OCTOBER 2014 Vol 207

I B C 2014

The first question that I want to start off with, before we

go into the new product from Blackmagic, and there

certainly is some new product here at IBC – we’re

continually amazed and impressed by how quickly

product gets to market … there’s one product that hasn’t

come to market yet and people are desperate to get their

hands on it, and that’s the URSA. What’s the shipping

news?

Stuart: Well it’s actually already there in part. Westarted shipping the product around about 2-3 weeksago. We’ve released our first few cameras into themarketplace and we’ve started to see some of the resultsfrom those cameras coming back to us, which we’re veryhappy about. We’re happy with the manufacturingprocess, there’s obviously a process now which requiresus to ramp up manufacturing to start meeting those back

was simply a very good show.

There are always new productsof interest unveiled inAmsterdam and not only byEuropean manufacturers whodon’t appear at NAB. Thetraditional big areas for us ofcameras, lighting and storagesolutions showed furthergrowth, but the overall winnerwas video over IP. Some evencommented that this was goingto be more ubiquitous thanbroadcast in two years – butthen 3D was going to be hugeonce upon a time too.

However, a wise person wouldtake heed of IP developmentseven if it were only to ensurethat their new camera was IPcapable. There were manysmall and large solutions on offer and you will bepresented with a fine selection in these pages over thenext two issues.

We will start with Blackmagic Design who, yet again, sentshockwaves through the established players with theiracquisition and innovation actions. Read on.

Blackmagic DesignWe are at Blackmagic Design with Stuart Ashton, adirector of EMEA ( Europe, Middle East and Africa ) forBlackmagic.

Ed: Now Stuart, you’re going to do your best to answersome of my questions even though you are notresponsible for our region, so I promise to be gentle.

Blackmagic’s URSA featured large at the show.

body of the URSA to benefitfrom that 10 inch screen,the audio monitors, theaudio connections, the 12G-SDI output. So the HDMImodule on the frontbasically allows that. Youcan take an HDMI out of anycamera into the URSA andutilise the whole back end ofthe camera.

Ed: Or any head forexample?

Stuart: Yes, absolutely.

Ed: So even a GoPro withan HDMI out you could plugthat into your URSA body ifyou really wanted to. I’msure there will be someonewho will want to?

Stuart: Any camerathat has an HDMI out will beable to benefit from that.

Ed: Okay. Now along withthe URSA there have beensome improvements in theother cameras?

Stuart: Yes, we obviously have got the other twocameras which are the 2½K and the 4K and then we’vegot the little Pocket Cinema Camera as well. When weset out to design the 2½K about three years ago, weinitially thought “let’s produce a RAW base camera witha PL mount” and it wasn’t until we really started to dosome market research, listen to what customers areusing the cameras for and where we thought thatcamera would work, that we decided to go down theroute of the EF, mainly because a lot of DSLR userswere the guys who were really going to gravitatetowards that camera.

Ed: What were they looking for … were they wantingthe RAW capability or …?

Stuart: I think the main one being that theywanted wide latitude and they wanted RAW capturecapability and they wanted a camera that wasengineered and designed for digital film. I think thatwe achieved that very well in delivering first a 2½Kcamera that, within a matter of months, we saw guysgoing out in the field, not only with our camera, butwith a DSLR as well, and using their lenses, their groupof lenses to interchange between the two types ofbodies. We really wanted not to destroy the DSLRmarket like many people said that we were trying to do– it was about giving people options, you know, as theright camera for the right job, and in some cases youmight go “actually, you know what, this body might suitthis process better” and when you started to see twocameras being used with the same lenses, it meant thata guy didn’t have to go out and invest in gettingmultiple types of lenses and increasing his backpack to

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orders. Like anything, you don’t want to go and build10,000 of something and then drop them oneverybody’s toes … you know you have to get them outinto the marketplace and start filtering those through.So anybody who has an order for an URSA at themoment will start to see delivery very shortly.

Ed: Excellent. Now already there are at least fourmodels that I’ve noticed. Just run us through thevariations on those – and I think this might even be anew one, there’s one there with a body and a Canoncamera connected to the front of it?

Stuart: Well the URSA camera was always designedto be a camera that could be very versatile in a numberof different ways – I guess the first being that weannounced an EF and a PL mount version. That waspredominantly because the lenses that would work onsuch a body are generally the larger size lenses, solenses from Canon, lenses from ARRI, lenses from Zeissand so on. So the EF version is the one that’s actuallyjust started shipping; the PL version is coming very,very shortly … and then we’ve got two others which weannounced at NAB which are the B4 mount, whichwe’ve not given any indication as to when that’s goingto be out, but we made a commitment at NAB that itwould be a product that we would be doing; it was a bitof a tech preview really. And then the other one is themodel which is the body only with an HDMI input mounton the front … and going back to what I was just sayingin terms of having versatility, our thoughts were that,wouldn’t it be great if you could attach a third partycamera, whether it be a DSLR or whether it be adifferent type of camera, a video camera, to the actual

Stuart Ashton from Blackmagic.

www.blackmagicdesign.com/nz

Talkback and Tally

The Blackmagic Studio Camera features built in talkback using

general aviation headsets, so you get better noise cancelling

and comfort at a much lower cost! You also get built-in tally

lights that illuminate automatically when your camera is live so

your cast and crew can easily see which cameras are on air! Talkback and tally

signals are embedded in the return video connection to the camera, so you

don’t have to run separate cables!

Micro Four Thirds Lens Mount

The active Micro Four Thirds lens mount is compatible with an

incredibly wide range of lenses and adapters. You can use your

existing photo lenses for smaller setups and fi xed camera use,

or connect incredible broadcast ENG lenses via a B4 lens adapter. You can even

use third party adapters for high end feature fi lm PL mount lenses, so it’s easy to

customize your camera to suit any sized production!

The Blackmagic Studio Camera is the world’s most advanced broadcast

camera for live, multi camera production! It features an incredibly

tough, lightweight machined magnesium design with a massive 10”

viewfi nder, 4 hour battery, talkback, tally indicators, phantom powered

microphone ports and built in optical fi ber and SDI connections. That’s

a fully self contained, broadcast grade, live camera solution!

Full Size HD Viewfi nder

The Blackmagic Studio Camera includes the world’s largest

viewfi nder built in! The massive 10” high resolution screen

has a super wide viewing angle and extremely high brightness

so you can see your images with amazing detail even in bright daylight! This

professional grade viewfi nder makes it easy to frame, focus, change iris settings

and make subtle adjustments with full confi dence even when you’re live on air!

Optical Fiber and 6G-SDI Connections

Connect Blackmagic Studio Camera to your live

production switcher with optical fi ber cables connected

to the built in fi ber port or use regular 6G-SDI BNC

video cables! The video connections are bi-directional

and carry HD or Ultra HD video with talkback, tally, embedded audio

and even camera remote control. With standard, low cost fi ber optic

cable, you can connect to your cameras over massive distances!

Blackmagic Studio Camera 4KBlackmagic Studio Camera HDA$2,415 A$3,625

and carry HD or Ultra HD video with talkback, tally, embedded audio

Blackmagic Studio Camera HDA$2,415

Blackmagic Studio Camera 4KBlackmagic Studio Camera HD

2,415 A$3,625

The new Blackmagic Studio Camera. Get optical fi ber, talkback, tally and massive 10” viewfi nder!

Lenses and accessories shown are not included

store these extra lenses in. So we achieved exactlywhat we wanted.

But coming back to the original decision of a PL mountcamera, we felt that once we’d done the EF and oncewe’d done the micro four-thirds version, the next stepwas to go in and do the PL mount. So at IBC we’veannounced two cameras – the 2½K PL and the 4K PL,and that means now you get access to all thosebeautiful PL lenses plus 20, 30, 40 years with thevintage lenses that you couldn’t access before with anEF or micro four-thirds mount.

Ed: It sounds as though it’s very important that yourcustomers are educated in the range of cameras thatare available and to pick the best one for their needs.Is this where you do rely on a dealer network?

Stuart: The dealer network is hugely important tous because they also have access to third party lenses,third party accessories and they have a wide experienceof selling to customers of all different needs and at alldifferent levels. As a manufacturer, our aim is toensure that we provide a number of different solutionsso that a customer can make a calculated decision ontheir purchase. Sometimes that decision may be basedupon price; sometimes that decision may be made uponformat and ergonomics; another time it might be madeon what they already own and how that fits into theircurrent setup.

Ed: Can they access information on your website?

Stuart: You can find information

about all the technical specs of the

cameras on <blackmagicdesign.com>

Ed: Yes, but it’s understanding those.

Is there any training information?

Stuart: We don’t actually offer any

direct training from our website.

Ed: Then it should be the dealer?

Stuart: And this is where the

dealers are doing a fantastic job. I think

that there are a lot of courses out there,

there are a lot of dealers who really add

value to the process and in delivering

their understanding of what some of theterminology is and where the benefits

are comparative to maybe other cameras

in the marketplace. So we very heavily

rely upon them to do their bit in the

process as well.

Ed: Now one of the other areas thathas come up – a dealer comment thatthe little pocket camera gets very hotsometimes when it’s being used a lot.Have you heard of this before?

Stuart: It’s not something thatwe’re familiar with in terms of itoverheating or becoming too hot tohandle. The Pocket Cinema Camera ofall the cameras that we have is the onethat’s probably being used in the mostversatile way. It’s being used byeverybody from the guy next door tofeature films and they are using it forlong, long periods of time in very trickyand awkward situations – it’s become areal workhorse.

There are examples where, over the lastfew months, we’ve had some very highprofile customers using it in verycondensed and confined environments,

and it produces great results. So in terms of actuallyoverheating or being too hot, it’s not something that wesee as being a common thing with the camera. Wewould obviously have to dig more into that in terms of ifthere’s a particular issue which a certain customer hasseen.

Ed: Now of course the big piece of information thatwas released just before the show was yet anotheracquisition and that’s Fusion or Eyeon … what’s thecorrect name for it?

Stuart: Eyeon is the company and it’s been aroundfor about 26 years. It’s really become a key playerwithin the Hollywood feature film market in that if youtalk to anybody within DFX or compositing they’ll tellyou that Fusion is really the Rolls Royce, the drivingproduct for compositing, for Paint, for 3D particles andreally kind of the stuff that you see that makes afeature film extra special.

When we started to look at Fusion, we realised thatthere were a lot of similarities between Eyeon andDaVinci. When we bought DaVinci 4½ years ago, weset off on this new path to bring what was a Hollywoodtool to the mass market and really educate peopleabout colour correction. At that time, colour correctionwas seen as being something for the rich guys inHollywood and it wasn’t really part of the process thatwas considered to be expected of everybody. I thinkwhat we have been able to do along with other

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companies that have seen an interest around colourcorrection in the last 3-4 years, is now make that apractice to most productions whether it be documentarydrama corporate or short film or feature, and we look atFusion and we think to ourselves well how many peopleactually take their project into a compositingenvironment; how many people actually do use acompositor, and with the experience that we’ve gainedfrom Resolve, our aim is to educate people inunderstanding that this is probably the best kept secretin Hollywood, but also probably the best kept secret inyour workflow that you don’t actually know about.

Ed: I know in other companies, they’ve made greatsuccess about incorporating their colour correction andtheir effects into one package. Are we going to see thisas two separates softwares that Blackmagic’s going tosell, or some sort of package with DaVinci?

Stuart: Well it’s very early days, I mean theacquisition only happened 10 days ago …

Ed: Oh, well, come on?

Stuart: I think that the options are open on anumber of different levels. The first thing to do is toensure that the product is going to fit within our currentproduct range and it absolutely meets that criteria.We’re going to now take that product and take thedevelopment team with all our 26 years of experienceand we’re going to sit down with them and start to talkabout what can we now do to make this product moreavailable and more accessible to our existing and tonew customers.

Ed: Oh I know, add an editing package?

Stuart: Well we can go to Resolve for that you see.The editing features within Resolve have now becomeextensive and, at the show, we’ve announced anotherdozen or so more features within the editingenvironment in Resolve.

There’s definitely a trend to go with Blackmagic interms of editing and colour correction and now there’sthe compositing – how we align all those in the future isyet to be determined, but I guess anybody who isinterested in following Blackmagic and what we’redoing, or anybody who is interested in looking in thecompositing world right now, should be very excited aswe are, because in four years we’ve done 600-700features for Resolve and we’ve really kind of brought itto the forefront of the industry and I really think thatFusion is going to go in the same direction.

Ed: Okay, we’ve talked about dealers and howimportant the relationship with a dealer is for helpingyou choose the best piece of equipment for the job thatyou’re doing and obviously within Blackmagic camerasthere’s quite a range there, so there’s a lot of flexibility.However, what happens when something goes wrong –the piece of equipment doesn’t work. Are you wantingthe customer to take it back to the dealer or do youhave another channel?

Stuart: Well the decision is up to you as an enduser. What we try to do is keep communication lines asopen as possible. If you have got a good relationshipwith your dealer and your dealer is educated insupporting you in that process, then by all means, goback to your dealer as the first port of contact.

If you want to actually contact Blackmagic directly thenyou need to call your local Blackmagic office and speakwith our technical support department, and ourtechnical support department will troubleshoot thoseissues with you and they will look into trying to resolvethe problem. If the problem can’t be resolved, then it

may be that they ask you to return that product forrepair or replacement for something new.

Ed: And if you have bought it from a good dealer whohas looked after you in the past, maybe they’ll be ableto lend you something in the meantime, but that’s up tothat relationship that you have with your dealer?

Stuart: We’ve got a lot of value added resellersthroughout the world, and sometimes the dealer doesn’twant to be sidestepped or stepped over – he’s investeda relationship in you as a customer, as much as you’veinvested a relationship in him as a vendor and I oftenhave conversations with resellers where they say to methat if somebody contacts you or has an issue, they’llmake us aware of it, because next time they call me upfor a product and they want to buy a product, I want tobe in the picture and I want to know what’s going on.So it really depends on the circumstances of you as acustomer; it also depends on the relationship that yourreseller has with you yourself and we’re happy to mouldand adjust to whichever suits you best.

Ed: Fantastic. And I can comment from one dealer inNew Zealand who told me about his Blackmagic sales,that they’re going “gangbusters” and it’s a lot of the“glue” product, a lot of those little boxes, the littleconverters that you guys have made for a long, longtime still going really well, still very important. What’shappened since NAB – any additions?

Stuart: Well IBC obviously is another platform forus to announce new products. We announced a newSmartView 4K monitor, which is fully Ultra HD, it’s 2160and it’s 60p; it’s got 12G-SDI on there with loopthrough as well as the ability for when those 12G optical

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more on page 9

Page 7

Lenses and accessories shown are not included

Now you can shoot Ultra HD TV or 4K feature fi lms virtually anywhere with

the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K! You get a large Super 35 size imaging

sensor with global shutter, professional PL or EF lens mount, high quality

visually lossless Cinema DNG RAW and ProRes recording with the built in

SSD recorder, and an easy to use touchscreen for entering metadata, setting

camera options, and checking focus. Imagine shooting cinematic, feature

fi lm quality video with the world’s most portable 4K digital fi lm camera!

Super 35 Sensor

The large Super 35 size sensor gives you 12 stops of dynamic

range for beautiful, fi lm like images. The camera’s PL or EF

compatible mount combined with the sensor’s minimal crop

factor means you get familiar framing, great depth of fi eld, and beautiful wide

angle shots from the lenses you already own! And because the sensor features

a global shutter, you’ll get perfectly smooth pans and camera moves every time!

Ultra HD 4K

The future of broadcast television and Digital Cinema is 4K!

With its massive 3840 x 2160 pixel image, Ultra HD is 4

times the size of 1080HD and matches the resolution of traditional 35mm fi lm.

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K lets you shoot the most amazing

high resolution music videos, episodic television programs, commercials,

documentaries, and more!

Portable Rugged Design

Precision engineered for quality and durability in an incredible

size! You get a beautifully crafted design featuring a machined

aluminum chassis, professional broadcast connections, internal

battery and high resolution LCD display. Now you can shoot native 4K video with

a professional digital fi lm camera that’s small enough to hold in your hand!

Workfl ow/Compatibility

The Blackmagic Production Camera 4K includes a built in SSD

recorder that saves industry standard ProRes and compressed

CinemaDNG RAW fi les. That means you don’t have to convert

fi les to start working on your video. Simply connect the SSD to your computer

and edit or color correct your shots in applications like Final Cut Pro X and

DaVinci Resolve 11 straight from the disk!

Introducing the world’s smallest and toughestPL mount Super 35 digital fi lm camera!

Blackmagic Production Camera 4K PLA$3,549

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www.blackmagicdesign.com/nz

fibre connections come available, it will actually accept12G optical fibre. As well AC and DC power options,you can mount it on a VESA mount. It has built-in lookup tables; it has a safe area on there as well, plushorizontal and vertical blanking.

So we’ve really tried to create a high end broadcastmonitor at a price that’s affordable to the market and inEuros that comes in at about Є1425 I think. We announced a new multiviewer – MultiView 16, whichagain is another Ultra HD product with 16 6G-SDIinputs that allows you to see a 2x2, 3x3 and a 4x4 viewof those incoming sources. They can all be mixed andmatched in terms of resolution so you can accept SDHD Ultra HD.

One of the nice things with that is if you have a 2x2 andyou’re viewing that on an Ultra HD monitor, then eachof those quadrants is going to be 1080p, so very highquality image at, again, a very affordable price ofaround about Є1125. We’ve then got a new DeckLink card which is four times faster than the existingDeckLink card and that’s the DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G.That’s got two 12G-SDIs so that will do twosimultaneous 2160 at 60p key infill. There’s also goingto be an optical fibre module on there as well, andHDMI. So if you’re working with a high end compositoror you’re working with Resolve and you’re looking for avery fast card, this card is going to beright up your street. All the mini-converters, the glue products that you’retalking about, we’ve upgraded all thosenow to Ultra HD …

Ed: But you don’t have to be usingUltra HD do you – I mean, they’re UltraHD capable?

Stuart: Well the way that we look atit is that Ultra HD shouldn’t be apremium; you shouldn’t pay more justbecause it’s Ultra HD. The transition oftaking a product from HD to Ultra HD is adecision that we’ve made as amanufacturer to give people the latesttechnology. We don’t want to chargeyou any more, we want to give you thefeatures that you already had and thoseextra features. So they’re essentiallyfree updates if you’re in the market forone today to buy.

Ed: What it means though is that youonly sell the Ultra HD, you don’t need to sell HDbecause the Ultra HD does it as well?

Stuart: Yes, the way we sometimestalk about it over here in Europe is it’sthe best HD product in the market, but italso does Ultra HD.

Ed: That’s being very modest.

Stuart: Well we have to try andwork to obviously deliver high qualityproducts to a wide audience ofcustomers.

You know when you actually look from aglobal perspective and you take ageographical split, there are some people… I was talking to a Nigerian customertoday who is literally just going throughthe switchover from analogue to digital,and one of the things that you have tobe very, very careful of as amanufacturer, is that you don’t neglectpeople. What we don’t want to do is go

right, everything stays Ultra HD and that’s the directionwe’re forcing you down. You know you have to be verycareful that people may still be in an SD environment oran HD environment. I think you’ve got to give peoplechoices, but you’ve also got to give people thatflexibility as well.

Ed: Right, a personal question – what’s your favouritebit of kit from Blackmagic. What’s the piece that, if youhad a chance to sell or use yourself that you think“wow, these guys have made something that isoutstanding”. What would it be?

Stuart: That’s a difficult question. All of them arevery close to my heart, but I’d say that probably theone for me that would … if I was going out today and Iwas looking to produce creative content, the productthat for me personally I believe I could get the most outof, I’d say is Resolve. I think that when you look at thetoolset that that offers you, not just within colourcorrection, but within editing; and also the fact that wehave a development team that has just absolutelyrocked it for the last 3-4 years and added everythingthat is required, and more and more keeps coming allthe time. I think that if someone was to give me thatand I was to start implementing that, and then theytried to take it away, I’d be wrestling them to theground and I’d be snatching it back.

Page 9

Ed: OK, on that recommendation, I’ll be sure andhave a look too. NZVN

The Resolve timeline.

ABonAir for QuintoFor Quinto Communications wehave Alan McIlwaine at ABonAir.

Ed: Alan, we’ve been to thisbooth before, very recognisablebecause of a very bright red boxthat goes on your camera forwireless transmission. What reallyimpressed me while I was readingthe brochure to get a bit ofbackground on this, was thatAustralia features rather a lot intheir advertising. You’ve obviouslydone a sterling job in promotingthis product in Australia. Was thatdifficult for you?

Alan: I think to promote anyproduct in Australia is difficult.

Ed: Is that to say somethingabout Australians?

Alan: Well Australians, likemany customers, are verydiscerning both in quality and price. They want the bestvalue for money that’s available and that applies rightacross the spectrum from broadcast products to almostthe household consumer goods. When it comes towireless systems such as ABonAir, there’s obviouslyquite a few of them out there and customers arelooking not necessarily for the cheapest one, but theone that offers them really good value for money. Andthat equates, particularly in wireless work, torobustness of the signal they’re transmitting for thecameras – what the range is going to be like and howrobust it’s going to be whenever it gets to the receivepoint. During many tests with many systems, ABonAirseems to excel in that.

Ed: And it seems again, reading the brochure, thatthere is some software in there that buffers the signal,so if there is a dropout, it resends that little piece ofinformation, so you are covering those dropouts thatwill occur in any wireless transmission?

Alan: That’s right. As I said, robust is the key toany camera wireless transmission system, whether thatbe for news or sports. One of the new areas that wehave found for this camera is in sports production work– horse racing is a very good example of that and rightthrough to many other sporting events.

Now to talk to the man himself, Eran Igler, owner ofABonAir.

Eran: Hello, lovely to see you here.

Ed: Eran, I firstly want to know about this Ferraristripy thing that you’ve got here. Did you get this whenyou bought your Ferrari?

Eran: Unfortunately I was unable to buy theFerrari, but I will do so shortly, I promise you that. Allour products are red, just to remind me that I need tobuy a Ferrari.

Ed: Now I have sat down and read the brochures asyou instructed, and it seems as though you are right onthe money in terms of fitting that middle market, fittingthat market that’s not the most expensive and not thecheapest option, but it is a robust product that has theability to fix any little transmission errors that mightoccur, which a cheaper system wouldn’t do. I guessthat’s really got to be a major selling feature?

Eran: Yes, this was the strategy when we startedsix years ago. We defined to the development teamthat we wanted to have the quality of the big players’product and the robustness of the link and the picture

quality was the No 1 priority for us. But at the sametime, we identified that there is a gap in the marketbetween the $70-100K systems and the $2000-3000systems – there’s nothing in between. So we defined tothe R&D team that they not only make a robust andhigh picture quality system, but they also have to feedtheir second tier channels and broadcasters and systemintegrators who need systems that are reliable, butcan’t afford to pay 70-100K per system. So that wastheir product definition six years ago and I’m happy tosay that we’ve achieved that.

Ed: And it’s using the H.264 codec – that’s been areal winner for you?

Eran: Yes, this is using H.264 codec but this isbased on a DSP, so we are able to change the codec tobe specifically robust for wireless application. Thatmeans that the codec can mitigate errors very strongly.So if there is a problem, if there is a noise, if there is askip of a frame, it knows how to compensate and hidethose so the picture on the screen will always beperfect. Our team invested a lot of time and effort, notonly on the radio to be robust and reliable, but also onthe codec, the encoder and decoder to be suitable forthis kind of application.

Ed: To me, the proof of that is that it’s used in theMotoGP in Australia, and MotoGP is not going to usesomething that is going to downgrade their pictures –it’s got to be the best quality?

Eran: Yes. Actually we are very proud of thestability and the picture quality that we have. We havea long list of customers from MotoGP to NASCAR racingto NBA basketball teams, to FIFA that are using oursystem in tough events and appreciate the picturequality. Also this year just at IBC, we introduced aMIMO system – that means our system is transmittingon 2 channels all the time so the system is double thebandwidth of normal systems.

Ed: Is that a diversity system?

Eran: It’s a MIMO. Actually, diversity means youselect only one of the receivers at each time. This is aMIMO technology, that means both receivers receiveand combine the signal together to have double theenergy in the reception, and because of that, we arecapable of having a more robust link that also capturesreflection from the walls so you don’t necessarily haveto be in clear line of sight. It can be near line of sightand behind the wall and you still have a perfectreception.

Page 10

Alan and Eran Igler.

Ed: But it works in the diversity style in that you only

need one of those channels really to get a good picture,

but you’re compensating for any errors involved in one

of those channels?

Eran: That is correct. We can work with onechannel as it was previously with the 300 family, butnow with the 400 family, we can work with one channel,but we have two, so all the time the system isenhanced, the reception, because we have twochannels. Also another thing we introduced this yearwas a new codec which tends to be more in the picturequality. So now our picture quality is around 10dBbetter. This is amazing quality that we think is betterthan most solutions that you can find here in the IBCshow.

Ed: But it’s still based on the H.264?

Eran: Yes, this is H.264 but we improve the codecagain to get better picture quality.

Ed: Now the other thing I notice that I guess wasreleased this year, was your fibre – how you cleverlyused fibre in the system to separate the truck from theantennae in the stadium?

Eran: Yes, this is actually based on a lot offeedback we got from customers. Customers told usthat they have the problem that the OB truck is alwaysparked outside of the stadium, but they want to placethe antenna inside the stadium and for that, they needto place long, expensive and difficult to use RF cables,that also contribute to attenuation of the signal. Wecame up with a solution where we put the antennaeinside the stadium and we have what we call the fibrecoverage extender that connects to these antennae.The output of the fibre coverage extender is a fibre thatyou can pull up to 10 kilometres and put the OB truckanywhere in the parking lot and you still get all thesignal and all the antennae inside the stadium. Thisenables a very easy quick and cheap installation in thestadium event. But, on top of that, it enablescustomers to use in a multi-venue scenario, they putone fibre coverage extender inside the stadium andanother one in either the parking lot, or in a campingarea near the site, and can cover every place with just asingle transmitter. So the cameraman can go in themorning to the camping area and then in the afternoon,or when the game starts, inside and still be workingwith the same OB van with one media centre.

Ed: And even more applicable to a track situationwhere you’ve got a big area that you’ve got to cover?

Eran: Exactly that, you’re absolutely correct.

Ed: Now back to Alan – I understand there’sa big show coming up in Sydney very shortly,all about broadcasting sports, and you’re goingto feature this at that show?

Alan: That’s correct. The broadcastmarket has expanded; originally it wastelevision stations and now the market hasexpanded out to include content providers andmany other niche facets and one of thegrowing and very important ones is in theworld of sports.

So this year, for the first time in Melbourne,there’s going to be a sportscasting exhibitionand Quinto have taken a stand at this. It’sgoing to cover all facets of sport and we havegot a stand there on which we will be featuringthe ABonAir products because we see a moveworldwide towards, not only the broadcastingof the sports matches themselves, but alsoteams using video for analysis of the eventsand analysis of their player performances.When you have equipment such as the ABonAir

wireless equipment, then that becomes a very valuabletool to any football team.

Ed: Because it brings the cost way down but stillmaintains that broadcast quality?

Alan: Well you want to see what’s happening, butat a reasonable price and importantly, you want to seewhat’s happening in high quality. It’s no use having avery cheap system and then suddenly you’ve got packetlosses all over the place; you want to see the robustsignal there. NZVN

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Marshall for QuintoFor Quinto, we are at Marshall Electronics and we haveDevan Cress.

Ed: Now Devan, I came past the other day andimmediately my eye spotted some little cameras there.You’ve had cameras for some time, you’ve had thesecurity type cameras, but these little ones …?

Devan: These little ones are built for the broadcastmarket. These are miniature HD-SDI cameras that canfit into the palm of your hand. These have list coststhat are really attractive. They have HD-SDI as well ascomposite video output. What’s nice is that you don’thave any external boxes to do the control on somethinglike this; everything is an onscreen menu, the controlthe joystick is built into the camera, I can adjust thewhite balance, the colour, the resolutions that I’ll beusing, so in one very small form factor, you’re able toget an HD-SDI high quality up to 1080p 50 signal out.You also have the added benefit of easy exchange oflenses. We use two forms of lenses – an M12 lens andwe have about 12 of those available, so you can specifyif you want a wide-angle or a close-up view; we cancertainly change those, they simply unscrew and screwback on. What’s new at the IBC show here is that wenow have a CS mount. So now there are not just 12lenses available, there’s thousands of lenses availableto fit just about any and every application for a cameralike this.

Ed: We’ve got to make a comparison here with theGoPro where you’ve got everything built into one andobviously they’re very, very popular, but these provideanother solution because, well the interchangeablelenses, the higher quality output that comes from thatcamera head, but it also has remote recording?

Devan: Sure, absolutely. So we might see thesebeing used in a reality TV show of some sort. Youwould put some of these in the car. It’s quite nice to beable to output via HD-SDI. If you have a product likethe GoPro, the GoPro requires a converter to change toan HD-SDI signal. That can become a point of failureand obviously in a recording session, you can’t have

points of failure; youneed to have the mostrobust solution that youpossibly can. The Mar-shall pure HD-SDIoutput on this certainlycreates a robust solu-tion that is giving moreand more filmmakersthe confidence thatthey need to use thesetypes of cameras inthose applications.

Ed: And to monitorthose you’ve got thesolution for that too?

Devan: So to mon-itor those, yes, that’swhat Marshall is bestknown for. These cam-era top monitors can beassociated or pairedwith these cameras sothat you can simply seethe signal via aconfidence monitor, tomake sure that it’scoming through.

Ed: And all the wayup to 4K?

Devan: Mar-shall has gotinto the 4Kfield. We havea number of4K monitorsthat are ondisplay here.

We’re doing afew things thatare unique totry to bring theprice pointdown in 4Kmonitoring.

We’re doing 4sizes – a 17inch, a 24 inch,a 27 inch anda 31 inch size.When you lookat our 17 andour 24 inchsize monitors,they have mul-tiple functions. They can be based as a quad viewmonitor, or they can take in a 2K or a 4K signal. We’reinputting 4K via 4 3G HD-SDI inputs. What we do is weseamlessly stitch all of those together and then wescale them to fit the monitor. So for the 17 and the 24inch monitor, those are actually 1920x1080 panels andthen we scale the 4K signal to fit the monitor. On the27 inch, that is a 2560x1440 panel – once again wescale to fit it. What’s new is our 31 inch 4K monitor,which is a true 4096 panel – it’s absolutely spectacularwith an 850 nit panel on it. So when you need thingslike colour grading, 3D LUT in the professional market,Marshall has a 31 inch that is available. We’ve reallybrought down the price points on these products; youlook at comparable products made by other companiesand they’re 2-3 times as much as what Marshall isproducing this at. So as this market opens up, we’reseeing more and more people and more cameras andmore filming in 4K … Marshall is ready for that.

Ed: And from what I’ve discovered at this show, thereis a difference between 4K and Ultra High Definition?

Devan: Absolutely. That’s where I was clear tomention the 4096. If you take a UHD signal, you’re notgoing to have as high a resolution. It’s not what thecameras are recording in. You have to be able to seethe full field of view; you can’t just go to a Best Buy ora consumer panel, get a UHD panel and see what theRED cameras are actually filming; you have to have atrue 4096 panel to see the full field of view that’s beingused by the cameras today.

Ed: And we did mention encoders before?

Devan: Marshall has been doing encoding anddecoding for about 2½-3 years now. One of the largestrequests that we have continued to get with our currentbased solutions was that in the broadcast market theywanted to have embedded audio. So Marshall is proudto introduce the VS-104. The VS-104 allows for a fullresolution up to 1080p 50 or 60 video signals withembedded audio. So no longer will you have lip syncissues or correction; you’re going to get a very cleansignal with low latency. You’re looking at an entire timeto encode and decode of about 2-3 frames, so that is avery quick processor that we put together with this.Solutions like this can be used as point to point, or pointto multi-point, but where we often see them beingdisplayed or used is removing fibre lines. Fibre can bevery expensive for some stations, so if they need to

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move a signal from one point to another, this is a veryeconomical way to accomplish that and still maintainthe integrity of the sync.

Ed: Because is that done by CAT cable?

Devan: It is, it’s done over the CAT5 or CAT6 cable.It can be done on an Intranet or it can be done over theInternet. So there is really no distance limitation. Icould go from New Zealand to the US; I could go fromthe US to Dubai – there is no limitation.

Ed: And you’re only two frames behind?

Devan: But 2-3 frames behind in an internalnetwork.

Ed: Aaaah, okay.

Devan: Now if you’re going over the Internet …

Ed: I thought there was a magic solution fromMarshall here?

Devan: There are certainly things that we can’tcontrol and those are the thousands of switches anddelays that are inherent within any Internet network.

Ed: But you’re working on it?

Devan: We’re not going to fix this, but what we dodo is a very clean encoding and decoding of highdefinition signals with embedded audio. We also havesome new cameras that were released – the VS-577and VS-547. The improvement versus our previousversion of PTZ and fixed IP based cameras is that theseare very low latency on the HD-SDI output. We had anumber of customers who were using our VS-571s and,when utilising the HD-SDI output, you could have 10

frames of delay, which was unacceptable in thebroadcast market. We wired directly into the camerablock on the VS-577 so that the HD-SDI feed has littleto no delay on it. It would be half a frame or so. Sonow this is a true broadcast quality PTZ or fixed boxcamera that can be used in professional applications.

Ed: Fantastic. And to complete this Marshall story,we have a very small form factor test generator in 4K?

Devan: This is new – a signal generator with asmall OLED screen on it.

This is going to be able to display multiple screens ontoany monitor as well as different resolutions. It’s verysimple to use, there’s only four buttons that really needto be utilised. You have an up and down button toscroll through the various different patterns that can bedisplayed. Some of these patterns also havemovement, they have lines so that you can really get ataste of the quality of a monitor. You also have theability to change the resolutions. Those are used withour left and right button. So I simply push the buttonto the left and it can change to any number of 27different resolutions that are available going down to480 all the way up to a true 4K 4096 signal. So this isa handy little tool that we’re offering at a very goodprice that should be in everybody’s toolbox.

Ed: This is something for a studio to regularly checktheir monitors to make sure that they’re up to spec?

Devan: Absolutely, up to spec, that they’reaccepting the correct signal, that that signal is beingmaintained and that the monitors are in balance. NZVN

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JVC for QuintoFor Quinto, we are at JVC and I guessthe camera story continues because forme anyway, seeing the rebirth of JVC inthe small camera market has been veryinteresting. I appreciate the work thatJVC have done in getting back into thatsuper professional space and dare I saynow knocking on the broadcasters’doors. Obviously, there have been somebig, big sales to broadcasters and itcontinues to grow. To tell us all about it,we have Paul Pasveer, EuropeanMarketing Manager for JVC ProfessionalEurope.

Ed: Now Paul we’re sitting here infront of a very elegant JVC camera, tellus about this one to start with?

Paul: We are looking now at theGY-HM890E. This is our latest model in the shoulder-cam range and this is a camcorder that has someunique features. For example, on the back, we have aUSB port and this USB port can be used for a 4G LTEtelephone connection to stream your video; you can useit for a WiFi dongle to stream via WiFi to your router;but what you also can do is stream via cable, so youhave a USB connection to a LAN connector. Thatmeans this camera is able to stream live video fromevery location around the world into your studio. Ourslogan for this year on the booth is “First on Air, First onLine” and this means that we’re bringing a newrevolutionary product to the market where you can savea lot of costs in your production workflow.

Ed: But you’re still recording to onboard cards?

Paul: We have SDXC cards – actually we werethe first in the market. We started with SDHC cardsand you see now that a lot of manufacturers haveadopted these cards. So that means that, even if thereis a major breakdown on your Internet, you’re stillrecording your footage on full HD on your SDXC cards.You can use any of the SD range of cards actually butthe simpler ones will not be capable of high data raterecording.

Ed: Now correct me if I’m wrong, but we’re goingback to the streaming solution, so you’re saying there’sactually three possibilities there, that I guess if you’restuck in Vanuatu or somewhere and you really onlyhave some sort of wireless possibility, you can use that,but if you have the connection to a full broadcastnetwork, you can use that instead. So you have now avariety of streaming solutions as opposed to, inthe past, one?

Paul: Yes, that’s totally correct whatyou’re saying.

Imagine you’re in the wilds of South Otago andyou want to have some live footage for your 8o’clock news or you want to have somestreaming and you see a lot of webcast comingup, then you can transmit via your satellitetelephone for example or, if you haveconnection with your 4G telephone card, youcan instantly stream your video direct into yourstudio. So you can have a live report instantly,on the spot, from where you are. We have alive coverage on our booth where we have areporter in Rotterdam who has a liveconnection here via the Internet to our host,Lisa. So yes, you’re correct, we have threepossibilities.

Ed: And is that only with this 890 camera?

Paul: No, actually not. We started with the 650 –this was our first handheld camcorder with thestreaming possibility and now we’re extending everynew camera with this feature. We are now showingalso our new GY-LS300 on our booth, which is our new4K camcorder with 35mm sensor. This also has thecapability to stream – of course not in 4K yet, still in HDor SD, but it’s equipped with streaming video capability.If you go a long way back, in 1999 we had our firstStreamCorder with a stream adapter plate, but we havekept it in the closet until the market was ready, becausein 1999, the market was not ready for streaming videoalthough we were at that time.

Ed: Now this little 4K camera, we have seen it in amock-up version at NAB in a Perspex case. We’regetting a little bit closer to production, but it’s not quitethere?

Paul: That’s correct, we are finalising theconcept. Of course, we will use all the interviews wehad here at IBC and all the reaction from the potentialcustomers and we are aiming for delivery in February2015.

Ed: And this is a cinema camera as opposed to avideo camera?

Paul: Actually you can do a lot of things with it.We’re not only targeting the cinema market, becausefrom the interviews here on the booth, you see a lot ofreporters who also use 35mm cameras. So it’s not onlyfor the cinematography market, it’s a wide variety, awide market.

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The GY-LS300.

Ed: It has a single large sensor?

Paul: It’s a single large sensor and I have to tellyou that it’s our own sensor. We have our own sensorfactory in San Francisco and it’s part of the JVC CameraGroup. We use this 35mm sensor and actually, it’smore than 4K, because on this camera, we have themicro four-third lens mount and you can imagine thatyou can mount a lot of lens types. There is anelectronic connection between the lens mount and thesoftware which recognises what kind of settings eachlens needs for the sensor.

Ed: Now just back on the 890 – this particular shapehas been around for a number of years and I’ve noticed

in the past, a studio configuration andthis continues?

Paul: Yes this continues. Regard-ing the shape, I will start with that first.The shape is very well balanced and ofcourse, what we found out in the marketis that they really like the shape and thebalancing of the camera. So this is thereason that, if you look very closely, youcan see a lot of difference in themoulding and in the camera itself, but ifyou look from a distance you think “hey,this is the same camera”. This is whatwe did, we listened very carefully to ourusers and it means that we have the 890and the 850. The 890 is the studioconversion; the studio model which weuse in a special equipped studioconfiguration set with a sledge where

you can enter the camera. So it has the possibility touse it for multicore or the possibility to use fibre. So wehave all kinds of fibre solutions – if you want SMPTE oryou want Neutrik or anything else, we have it and it’s areally module basis. The camera can be taken veryeasily out, it’s only click connection, in and out of thesledge for the studio configuration.

Ed: Now Alan, I guess for somebody to seriously lookat a JVC camera at this level, they want to get theirhands on one – this is possible in Auckland is it?

Alan: Yes, we have a range of cameras which areheld in our Auckland office with Pete Fullerton. We’vehad the cameras out with broadcasters, with the

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4K 35mm Elise prototype.

wireless streaming and we can arrange for temporarylicences for people to do their own evaluations to showhow robust the cameras are. So if anybody wants totry or evaluate the cameras, they can contact Pete.

Ed: Now just off the camera market and a box that

we’ve seen before, but which continues to be very

popular, and that is an optical disc recorder?

Paul: Yes, that’s correct. Actually we have it

already a long time in our line-up. We started with the

70, we have now the 2500 as a flagship model. The

2500 is actually triggered for the broadcast market, so

it has the HD-SDI in and out and it records on DVD and

Blu-ray, but also has the possibility to put in your SDHC

or SDXC card so that you can take off your content

from your camera direct on the hard disc.

So it has three functionalities – it has a DVD Blu-ray, it

has a hard disc and the possibility to enter your card

from your camera. So it’s a multi-format codec and it

can be used for several applications in the broadcast

industry, but also in the standard audio video industry

for all kinds of industrial applications.

On the right side on the bottom you have two slots to

enter your SD cards. So the footage you record on the

GY-HM600 or GY-HM890 or 850, you can instantly

insert the card into the recorder and put it on your hard

disc.

Ed: And then can you transfer that data onto an

optical disc?

Paul: Yes, what you can do is you can put the

data into an optical disc and you also have a small

possibility to do some editing. So that means you can

add a full front page, you can add a logo, you can also

add some menus in between, so don’t overestimate that

this is a full editing; it’s a small editing, but you have

the possibility.

Ed: But I would see the critical application as a very

robust and simple device as backup for your data?

Paul: Yes, for example, it could be a backup for

your data, but also if you have fast content you need on

a DVD disc you want to give away or something else,

you can do that.

Alan: We’ve sold a lot of these into universities

and colleges for media studies so that the students can

go out, shoot their material, bring it back and then take

away a Blu-ray or a DVD of their work …

Ed: And then edit it at home?

Alan: Edit it at home … it gives you a very fast

way of being able to turn around work from cameras or

other video sources into a disc format that people can

take away.

It’s proved in Australia and New Zealand to be a very

popular choice and it’s just something that sells on a

continuous basis.

Ed: One last camera in the 4K range?

Paul: Yes. What’s really new also and was not at

NAB is the 4K block cam.

This is a 4K native 35mm block cam which you can put

in a pan and tilt head for using in a remote controlled

area, a studio without any technicians. This is of course

a study model but we expect very soon to come on the

market with it and again this is the 35mm sensor and

there’s a lot of demand on the market for remote

studios. NZVN

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Autodesk for DVTFor DVT, we are at Autodesk and we have MauricePatel.

based production management tool that we acquired inJune – Shotgun Software – which is all about improvingthe production management process within visualeffects and content creation. That’s kind of been whatwe’re showing here. What else is new in Flame? PlanarTracker – there’s been a lot of tracking tools in Flame,but this is now directly in the 3D compositingenvironment which people have wanted. That’s a greatcreative capability directly within Action. We’re alsoannouncing a whole bunch of improvements to theworkflow. We changed the entire workflow for Flame acouple of years ago to modernise it, it was a re-architecturing of the product and we’re adding somenew enhancements in this release – the ability to groupwithin the desktop reel so you can create basicallygroups of clips, and also within the batch tree, betterkind of nesting, so that when you nest modes andexplode them, the process of basically working withmuch more complex data processes is easier. And thenas I mentioned, we’ve announced the Shotgunintegration with Flame. When we acquired Shotgun wetripled the R&D resources on that, because we believethat production management is definitely critical in ourindustry, budgets are tighter, you have to do more inless time, less budget …

Ed: And you’ve got to keep track of that, you’ve gotto keep track of the dollars?

Maurice: Exactly, keep track of the dollars and keeptrack of your data and there’s more of your data. Soproduction management is a key area of investment forus and, since we’ve acquired Shotgun, we’ve alreadylaunched four new capabilities. The first thing we didwas a review app for the iPhone so that anyoneworking, whether they’re working in Maya, Nuke orFlame, can now send their work to be reviewedremotely. Someone can play back video, mark it up,send it back with comments, directly from their iPhone.

Ed: But do they get the resolution on iPhone that youwould be after if you had a product such as Flame?

Maurice: Well they get a good enough resolution formaking comments on a work in progress, yes. That’sessentially what it’s done for.

Ed: Is that grey enough, for example?

Maurice: Very grey. Talking about colourmanagement and things like that, one of the thingswe’ve done is to put ACES and OpencolorIO support inour products to try and manage the colour. I’m notsure you’re going to be checking colour grading, onyour iPhone – this is more for visual effects creation,this is not for finishing. This is the visual effectscreation process. So someone’s created an animation,is it the right animation, the right speed, does it lookright for the character design, does it have to go backfor remodelling – those kind of things can be easilymade. So you know, horses for courses, we’re notsaying that anyone’s going to be reviewing andapproving the final master on their iPhone …

Ed: Oh, thank goodness.

Maurice: Yes, I think that’s a bit of a stretch, but weknow that visual effects supervisors can check in on thework in progress, you know they’re on set, on location,and they want to see “so how’s the animation coming,is the animation cycle right, is the walk cycle right, is itrealistic enough, is it believable enough?”. Those kindsof decisions could easily be made on an iPhone,commented up and say “you know what, thatbackground maybe you need some more dressing here,maybe the prop is not quite right”. That kind offeedback you can give and that’s what it’s designed todo.

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Ed: Maurice, in the past, we’ve talked about Autodeskin terms of “Smoke on the Mac” as being the wayAutodesk has hit a new video market, but Smoke on theMac has become much more popular, there are morepeople using it and now they’re looking for the evengreater creative tools that Flame offers?

Maurice: Flame has been around for quite a while,it’s at the high end of postproduction. We do seeinterest from people who have used Smoke to augmenttheir workflows with Flame, but also ultimately, whenwe introduced Smoke, it wasn’t necessarily that weexpected people who used to Smoke to move to Flame,and we have a lot of customers who use Smoke and itmeets their requirements and allows them to docreative editorial finishing with a huge amount ofcapabilities. The other thing we did on Smoke was wemade it available as a Desktop Subscription which is arental model, so people can rent it. That gives them alot of flexibility. So that’s been quite popular and we’veseen that also with Maya LT, so these are two productsthat we have been trying to target more towards theindependents, the small studios. In terms of having thehigh end postproduction tools whether it’s Flame or forMaya, those continue to obviously show a strongappeal, and here at IBC, we’ve announced both anextension for Smoke as well as a new extension forFlame.

The Flame extension includes something called ShotgunIntegration, which is integration with the new cloud-

Ed: Now there is also atool that helps people getinto that Flame area and Ibelieve that’s called FlameAssist?

Maurice: Actually thereare two tools Flame Assistand Flare, so both are toolswhich help build out yourFlame workflow, or get intounderstanding how Flameworks, so assistants canwork with the Flame guy,learn the software, masterthe software. If you’recoming from Smoke it’s apretty easy transition, thereare a lot of similaritiesbetween Smoke and Flame,and that’s part of what youwere mentioning earlier.Someone can start out inSmoke, they become veryfamiliar with the workflow, ifthey want to move onto aFlame, they can then move directly to the Flame, it willbe very familiar. Or a facility which always uses aFlame and hires some junior staff they want to train up,they can put them on the Flame Assist or the Flare andthey can help the Flame artist and learn the ropes.

Ed: For the uninitiated, just give us three keydifferences between Smoke and Flame?

Maurice: Ultimately Smoke is really an editorialproduct so the key difference in Flame is the visualeffects capability, you know the advanced 3D tools.Whereas Smoke is essentially a timeline with a lot ofeffects capability that you can do, Flame is a visualeffects powerhouse with an integrated timeline, so it’skind of a slightly different focus. A lot of the toolset issimilar, but Flame is really designed for verysophisticated visual effects creation, a lot of 3D tools …

Ed: I think we saw an example of the Brazil WorldCup, where there were soccer players montaged withflames pouring off them and soccer balls … that was aFlame job?

Maurice: Yes exactly, all the very sophisticated kindof visual effects that you want to do typically tend to bedone in a Flame, because that’s really what it’s good at– so the World Cup commercials or the commercialsthat were using the World Cup as a theme, or car

commercials, Nike spots, Coca Cola spots, those kind ofthings will often end up using a Flame for the visualeffects creation.

Ed: So where does it go to from here?

Maurice: Our focus going forward is really going to

continue to be on the production management side of

things. I mean, we’re not neglecting our animation

products or Flame, these are core parts of our business

and we’re still continuing to invest heavily in that, but in

terms of new areas where we’re also starting to pay a

lot of attention, production management is one of them.

And, as we were saying before, that is because it’s

become one of the most painful parts of the production

process given the sheer amount of data and the

pressure on budgets, you know, being able to do

everything efficiently on budget, on time, at the quality

required and keep track of the massive amounts of data

that are being produced throughout the production –

digital data, because everything’s digital so we just

create more and more digital data and then keeping

track of it, versioning it, finding out who is doing what

and where and what state is everything in, reviewing it,

approving it, all those are very real problems that our

customers face that we want to help solve.

Ed: Right, education. I know myselfit’s a very difficult choice to change anediting platform, but for younger people,if you can get them early and show themhow Smoke on the Mac works, you’regoing to keep those people for a longtime. Does Autodesk have a futurestrategy for that?

Maurice: I think we have multiplestrategies to introduce people to oursoftware, whether it’s through education,through training, through the book wejust published with Wylie, the AutodeskSmoke Essentials book, so we create alot of training materials. At the sametime, a large part of it has been accessto the software, making it moreaffordable and that’s why we have itavailable as a subscription. Our productsare available as a desktop subscription orrental plan, it allows people to access the

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Ed: Denis-Pierre, what’s intrigued me is that yoursign says “Adobe Creative Cloud for broadcast”. This isobviously a big step, Adobe’s put its hand up and said“yes, you can use our editing platform for broadcast”.How can broadcasters be assured that you’ve got thetools to do that?

Denis-Pierre: Okay, so 2 things – what is CreativeCloud and why do we say broadcast. So broadcast ismore, I would say, on the features we’ve built insideour products, like Premiere Pro for broadcasters, andwhat we are in Creative Cloud is your Adobe identity,because we don’t have any more say in numbers onthat software, we have an activation by identity. Sothat means you can install your identity on two stationsand work on either. For example, I can go to work for acompany, I know Premiere, I know After Effects, I havemy own settings, my workspace that I take with me. Ijust log inside the application with my Adobe ID and wego to the Cloud to fetch all my preferences and takethem back and I’ve got all my UI as I’m used to work.So things like that are very nice.

Also, when I’m editing inside Premiere Pro, I’ve got a

note to autosave my project on the place in my hard

drive. We never know if the electricity goes down,

something like that, but I can also ask to have a backup

of my timeline in my topic folder, my own folder on the

Cloud. In that case, if my machine burns, I know that I

can start again because I’ve got my project – not the

media, only the project, so it’s not lost, my work is still

there. So the part I can put on my space on the Cloud,

it’s a safety space, it’s owned by Amazon and Amazon

has all the security about that; it’s completely

encrypted only I can go and get my things and I can

share if I want, but I’m not obliged to. If I’m working in

Europe, my files will go into servers in Europe.

Ed: So Homeland Security does not get to look atthem?

Denis-Pierre: Maybe … it’s encrypted so theyshouldn’t see anything anyway. So that’s one thing.So now Premiere Pro for broadcast; we have manyfeatures ready for broadcast. When you’re doingbroadcast you need to go fast. You don’t have time towork, you have to do it very fast.

Ed: And when it says “broadcast” it means forreporters to use in the field at any moment, or is it forlong-form documentaries?

Denis-Pierre: Both of them. It’s a very openworkflow. So if we choose one for example. I’mworking on a sport TV show and I’m doing the editing,I’m going fast because they are coming directly fromthe camera and I’ve got some animated titles comingfrom After Effects. I can directly place those titles onthe timeline of Premiere Pro, they are not rendered andthey are titles but I will need to change the names ofthe people without going to After Effects, so I will beable to edit the text layer of After Effects insidePremiere Pro. That’s very fast, no render.

Another thing, I’m editing and I’ve got a special clip andI want to put a special effect on that video. FromPremiere Pro, I can ask to replace my clip with an AfterEffects project. It will launch After Effects, I will be ableto do all my effects, text, animations, colour, anythingand all what I do in After Effects is automatically seeninside After Effects without any render. So I’m saving alot of time and also quality because I’m not degradingthe footage because I render again and again andagain. So that makes it very, very fast.

Also we know that we have more and more footagecoming from a lot of different types of camera – DSLR,

software more easily. We recently launched a globalinitiative to support our very extensive educationalprogramme. In the past Autodesk has providedsoftware for free for students. We just announced thatwe’ve expanded that program to provide free softwarenot just to students, but to faculty and institutions aswell. .

Ed: What country is that in?

Maurice: It started in North America in the springand just recently expanded to include A-NZ, Japan andKorea..

Ed: Well it’s good to say you’ve got free softwarethere, but it’s like you’ve got your computer, you’ve gotyour own system on that, and then you downloadsomething to try it out – are you going to use it as amission critical tool until you really know andunderstand how it‘s used, if you don’t know anythingabout it beforehand? Having some sort of formaleducation, with somebody showing you what it’scapable of - Training 101 – that’s where you’ve got tokick-start it?

Maurice: Ultimately, I think part of it is the work thatwe do with various institutions in terms of making surethat they have access to the software. We ourselvesprovide a bunch of materials and tools online; weprovide tutorials and training, so the materials are thereand then I think it’s up to the schools whether theywant to teach it or not.

Adobe for DVTFor DVT, we are at Adobe and we have Denis-PierreGuidot from the Paris office of Adobe.

NZVN

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

www.dvt.co.nz

The experts in 4K workflows

PRODUCTION | POST | VISUAL EFFECTS

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If you are interested in pushing your production and post production processes to the next level with the high resolution and high frame rate on these amazing new cameras then get in touch with the experts at DVT today.

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small cameras like GoPros, or RED 6K cameras – thingslike that. With Premiere Pro, it will read the footagenatively with no necessity to transcode them in anothercodec and I will be able to put them in different files onthe same timeline and see them straightaway very fast,very easy, so that is a big, big timesaver. And now, asI have many, many, many files of different types, wemade a new feature inside Premiere Pro and it’s the“searchable bin”. You know that we work a lot onmetadata and what we want is to be able to search forfiles through their metadata.

So when I’m inside Premiere Pro, I can make a bin andsay I will share some old metadata, maybe all our 3Dfiles, and when I click, I’ve got the folder telling whereevery piece of data related to that bin description is.That makes it very, very fast.

Ed: But it also works for the individual too. If youhave a lot of client projects to be able to findinformation that might be across a number of clients,you can find it immediately?

Denis-Pierre: Yes, absolutely. We won’t need touse proxies because we will be able to work directly onall the files natively very easily all along the project,and you will be able to export at the end on differenttypes of settings. For example, I’m working on adocumentary and I know that I want to put somethingvery quickly on the Net, on YouTube. It won’t be thesame settings that I put to broadcast onthe TV, or I want to have an export to beable to see that on a Tablet, like an iPad,something like that. All those exportswill be different settings.

With Premiere Pro, I will be able toexport, it will go to Adobe Media Encoderwhich is our specific software to encodeand I will ask Adobe Media Encoder toencode directly in those different formatsand it will read the Premiere Pro timelineand at the same time encode in that 3different formats I ask for. So thatmakes it also very, very fast.

Ed: In the last year or so, what wouldhave been perhaps the 3 most importantor valuable improvements in PremierePro that you would have seen?

Denis-Pierre: As a user, what I likethe most is that it is completely freeabout the format on the fly. I just cansee on the timeline …

Ed: Yes but that’s been there for quitesome time hasn’t it – I mean, even inCS6 I can do that.

Denis-Pierre: Okay, so in the newversion, I would say what’s very nice isto have these searchable bins, that’svery important; and something also verynice we have in that new Premiere Pro isthe ability to see a project that is alreadydone and to compare it on two timelines,the timeline of my project and thetimeline of the other project and to dragand drop footage if I want to. That’sabsolutely marvellous, that is veryinteresting.

Ed: In the older versions, if it’s in thesame project and you’ve got a differentsequence, you go and you can grab achunk of that sequence and drop it into anew timeline, but this is actuallyprojects, not just sequences?

Denis-Pierre: Yes, we go and fetch a specific

sequence and open it in a source monitor and I can

make a comparison with another project I’m working on

and take the elements I need to and drag and drop

from one to the other – that’s very nice.

Ed: Wow, the photo should show two timelines open

on the same screen.

Denis-Pierre: And I want to tell you something else

also. We have a feature called Project Manager. With

this manager, you will be able to collect in the same

folder, all the clips you have from different hard drives

and the sequence. That’s already there.

But now we can ask it to condense and transcode, so I

can say “okay, we will put all the footage in the same

folder but with only one codec” and I can choose the

codec so it will be DNX, MXF, QuickTime and what’s

important, we can choose the new file format, CineForm

Wavelet format, very good intelligent codec format that

is in 4444 with the Alpha and so it will give you very

nice footage with all the – I’d say the quality inside you

can use to edit again.

So that’s new things really interesting in our product.

Hey, if you don’t follow all of that, don’t worry, talk to

the team at DVT about your Adobe solution.

Page 23

NZVN

Matthews for PLSWe are at the Matthews stand for PLS with the beautifuland vivacious Linda Swope once more.

Ed: Linda, I know that the PLS boys have been veryhappy with your little slider stands, and I understandthat you’ve upped your production for these?

Linda: We have. The slider stands themselveswere oversold. We can’t make them fast enough.

Ed: That’s good. Why has there been this gap in themarket?

Linda: Well traditionally, sliders themselves havebeen mounted on Low Boy combos, which is just a littletoo high. You can’t get down low enough if you want alow shot, so we’ve just developed a new stand which isblack with red braces – it’s very cool looking, by theway – that gets you to that little point and will extendup as high as you need to go. Just a different stand,doing the same thing that other stands can do butgetting you to a lower loading point.

Ed: The slider stands are a Matthews design?

Linda: Oh they’re a Matthews design, 100%.

Ed: So you’re now making the slider stands and thesliders?

Linda: Yes.

Ed: Do you want to elaborate on that a little bit moreLinda?

Linda: Yes! The sliders were made by theinventor, a gaffer from Montreal, but we’ve now broughtthe production in-house, so we’re manufacturing thesliders and the slider stands.

Ed: I guess one of the difficulties in making thesethings is that you’re tooling has to be very accurateotherwise you’re going to have a little bit of wobble orit’s going to grip the wrong place?

Linda: That’s especially true with the sliders,because the rails are precision. If you have any offtooling, you’re not going to have the smooth cameraglide that you need. So yes, extremely.

Ed: I guess that’s why they have to be heavy, orrobust should we say?

Linda: For our sliders, yes, because they’re not

made for little cameras, they’re made for big camera

packages. Our sliders will hold about 40 kilos, so they

take big packages. There are a lot of sliders out there

that will take small packages, a lot of sliders that aren’t

so great. Ours is …

Ed: Industrial?

Linda: Oh very industrial – it’s a tough one.

Ed: Well that’s a Matthews’ standard isn’t it?

Linda: It is. We make heavy duty grip equipment.It’s not the lightest in the world, it’s the best.

Ed: But speaking of “lighter”, you do have thosesmaller arms, I know the MICRO arms, but the NOGAarms seem to be something that’s pretty popular?

Linda: The NOGA arms are new for us. Last IBCwas the first time we introduced them. They’re justsmall, our version of the Magic arm with camera

Page 24

Linda’s obviously happy with her slider stands.

PhonePhonePhonePhone:::: 09090909 302 4100302 4100302 4100302 4100 Email: Email: Email: Email: infoinfoinfoinfo@kelpls.co.nz@kelpls.co.nz@kelpls.co.nz@kelpls.co.nz Website:Website:Website:Website: www.www.www.www.kelpls.co.nzkelpls.co.nzkelpls.co.nzkelpls.co.nz

The new Slider Stand from Matthews.

A strong, wide-based stand with a low working

height for those using camera Sliders, Monitors,

Speed Rail/Pipe Dolly etc.

• Working Height 61cm to 117cm

• Operating Capacity 36.3 kg

• Incredibly stable with dual adjustable legs

• Stylish Aerospace Inspired design

• Welded Junior (1-1/8") Receiver

• Stand Adapters can convert to; (sold separately)

o 5/8" baby pin (16mm)

o 3/8" Tripod Mount

o 5/8" Magic Finger

“Try this, you’ll like it, I guarantee it” Ed Philips, CEO Matthews.

Noga Arm • MICROgrip • GoPro Mount …now @ PLS

The Matthews innovative 3/8” - 1/4" 20 camera mount system.

Attach lights, monitors, iPads. Rig your DSLR / GoPro at any angle.

Works great with the big

lights and pairs well with

the new DIT Laptop tray

mounts or light mounts that you get in little tiny places,lightweight cameras.

So we go from one end of the heavy robust items, to

the other end of like small camera mounting options.

They’re not made by Matthews, they’re made by NOGA.

It’s not a spring that’s inside the arm, they’re actually

steel rods.

So after a while a spring – like a rubber band – it

stretches and it stretches and doesn’t regain its shape,

so some other brands don’t last as long. Ours will last

for quite a long time, because they’re steel rods.

Ed: NOGA sounds Japanese – is it a Japanese

company?

Linda: No, it’s an Israeli company and they have

been making them for a very long time.

Ed: Now Linda I notice there’s some wooden boxes

here with Matthews all over them. Is this a new

product line?

Linda: No. We’ve had Apple Boxes since the day I

started working at Matthews. They’ve been in the

industry forever.

Basically there are four different sizes, there’s a full

Apple Box, a half, a quarter and a pancake and they’re

used anywhere from mounting a light – you need to get

a light real low on the ground, you would put a baby

plate, a Nano plate on this, and you’ve got a light down

there.

Or you take a full one and you put a cushion on it and

the grips sit on it. Or, you’re a short person and you

need to get up taller for the camera, they stand on it.

There are many varied uses for Apple Boxes.

Ed: Does it have a weight loading stamped in there

somewhere?

Linda: No it sure doesn’t, but ours are reinforced

inside … you see inside there, there’s a reinforcement in

the middle, so they’re pretty sturdy.

Ed: You can’t actually open them I see?

Linda: No, they do not open.

Ed: So you can’t put your lunch in there … well you

could put your lunch in, but you’d never get it out

again!

Linda: No, you’d never get it back out. But these

aren’t new, they’ve been around for as long as they’ve

been making movies I think.

Ed: Oh okay – has Chris bought any?

Linda: I don’t think so.

Ed: We would probably have trouble getting the wood

in, but maybe he could make them under licence?

Linda: He could … he could make them without my

permission.

There are a lot of people who make Apple Boxes, but

ours are so pretty with the logo.

I could add another logo, but the Matthews logo would

stay. So on the other side we could do a PLS logo …

Ed: Could we get them individually signed Linda?

Linda: You want me to sign it? Yeah, I could

probably do that.

Page 26

NZVN

A more subdued Linda with apple boxes.

Dedolight for PLSWe are now at Dedolight for PLS withRoman Hoffmann, marketing manager.

Ed: Roman, what impresses me withDedolight is the range that you offer.You’ve obviously taken on LED, butyou’ve taken on LED in areas where it issuitable. But for other areas, you arecontinuing with tungsten, you’recontinuing with HMI, so you’re offeringlights for the quality of the light, not justnecessarily the convenience that LEDalone offers?

Roman: Exactly. We try to buildlight instruments. What I always try tomake understood is that, it doesn’tmatter which light source we offer, it isstill a very convenient and very preciseinstrument around it. So we have ourtungsten range, which offers perfectcolour … tungsten lights still offer perfectcolour. We have our HMI range – the200s, the 400s and of course now weoffer the same quality of light, the same quality of lightcontrol in our LED fixtures as well. LEDs offer a coupleof advantages like the battery operation is moreconvenient, not only because of the lower powerconsumption of the LED light source, or because theLED light source is so much brighter, but it shines to thefront, it shines to the lens so you lose less light in thefixture.

And of course, the capability to use it as a bicolour lightis a big, big advantage if you have a bicolour LED.

Ed: Let’s start with the HMI light. I know I was veryimpressed seeing how easy it is now to change thebulb. In those early fixtures, it was quite a longoperation and if suddenly your bulb failed during ashoot, well it might take you 20 minutes to half an hourto reset. Nowadays, with the Dedolight fixture, it’s a loteasier and you’ve extended that design into a smallerlight I understand?

Roman: It was not 20 minutes, but 40 minutes. Anexperienced maintenance person could manage it in 40minutes – it was a big problem. The light itself waswonderful, the quality of light was perfect, but thehousing was not easy to maintain. So Dedo first triedto change the housing on our 1200 HMI. It worked, thenew housing is very simple. You can open it from theside and you can easily reach the bulb or repairanything that is inside the housing. That design is nowtransferred to the smaller lights – from the 1200 hetransferred it to the 400 series, so the 650 tungstenlight now has the same housing as the 1200, but it’s asize smaller; same you have on the 400 series and theballast design also changed. It looks now like the 1200ballast.

Ed: So it’s not just about the quality of light, but it’salso about maintaining the light that you’ve got?

Roman: Exactly. We still have the double lensaspherical system inside it, so the quality of light, thecontrol of light is still the same, but the maintenance ismuch easier.

Ed: Right now, the LEDs, you are continuing todevelop the range that you’re offering in LED?

Roman: Yes. We were very successful with ourTecpro Felloni range, but this range is limited in lightoutput. So the Fellonis still are used for mobile work orfor very small studios because the output is limited to50 Watt.

Dedo always listens to his customers and of course wealso try to satisfy the TV studio customers. So for thelast couple of years, Dedo worked on high output LEDpanels, big ones, and he introduced the first one at NABthis year. It is called the LEDRAMA. The powerconsumption of this light is around 250 Watt which isnot that much, but the light output is amazing. Thelight output at six metre is still 700 Lux, so you caneasily work over bigger distances, especially when youhang such a light in a studio somewhere up towards the

Page 27

Roman with LEDRAMA panel.

ceiling, you can easily work with it over biggerdistances. So the light output is one thing …

Ed: Also I guess it’s the spread of that light isn’t it –

the difference with an LED panel is that the light doesn’tobey the inverse square law because you’re not sending

it out in three dimensions?

Roman: Actually yes.

Ed: I’m throwing a bit of physics in there you see – in

a former life, I used to be a physics teacher.

Roman: You’re right, the square law on a soft light

is to be differently considered as on a beam. So this is

why we simply say how much light you have over howmuch distance. That’s it. Just to make it understood

that for example there are a lot of fantastic soft lights

on the market like the Kino Flo Celeb or the Celeb 200,

the Celeb 400 or the Cineo. But there are differences.

The Cineo for example is a fantastic light in colour and

light output, but it consumes 400 Watt and it has less

light than ours at the same distance. So this is just to

make it understood that the Wattage of a light does not

say everything.

Ed: It’s the Wattage at a distance?

Roman: Exactly. And also the quality of the LEDs.

So the LEDRAMA now, it is a very heavy animal, but it

is meant to work in studios. So you hang it once on

your rail system and there it is and you use the light

output. You have it as a daylight fixture, but of course,

also as a bicolour. The interesting thing about this light

is that, if we take a look at the bicolour version … you

have both the tungsten and daylight dyes in one placecovered by a lens. So it doesn’t work in LED rows, like

you have one daylight row and one tungsten row and

then you switch between them. You switch below the

lens, so the light source remains on the same place

when you switch between the colours. This makes it

very convenient and the shadows do not change. So

that’s basically it, but this one of course it is DMX

controllable; we have it as PO ( Pole Operated ) versionand the very first prototype we brought to this year’s

IBC stand, the LEDRAMA 40x40, so far it has a metal

housing and it is quite heavy, but it is meant to be a

mobile version. It has a bigger surface, so 40x40cm

which many customers ask for, because very often the

30x30 versions are not soft enough.

Ed: But we don’t want to get their hopes up too early

do we Roman, because this is going to be a little while

in development?

Roman: Yes. Let’s wait another year. Of course,

we bring such prototypes to exhibitions to get feedback

and to get to know what we have to change or to add.

Ed: If the customers come along and say “Wow,

that’s exactly what we want” you know that you can put

the money into the tooling and actually go into

production?

Roman: We already had a couple of such customersand feedback.

Ed: You need more than a couple. Now I know one ofthe areas that Chris is particularly keen on is your kitsand I see that you’ve gone to town and made somereally nice kits this year?

Roman: Yes. Our traditional kit system is based on

a combination of a soft light or a couple of soft lights

and a couple of focusing lights, just to offer two

different light characters – a soft light for a portrait and

focusing lights for backlights or effect lights, whatever.We have this system for our traditional tungsten and

HMI kits and we now offer the same kits in LED

versions. So we have many, many new kits. Just to

point out the differences … as we also have small

portable battery operated LED lights like the Ledzilla

and the 2.1, we combine them now in smaller kits. So

the kits can be made much, much smaller and we have

now a very small kit for documentaries which is not

much bigger than hand carry luggage.

It is a combination of Nano stands and up to four lights,

so you can go either for focusing lights or let’s say two

focusing and two soft lights or you can also add some

accessories like a small projection attachment and it

makes it very convenient for people who work on their

own. Of course, the bigger cases that we already have

can also be filled with our 4.1s and Fellonis. There is a

huge variety of kit combinations, so it’s better to ask.

Ed: Ask a professional, and that’s where Chris

McKenzie and the team at PLS come in. Something like

light at this level is not an easy subject to get right and

so it’s good to rely on a good distributor who knows

what they’re talking about to help you into the decision

that’s best for your operation?

Roman: Absolutely, that’s the way. But of course

we also try to prepare standard kit variations because

you have customers who want to have it absolutely

individually and for this, we have the cases and the

lights and you can put it together your way.

For the catalogues of course, we want to offer ready

solutions and there are enough people who want to

have a kit that has everything and you just open it and

you go. So we have that as well.

Page 28

PhonePhonePhonePhone:::: 09090909 302 4100302 4100302 4100302 4100 Email: Email: Email: Email: infoinfoinfoinfo@kelpls.co.nz@kelpls.co.nz@kelpls.co.nz@kelpls.co.nz Website:Website:Website:Website: www.www.www.www.kelpls.co.nzkelpls.co.nzkelpls.co.nzkelpls.co.nz

LED dedocolor® sources; daylight, tungsten

& bicolour versions from 2700K to 6500K

The 40W DLED 4.1 and the 90W DLED 9.1

• Separate dimming control adjusts the intensity

with no colour change

• Wide 60° to extremely narrow 4° clean beam -

no stray light

• Passive cooling, no fan – no noise, for all dedo

focusing LED lights from 8W to 90 W

• Dedolight patented aspherical optics

• Providing astoundingly high efficiency

• Dedolight clean beam concept

• Precise barn door shadows

• Perfectly Even Light Distribution

Battery Power Supplies now available for the DLED 4.1 & 9.1

With Single Colour & BiColour Battery Power Supplies released for

both the 40W & 90W DLED’s, you have a truly portable lighting solution.

Combine with the V-Lock Mount Plate accessory for a cable-free shoot.

Wide range of accessories

available for the Dedo LED

series includes Soft Boxes

& Projection Imagers.

Ed: And here’s the master himself. We’re justhearing wonderful stories Mr Weigert …

Dedo: Interesting ain’t it?

Ed: Very interesting.

Dedo: Can we understand this …no.

Ed: It’s alchemy.

Dedo: The only thing that we careabout – it works. Go and talk to Mr Itō at Tokina. Tell him I sent you and askhim about any film … what was the firstFellini film, who played in it, when was itshot. He knows everything.

Ed: I have … I shouldn’t say fondmemories, but I have quite graphicmemories of Fellini’s Roma. When I firstsaw that I wondered what was going onin his mind?

Dedo: For me a classic one is I

Vitelloni – that’s a group of kids that live

in a small town and they don’t know

what to do and so they roam around and

they drink and they don’t do much and

they don’t have jobs and so on.

One day one of them has papa’s car, it’sa cabriolet and they drive out of town in the morning,but it’s already hot and they have street workers doingthe asphalt and it’s beastly and steamy and so on, andas they drive by one of them stands up in the car anddoes an obscene gesture, saying laboratori (followed bya raspberry) which means “phark the workers” and atthat moment the engine starts stuttering, the car stops…

Ed: Let me guess – it got filled with asphalt?

Dedo: So whenever I go to my Italian restaurant…

Ed: That’s how you call a waiter is it?

Dedo: … where the owner is working in thekitchen all day long, we greet each other, because I’malso a laboratori – a stupid worker. But you see they’reintelligent people, they don’t need to work as hard.They have weekends, they have holidays, they havefamilies. But if you’re totally stupid and do themaximum damage by starting a company …

Ed: But then you’ve got children like Roman to lookafter?

Dedo: If you have a company, that’s incurable.You’re stuck.

Ed: I’m sure Chris will be nodding at this point. Ahwell, somebody’s got to do it.

Dedo: But there’s relief. We should send you thevideo of a guru from Oregon I think. It’s quite famous,I never knew about him. He talks about the mostversatile word in the English language – the word“phark” ( not really but you can replace this withanother homophone.) It can fall into many grammaticalcategories. It can be used transitive – John “pharked”Mary. It can be used intransitive – Mary got “pharked”by John. It can even be used as a noun – Mary is agood “phark”. It can express many, many emotions,like anger – I got “pharked” at the used car lot;aggression – I knock your “pharking” head off;innovation – get a “pharking” bigger hammer … and itgoes on and on and on. It can also be very healthy – inthe morning when you get up, repeat a mantra afterme, say five times a “phark” – it clears your throat too!

Ed: Well, I think that will be my last interview for theday. NZVN

Page 30

Dedo: So I won’t disrupt you because from meyou only hear negative things.

Ed: No, no, Roman is singing your praises – that’swhy he’s employed isn’t he?

Dedo: Somebody has to be positive.

Ed: But hopefully you’re passing on your wisdom tothe young man?

Dedo: Wisdom … German dinosaurs know nowisdom.

Ed: Yes, but you’re Bavarian?

Dedo: I’m not, don’t insult me! If you want toknow when I am at home, if I want to paint a picturewhere I feel at home, give me a ruler to make astraight line. That’s where I’m at home. Bavaria hasthese bumps in the landscape.

Ed: Okay, you’re a flat earther then are you?

Dedo: Yes, it suits my mentality.

Ed: Now do you think Chris would be interested inyour Tokina lenses?

Dedo: It’s not for New Zealand; it’s not “our”Tokina lenses. I think we could put him in contact withthe Tokina boys and for anybody who is a film person totalk to Mr Itō is pure joy. Ask him for any film that Marcel Carné shot in 1932 and who was the costumedesigner, who was the cameraman, who acted in it … heknows everything about it, so he’s not only a lensperson. And there’s another product that they havethat may be of interest; it’s called a hydrophilic filter.

Ed: Does that repel water?

Dedo: Yes. We used to have rain deflectors …

Ed: Oh, those spinning things?

Dedo: That were spinning or shaking or vibrating,but they leave those to the sex shops now and now thisis on its own magically, no water stays on it. Exceptthat it gets tired, like filters in the old days whendinosaurs were young, you put filters in the darkbecause sunlight was no good for filters. This filterneeds ultraviolet, so if it has a bit fallen asleep, yougive it a shock of ultraviolet and it becomes hydrophilicagain.

Ed: Wow.

Dedo shares a good story with Roman and us.

ARRI CamerasOn the ARRI stand sur-rounded by cameras andlenses we have MarkusDuerr.

Ed: Now Markus tells methat he hasn’t been out onthe karaoke last night, buthe’s sounding a little bithusky; I think he’s beentalking a lot because theARRI stand has been verypopular. I notice a lot ofpeople around it and all ofthose sceptics who mighthave said “oh the AMIRA, ohthey should have donesomething better” havebeen proved wrong. It’sbeen very popular and verywell received. CorrectMarkus?

Markus: Totally correct,we are very happy with thesuccess of the AMIRA, wehave very good feedback,we have very good numbersof orders.

Ed: It took a little longer to get out than you hopedthough didn’t it?

Markus: Yes we couldn’t ramp up the production inthe speed as we would have wished for, so that gave usa little delay, but they’re catching up, so we hope todeliver more cameras even sooner.

Ed: Have you already made some upgrades in thesoftware?

Markus: Yes we have. The first major update inAMIRA is the SUP 1.1. This delivers a couple of featureswe have announced at the beginning; a wireless remotecapability, Bluetooth audio monitoring, a pre-recordbuffer so you can record into a buffer before you hit therecord button so that that is then added to your recordto clip. We have already implemented a lot of thefeedback from users that we got in the first month thatAMIRA was delivered, so we have improved our boot-uptime of the camera by more than 25% so it boots upnow in less than 15 seconds. We have implemented awaveform display – a lot of users asked for that inaddition to the zebra function and the false colourfunction for exposure control. They alsowanted to have a waveform to check theexposure. We have done this. We havecolour bars implemented to matchmonitors and more. A lot of things alsohappened under the hood – we have anew debayer algorithm, we haveimproved a lot of different things as partof SUP 1.1.

Ed: And the good thing is that theusers haven’t had to buy a new camera,as some other manufacturers tend to do?

Markus: Absolutely. That is ourstrategy with AMIRA, the same as thestrategy with ALEXA. With ALEXA, we’renow at SUP 10.0 and over the course ofmore than four years, we are alwaysable to update our cameras with totallynew functionality that we have notthought about when we developed the

camera, because there was just no demand for it, notechnology for it, so that is all possible because ourelectronics architecture is FPGA based and that allowsus to do dramatic changes in the functionality of thecamera just with a software update.

Ed: So that’s four years with the same basic cameratechnology in the background that you’ve been able toupdate?

Markus: We have also updated the camera on theelectronics side, but a customer who purchased thisALEXA four years ago benefits from the same softwareupdates as the customer who purchases a new ALEXA.So yes, the same functionality in terms of softwareupdates as the new ALEXA.

Ed: Have you ever done a comparison – put the twoside by side, your first firmware installed versus thelatest firmware and looked at the differences?

Markus: We could do that. We sometimesremembered the first version and thought “oh wow,that’s quite a while ago” and lots has happened inbetween.

Page 31

Marcus demonstrates how light the AMIRA really is.

Ed: And they’re all good things?

Markus: They are hopefully all good things yes. Thefeedback is good and that also leads us to anannouncement we made a few weeks ago on the AMIRAthat we now can record ProRes UHD. That is also by asoftware update; that is also because the sensor is themain foundation of the camera and it’s so good andthen we can implement new functionality just throughupdating our image path on the FPGAs.

Ed: So this UHD for the uninitiated is nearly 4K – it’s3,840?

Markus: We could probably talk for 2 hours aboutcertain aspects of 4K or not 4K. One of these is theconfusion about the terminology. 4K is what everybodytalks about, but 4K is only relevant for a cinema screen.4K has a little bit of a broader image. If people talkabout 4K, 90% mean UHD, because UHD is the formatwhich is on every monitor and that is what peopleassociate with 4K. We have here a 4K monitor if youlike, but of course, it’s really a UHD resolution becauseit’s a monitor. If you would go to the big screen hallhere at IBC or go to a movie theatre, then that wouldbe a 4K resolution on the projector and that is thedifference. People talk about 4K but mean UHD.

Ed: You’re keeping them honest?

Markus: What we do in our marketing language issometimes also talk about 4K because that is whatpeople understand and what people want to read, butwhen we talk about what the camera does, it’s alwaysUHD.

Ed: And at the moment, I’m actually being recordedin UHD and I’m looking at the picture on the screen andluckily Markus has slightly soft focused it, becausethere’s too much resolution there Markus. One thing Ihave noticed is that I have this stripy shirt on and, if Ijust do even a little slight movement, I can see theblurring in the stripes and this is at 25p, correct?

Markus: Exactly and that is also another aspect ofthe whole resolution topic. Just increasing the spatialresolution of an image does not necessarily improve thequality of the image. It’s only one aspect of the imagequality. So just to take one step further back – wedon’t have a new sensor in the camera, we use thesame sensor. How we achieve that ProRes UHDrecording is by a software update. On the sensor, wetake a larger portion of the sensor, approximately 3.2Kcut out of the sensor and then internally in the camera,upscale that to the UHD resolution, to 3.8K if you want,or 4K if you want.

So that is what we do by software and what we see atthe end is the delivery format in UHD. The basic qualityof our sensor is so good that it can easily accommodatethat higher resolution and we have done a lot ofcomparison between competitor cameras and our testcameras and we feel very, very well positioned againstour competition. We feel that our images are evensuperior to some competitors also in terms of sharpnessand resolution, so we are very positive about that. Andof course, that is only one aspect and if you talk aboutthe kind of behaviour when things move in images –that is the other topic. If you go to a TV shop, a shopselling TV screens, or if you go to the 4K shows herefrom other manufacturers, you will notice that theymost often show either stills or slow motion images,and that is not by accident. That is because you onlybenefit from the higher resolution if your image doesnot move, because as soon as something is moving inthe image, you get motion blur and motion blur you canonly avoid if you run on higher frame rates. If you nowwould run 4K also on higher frame rates, then 4K needsa lot more data ( pretty much 4 times the data ); if you

also want to increase the frame rate of the images toavoid motion blur and to benefit from higher resolutionswith moving images, then you would increase that evenfurther. So I imagine you would do 50p which is notoutrageous, I mean, that’s kind of a reasonable framerate, then you would double it again. So that makesthat all very difficult to handle for most of the workflowstypically customers in our area are …

Ed: But you can easily switch the AMIRA to 50p if youwanted?

Markus: You can run any frame rate up to 200frames, that’s no problem. On UHD, we are limited to60 frames per second but that would still be a goodframe rate. But people won’t do that anyway becausethe amount of generated data would be much too big.So if you do 4K, that’s nice, you can do that, but youneed to live with the truth that, if things move in yourimage, they’re going to be softer and they are evensofter as they would be in HD.

Ed: That’s 4K 25p?

Markus: Yes.

Ed: Because I use this comparison on a number ofoccasions, that to get 4K, you have to have every littledifferent piece of light falling on a different pixel. Assoon as you have any slight movement, either in thecamera or in the subject, and your light is falling acrosstwo pixels within one 25 frame, 1/50th of a second at180 degree shutter, you’re immediately down to highdefinition?

Markus: Right, exactly.

Ed: And also, in the cinematic sense, which part ofthat image is actually in 4K, because you have such atight focus if you’re doing an interview for example. Isit the nose, is it the cheek, is it the ear – which part isactually in 4K? So it just tends to reinforce this concept

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that, yes, 4K is a good idea, but there are lots of otherthings that make up a nice image?

Markus: I couldn’t have said that better myself.

Ed: Oh thank you, you’ve got a vacancy in marketinghave you?

Markus: Leave your CV at reception next timeyou’re in Munich … but that’s exactly the point. For 4K,the resolution is nice, but you need to increase imagequality. It’s a big misunderstanding that people alwaysassociate 4K with better image quality. That is totallynot true; it’s just a higher space for resolution and toget a better image quality you need to consider acouple of other factors as well.

Ed: Excellent. Now you were talking about bringingin the improvements that your customers have askedfor from the initial release of the AMIRA, and I knowone of them was “oh this is heavy.” Have you put theAMIRA on a diet or are there plans to do that?

delivers a very high image quality; and then you need ahardware architecture where you can do a lot ofupdates. We think that, with the ALEXA and AMIRAusing the same sensor, it is a benefit with AMIRA, abenefit from that sensor for the ProRes UHDcapabilities.

What we do with the ALEXA is that we have two kindsof functionality to accommodate the requirements forhaving a 4K or UHD delivery. One is we have an opengate mode where people can record the full sensorsection, the full sensor range into ARRI RAW which isthen again a lot of data.

Now we have announced the functionality that you alsocan use a 3.2K cut out like the AMIRA uses for theinternal upscaling. You can take that 3.2K cut out onthe ALEXA to record that to ProRes directly, so you havea ProRes 3.2K. That is a very data efficient workflow tothen in postproduction upscale that to UHD and that isyour final delivery format.

Ed: So you’ve taken some of thethings you’ve learnt in the developmentof the AMIRA and introduced those intothe ALEXA software?

Markus: Right. It’s pretty much, onthe sensor side, a kind of commondevelopment. We don’t have twodevelopment teams for the AMIRA andthe ALEXA, and there’s one developmentteam for the sensor. In the AMIRA, wehave higher processing power to do thatinternal upsampling out to the workflow;in the AMIRA world, it’s much more thatpeople want the final delivery formatalready recorded to the card.

On the other side, in the ALEXA domain,there’s normally a larger post processinvolved so people can also easilyupscale their images in the post process.That is where we see the kind ofdifferences in the workflows and that’s

why we implemented different functionality here interms of the final delivery format.

Ed: Now let’s move onto glass. I understand that, inthe AMIRA, you’ve actually made a new offer in lensmounts?

Markus: From the beginning, the AMIRA conceptwas that we have very easily interchangeable lensmounts. You can change the lens mount within 40seconds. At the first place, the PL mount is the typicalmount and the typical glass for a large sensor camera –but we also offer a B4 mount where you can use yourtwo-third inch glass or the zooms you have on yourENG cameras. You can put that on the AMIRA, usethem in the same way, you have the same angle ofview with these lenses by using our mount. Also, weoffer an adapter for that. So that is one way to (a)have a lower investment in the first place because youmay own that glass already from your previous camera;and (b) also to increase the possibilities to use thecamera for longer focal lengths – all that stuff which iseasier to accommodate with these kinds of two-thirdinch lenses.

The other option is the EF mount. With the EF mount,you have access to the whole world of still lenses fromCanon or from other third party manufacturers whichsupport that standard. That is also a very goodcompromise because they offer very good image qualityfor still images. Of course, they are compromised inmechanical quality and compromised in image breathingand that kind of stuff which is not that relevant forstills. But if you want to have an affordable solution in

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Markus: On a what … on a diet, no, no I think thefeedback sometimes went in that direction. That’s notonly because of the camera, it’s also because of thelenses. If you shoot with a large sensor, you need largelenses and they have a certain portion of the weight.We think the AMIRA is a very nicely balanced camera,so the feedback we got is that, if you put that on yourshoulder and you balance it out, it’s perfect forhandheld work. We have a lot of feedback from peoplesaying that it’s just exactly the right weight because,while you’re doing smooth handheld work, you alsoneed some kind of mass to have smoother movementsof the camera …

Ed: More inertia?

Markus: Yes. The camera can be too light as well,so I think we’re pretty well suited there, but of coursewe are always working on improvements on all sidesand maybe we can get also a little bit of weightreduction sometimes.

Ed: Okay, so that’s the AMIRA, now the ALEXA. Wedon’t normally cover the ALEXA because that’s reallyyour top end, but there have been so many examples ofmajor TV productions being recorded on the ALEXA andthat trend continues?

Markus: That is … I wouldn’t say surprising, but it’sa very positive experience that our ALEXA sales are stillmaintaining on a very high level and that is after thecamera is now on the market for more than four years.That kind of proves our concept that the first thing youneed is to have a really good sensor – a sensor which

the first place and you already have these kinds oflenses on your shelf, then you have a very nice way touse other lenses on the AMIRA camera. So you canalways use the best camera you can get and fit thelenses you have or you can afford to that camera.

Ed: That’s it, you’ve answered my next question – theperfect solution is an ARRI camera, ARRI glass, but ifyou’re starting out, you buy the ARRI camera, youmake do with what glass you’ve got or can afford; ifyou really need something special, just hire it for theshoot, but the investment to work on next is the glass?

Markus: Right, yes.

Ed: And of course ARRI is very well known for thehigh quality accessories that it manufactures, not justfor ARRI cameras, but for a whole range of cameras.Any hot items in the last six months to one year?

Markus: We introduced at NAB our new SMB-1which is a high end matte box which can also be tilted,so you can avoid reflections in the further stage bytilting the matte box. We have news on electroniccontrol systems, so we have a motor controller foraccessing the servos from the ENG style lenses like theFujinon Cabrio series or the Canon 17-120mm and wehave also a single motor controller which is a moreaffordable solution if you only want to control one lensfactor, like the focus for example via wireless or remotedevice.

Ed: So you’re always innovating?

Markus: We try to – that’s what we’re paid for.

Ed: “That’s what we love to do” you should say or“we’re German, what do you expect?” Can I put downthat you said one of those?

Markus: That’s okay. NZVN

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Storage DNA for AtomiseWe are at StorageDNA for Atomise and we have DanBright from the United States.

Ed: Now Dan, StorageDNA, this is something thatRichard Kelly’s particularly proud of. What do you guysdo, for those that don’t know?

Dan: StorageDNA … at our core we’re an archivalsystem, but we are heavily tied into the media andentertainment world and we’ve built a lot of intelligencewithin our archival system that differentiates us fromthe other systems that are out there. What we do is weallow you to archive your data, whether that be asimple archive where you’ve got a bunch of folders thatyou’re writing to LTO tape, or a more complex workflowwhere you want to actually archive things from one ofyour editing systems; let’s say you’re using Avid orFinal Cut or Adobe and you want to archive the materialfrom a particular sequence or a Final Cut project, youcan actually export a file to StorageDNA, we can pick upthe media files that are relevant to that, and archivethat off automatically for you.

Ed: It sounds as though your expertise is inmetadata. Anybody can store footage onto some drivesomewhere, but the big question is being able to find itagain in a hurry?

Dan: Yes, so one of the things that StorageDNA reallywanted to do was, not just to let you archive thematerial but, as you said, index, catalogue, extract themetadata, make it accessible, make it searchable. SoStorageDNA in our new 3.5 evolution product, that’sbeen the real goal, to enhance what we call theminiMAM, which, as we archive the material, we’reextracting clip information, so we’re getting a catalogueof your clips and we’re extracting the metadata for allthose files of clips and making them presentable in theinterface and searchable. But one of the things that we

recognise is that people often have their own metadatathat they also want to tag their assets with. So weallow you to create custom metadata templates thatyou can then apply to the assets that you’ve archived,so you can tag particular media or clips with theparticular metadata and then search on those metadatafields within your archive.

Ed: Now does it only work with LTO?

Dan: No, we are making plans at the end of year toship a product that will archive to Sony ODA, and wealso have unofficially – I don’t know when we will be

presenting it, but we also may allow you to archive toNearLine disc as well.

Ed: You mean hard discs?

Dan: Yes.

Ed: It’s interesting you mention the Sony optical disc,or the Blu-ray disc, because Sony has its own solutionfor that, but I guess you’ve recognised that thelongevity of optical disc is there, but you can do thesearch and retrieve better?

Dan: Right – well there’s a couple of points to that.Obviously, the robustness of the optical disc and itsretrieval speed is key. We’ve been able to do somethings with LTFS that we’ll be launching later this yearthat will do a lot of things with tape, and allow it to actmore like a NearLine than ever before. So we’ve gotsome things coming up that will actually enable you totreat your LTFS in certain situations, just like aNearLine, where you’ll be able to transcode directlyfrom LTO rather than having to pull it off onto a harddrive and then run your transcode. So doing workflowsnow directly from LTO tape, which previously was anightmare because you’re at the mercy of howapplications access the LTO files, but we’ve been able tonarrow down a set of media types that we can workwith, where we can actually prevent a lot of thatthrashing about on tape.

Ed: How can that be possible because you might havesomething right at the start of the tape and you mighthave the next bit right at the end of the tape?

Dan: What we’re doing is we’re actually loadingparticular areas of the tape and then caching those intomemory and allowing the application to work with sortof a hybrid of tape and RAM to enable us to access thefile quickly.

Ed: You must have quite a bit of RAM there?

Dan: Well believe it or not, the information in a lot ofthe media files that’s needed is not huge sections of thetape; it’s really the header information and metadatainformation. It’s specific to certain file types, but we’vebeen testing it so far and the results have been verypositive.

Ed: Okay, 100% open archive – I guess that’s got tobe a moving target though; that’s got to be now, butthese manufacturers keep coming up with somethingnew?

Dan: Well the nice thing about the system that wehave is that we built it on LTFS which is already a non-proprietary open format, and if you’re familiar withLTFS, basically IBM, Quantum and HPhave a consortium where they agreeupon what the next set of standards are,and anyone that has an LTO 5 or 6 drivewith LTFS loaded can take a tape that’sbeen written in LTFS and load it up andmount those files just like a hard drive.So it is a bit of a moving target in somerespects, but we’ve built our applicationon LTFS to prevent a lot of theproprietary problems that have beenaround with traditional tape archivesolutions.

Ed: Now you’re saying that somebodywho might be currently looking at anLTO tape solution might best wait untilyou’ve got the optical disc solution?

Dan: No, not at all, because we thinkthat the LTO tape with LTFS is actuallygoing to be just as big as optical disc …it’s already much bigger. The speed atwhich the LTO tapes are already writing

and the proposed speeds that are supposedly comingout with generation 7, and the price which the LTOcartridges are at right now, all make it a verycompelling solution for not just long-term archive now,but with some of the things we’ve come out with,actually using it in your daily workflows. We haveseveral customers who are using LTO in a more activeNearLine format by archiving their RAW footage on LTOtape and then running conforms every day to bring backa hi res media that they’re editing from. Yes, opticaldisc is certainly a challenger in the market and, becauseof the way we’ve written the software, we can write tooptical disc, but we still see a huge future for LTFS andLTO tape.

Ed: I guess there’s no reason why you couldn’t haveboth, but as you wanted to increase your archivestorage or your capabilities, you would start to add theoptical disc rather than more LTO?

Dan: Well it really depends on how comfortable theclient is. A lot of customers can expand their existinglibraries to increase their LTO capacity, but if there is acompelling workflow that requires optical disc or if acustomer is more comfortable with the speed anddurability of optical disc … you know LTO tapes aremeant to last, with the materials they’re coming outwith now, 40-50 year shelf life, so the days of tapesdeteriorating within 10-20 years are done, and nowtape technology has really moved in leaps and boundsover the past 5 years, and with the advent of LTFS it’sreally opened up a lot of application vendors as well tobe able to use it as a viable media. Now optical discsare still in their infancy right now, so it will beinteresting to see how the market responds, butStorageDNA is committed to at least offering customersthe option of going in either direction. The ODA productis still being developed and tested right now – we don’texpect it until probably the end of the year, but wehave a demo even set up today where we’re actuallywriting to optical disc. It really depends on thecustomer’s comfort levels. The ODA offers some of thethings that the LTO … they have libraries now for theODA where you can have several ODAs loaded into alibrary at once, but again cost, speed, durability andaccess are all going to become critical factors in thatdecision. But we hope that with the introduction ofwhat we’re calling our Smart Access Technology, whichis going to allow you to access LTO more like aNearLine, that we’ll be able to bridge that gap a little bitbetween the random access speed of ODA and thesequential access of LTO.

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Ed: I couldn’t have put it better myself. Now Dan,one of the issues with LTO is that read/write speed ofan individual tape which has been solved in the harddisc world by having a RAID arrangement; you’relooking at doing something similar with tape?

Dan: Yes. One of the issues that we’ve seen is whenyou’re dealing with certain file systems where maybethe write speeds for writing files on a single stream to asingle tape drive aren’t performing quite as fast asthey’d like. One of the things that StorageDNA ismoving towards now, with our 4.0 product towards theend of the year, is to start doing things in parallel. Sothis means that I can take a large collection of datasitting out on my SAN or my hard drives and tellStorageDNA that this is what I need archived and tell us“I’ve got 2 tapes or 4 tapes or 8 tape drives” and wecan actually split the data and they’ll write in parallel sothat your aggregate throughput now is 4x, 8x orwhatever it is that your capacity of drives are. Wherewe’ve noticed that’s really critical is not just on thearchival side to get things onto tape, but when peopleare trying to bring things back quickly, they’ve got acouple of clips they have to get back as soon aspossible, now we can tell them look, we can actuallynow break up that restore process assuming that the

clips are on different tapes, we can load 2 tapes, 4tapes, 8 tapes at a time as part of that restorecollection of files and bring them back in parallel aswell.

Parallelisation is a very important thing that we’removing toward because we recognise that it’s not onlyimportant to the enterprise level guys, but even the midand small market guys can really benefit from thistechnology.

Ed: So you’re moving to NearLine storage as opposedto archive I guess?

Dan: Well yes … conceptually we’re trying to movetowards making LTO and LTFS a more of a NearLinemedium than it is today and part of the advantage of aNearLine and disc is yes, I can write as many files as Iwant at a time. But we’re trying to again push theboundaries of what we’re doing with LTFS to make it asclose to a NearLine as we can.

Ed: Was that parallelisation?

Dan: Yes.

Ed: Z’s or S’s?

Dan: I guess it’s a “z” for us, but …

Ed: That’s okay, I’ll throw you back there. NZVN

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Avid for AtomiseWe are at Avid for Atomise with Ren Middleton fromAvid Australia.

Ed: Ren, the big news has got to be Media Composer4K. Everybody’s been waiting for this for quite sometime – there have been workarounds, but people in thisindustry don’t like workarounds, they like to work nativeand no mucking round – now it’s there?

Ren: That’s right and now they have it. We haven’tdelayed it, but we’ve looked at the whole workflow, soit’s not just about having 4K in Media Composer, it’sabout the full workflow and as part of our AvidEverywhere strategy and the media central platform,it’s an important part of that. So we just don’t wantpeople to be able to access Media Composer on theirdesktop as an application, be it 1K, HD, 4K, 2K … wewant to be able to expose that to multipleusers with remote workflows as well. So it’sa really important strategy and part of themedia central platform that we join all thedots and release it as a full workflowproduct suite, not just focusing on singlepoint products.

Ed: If I can make a slight diversion here –I’ve come to realise in the last year or so indoing these shows that 4K on its own isn’tactually the only thing. Just becausesomething’s 4K it doesn’t mean that it’s thebest. Is that true also in your side of thebusiness?

Ren: Yes, I agree and I think the importantdistinction is resolution independence, sowhilst we’re releasing and highlighting 4K atthis show, things will change. Japan, forinstance, is very focused on 8K at themoment and this will continue to grow upand up, so we’re making sure that thewhole platform is ready for resolutionindependence, be it 4K or whatever. I thinkprobably the other distinction is that native4K editing is okay, but it takes up hugebandwidth and huge storage as well, so oneof the other important things is that we’vereleased a new codec.

You may be aware of DNxHD which has been a verysuccessful HD codec made for Avid but that’s beingused by everybody. We’ve now released a new codecwhich is DNxHR, so high resolution. You can still havelow bitrate 4K media if you like, so that means you canreduce your storage capacity and you don’t have tohave as much bandwidth requirement on your storage.Now the important thing is that you could edit in thatresolution if you wanted to, then relink to the full nativehi res files at a later date. So we’re really covering offall areas of the requirement here.

Ed: In terms of resolution, what’s the comparison?

Ren: DNxHD is the HD codec that we have, 1920x1080and now we’ve released DNxHR which has variousflavours up to 4K.

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8

We are now talking to Deepraj Sandhar from Avid inDubai.

Deepraj: The DNxHR codec is a codec for resolutionshigher than HD, so any of those resolutions we supportin the project, so 2K, UHD, 4K can be encompassedwithin this wrapper. As Ren was saying, a lot of peopleare acquiring 4K but usually the camera acquisition isnot the format you want to edit in, because it’s eithergoing to be highly compressed or it’s not actually aneditable codec. So you need an interim place to go toand, in many senses, DPX files which are uncompressedare great to work with, but have a huge bandwidth andalso cost on postproduction houses. We support ProResfor example, we support DNxHR, so you’ll be going to ahigh resolution codec, you will edit in that codec andthen for TV, you may just output from that codec. Butfor film or high end commercials, you may then relinkto the hi res DPX and then do a finish on those DPX andoutput DPX files as well. So much like the workflowswe were seeing in HD, but it’s dependent on who you’redelivering to. You will choose to work in a normal codecwhich is, for example, DNX or ProRes within Avid, andthen if you’re going to the commercials or films, youwould move on to a DPX workflow and finish on the DPXfiles at the same time.

Ed: So why wouldn’t you go in a generic type like anH.264, H.265 type codec?

Deepraj: Well our DNX codec has been used with ourHD codecs as well, so it’s a SMPTE standard which weratified and it’s also a codec which the application hasbeen ratified for as well. So going for an H.264 or anH.265 wrapper within an MXF format isn’t necessarilygoing to give us the bandwidth for the data rates we’retrying to get to our customers. If you look at ourDNxHR codec, it’s around about 650 megabits a second,which is four times larger than DNxHD 220, but for the4x more in terms of data rate, you’re getting morebandwidth, you’re getting an efficient codec and moreimportantly, you’re getting the best quality on theactual screen which you may not get with other types ofcompression.

Ed: So are you getting the camera manufacturersonside?

Deepraj: It’s a bit early to say … they get onsidewith their HD for example, having a QuickTime with aDNxHD codec inside the camera as well, so that’ssomething we’ll be working with, but not at themoment. If the camera codecs are their own types offormat, like RED for example, then from that we’llgenerate a DNX file. But what wouldn’t surprise me in

the future is if they had native DNX recording cameras,like you have at the moment with the ARRI for example– they’re going to implement those codecs well. But Icouldn’t say, we can’t confirm whether it’s going tohappen yet or not.

Ed: It would be quicker to start with some of the off-board recorders such as the Codex?

Deepraj: Yes definitely. Codex is a big partner ofours; AJA with the Ki Pro are a big partner of ours aswell, so as this becomes more prominent as thisapplication gets released, then we’ll start to see thosepartners coming onboard as well.

Ed: On the other side of it, isn’t it a case of “oh dear,not another codec”?

Deepraj: I wouldn’t say “oh dear, not another codec”– you need a codec, there has to be a codec somewhereand luckily the codec is an established codec ratherthan a new codec that’s coming out in the field oranything like that. A codec is needed unless you’ve gota lot of money, a lot of storage and a lot of computers.

Ed: No, none of us have that.

Deepraj: A free codec is probably the best optionthen.

Ed: Right, what else is Media Composer now offering?

Ren: Well Media Composer is probably just onecomponent of part of the bigger story I mentionedbefore, but there’s other workflows that go with it, soI’ll jump into a product called Media Director which isfairly new and it’s for file based ingest. That’s also 4Kcapable, so if you have file formats that you want tobring in, you can transcode them to one of the DNXcodecs, DNxHR codecs that Deepraj has just mentioned,but that will also push the hi res media onto third partystorage or onto our storage, so that’s part of thatworkflow whereby you can relink to that hi res file if youwant to output in full hi res at a later date.

Ed: Of course, the common belief is that people wantto work in their native format – however, if you’reworking in a collaborative environment, which Avid isobviously the leader in, you’ve got to have a commonformat for everybody?

Ren: Yes and that’s fine. You can do that – if you havethe storage and the bandwidth capability, you canabsolutely do that with hi res.

There’s no issue about that. But, in general, what mostproduction houses and broadcasters do is that they’lluse a lower res, so DNxHR to edit and then if they needto send it to playback or if they want to master then

they’ll relink to the other media files. Sothat just keeps your storage and yourbandwidth and your network requirementsdown to as low as you can possibly go.But yes, if you have the bandwidth andinfrastructure we can have collaborativeworkflows with native files.

Ed: Okay, next?

Ren: MediaCentral | UX I think issomething that is quite important. I’m notsure whether you’ve seen it before …

Ed: I’ve heard of MediaCentral.

Ren: It all started with our storageproducts. We have ingest and playoutdevices and ISIS 5500, ISIS 7500 for ourcollaborative workflows. We’ve got alsoan artist suite which has our traditionalproducts like Media Composer or like ProTools and products like that – Sibelius isanother one – so the way that we’re doingwith the Avid Everywhere strategy in

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Deepraj (left) from Avid.

MediaCentral is we can expose this media out throughthe Internet effectively in a number of ways. So youmay have an IOS device, you may have a web browseror you may have Media Composer in the fieldsomewhere and you can remotely connect to this mediawhich is pretty powerful and pretty effective. Evenfrom that Media Composer point of view, if you’re out inthe field, you can ingest media locally and then you cansend that media back into the centralised collaborativeenvironment as well. All of the metadata is retainedwith that media as you’re sending it. So it’s a two-wayworkflow. With the web browser only, you’re stillcapable of doing edits, you can do dissolves, you canlook at your Newsroom rundown, you can combine yourNewsroom rundown with the media, you can edittogether so that you can retain the metadata, the sluginformation from the iNews rundown all the waythrough the workflow. For a journalist in the field, theycan also write their script and if you’re a Newsproducer, you can even approve things remotely via anIOS device or an Android or a web browser. I guess I’mtrying to describe that it has really grown out to a verypowerful sort of workflow. There’s even another layeron top of that which is Interplay Media AssetManagement (Interplay MAM) which enables largerenterprises to hook up with their business systems, beit traffic systems or third party products, transcodedevices or archives when you can store in archive andretrieve and do other different workflows that you mayrequire, from site to site, externally or perhapsinternally. The other product that we’ve got is Media |Distribute and this is for social media publishing. It’sreally good …

Ed: Really – and you want to get into that space too?

Ren: We’re doing it, we’re doing it. So you can takeyour Media Composer sequence that you’ve edited in aMedia Composer or in MediaCentral remotely and thenusing that same MediaCentral interface, but a differenttab on it, it can then determine where you want topublish that media. You might click the Facebookbutton, the Twitter button or YouTube button; you canadd scripting information or, if you’re in the Newsenvironment, you can suck that straight in from yourNewsroom system, edit it and then post it directly, andthen we’ll integrate with transcode devices in the backend, all seamlessly to the operator and then actuallypublish that to those sites. We have a lot of interest inthat because it brings that social media publishing backinto the Newsroom or into the production house. Theother thing is analytics. Our goal – and we’ve startedthis journey – is to retrieve analytics from Twitter orFacebook on how many people have viewed things, anddisplay that information back in your interface or iniNews, so you can start making live editorial decisionson what you may want to produce or publish or change.

So we’re round circling the whole productionthings, we don’t have this linear hand offanymore, so it’s a good story.

Ed: So it’s a good thing is it Ren?

Ren: Of course it’s a good thing Grant. Geton the platform, Avid Everywhere, that’swhat it’s all about.

Ed: Now Ren, the other two stories thatI’ve done for Atomise have beenStorageDNA and MOG and both of themhave said they work really well with Avid.How do you feel about that – wouldn’t youlike to have all that business yourself?

Ren: No, in a sense. So as part of our …and I know I’m harping on about the AvidEverywhere strategy, but a part of thestrategy in the MediaCentral platform is ouropenness and we’re now the most open

vendor around. We’ve just released our connectivitytoolkit, so this enables third parties through variousAPIs and SDKs …

Ed: What’s an API and an SDK – I thought that was atype of tape wasn’t it?

Ren: No, that was TDK. So, different ways ofintegrating third party products. We work very closelywith lots of third party products so that they can be partof the platform as well. So in fact what they can do,they can come onboard, they can develop effectively anapplication if you like and then we’ll certify it and weeven give them the capability through a publicmarketplace to be able to sell their product integrationthrough the Avid marketplace. We have about 600development partners that work with Avid and thatintegrate with Avid, so we are the most open platformavailable. In fact, here at this show, we’re highlighting10 different manufacturers that we’ve integrated in aspart of the MediaCentral platform. Some of them arecompetitive products. We have an asset managementcompany that we just want to highlight the fact thatwe’re open and that we want to work … it’s all about thesolution for the customer at the end of the day. Theyspend a lot of time and money trying to glue thesedifferent components together. We want to make iteasier through MediaCentral platform and theconnectivity toolkit to make that happen. So we’reincredibly open and yes, we do work with MOG, wehave a good relationship with them and StorageDNA aswell, and we’ve got plenty of sites that integrate that,and we’ve got some in New Zealand.

Ed: That’s got to be good for the customer. Now,we’ve talked about this before, where you’ve got tostart is with the students haven’t you? You’ve got toget Avid out there to the students and hopefully we’regoing to be doing something on the education market inNew Zealand very shortly with Richard … is that right?

Ren: That’s right. Look we’ve made really goodinroads into the education area. I know that Richardhas been flat out there and he’s working with a lot ofeducators and I know that many of them really areonboard with Avid products now with Media Composerand ISIS. From an Australian perspective as well,we’ve kicked some really good goals and so we’vebrought a lot of universities on to the platform with fullworkflows, which is tremendous because it has to berelevant to the market and Media Composer and Avid isthe market leader by far in production and broadcast,so educators are realising that they need to be relevantand train their students on relevant products.

Ed: Well, we’ll see what Richard comes up with veryshortly shall we?

Ren: We shall, I’ll prompt him.

Page 39

NZVN

Lupolux Lightsfor Gencom

For Gencom, we are atLupolux and we have AndreaLupo from Italy.

Ed: Lupolux – this issomething new for us.Andrea, how many yearshave you been in businessmaking lights – I guess thisis a family business?

Andrea: The companywas born in 1932 with thename Lupo which is my lastname. It was founded bymy grandfather and wespecialised in professionalcameras for photographers,so it’s very old. Then it gotsplit in 2010 and Lupoluxwas born, so the newcompany is now four years old and we decided tospecialise in the small Fresnels, beginning with smallHMI Fresnels and now LED Fresnels which we see asactually the future of lighting.

Ed: Did you see some opening in the market wherethese sorts of lights weren’t being produced to the bestpossible standards … why did you choose this particularstyle of light?

Andrea: We chose the Fresnels because we saw thatthere was a possibility of making good sales with smallFresnels because usually Fresnels are quite big. That’sgood for studios, but some customers, like videocustomers, ENG customers, even photographers, theyneed something lightweight and so we add small bodiesto fit in HMI lamps and when the LED came of age, liketwo years ago, with big LED COB chips, we tried to fitthem inside the two fixtures we had and they fit verywell. So we understood that customers didn’t want anymore the HMIs and they were very excited about thenew LED Fresnels.

Now tenders are made with specifications for LEDFresnels equivalent to 600 Watt, equivalent to 1K, even2K because a lot of people in the video market, in TVstudios, they have tungsten lights and they need toreplace them because of going “green”, because ofheat, because of power consumption. At the beginning,like three years ago, they didn’t have the choice of LEDFresnels, but now they’ve realised that severalcompanies are making good LED Fresnels which work,which have a good output, a good quality of light, sothey can really put away the old tungsten and go withthis new technology.

Ed: What really impresses me immediately with theselights is that they are very light. That of course wouldbe a concern if they were plastic, but I have seen thatthey are certainly very robust because you’re not usingplastic, you’ve got a special material here?

Andrea: Yes, we use an alloy, nylon injected withcarbon fibre. We couldn’t use plastic for HMIs becauseit would melt, so we had to inject the nylon with carbonfibre and we still do this for LEDs, even if we could justuse plastic. In this way it’s more robust and it can takea beating. Obviously it’s not as tough as metal, but it’sa very good compromise between weight andtoughness.

Ed: They’re still used in rental houses I understand?

Andrea: Yes. Actually the core market is studio andvideographers, cinematographers, photographers andrentals.

Ed: And also what impresses me – you’ve only gottwo sizes of fixture, but then within those two sizes, youcan either have a daylight or a tungsten, so really thereare four varieties in light and that covers quite a widespectrum of uses?

Andrea: Yes, we now have a 50 Watt equivalent to650 Watt tungsten and a 90 Watt equivalent to 1Ktungsten and they sell very well. We are planning onexpanding the line with something equivalent to 2K, butdifferently from other companies we are waitingbecause we don’t want to make something big andheavy and super expensive. We want to makesomething quite small with a big lens, but still small andlightweight so that people can have a 2K equivalent LEDFresnel but at a reasonable price, a reasonable size. Sowe will expand the line with something bigger, it justtakes time.

Ed: And also they’re very clean because there’s noexternal ballast – everything’s inside the lamp body. Ofcourse, being Fresnels they’re focusable – what’s thefocus range that you offer?

Andrea: It goes from 12 degrees to 55 degrees inflood, so it’s like a traditional tungsten or HMI.

Ed: But of course the real test is how even the spreadis in that flood?

Andrea: Actually, customers usually find that it’smore even than tungsten or HMIs because there’s noreflector. You know the problem with evenness withbulbs is that you have a reflector and it projectsshadows. With LEDs, there’s no reflector. All the lightgoes forward, so it’s very even.

Ed: And the only accessory that goes on the front ofthis is a set of barn doors to which you can clip yourgels or your softs or whatever you want to put on thefront. So a really simple easy package?

Andrea: We also have the option to have gels put infront of the lens, like round gels, traditional but semi-rigid filters, so you don’t need a frame. You just put therigid filter and it stays like a gel clip in the metal frameand it’s very easy. The point of these lights, and also ofthe company, is making a few products sold in goodnumbers, easy to use, easy to sell, so we believe inmaking things easy for everybody.

Page 40

Note: This is not Andrea in the photo, but who’s complaining?

Ed: Now what about the stands – are they yours aswell, or do you have to get your own stands?

Andrea: We sell stands on request. We make lightsso we offer stands.

Ed: I see that there are bags here with kits – so yourkits are just the lights and the customer provides theirown stands?

Andrea: Yes. We can provide very professional kitsif customers want them, but usually the advice is put

the kit together yourself because it’scheaper – because we make lightsourselves but we buy cases, we buystands, so customers will pay twice tobuy the accessories from us.

They should buy the lights from us … I

mean if they want all the rest we can

provide it, but we specialise in lighting

and lights.

Ed: There’s not a lot of colour on this

stand Andrea, it’s black and white?

Andrea: Yes it’s simple – like the

website and all the adverts we do are in

black and white because we like the

colours.

We used to sell a lot in photography and

in that field this combination is very

appreciated, it’s very stylish …

Ed: Italian fashion huh?

Andrea: We take a great deal of effort in offering

something professional which works in time, which isreliable, but which also has a very nice design, because

now I don’t think it’s like 20 years ago when you could

sell anything, any shape … now everybody wants

something nice from the Smart Phone to the car, so we

want to offer also good design.

Ed: And quality too?

Andrea: And quality too, of course. NZVN

Page 42

Elemental for GencomWe are at Elemental Technologies for Gencom withKeith Wymbs.

Ed: Now this is something a little bit new to all of usand I see in a number of places the words “Cloud” and“server” so that gives us an idea of what you’re allabout – just give us your “ten cent” version?

Keith: Elemental is a video processing softwarecompany. Over the last four years, we’ve been focusedon the multiscreen space, so we offer a variety ofproducts that are helping content owners and contentdistributors get their video from what was typicallydestined for a TV set, and convert that content over sothat it can go to a multiscreen environment withdelivery to Smart Phones, Tablets, gaming consoles,and Smart TVs. Over the last four years, we primarilyhave been focused on two areas – one is file basedencoding which entails con-verting files that weretypically going to a video-on-demand (VOD) set top boxand converting those over for multiscreen delivery orover-the-top TV types of applications that you wouldfind on an iPad and, as well, live processing. We havetwo flagship products. Elemental Server performs file-based processing, and Ele-mental Live live streamscontent. That live streaming can be sporting eventsthat last an hour long or 24x7 types of operationswhere we’re taking down live feeds from satellite andconverting those over for different types of multiscreendelivery.

We’ve powered a lot of landmark customers in this areaall over the world. We’ve sold in 50 countries and wenow have more than 500 accounts. On a global basis,we work with media leaders such as HBO, ESPN,Comcast, the BBC, Telefónica – and many othercompanies like that.

Customers in your region that we’ve publicly disclosedinclude Foxtel in Australia, Sky Racing in Australia, and

the University of Auckland in New Zealand. All of thesewere actually some of our early customers for ElementalServer. In New Zealand, we’re proud to partner withGencom as our in-country distributor.

Ed: So this is a service you sell, it’s not actually abox?

Keith: It’s software. We productise in a variety ofways – one way is as an appliance, so it’s a full turnkeysystem, but we have a very powerful solution that isbuilt on the acceleration from graphics processors, so ingeneral we can do more in a given footprint than any ofour competitors.

As a software company, everything that we do is on “offthe shelf” hardware. We can virtualise in standard datacentre environments, private Cloud environments, aswell as going all the way to the public Cloudenvironment. About a year and a half ago, we launchedour Elemental Cloud platform which is built on AWS( Amazon Web Services ) so we can enable Cloudscenarios, sometimes pure environments. An exampleof a customer that is relevant in that area for us, isAccess Digital Entertainment. In New Zealand andAustralia, they own the rights for a lot of Hollywoodcontent and they do all the processing on ElementalCloud for their applications.

Ed: So to put it simply, what they buy from you is the

software, they have to have their own hardware and

everything that they do, if they wanted to, could be

totally in-house. There’s nothing that goes out, there’s

nothing that goes to the Cloud unless they want it to …

unless they wanted the Cloud as part of their storage ordistribution system?

Keith: Yes, and if our customers want to have ahybrid where they build infrastructure for their knowndemand, they can build the infrastructure for that, andfor big increases in demand they could spike it to the

Cloud. We call this Cloud-bursting, where you canbasically fit the demand curve through peaks andvalleys.

Demand for processing can spike dramatically within agiven day – or even a couple hours – for somecustomers. So having the ability to spike theprocessing to the Cloud prevents wasted capitalexpenditures. If you’re building fixed infrastructure forthe peak in video processing demand, then you couldhave 30, 40, 50, 60% of your infrastructure not beingused at any one point in time. Elemental Cloud helpseliminate that waste.

Ed: Do you also offer the service where the particularclient doesn’t have any of their own software or any oftheir own server systems, that you can take a streamand do all the conversions for them?

Keith: No we don’t act as a managed serviceprovider in any way; we enable companies that do thatand we’re actually an enabler for probably a dozendifferent managed services companies. We made anannouncement in this area with The Platform at IBC2014 earlier in September. They are a managedservices CMS and we’re the underlying encodingprovider for them. We have a number of others that wehaven’t announced yet. This is an area where weprovide a video processing engine that’s extremelypowerful and robust and flexible because it is software.To showcase the flexibility of our software engines, atIBC we also announced our new video delivery platform,Elemental Delta. Delta is our move to the right in thevideo value chain beyond the encoding and videopreparation market to the video distribution side of thevalue chain.

Ed: You’re moving to the right which is conservative,but is there a left?

Keith: Funny! Going to the left in videovernacular would be going into the contributionencoding side; we’re not necessarily doing that. We’reknown for being at the core, creating the assets and wehaven’t done much in the delivery side. ElementalDelta essentially takes inputs from our compressionsystems and helps customers create customer

experiences that can be verycustomised and very efficient interms of how the content isactually delivered. In themultiscreen world, there are alot of complexities to deliveringto all the different devices. Attimes, you want to deliver veryhigh quality, high bitratecontent to a Smart TV, but youwouldn’t want to necessarily dothat for an iPhone, because youcould deliver to the iPhone butyou wouldn’t see the qualitydifference.

Elemental Delta helps with that,and it also helps withapplications like catch-up TV,pause TV, start-over TV, or liveto VOD conversion where youtake a live stream of a sportingevent and create clips ofhighlights or clips of differentperiods in a match, or inningsin a baseball game. Thebusiness owners of pay TVoperators and content pro-

ducers are really thinking about consumers and howthey want to consume the content. Things are movingaway from a traditional linear mindset for video deliveryand the willingness to sit back and watch video on theterms of the provider.

Consumers want instant gratification. They want toinstantly get clips and snippets of videos relevant tothem or go into an environment where they can startover if they miss the first 20 minutes of their favouriteshow. In a linear world, you can’t really go back to thebeginning but with an iPad delivery or Smart TV you caneasily go back to the earlier part of content that youmay have missed.

Ed: Okay, just as a general question – there are Iknow, a number of big players who don’t get intoowning their own software, and I know there’s anexample in TVNZ with their Video On Demand service.They have a provider who does everything for them.Whereas, what you’re offering here is something thatthey would have internally; they would have thesoftware internally, the server internally – it wouldcertainly seem to be a quicker version, but do you needto have a greater technical team to manage this ratherthan that external platform?

Keith: In general, we have the three flavours,where you can either have a full turnkey system or avirtualised machine instance or a Cloud platform. Itdoes require a technical team to kind of run it, but inthe Cloud environment in particular, we’ve built aplatform that is basically built on rules.

There needs to be a certain setup and we tend to targetthe high end of the market where they’re extremelyconcerned about the experience that’s being deliveredto the consumer. There are companies that will take anend to end managed services solution and a lot of themare actually using Elemental underneath for the videoprocessing, but we don’t stand as that kind ofoutsourced arm on behalf of the customer. It’ssomething that we could do, maybe over time, but whatwe’re really good at is building the core technology andwe want the world to use that technology for processingand delivering multiscreen video.

Page 43

Keith with some Elemental tonic.

Ed: I would think that the two benefitsof having it yourself is firstly security,and secondly speed – that you get itback to air quicker than you would if yousent it out to some external provider?

Keith: I think you’re right,especially from a security standpoint.One of the things that we’re enablingwith our new delivery solution ElementalDelta is we’re taking a lot of ourcapabilities in digital rights management(DRM) and encryption – which are key toprotecting content – and providing thatend to end. Because we do encryptionwe can do decryption; we’ve allowed forscenarios where, if you’re storing anasset for VOD types of playback, weactually store it in an encrypted formatand then do Just-In-Time encryption andpackaging for delivery to the differentplayer devices that are out there. Thereare a lot of times where you actually change the DRM –it may be PlayReady DRM, but it could be version 1.5for a TV set which cycles upgrades over a yearly basis,or it could be version 2.1 for a tablet. You don’t want tohave to store all those different versions. Being able todo this on the fly ensures that you have contentprotected end to end, because while it may be at restsitting on a storage system, it’s encrypted in thatsystem.

The other point that you bring up in terms of speed –yes, when you have it all in-house, particularly with us,we can take assets that are 2 hours long and create aVOD asset in less than 20 minutes. So that’s extremelyfast. Most systems take at least real time, sometimeslonger than real time.

When you get into the 4K world, then next generationvideo compression like HEVC, it takes even longer. Oursystems happen to be very, very powerful and able toapply that power to that more extreme processingscenario that is coming in the future. With more pixelsfor 4K, or when you’re doing next generationcompression there are more decisions that are made inthe encoding algorithm, and it all takes more time to dothis next generation processing.

Ed: How small a solution can you provide? One of theareas that is obviously growing is these little webchannels, the smaller broadcasters – well they’re notreally broadcasters, they’re webcasters, and they mighthave set themselves up in a garage somewhere andthey might have a few programmes that they’rerunning, but if they want to deliver on multiple levels, isElemental a bit too much of a Mercedes for them?

Keith: You know, it is a high end option, even forthose guys, but I would say that we’ve probably donethousands of YouTube Live streams over the course ofthe last 3 years. YouTube Live was one of the firstintegrations that we did. We were one of the first twovendors qualified by YouTube for live streaming, and sothat goes all the way down to the individual not quiteprosumer level, but those that are trying to disrupt themedia industry.

So we do have a lower level of system that we provideto them that is 1) space efficient, 2) quiet, portable andmore cost effective, because a lot of those streams, it’sjust a one to one translation. We tend to specialise inapplications that require converting content from amezzanine input to 20 different versions, where itrequires a lot of horsepower, but we also haveapplications that are one to one. Sometimes ground

processing for a live event is just transcoding off acamera and then sending it up to the Cloud and makingthe different versions that are required from the Clouddirectly.

Ed: And they can build on that can they, so if youstart out with a small package, you can add streams?

Keith: Yes, you can start out and not utilise thefull system and it will get capped out only when it’s fullyutilised later. We have probably five different levels ofsystem based on performance. It’s based on theunderlying “off the shelf” hardware that’s in there, butcustomers frequently buy with the future in mind, andthey’ll be maybe utilising 20 or 30% of the system andthen over time grow it, without having to pay anythingadditional.

We have a very straightforward pricing model, it’sbasically “all you can eat” based on the system. If youhave a system that can do a lot, then you pay a little bitmore, because you’re paying for the value that that canprovide; but we don’t nickel and dime and say well youknow you can pay this basic level and then if you wantto do anything else with it, you have to pay. We don’treally do that, we make it very simple andstraightforward.

Ed: So really, somebody who has a small TV station,who might be traditionally doing local broadcast at themoment, with the addition of Elemental software andthe services that, for example, Gencom can provide inNew Zealand, has perhaps a new way of distributing thecontent that they should talk to Gencom about?

Keith: Gencom is a great partner for us and whatwe’re doing with them is really taking a lot of whatwe’ve done in other parts of the world and bringing it toNew Zealand.

We do have a lot of customers who are just getting intothe streaming side and we have solutions that can bemore of a starter package and get them into theencoding business at a very high level of quality, and doso very easily. It’s all integrated with different contentdelivery network (CDN) technologies; it’s integratedwith all the encryption that’s required and becausewe’ve been able to grow very quickly internationally, ithas all the international subtitling capabilities anddifferent standards that are required, and translatingthose from the traditional broadcast world over into thenew media world so that it’s very seamless for them.

Ed: So go and talk to Gencom.

Keith: Absolutely.

Page 44

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G-Technologyfor Protel

And now for Protel, we areat g-technology.com and inthe G-Team today we haveMark Anderson.

Ed: Mark, you’ve got a bigblack thing here – it lookslike a mini fridge?

Mark: It does indeed,but it’s much more excitingthan a mini fridge. Haveyou ever seen a mini fridgethat has 64 terabytes ofstorage in it?

Ed: No, show me?

Mark: There it is. Sowe’re part of HGST, we’vealways used Hitachi driveseven before Hitachi ( nowcalled HGST ) bought us, sothe great thing about nowbeing part of HGST for thelast 5 years is that we getaccess to all the newest intheir pool of stuff. OnTuesday of last week, HGSTannounced 8 terabyte helium drives as well as 6terabyte air drives and down the road coming a 10terabyte drive as well.

Ed: What’s the helium for?

Mark: The helium enables you to fit more plattersin the drive. The biggest thing in a hard drive is airresistance. As the platters are spinning, they’respinning at very fast speeds, 7200 rpm, and the headswhich read the data off the platters are essentially littleair foils. So with all that air resistance, it causesturbulence in the drive, causes the heads to move, soyou can only put everything a certain distance apart.By putting something in that’s far less dense – helium –you can put everything closer together and so, in thecase of our helium drive, you can fit 7 platters and 14heads in the space where you’d normally fit 5 plattersand 10 heads. But on top of that, it actually createssome other benefits. Because there’s no air resistance,it’s much quieter; it’s also completely sealed, so it’s lesssensitive to dust; and it also consumes far less power.So especially when you’re talking about multi-driveunits involved in large data centres, but even insomething now where we’re getting into an 8 drivesystem, that consumes far less power.

Ed: And produces a lot less heat?

Mark: And produces a lot less heat and of course,for editors, they’re very sensitive to sound as well, soit’s much quieter.

Ed: Yes fantastic. The design looks very sort of Applemodern. Is that deliberate?

Mark: Yes. We follow the Apple design. From thebeginning, that’s been part of the secret to our success,is also being very design concerned and makingproducts that really complement Apple, though they doalso work on PC and the nice thing about the blackdesign is it looks great next to a Z820 or whateversystem you’re looking at as well.

Ed: So it’s all Thunderbolt or are there other optionsin terms of getting data in and out?

Mark: This is all Thunderbolt 2. We do haveanother system called eS PRO that is PCI based. We’vehad it for a while now, where you can use the PCI RAIDcontroller and so you can similarly have up to 8 drives

Page 46

Mark with Tyrone and some very fast drives.

in a RAID array and get similar performance to whatyou see on here, especially as we’re also putting ourfaster drives on there as well. Because the otheradvantage of the drives getting bigger is they’re gettingfaster. With the 8 terabyte helium drive, we’ll get up to195 megabytes per second per drive; with the 6terabyte air drives they’re even faster because theyhave fewer platters against the other drives. Withthose we’re seeing up to 215 megabytes per second.So the absolute fastest performance version of this willbe the one with the 6 terabyte air drives and in that wewill see up to 1350 megabyte per second RAID 0.

Ed: Wow.

Mark: And then in RAID 5, you don’t see a hugedecrease in performance. I can actually show you …this one’s in RAID 0 here, but I did run a speed testearlier today and that was what we saw.

Ed: Yeah, that’s quick. And for those of us who don’twant such a big monster?

Mark: We have a 4 drive version as well – thatwas what we announced and are currently shipping.We announced that at NAB. That’s our GSP Studio; thebig one is called the GSP Studio XL, its little brother isthe GSP Studio, 4 bays, uses the same RAID controller,it’s an enterprise RAID controller, does RAID 0, 1, 5, 6,10, JBOD, RAID 50, RAID 60. So it’s very configurable,depending on your needs. Now granted of course,some of those RAID levels aren’t necessary with 4drives, but as we have an 8 drive system, it makesmore sense.

Ed: Okay, and then if you didn’t want the black, youstill have the silver. Is that the older technology?

Mark: It is, that’s the legacy technology … well weconsider it the legacy technology, for the Windowsusers and those using tower workstations, it really stillmakes more sense in a certain way because, forexample, on your HPs, your Dells, your Lenovoworkstations, while they are bringing Thunderbolt tothem, there tends to be a single port, or at best 2 portsand so you’re very limited in your amount of ports. Soit’s better to use something that takes up one of the PCIslots which they tend to have many of, and in this caseit’s a very fast performing system, also veryconfigurable, very reliable.

Ed: And Tyrone, is this good for you because I guessnow it covers both bases, you can look after the Macusers and the PC users?

Tyrone: Absolutely. We’ve done a lot of G-Techover the years. Certainly storage is a major concernwith just about anybody in our industry and they’relooking for reliability, they’re looking for products whichare going to do the job that they need them to do,everything is going the Thunderbolt direction thesedays. FireWire and USB are still around and they’re stillsupported obviously, but the future is these newThunderbolt products and storage requirements aregetting greater and greater.

Ed: And the good thing is, if you do as it were “bitethe bullet” and pay for a high safety RAID configuration,the whole problem with hard drives failing is done awaywith?

Tyrone: Well I wouldn’t say it’s done away with, but…

Ed: It’s lessened?

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Tyrone: It has. People out there who have had the

pain of a drive fail will know that you can’t do enough to

backup and double insure your content.

Mark: And one nice thing about this is that all of

our studio line plus our new G-RAID with removable

drives, which is essentially a legacy equivalent of our G-

RAID Studio, all use the same drive modules now.

So if you get one of the systems, or even multiplesystems throughout your facility, as long as they’re allpopulated with the same size drives, you can have on

hand a single replacement module if you want to forthat security. And one added feature, of course, inaddition to having the secure RAID levels, we’re theonly ones shipping Enterprise on the drives – especiallyat anywhere the price point that we’re at.

These are 2 million hour mean time before failure.They’re the most reliable drives you can buy. Even ourcompetitors Enterprise fast drives, they at best have a1.2 or 1.4 million hour meantime before failure. We gothe extra mile and we’ve gotten our sort of hype for 2million hour meantime before failure. NZVN

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Datavideo for ProtelAt Datavideo, we have Valentijn Diemel.

Ed: Now Tyrone’s brought me alonghere because he’s very impressed withsome new products from Datavideo andlet’s start with a camera. Now this is notyour handheld camera, this is a PTZcamera. What does PTZ stand for?

Valentijn: That stands for “pan tilt andzoom”.

Ed: Right, so it’s a little robotic camerathat you mount on something and leaveit there?

Valentijn: Yes, you can mount it on theroof of something, you can mount it on atripod, or you can also mount it upsidedown to the ceiling or to the wall. Itdoesn’t really matter, you can flip theimage anyway you like, and with thelittle joystick control you can cascade upto seven cameras and control themremotely.

Ed: Wow. Is it mains fed or is it battery powered?

Valentijn: It is fed from a wall outlet, but it is lowpower like all of our equipment so you can actually do itbattery powered, but you have to make your separateinstallation with that.

Ed: Right. Resolution?

Valentijn: 3G-HD, so it’s a 1080p 60 maximumresolution.

Ed: That’s high. So what application would you seefor this Tyrone?

Tyrone: Well, we’ve sold the previous model, thePTZ-100 into theatres in Auckland. I think the issue wesaw with the camera at that point was the latency, so itwas great to see Datavideo come out with these newerPTZs which have much improved latency and we’repretty positive about it.

Ed: No chance of a firmware update on the previousmodels to bring them up to this spec, or do you justhave to get the new cameras?

Valentijn: Sadly, you have to get the new camerasbecause there are hardware limitations with theprevious camera. We needed to start from scratch andso we launched the new cameras.

Ed: Now it’s not just the reduced latency is it Tyrone,there’s a whole raft of little improvements?

Tyrone: There’s a whole tonne of them, the abilityto daisy chain so many cameras versus the old model;the joystick which I think just works wonderfully – theone button push to swap between the cameras, etc.Yes, there’s a whole heap of changes.

Ed: And to go along with this, some other productsthat are new?

Valentijn: Anything on this table is quite new. This isthe TC-200 which is a nifty little box that transforms theHDMI output into an alpha and title layer, so you canoverlay them in your switcher; also HDCG graphics areavailable now on the move without a whole PC rig, foronly US$675 which is fairly nothing!

Ed: That’s really what Datavideo started out doingwasn’t it, making little boxes, and you continue in thatdirection?

Valentijn: Yes, we like to use all the available

techniques in the market to make things smarter and

more affordable.

Ed: Tyrone is also pointing at this large black box

here with lots of wires coming out of it. What is

interesting you about this Tyrone?

Tyrone: This is basically a complete studio in a box,but more importantly, what Datavideo’s done is thatthey’ve set up this website called rack builder and you

Valentijn from Datavideo.

can then build your configuration andthey’ll make it to order.

Ed: A bit like Subway?

Tyrone: Yes like Subway, it’s a

business, no sauce.

Ed: Valentijn, would you like to bring

some intelligence to this conversation?

Valentijn: Well the rack builder is all

about versatility. With the right builder,

our end users have all the freedom to

build up their own racks and to see the

end result directly on their screen. So

the end user is getting educated about

the possibilities of our OBV racks.

Ed: So what sort of variations would

be the main ones that they would look at

in this?

Valentijn: You start out by choosing

the amount of OBV racks you like toconfigure and after that you can choose the main

switcher. So our main switchers are choosable within a

wide region of input channels, but also you have the

choice of an HD or SD switcher.

Ed: Right, so that’s it. I guess it’s the number of

channels you want to have in there and then the flavour

or the level of video you want to work with?

Valentijn: Exactly. And after that you can choose

your standard peripherals like recorders or multiviewersor talk back equipment, audio mixing, audio delay,

streaming encoders or pretty much anything that a

video serves that can be mounted in a rack you can

configure in the rack builder.

Ed: And I guess the really good thing is that, if one

piece of the hardware needs upgrading, you can just

take that out and replace it and you keep running?

Valentijn: Yes, definitely. That’s completely correct.

Moving on to the Datavideo visual mixers, we haveMark Ederveen.

Mark: Here we have our 12 input vision mixer forHD-SDI signals, model 2800. It comes as a boxsolution with a talkback system, vectorscope system,hard drive and 17 inch preview monitor and with the flyaway kit it’s available at the price Є15,000. It can take 12 high definition cameras; it records onto a hard drive

and after the event has ended just take the hard driveout, connect it to your editing system and you can startimmediately to drag and drop the files into your editingsystem and do your job.

Ed: So this is only recording the mixed output –there’s no safety record of any of the inputs?

Mark: For this system no, there is only onerecorder built-in, but if needed we can also configuresuch a system with an extra ISO recorder for specialcustomer requirements.

Ed: So for example, if you wanted to keep a wideshot, you could keep recording that wide shot or Isuppose you could use the camera recorder for thatanyway?

Mark: Yes, just add an extra recorder and thenyou can record two streams. But in the standard setupit comes only with one recorder.

Ed: And the advantages of this version over previousmodels, because you’ve been making vision mixers forquite some time now?

Mark: I think the first professional mixer byDatavideo was introduced in the year 2000 or 2001 andof course, it was only analogue or standard definitionquality and now we’re talking for 12 channels HD at avery competitive price level and as you can see on themodel on your lefthand side, we can make it even

smaller and more compact as we use thesame technology in our HS systems, thehand carry systems, for making mobileswitchers with 12 inputs also withtalkback and preview, and then we havea very lightweight version. Buteverything is smaller now, higher inquality compared to the previousgenerations.

Ed: And while Mark’s been talking, I’vebeen playing with the buttons and therocker and yes, easy-peasy.

Mark: It’s very easy to operate, nohidden menus. Of course you have a setup menu which you only have to useonce, but as soon as you want to go live,it’s direct cutting on the programmewhere we have some basic wipes anddissolves onboard. Anybody with anyinterest in video or any interest in liveswitching can operate this unit withinonly 5 or 10 minutes. NZVN

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Mark from Datavideo.

Avid Audiofor Protel

At Avid, we are talking audiofor Protel with Tyrone Payne.

Ed: Tyrone, you’ve gotsomething here that you’rereally interested in andyou’re calling it – what is it,a “rock ‘n roll” editor?

Tyrone: This is the S3Lwhich we first got at the endof last year and really, atthat point in time, all thisdesk was – well I would callit a “rock ‘n roll desk” but itwas a desk for the livesound industry. In the lastfew days, Avid haveupgraded it and now it’sbecome a useful desk for theediting industry as well. It’ssomething you can pick uppretty easily, put in the car,go off to your rock ‘n roll, do your recording, come backthe next day and edit.

Ed: And of course, all the people who bought themway back then – it’s just a firmware upgrade is it?

Tyrone: Yes, absolutely.

Right, to tell us more detail about this we have ChrisLambrechts from Avid.

Ed: Chris, was that a fair introduction?

Chris: Absolutely, it was spot on. One of the add-ons that we’ve done now is that it’s a EuCon DAW

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Chris and Tyrone at Avid Audio.

controller so you can effectively bring it back from yourlive sound environment and use it in your studioenvironment and use it for mixing and editing.

Ed: Aaaah, that’s what he means by a rock ‘n rolleditor. So you can have it out in the field, do that livemix, but then bring it back in the studio and do yourpost mix?

Chris: Absolutely. You could even do someoverdubs with it if you wanted, because it has somelocal IO, same mic reads in the back of the surface ason your stage boxes, so whatever you recorded duringthe live show, those same mic reads are available inyour post environment, do some overdubs and mixeverything.

Ed: Basically, this is still running Pro Tools isn’t it?

Chris: Yes, so we have two environments here –we have the VENUE D-Show Live Sound software whichruns for the live mode and then the integration with ProTools makes it possible in live mode to do a 64 channelrecording over CAT5 straight into your laptop or ADBcapable Mac. Then once you go into studio mode youjust take that same CAT5, hook it up to that samecomputer and at that point it becomes your IO interfacefor your Pro Tools environment. At that point it’s aDAW controller and it controls Pro Tools.

Ed: Right. What I’m always trying to get my headaround is this mix between software andhardware. For many, many years it wasall hardware – the audio/video side ofthe business was hardware controlled,then software came along and peoplestarted to say “well, you can replace allof this hardware with software”. Butnow it’s going back the other way – butit’s a bit of a hybrid situation, the best ofboth worlds. Would that be right?

Chris: To some extent yes. I thinkfor us, for a live sound environment, anydigital desk will have software runningon it and that software needs anoperating system, so to some extent,any digital desk could be looked on as acomputer. But software only haslimitations – if you use your standardcomputer keyboard and a mouse forexample, you have 10 fingers, what doyou do with all your faders? With amouse, you can only grab one fader at a

time and that’s really not enough ifyou’re mixing a live show. So you needhardware controllers. Those hardwarecontrollers are tactile, they give youhands-on on virtually any parameterthat’s part of the software and, where weused to have analogue circuits, forexample, to control an EQ on a digitaldesk, that EQ is embedded in thesoftware, but it still needs to be tactile tobe useful in most hands-on live soundenvironments.

Ed: So this is all networkable and,Tyrone, this is really the way Avid Audiois going, is that right?

Tyrone: Well yes, I think so. I thinkAvid would love to have brought this outa little bit sooner than they have, butcertainly for those who are Pro Toolslovers, this is the way forward for themand it’s affordable, it’s something they

can pick up and carry around and place it anywhere, soyou don’t need a pallet and a crane and all that sort ofthing that you might need with some of these biggerconsoles, and of course, take it home and start yourediting in the wee hours of the morning.

Ed: Are there smaller versions of this. This looks asthough it’s about 16 faders?

Chris: This is the smallest desk that we do. Ithink it’s actually one of the smallest live sound desks inthe world and, like Tyrone just mentioned, we come outof an era where, if you were doing a festival, you had tohave a crane or one of those forklifts to bring youranalogue desk out to the middle of the terrain whereyou’re setting up front of house, right. That had itscharms, but these days with the need for speed, peopleexpect you to be doing a show one day and then thenext day you might be thousands of kilometres away soyou have to pack that up, not only put it in trucks, butalso in airplanes and just fly it to the next location, andyou’re expected to do that exact same thing on the nextlocation the next day. This kind of desk allows you topack it up, put it in the hold of an airplane and you’reactually carrying around a 64 channel full blown digitaldesk with integrated multitrack recorder.

Ed: So it’s all there, all in one?

Chris: Yes.

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