, white thermal printable – any type of discthat you put in there, in fact pretty much any surfacethat you put in there. So what it does is it gives youthe ability to have an inkjet printable disc with fullwaterproof, full scratch resistant and you can print onany surface; you don’t need a special disc, so you canlower your cost when it comes to the type of disc thatyou use, or what you want to print on.

Ed: And also, you save the cost of those little inkjetcartridges at horrendous prices?

Ryan: Exactly – and that’s the other factor, it’s acontinuous ink system, so it has a six ink system whereyou can fill it as it’s going. It’s visible from the outside,so that means that you can see exactly where your inklevels are. The computer will let you know as well, butyou can visually inspect it; you can add more as youneed it and then it will keep your production going.This system is more for production; it’s not meant say,for just like doing one or two every few weeks or so.This is meant if you’re really putting out a product thatyou intend to make an impression with, whether it’s forsale or giveaway, anything that you want to do that youwant to have a nice colourful, bright image that reflectssomething that’s professionally done.

Ed: So does the robotic disc feed side come as part ofit, or can you have that separate?

Ryan: It’s both. You can either get the printer byitself, or you can get the printer with the robotic feeder.So the robotic feeder holds 100 discs and it allows youto just walk away from it. Otherwise you have to slotload each one.

Ed: A very time consuming operation, but still forperhaps a small operation, it might be viable.

Ryan: One of the important factors of this is it’spretty much “on demand.” So instead of going to someduplication house or going somewhere where you needto have a certain number of quantities that you have toproduce, this you can do on demand, in your own time,when you want to do it; and it’s great because I don’tknow in terms of your currency, but in the US currency

it’s equivalent to about 10 cents adisc for the print cost, where formost other like ink cartridges orthermal ribbon transfer, it’sbetween 20-40 cents a disc.

So you’re saving a lot there aswell.

Ed: And in terms of the softwarethat you use to create the discface, does it come with that?

Ryan: It does have asoftware template that you canuse, but you could also use aPhotoshop or other type ofstandard design software that youwould normally use.

Ed: I’m very impressed with therobotic loader.

I’ve seen some very complicatedlooking ones in the past, but thislooks very straightforward Ryan?

Ryan: Yes.

Essentially it works through agravity feed pole, so the disc falls

Page 57

Ryan Swerdloff.

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Venetian Printer at $1,195+gst, and comes with 6 colour Solvent ink bottles at 100ml each

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www.imagingtechnology.co.nz; 12 Holloway Place, Penrose; PO Box 62-157, Auckland; Tel: 09 5257888 Fax: 09 5257898

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down, it slides it in and then it pulls it back out and itfalls into the receptacle.

Ed: So you just have to put it a little bit higher onyour desk than you normally might have your printer –or cut a hole in your desk for the bin?

Ryan: Well it has a stand so it stands higher up.

Ed: They’ve thought of everything!

Ryan: Well we try and make you not have to doany alterations to your existing furniture.

Ed: Now is the solvent ink a proprietary ink?

Ryan: Yes, it is a proprietary ink.

Like I said, solvent ink is not a new system, it’s beenaround, but it’s typically for large format printing, sousing it in a lower cost, smaller printer it has a couple ofproblems.

The problem is that the particles that make solvent inkare too big to fit through the print nozzle, so it clogs upthe printer whenever you try and use it.

We had to work with chemists who re-engineered theink so that the particles could not only be smaller, butthat they wouldn’t bond together to create the largeparticles again. Also, when you’re using solvent, it driesa lot quicker, so you have to keep it from drying beforeyou use the printer. NZVN

Page 59

Shure for Now SoundWe are now at Shure and we have ChristopherLyons from Shure Incorporated.

Ed: Now we’ve seen the Shure microphonerange, the professional range advertised for awhile now, but the big news at NAB this year isthat Shure have well and truly expanded theirrange?

Christopher: Yes, we’ve added a new line ofportable wireless system called the FP line – that’sthis one right over here, in fact I’ve got it in mypocket as well. That’s the nice thing aboutmaking small products – if it was a rack mountsomething … So the FP series ( FP stands for FieldProduction ) is aimed at people who are doingvideo production maybe on behalf of theircompany, or school, or church, a theatre –perhaps not broadcast level per se, butsomewhere in between and who want professionalquality sound but don’t really need to spend$2000 for all the features that a broadcasterneeds.

Ed: But it has some of the features and I cansee two aerials come out of here – two floppyaerials, it must be a diversity mic?

Christopher: Yes it’s a UHF diversity system, soyou get diversity performance; it comes with two outputcables, so you get an XLR connection or a 3.5connection, and it fits a variety of different cameras.It’s based on the same circuitry as our SLX system,which is very popular and so it’s compatible with allthose components; it comes with a shoe adapter so youcan mount it directly on top of your camera; it runs ona couple of AA batteries …

Ed: Oh that’s always good, no fancy batteries in thisone?

Christopher: No, simple and reliable – runs about12 hours on a fresh set of batteries. It’s also easy tosetup – on this model you push a button, it scans thefrequency range, finds a clear frequency, then you hold

Christopher Lyons.

it up in front of the transmitter and push a button andan infrared link transfers the frequency setting to thetransmitter. So you don’t have to go through a menuwith your eyes half shut, or anything like that. In about30 seconds you can arrive on site, do a quick scan, picka frequency and get it all set up to use.

Ed: Okay, but that’s not across all frequencies is it …

you must have a band of frequencies that this particular

device runs on?

Christopher: Correct. This FP system is available I

believe in five different frequency ranges for the US.

Ed: That’s where having a local dealer is important –

they’ll know which is the right frequency band for the

country and they’ll sell you the right one?

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Christopher: In different countries, we sell eitherdifferent numbers of bands or each band is different byits width or the actual frequencies that it tunes. Soevery wireless system that we sell in different parts ofthe world has been certified with the local regulatoryagency as legal for sale, and through our localdistributor in that country, we’ve co-ordinated withthem to figure out which are the appropriatefrequencies to use. In some countries, that might bedifferent regionally … where in this city you want to usethis frequency range, in that city you want to use adifferent range – so it might be customisable.

Ed: Now tell me, you say that it will scan theavailable frequencies – can you preset a frequencymanually?

Christopher: Oh yes, you can go in and say I wantto use this particular frequency and it stays there andnext time you turn it on it’s still at the same frequency.

Ed: That’s a very versatile device.

Christopher: It only scans if you tell it to, or if youpush the button to make it do it. Now that’s theportable receiver … to go along with it, we’re alsointroducing a portable plug on transmitter. So forpeople who want to do that ENG style you know omni-directional interview mic, we’ve got an inexpensive plugon transmitter to mate with this system, in addition tothe normal handheld and bodypack transmitters we sellwith all our systems. So it’s really a flexible systemwith a lot of different options for people who dodifferent types of work. Someone might be doingmostly interviews, someone else might be doingproduct demonstrations, you knowdramatic video or low budget films – allkinds of things.

Ed: So is there one bodypack that’scompatible with this?

Christopher: Yes, there’s an FP1bodypack transmitter that’s compatible –it looks just like this actually, but onlyone antenna on it and it’s available withall our range of lavalier mics andheadworn mics; and then there’s an FP2handheld transmitter which again comeswith a variety of heads like the SM58 orBeta 58 or what-not.

Ed: And does it have a standardmicrophone input so you could actuallyuse somebody else’s lavalier micro-phone?

Christopher: Well I don’t know if it’sstandard, but it’s popular enough that Shure usesit and I want to say one or two other brands usethe same connector with the same wiring, soCountryman makes lavalier and headworn micsthat will work with it, but there are lots of differentones that are easy to work with. So if you have aparticular favourite, chances are you mightalready have it or at least you can buy that micwith this connection on it. It’s certainly notsomething proprietary and secret to Shure.

Ed: Are they actually compatible across therange – like if you had the bodypack from the topend range, which is the UHF-R – is that compatiblewith the receiver on this one?

Christopher: No it isn’t. We actually make adifferent portable receiver specifically for the UHF-R range, called the UR5. What’s really different isthe audio processing – so even though they mightbe able to tune the same frequencies, thecompanding and the audio processing wouldn’t be

exactly matched, so it would work but it wouldn’t soundright.

Ed: That’s no good then?

Christopher: No it isn’t.

Ed: Well, that’s covered the radio mics … in thecamera mics, I see there’s one particularly interestinglooking one here that’s a bit of a “U”?

Christopher: Actually, this is one of our BP89shotgun microphones and this little attachmentaccessory here is the direct result of going out andtalking to people who do video production. They said“you know, sometimes I need the directionality of amedium length shotgun, but I don’t want the length ofa shotgun that long, because it gets in the camerashot.” So we said “well, what if it was essentially foldedin half?”

So we came up with this little adapter that lets thebarrel to be on the top, making a U-turn to the preamptube on the bottom, so it’s a little bit taller, but it’seffectively about 6 or 7 inches shorter. You sort of getto have your cake and eat it too – you get the longdirectionality, but a shorter length.

Ed: So it’s the same adapter – you could plug in amedium length, a long length or a short length?

Christopher: Correct, yes, the BP89 is all modularso that one preamp can work with three different tubelengths; you know there’s a variety of Rycoteaccessories also for wind blocking and shock mountingand so forth, so it’s really a flexible system. And thenagain, for people who are at a more entry level point

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and aren’t ready to spend quite that muchmoney on a shotgun mic, we offer anintegrated unit that’s not modular, calledthe BP82, that’s just a short shotgun forpeople who are doing some production workand want a good shotgun mic but don’twant to spend too much money.

Ed: Right, now a totally new product line,broadcast headsets and we’ll see if the NowSound team are going to be doing these,but obviously you’re excited?

Christopher: We are, because we’vebeen making headphones that have beenvery successful for about three years now,primarily aimed at recording studios andstudio monitoring – and of course we’vedone microphones for eons. So we decidedto put the peanut butter and the chocolatetogether so to speak and we’re doing a lineof broadcast headsets.

Ed: I don’t know if peanut butter and chocolate isvery popular in New Zealand, but we’ll go with themetaphor.

Christopher: See here in the States, there’s a verypopular candy that’s peanut butter and chocolate, sothat’s what I’m referring to – and they always talkabout the accidental merger of the peanut butter andthe chocolate, so that’s where that comes from. Whatwe’ve done is take some high quality full coverageheadphones with a flexible headband here, and added adynamic mic element on a flexible gooseneck. You gethigh quality mic and high quality earpiece available inboth a single earmuff and a dual earmuff, so dependingon your needs; removable cable, which can be replacedif it ever fails, or compactly stored so it doesn’t get beatup, locks on those, so that it doesn’t get unpluggedaccidentally. Also a clever feature, when you tilt themicrophone boom up vertically, it mutes themicrophone. It’s a magnetic read switch, so it’s a silentmute, there’s no “click” or “clunk” or anything like that.You can also tilt it around all to the other side if youprefer a left hand mic or a right hand mic – it workseither way. So the single ear and a dual ear version,both full coverage headphones. For those people whoprefer a lighter duty earphone, we’ve got a versionthat’s a very small, over the ear, open air version …same microphone and boom, but just a lighter dutyheadset and a smaller headphone driver.

Ed: And these look very robust I must say, althoughthey’re certainly not heavy, but they look as thoughthey would handle a bit of beating?

Christopher: Right, and like all Shure products,everything has to go through our legendary “drop” test,humidity testing, moisture resistant, salt spray –everything you can imagine. So like every Shureproduct, they’ve been through the wringer.

Ed: Now of course, in New Zealand, we’re still slightlyup in the air as to what frequencies are available and itlooks as though, for radio mics and coms, that we mighthave to hop if we’re moving from one part of thecountry to another … has Shure any way of making thiseasier for us?

Christopher: Yes – we’re pursuing two paths atthe same time. On the one hand we’ve got some newproducts like the Axient system that tunes an extremelywide frequency range. I believe, here in the States, it’s228 MHz wide; and on top of that, the system canautomatically change frequencies on the fly live, if itsenses interference. That’s obviously an expensivesolution though, so another approach we’re taking herein the States is that certain TV channels will be reservedfor wireless mic use, although they will be different ineach city. What we’re doing is working to make themost of those channels, ( because it’s usually going tobe 2, perhaps 3 or 4 channels ), by making wirelesssystems that can pack frequencies more denselytogether in a narrow section of spectrum. So with anentry level system, you might be able to get 3-6systems in one 6 MHz TV channel; whereas on our topof the line system, it’s now 15 in one channel. Butwe’re going to just keep pushing that number uphigher, so sometime in the future, hopefully if you canjust find one open TV channel, you’ll be able to

accommodate enough frequencies to do a show.

Ed: Okay, we’ll finish it off by saying that in anysituation, where you are dealing with a reputablemanufacturer such as Shure and a local agentsuch as Now Sound, it’s a case of you’re buyingfrom a reputable dealer, a reputable brand, you’regoing to get the service, the support if somethingneeds to be done because of a governmentchange in frequency regulations.

Christopher: And it’s also important that thatmanufacturer actually offers a wide variety offrequency ranges available, so that if you find outthe one you’re in is not the right one, you have tohope that they offer the one that is the right one.Not all brands do that; some brands only offer 1or 2 or 3 choices. We try to offer as many aspossible for that country. So by offering the fullpossible range of solutions, then if you find out,ooops, I’m in the wrong spot for this city,hopefully we can address that.

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Learn more at www.shure.com/asia

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Kessler Fusionfor Dolly Shop

We’re here at Kessler Fusion

with Eric Kessler.

Ed: My goodness, it must

be your company Eric?

Eric: Yes it is.

Ed: Now what we’ve got

here, because we’ve neverseen this before – I would

classify as a mini techno-

crane, but this looks very

cool and I guess it’s on a

small sliding track here, but

you could have this track as

long as you like?

Eric: Yes, as long as you

like and we have differentsliders, full size dolly that

you can adapt the system

to. Really what Fusion is, is

just the motors and the

control system. So the

mechanics of it can be

changed to whatever format

that you like.

Ed: And you can put quite a large cameraon there, or what’s your weight?

Eric: Up to 25 pounds. You can put an ALEXA, RED.

Ed: Okay, and so your track, and there’s no limitation on the

length of your track?

Eric: Yes, 1,000 feet, that’s just because of the belt length; that’s

as long as we can get the belt.

Ed: Can you go up hills?

Eric: Oh yes, you can go straight up vertically. You can see here

on our shuttle pod mini, obviously we could have it straight up anddown.

Ed: Aaaah so it’s not just sitting on the track, it’s actually

grabbing the track?

Eric: Right. You can hang it upside down, go vertical, whatever

you like.

Ed: Wow. And the beauty is that you programme the moves?

Eric: Right and it’s exact repeatability over any time. Once you

create the motion, you can save that bar, you can play it back over20 seconds and then shoot it as a time lapse over four hours if you

like. That would be the exact same path.

Ed: And you can manually adjust the way points if you decide

that “oh no, I didn’t get that one right”?

Eric: Yes, you can scrub any point, grab the line, drag it into

position, in real time the camera will move and you can tune in,

just what you like.

Ed: Now, also as part of the software package, you can perform

some camera control?

Eric: Yes, you can do zoom focus aperture – as long as your lens

has zoom focus aperture external controls – by using our focus

motors; or our F.I.Z mode which is just you know focus / iris /

zoom.

Ed: Have you actually tried it out on any shoots?

Eric: Yes, on the TimeScapes film. We went out with them; that

was a film that we sponsored with Tom Lowe and we took it out in

the desert and shot for three days with it out there and produced

some really nice pieces for him.

Ed: So what does this do that, for example, a Steadicam

operator couldn’t do?

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Eric Kessler.

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Eric: Well obviously it’s just the ability to set specifickey frames and have it repeat every time. So it’smostly going to be for visual effects, stop motion, timelapse and compositing – your visual effectscompositing.

Ed: In other words, you can have total control overyour frames?

Eric: Yes, everything.

Ed: Okay, now this looks a little bit delicate to me, Iwouldn’t imagine this out in the desert … it’s not goingto get much rain on it, but a bit of sand blowing in?

Eric: Actually it is made to be out in thedesert and it can handle some rain. Iwouldn’t submerge it, but weatherproofyes, even our connections. You can seethere’s an O-ring inside here and thatit’s pushed to connect to watertightconnections and they’re very solid. Imean, you can hang the whole systemby it, so it’s very strong.

Ed: So you’ve thought of everything?

Eric: Well we hope we’ve thought ofeverything. If not, we’ll be reminded ofwhat we missed and we’ll correct that ata later time.

Ed: How does the Revolution Headinterface with the motorised slider?

Eric: If the question is, how do youmount it to a slider – you can either boltit directly or we have a quick releaseplate kit that you can just snap in andout off the slider.

Ed: Okay, and in terms of time lapse,slo-mo with the controller?

Eric: Obviously slow motion is going to be the same, in

my opinion, as running live motion, just how quickly

you can do it.

If you want to shoot slow motion, you’ve got to move

very, very quickly. Our speed limits are on our website

as far as specs go, so I guess it would depend on what

you’re shooting as to whether or not that falls within

what you want to do. Time lapse … there are time

lapse capabilities, so the question is “can you do it?”

Yes you can – you can do an actual live recording and

play that path back over any time that you like. NZVN

Page 64

Nick Buchner with the NEX-FS700.

Sony at NAB2012 - Part OneFor Sony, we have Nick Buchner from Sony Australia-New Zealand Marketing and Scott Webster from NZ.

Ed: Nick, the buzz around the Press Room has beenSony 4K F65 and it’s big for you too?

Nick: It certainly is. Last year we launched the F65here at NAB, the world’s first true 4K camera. Wecommenced deliveries of the camera several monthsago and it’s now actually out there being used … there’sat least one Hollywood movie After Earth that has nowwrapped having shot on the camera; Oblivion iscurrently shooting with Tom Cruise and there’s also apicture shooting in New Zealand The Evil Dead remake,which is a Hollywood picture as well. We’ve hadtelevision ads shooting in Australia and NZ, plus seriesstarting to look at the camera for TV drama work.

So the F65 is moving ahead, but I think one of themajor themes that Sony is pushing here is indeed“Beyond HD” including 4K and we’re very keen forpeople to realise that it’s not all about 4K in and 4K out.You know, 4K is not just something that people who areworking in the cinema space need to think about. Ofcourse, that’s a big part of it, but what we are showinghere are other ways that 4K can be used, for example,in broadcast. Over the last few years, we’ve shown aconcept of several HD cameras locked together to givea spread or a view of an entire football field and thenstitched together to give that panoramic view.

Ed: I’ve seen that done with 3D?

Nick: Initially we showed it just as 2D, with a virtualcamera effect and we have subsequently also shown it

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with 3D where in fact, the depth of the pitch or the fieldis mapped and they can then simulate 3D. It’s veryeffective. But, from the virtual camera point of view ofbeing able then to zoom in on specific areas of thepicture, of course if you’re working with HD picturesinitially, you can’t really zoom in very far before thepictures start to fall to pieces. I remember saying topeople who we were demonstrating this “what if it was4K, what if the source cameras were 4K?” and that’sexactly what we’re showing here. We’ve got two F65slocked together to show a football field, so two 4Kcameras, and then, in postproduction in this case, not inreal time, but as a demonstration of the concept, we’vestitched those two 4K cameras together and we’reshowing here the windows that have been cut out ofthat total image. We are showing that you can zoom into a fairly small portion of the image and still get anextremely acceptable HD picture – perfectly goodenough for HD broadcast, and yet with enoughresolution so you can see the players’ numbers on theirjerseys. For example, you could then use trackingsoftware to track players; these are concepts, but it’s allpossible. And most importantly the cameras exist, theyexist now; the recorders that enable this exist. The realtime stitching of two 4K images is really just a functionof having enough processing power to be able to do it.I don’t believe we’ve got anything available right nowthat can do it …

Ed: Do it live, yes?

Nick: Do it live, as with the HD version that we’reshowing at the other end of the stand but, as you can

see from these images, the monitor shows a cut outarea and it’s a more than acceptable HD picture. Sohere’s another use for 4K.

Ed: Well it’s headroom isn’t it. That’s also what I’veheard about 4K is that you might not be making arelease television programme in 4K, but it gives youthat headroom to play around digitally with yourpicture?

Nick: Well that’s another aspect to 4K. Just to finishthough on the previous concept, another thought waswhat if you were to record this stitched picture? Thatwould mean that you had coverage of any incident thathappens on the field constantly. So if somethinghappens, if the action play is at this end of the field andsomething happens there, there’s a fight or somethingthat they want to see, they can still get it, even if thecamera guys weren’t there.

Ed: That’d be good for Australian League wouldn’t it?

Nick: Oh well, you know, the trans-Tasman tests, yes.So again, it’s not all about 4K in, 4K out; this is an HDscenario. Now you just talked about having headroom,that’s very right. Someone shooting a commercial forexample can shoot in 4K … and let’s say there areunpredictable elements in what they’re shooting, mightbe animals or kids or whatever. That gives them theadditional coverage area to actually reframe for an HDoutput and possibly save a shot that they mightotherwise just have to reshoot, because someone hasn’texited the frame at the right point, or positioned in theright way.

Ed: But also have that headroom for animation andeffects work on it without degrading the picture?

Nick: Extreme resolution, yes.

Ed: Okay, so that’s using the F65, but is that the onlychoice that consumers have at the moment if they wantto go Sony 4K?

Nick: Well right at this moment yes, but at this showwe have also launched the NEX-FS700 which is a 4K-ready Super35mm sensor camera. Think of it as a “bigbrother” if you like, to our popular NEX-FS100, with anumber of feature improvements and additions. Thebasics are the same – it’s a modular design with a SonyE-mount for the lens, it’s a Super35mm sensor, but wesay 4K-ready because the sensor is capable of 4Koutput. At this stage, that hasn’t been harnessed andwe will have a solution in the future for 4K output fromthis camera which will be recorded externally, but as forthe details of that, that’s basically all I can tell you atthis stage. The NEX-FS700 will start shipping from the

end of June.

Ed: So that’s it, it’s an external option, but it’s afirmware upgrade?

Nick: There will be a firmware upgrade required tothe camera and there will be some kind of externalrecording device and we imagine it will be somekind of stream out of the 3G HD-SDI output on theback of the camera. The 4K roadmap for thiscamera means people are future-proofingthemselves if they’re interested to think abouthow 4K can benefit them in the future. But really,the thing that seems to have got people reallystirred up here at NAB is the super slow motioncapability of this camera, because this camera iscapable of shooting in full high definition at up to240 frames per second – that’s in 60 Hz, or 200frames per second in 50 Hz plus it can also gofurther than that, at 480 and 960 frames persecond in 60 Hz, but with decreased verticalresolution. There are examples up here on thescreen of the super slow motion and you can see

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it’s very, very creditable and so we’ve had interest fromeveryone from creative filmmakers to broadcasters whomight be producing coverage of action sports – youknow BMX or skateboarding or surfing or extremegames or whatever, where they’re only recordinghighlights packages and things, who think that this is avery cost effective slow motion camera that will come inat around the NZ$12,700 mark.

Ed: But it also means they can still use that footageat normal speed if they want to?

Nick: Definitely – there are a number of key featureadditions to the camera too, which for the creativefilmmaker are very welcome. Things like inbuilt NDfilters; I’ve mentioned already it has an HD-SDI outputso that allows you to record to external devices if youwish; there’s a new more robust design to the top-mounted handle; and another key thing is theredesigned handgrip on the camera. What’s interestingabout that is there’s a servo zoom rocker on it, sowhilst we don’t have any servo-controlled lenses at thisstage, I think it gives you an idea of things to come. A

Nick: Well whether it’s Zeiss, Canon or any other DSLRlenses other than Alpha, once you put them on thiscamera you won’t get autofocus. It’s really importantto stress that, in moving to a large frame sensorcamera, you need to be very, very, very attentive toyour focusing. Certainly for a videographer, forexample, used to a normal two-thirds or smallersensors, focusing can be quite tricky. It’s another set ofskills you’ve got to develop and autofocus is probablynot something you should just dismiss, because therewill be situations where, in fact, it might save yourbacon.

Ed: Well exactly, I mean the cameras these days areso clever, you should actually rely on their focusingability to do it for you?

Nick: There’s some very nice footage showing here,there’s some surfing that’s been shot by a professionalcinematographer, but he used autofocus and he said itwas just so easy, it worked perfectly well, it trackedvery well. So whilst there is a huge range of third-partyadapters to other types of lenses, Canon EF lenses – Ikeep mentioning Canon because there’s obviously ahuge installed base of Canon lenses out there andthere’s a whole range of adapters here from Birger,from Metabones and others that allow the Canon EFlenses to be used on this camera, plus also adapters forNikon lenses, for Leica lenses, etc. But I’m just wantingto stress the value in some shooting situations of beingable to choose autofocus on the camera, in this casewhen using either the E-mount lenses or adapting up tothe Sony Alpha lenses.

Ed: Okay, now we’ve moved onto a set that Sonyhave setup that is really subtly lit. It’s a little bit orangeand I wouldn’t say “dim” light, but it’s a very filmiclight. Nick, why is this?

Nick: I’d say probably rather than dim light, it’s shapedlight and contoured light. The lighting for film shootingis quite different to television, so rather than have onebig set for all our camera range, we’ve separated off thecinema type cameras here to a special set for this year,where we can show off the NEX-FS700, the PMW-F3and F65 on a set that’s been lit more typically as itwould be for a film situation.

Ed: Right we’re onto a section here, the SRMASTERsection and this is production workflow?

Nick: SRMASTER encompasses all our recording andoutput options for the SR Memory system, which is thenew high-grade storage system that’s used on the F65and also on the SR-R1 portable recorder that we havethat can be used on lower level cameras, like the F3 orindeed anybody’s camera that has an SDI output. Thisis based around a new type of memory card that we callSR Memory. It comes in various sizes and variousspeeds – at its maximum, shortly we’ll release a 1terabyte card with about a 5 gigabits per secondsustained transfer rate, so with the F65, if you’re talkingabout doing slow motion shooting at 120fps in full 16bitRAW 4K, then you’re talking about an awful lot of data.So this memory system’s been designed to be veryrobust to ensure the integrity of the data and thefootage is secure, and also to support those very highdata rates. But, as I said, there is a range of data ratecards down to slower rates – it’s not all about the topend of town, we have a portable recorder that in Aussie$ terms is about $15,000. It’s designed for use on, as Isaid, cameras like the F3 or any camera that providesan SDI output. So SRMASTER is the term we use tocover the whole workflow situation, working with the SRMemory cards; that means everything from a simplepiece of software such as our RAW Viewer, that’ssupplied with the F65, that can be used to view the

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bit like when we launched the F3, it had a servo rockeron the side and people said “wow, well what’s thatgoing to do?” Well some months later we launched aservo zoom lens for that camera. But the modulardesign remains and I think it’s a very powerful cameraat a very good price, building on the reputation forimage quality established by the NEX-FS100.

Ed: And it’s good to have something as well as theF65 there on the horizon?

Nick: That’s right – and another key point is that weare showing these cameras here at NAB with lots ofthird-party accessories – lenses, recorders, mountingequipment. You know, there’s an entire global industryin making widgets to make these cameras and otherswork in ways that people like – different types ofbrackets, handles, mounts, etc. One key Sonyaccessory we are showing is the LA-EA2 lens mountadapter. This adapts the E-mount used on both theFS100 and FS700 to a Sony Alpha lens mount, that’sthe Sony Digital SLR lens mount, and we’ve got quite arange of very nice Alpha prime and zoom lenses,including some Zeiss designs. The thing about thisadapter that’s unique over using other adapters to otherbrands of mount, is that it preserves the autofocus andenhances iris control. So this camera is capable ofautofocusing with E-mount lenses and using thatadapter, also with Alpha lenses.

Ed: That would speed up your workflow immenselycompared to taking your standard Zeiss glass for aDSLR?

Sony is pushing the creative boundaries once more with the new NEX-FS700/K FullHD Super Slow Motion camcorder, the latest in Sony’s line-up of NXCAM interchangeable E-Mount camcorders. The new Super 35mm model is designed for high-speed shooting, capable of capturing footage at up to 960 frames per second. Features include 3G HD-SDI output and built-in ND fi lters. Additionally, it also offers several creative options, shooting styles, and enhanced ergonomics – all based on customer feedback – to deliver a fl exible production tool that can fi t seamlessly into a variety of shooting applications.

The New NXCAM

NEX-FS700P

Features:• The camera delivers full HD quality at 120 and 240 frames per

second in a 16 or 8 second burst mode• 480 fps and 960 fps at reduced resolution are available for

faster frame rate recording• 4K ExmorTM Super 35 CMOS sensor (total 11.6 million pixels)• Full HD 50p and 60p via 3G HD-SDI and HDMI connectors• 3G HD-SDI can output• Native 23.98, 25, 29.97 progressive signals

PRODUCTION | POST | VISUAL EFFECTS

Digital Video Technologies (NZ) Ltd | Phone: 09 525 0788 | Email: sales@dvt.co.nz | 45 Fairfax Avenue, Penrose, Aucklandwww.dvt.co.nz

Sony introduces the full-featured yet light and compact PMW-100 handheld camcorder. Equipped with a newly developed 1/2.9-inch ‘Exmor’ CMOS sensor, it delivers excellent picture performance and also achieves a minimum illumination of 0.08lx. Featuring a 5.4-54mm (40-400mm in 35mm equivalent) zoom lens, the versatile PMW-100 allow users to work in virtually any production environment where mobility and fl exibility is highly valued.

Features:• Newly developed 1/2.9-inch “Exmor” CMOS sensor• Minimum illumination of 0.08lx• 5.4-54mm (40-400mm in 35mm equivalent) zoom lens• Full HD video at 1080i, 1080p and 720p up to 50 Mbps• MXF record and playback based on the MPEG HD422• HD/SD-SDI output, HDMI, Composite output

The New XDCAM PMW-100 AVAILABLE

APPROX MAY

AVAILABLE

APPROX JUNE

Sony is giving video professionals freedom from camera shake with the HXR-NX30P high-defi nition camcorder, a palm-size addition to Sony’s NXCAM line. The new model uses Sony’s breakthrough Balanced Optical SteadyShot™ image stabilisation technology to make it ideal for eliminating camera shake in challenging shooting applications. Convenient features such as a built-in projector, are all combined in Sony’s smallest, lightest handheld professional camcorder.

Features:• Full 1920 x 1080 HD resolution• Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* lens (35mm equivalent : 26.0mm -260mm)• 1/2.88-inch Exmor R™ CMOS sensor technology• 96 gigabytes of internal memory• 1080/50p, 25p, 50i and 720/50p

The New HXR-NX30P AVAILABLE

APPROX JUNE

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files. We then have a number of partner companieshere, Colorfront and YoYotta, both of whom support theF65 RAW files and these are on-set data managementpackages that allow various forms of file output fromthe footage that’s been shot on the camera. Forexample, the director might want to take some of thefiles back to his caravan to do a bit of a rough cut thatnight on his laptop to see whether he’s got what heneeds, or it might just be dailies viewing by the cameracrew.

Ed: So is all this workflow different from whattraditionally a production house would have because it’smore difficult, or because it’s a different workflow?

Nick: It’s because it’s a different workflow. In the past,if we’d been working with tape, if you wanted to viewthe footage on set, what did you do – you put the tapeinto some form of player, play it back and there you go.If someone says “I’d like to take a DVD of that away todo something”, you burn a DVD or dub to another typeof tape. Here we’re working now with data, it’s adifferent sort of level. So, yes, it does change theworkflow, but what you’re trying to achieve at the endof the day is the same thing. If we think back to thefilm days, what did “dailies” mean? The dailies werethe footage that had been shot the day before, hadgone to the lab and been printed to a one-light print ormore recently probably transferred to some sort ofvideo format, so that the crew and the director andproducer could have a look and see that everything’sgoing well. Here it’s all about on-set data managementand, in some cases, these are very sophisticatedsystems that allow you to do all sorts of things on-setwhich may only be required in a high-end Hollywoodproduction.

Ed: But that data management process can be usedwith other formats at a lower level, once youunderstand the process?

Nick: Certainly, and in its simplest form you may justwish to save the data that you’ve shot during the day,secure it away, send it off for ingest at thepostproduction house and not worry too much aboutlooking at the dailies. It all depends on how theproduction wants to work. We’re also showing herenative F65 RAW editing, working with the RAW fileproduced by the F65 and we’ve again partnered withmajor players, like Adobe, Avid and others, so that thatfile can be read and edited. We’re also showing colourgrading – same story again, we’ve partneredwith companies like DaVinci, Assimilate andFilmlight, so that they can all work with thatF65 RAW file in the grading suite.

Ed: I’m sure Adobe’s happy with that, thatyou’re showing F65 RAW footage being editedon Premiere?

Nick: Yes, these are just examples of ourpartnerships, because when you introduce anynew kind of file format, obviously it’s veryimportant to have support across the industry,not only from the manufacturers of the editingand grading products, but also the people whouse them. Part of our mission is to let the posthouses know that working with this new formatis not necessarily as difficult as they mightthink.

Ed: Now we’re back to cameras and I saw anearly Press Release on this little baby and Iwas very impressed?

Nick: This is the PMW-100. This is our first HD422 handheld camcorder, basically now the“baby” member of the XDCAM family. So this

is a relatively small handheld HD 422 camera, recordingHD 422 50 megabits per second to SXS card. That’sthe same format as the XDCAM optical disc basedcameras are recording and that’s also what some of thelarger card-based cameras are recording. It’s a greatlittle camera for journalists, for entry leveldocumentarians and corporate video – that type ofthing, who believe they need to acquire content in 422,possibly because they’re doing some heavypostproduction, visual effects work such as compositinggreen screen, or whatever, where 422 capture will givethem some advantages.

Ed: So this is a slightly different path – I mean if westart off with XDCAM, initially it was known as the discformat, as the spinning optical disc. Then there was theEX range, which is a “flavour” of XDCAM but onto SXScards. Now you’ve also got in your stable this newcamera with …?

Nick: Well that’s true, but prior to this camera camethe PMW-500 which is a shoulder mount CCD camerathat records to card, but can record either the same fileformat as the disc cameras, that’s HD 422 50 megabitsper second, or the XDCAM EX 35 megabits per secondcodec as well. That camera has been out for a coupleof years now and it does both. This new camera isaimed at the handheld market, people who need a verycompact camera, so it’s not really a big jump in termsof codec. Of course, we’ve offered that in the PMW-500in a larger shoulder mount camera and now we’ve got ahandheld model. But 422 I suppose has become a littlebit of a buzz word in recent times. There have beenother manufacturers who are offering 422 cameras and,in some cases, people do have to look carefully at theirunderstanding of that and what it actually means. Asan example, take the very well regarded XDCAM EXcameras, the EX1 and EX3 – now there are thousandsof hours of footage from those cameras airing all roundthe world, yet they are not 422, but they have anoutstanding reputation for picture quality. However, insome situations, the extra colour information that’savailable from the 422 signal means that, in someenvironments, people want that picture quality and thisis a camera that will do that.

Ed: So the PMW-100 …?

Nick: Okay, the PMW-100 is recording to card exactlythe same as the PMW-500 larger shoulder mountcamera is capable of doing, switchable between a 422

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Scott Webster holding the PMW-100.

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50 megabits per second mode or a 35 megabits persecond 420 mode.

Ed: Right – Scott, do you want to add anything onthat camera?

Scott: Well the PMW-100 makes a great secondcamera for anyone working with XDCAM. We’ve gotsuch a large installed base of XDCAM within NewZealand – a lot of freelance guys running around withPDW-700 and this is just an easy second camera tointroduce into that workflow, because the format is thesame and obviously with the TVNZ adoption of the PMW-500 and 700, they can also have this as a nice low costsecond camera for their crews.

Nick: It’s ideal for compact situations, such as a backupcamera in the News car, you know thesesorts of situations, but also for one manvideo journalists, documentary makersetc. It’s not all about broadcast, it’s alsowell suited for corporate and educationalproductions.

Ed: So really it’s part of the Sonyfamily, it shares many similarities withthe previous cameras?

Nick: Well it does, but it is a third inchsingle chip camera whereas the existingEX cameras are both 3 chip cameras.But it has a lot of features in commonwith the EX1 in terms of its controls,audio controls, assignable buttons, theway you control iris and focus, etc. Verymuch part of the Sony family, but a newclass if you like within XDCAM.

Ed: Okay, now going down into what isa really little camera, but you’d still callthis a professional camera Nick?

Nick: We do, in fact this is the new entrypoint to our NXCAM range – NXCAMbeing our range of professional cameras that recordwith the AVCHD codec, but provide professionalfeatures such as XLR inputs for audio, etc. So we havea very successful model in the HXR-NX70P which is ourweatherproof and dustproof model that was launchedhere last year and so this new HXR-NX30P slots inbelow that model, with a lot of similar features, butsome very unique new ones as well. It’s a very smallcamera, priced around NZ$3,000 which is very good fora camera this powerful. Probably one of the key killerfeatures is the Balanced Optical SteadyShot and herewe’ve got the camera running on a vibrating tablewhere you can see how unstable the picture is, and thisis the stabilised picture here on the monitor. You cansee how rock solid it is – even if I start getting a bitaggressive with the table, you can see it takes a fair bitbefore the SteadyShot loses track of the subject.

Ed: And that’s it, I mean we’ve seen some fairlydodgy optical stabilisation systems years back ( notfrom Sony of course ) …

Nick: Never!

Ed: … but I can concur – I don’t think I could wobblethe camera that much …?

Nick: No, so I think for small handheld shootingsituations, this Balanced Optical SteadyShot system isvery powerful. It’s one of the key things that just addsto what’s already a very powerful little camera.

Ed: Does it still work when you’re doing a pan … doesit take out a lot of wobbles on a pan?

Nick: Yes it really does – here’s me doing a very dodgyhandheld pan which, on the monitor, is quite stable; itcertainly assists. For handheld situations and shootingfrom moving vehicles and boats etc, it’s a really nicefeature. The other very unique feature that this camerahas is a built-in projector, as we’re demonstrating here… the camera actually has a projector built into the sideof it.

It could be quite useful where more than one or twopeople want to review some footage or a group ofstudents in a small environment want to quickly reviewwhat they’re doing. The target market for this iseverything from schools and journocam users to peoplewho want something special. I mean, by the time youtake off the bracket at the top and the XLR input box,

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you’ve got quite a tiny camera for doing covert stuff …that also has some possibilities, the SteadyShot wouldhelp there.

Ed: And it’s true HD?

Nick: It’s true HD – AVCHD, up to 28 megabits persecond depending on what recording format youchoose. It’s also got uncompressed PCM audio …

Ed: And it’s going on to what sort of card?

Nick: It’s got 96 GB of built-in memory and you can useeither a SDHC card or Sony Memory Stick for removablestorage.

They’re available in sizes up to about 64 GB these days.

Scott: And the good thing is you can use thecamera in the “small mode”, without the lens hood orthe microphone package or the XLR connections there,and it really is a very, very small form factor. You canput it in your pocket. Once you add all the bits andpieces on it, it’s looking like a big camera.

Nick: Well it doesn’t look too big, but it certainly addsto the features as soon as you get the XLR inputs andlevelling controls and for the audio and phantom powerand that sort of thing, plus microphone … but also, thatincludes quite a nice handheld bracket; so if you wantto be able to carry the camera handheld, it adds to thepackage.

So while I think the two killer features are the BalancedOptical SteadyShot and the projector, they just add towhat is already a very capable little camera.

More from Sony in June.

NZVN

www.panavision.co.nz

Tim (09) 3608766 318 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn, Auckland tim.timlin@panavision.asia

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