nz video news november 2011
DESCRIPTION
New Zealand television industry newsTRANSCRIPT
P13 Loudness in Europe.
P16 Digital Rapids from Protel.
P21 Behind the scenes at Dedolight.
P41 Pixel Power with Gencom.
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We are in Mt Albert at the offices
of Hedley-Wakefield Media Ltd
with Ian Hedley-Wakefield and
James Greet – the two
directors, owners, producers
and coffee makers of this
company.
It’s a very flash name for a
company and we’re here for a
special reason.
I put out a challenge to Chris
from DVT to find me somebody
who was using an FS100
properly. He went through a
few names and eventually
came up with these guys, so
we’re here to put them to the
test and to really find out “are
they using their Sony FS100
properly?”
Ed: Ian, I see there’s a
movie camera there on the
shelf, but it doesn’t appear to
be moving?
Ian: No, it’s purely a prop
now. I was gifted that quite a
few years ago before I was
even into film but decided that
it was too expensive to produce Super 8 film and it’s
stayed on the shelf from that point on.
Ed: Probably a good decision. But you have been to a
movie school?
Ian: I graduated last year at Unitec Film School.
James: Much the same path for me, but I didn’t
finish my last year – I did the two out of three and then
decided “this isn’t for me” – writing down, getting marks
and dealing with administrators. So I decided to just go
out and wait for Ian to finish and make some money for
a year.
Ed: Aaaah yes, I used to have pupils like you. But
anyway, Ian, you’ve actually got a diploma on the wall,
but what was the main thing you learnt out of the Unitec
course?
Ian: For me, I guess it took me probably 2½ out of the 3years to find my feet and then from that point on, it verymuch clicked into place when I realised I could do it. Itgave me the confidence to know that I could do it.
Ed: Because you actually came into this from animationI believe?
Ian: Yes animation was a hobby of mine … muckinground making little films which didn’t really have much ofa narrative structure, it was more Benny Hill-esque andthey just kind of rambled on and weren’t very good at all.
Ed: Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. We rememberearly versions of Windows and look what happened to Bill.
Ian: Yes … over the three years it was a case of justhoning those skills and realising that you can do it. Notgoing out and suddenly thinking you can win an Oscar orsomething like that, but just knowing you can make a
Trade-up from your DSLR
NOVEMBER 2011 Vol 175
Ian and James and cameras.
Page 2
that a little $2,500 stills camera couldbeat the ENG cameras that they had,with price tags of $60,000 and up.
Ed: Now when you say “beat” in whatway do you mean?
Ian: I was looking at it from astorytelling point of view, wanting to beable to control what the audience looksat through depth of field, selective focusand things like that.
When you’re dealing with something witha half inch or two-thirds inch sensor, youdon’t have that luxury. A lot of peoplerely on “crank it out to the far end of thezoom” and then go a mile and a halfback and that wasn’t really for me. Iwanted to go with something that had asclose to 35mm cinema film, not 5D “I’ma photo camera” … that’s a completelydifferent kettle of fish. So we went withthe 7D.
Ed: But there must have been somegood points about the ENG cameras thatyou were using that you couldn’treplicate with the 7D?
Ian: If I was shooting a documentary, I’d use a 502any day. That’s what it’s designed for; it’s a newsgathering camera and it suits that role perfectly.
James: Also having to crash course the soundies insync sound at Film School. None of them had done itbefore, so the ones that were working on Ian’s film hadto learn it.
film. It’s that building up of confidence and having thesafety net of being able to make a big mistake and notruin your career.
Ed: And I understand you had some robustdiscussions with your lecturers over choices of camera?
Ian: Yes. I was the “rebel kid” I guess you could say.I wanted to use these 7Ds and they didn’t really believe
Woody overviews the death of film.
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Page 6
Ed: Because …?
James: They just weren’t taught sync sound.Everything was plugged straight into the cameras upuntil that point. I mean the clapper boards were littlemore than just for “look”.
Ed: Because with the 7D, for those people whohaven’t used a stills camera to take movies, what’s theproblem?
James: Well there’s not exactly an XLR jack on theside of what is essentially a photography camera. Asfar as their little inbuilt “microphone” goes, you may aswell turn it off, in which case you need an externalsound recorder and none of the sound students hadused one before.
Ed: No other issues with it, no other editing issueswith the format?
Ian: That was a very, very steep learning curve for us.One of the main issues was our lead actor – we madethe mistake of putting him in a patterned shirt; I gothalfway through scene one …
Ed: ... and learned what the word “moire” means?
Ian: I’d heard of it but I’d never seen it happen, soyes, early in scene one, we decided he was going to puta jacket on. That solved that problem, but it was a bitof a headache at first. Although one thing we did notice– once we wrapped it out, because we were editing inAvid, that was what Unitec was using and we’re veryhappy with it – once we rewrapped it into a DNX codec,it was very, very happy and it worked really well. Thatactually reduced a lot of the issues. We did a lot ofproblem solving in preproduction, probably about fiveweeks of proving and disproving and saying why itdoesn’t do this and it does do that … things like the 8bitbanding on light falloff and things like that. A lot of that
Page 8
as backup. It’s convenient … I think in the short filmwe’re at the moment pre-producing, we will go back tosync sound as well, or dual system should I say … havethat as well, because that does seem to give a nicerquality of sound. I did notice that in the short film thatwe did at the end of last year.
Ed: So have you actually used the 7D since you gotthe FS100?
Ian: As a backup camera, yes. We used it on awedding the other weekend. But one thing, comingback to it now, you realise the 7D is really, really un-ergonomically designed for shooting video. It’s just theway you hold it, as opposed to holding the FS100. Bothof them are very blocky cameras, but being a stillscamera trying to shoot video ( and I shake anyway – Ishake really badly ) …
Ed: It’s the drugs.
Ian: The coffee. It’s something that’s much morefavourable on tripod. I mean, you can handhold it, butit’s not as easy to handhold as the FS100. And beingboth trained in directing, we’re not camera students, sofor us it has been a steep learning curve, but both ofthem are very user-friendly cameras. A lot of peoplecomplain about the abundance of buttons on them –“it’s a box with buttons” – but it’s not too hard to getaround, it’s not that confusing. So comparing the two …it’s not really fair to compare them as two identicalcameras, because they’re not. One is a photo camera;one is a video camera.
Ed: And you had a bit of difficulty explaining this tosome of your friends who are still diehard DSLR fans?
Ian: I think the thing with the DSLR is that it’s a greatcamera going in and coming out of film school. At thatpoint, it’s perfect, because you have the luxury of “hey,I can deal with these problems, because it’s a projectI’m driving forward doing these things.” You can workaround those problems; you have the time and theluxury of doing that. If you’re working for a client, it’snot something you really want to be dealing with – theextra headaches of the problems the 7Ds and theDSLRs put forward. And then there’s the perception ofpeople when they look at you with a stills camera andgo “that’s not a real camera” and you give up trying toexplain that, well, it is a real camera. But it’s that thingwhen you turn up with a video camera, people go “oh,okay, so he’s doing this” … they sort of wonder whyyou’re here to take photos when they want a video.
Ed: Okay, so you’ve obviously looked at weddings asa “bread and butter” thing, something to pay the hirepurchase, but you’ve got bigger things planned?
Ian: Yes we’re currently pre-producing a short film,somewhere up to about 20 minutes in length. So that’shoping to go forward over the summer, when everyone
was solved once you went to a 10bit DNxHD. It was abit of a headache.
Ed: In your student days, you could make your filmswith the 7D because time was not an issue?
Ian: Yes. We had the luxury and not so much theluxury of tutors pushing us along, making sure we did itright. A lot of people dive headfirst into it and go “ohlook, depth of field” and that’s where it stops, and that’swhere the mistakes are made.
Ed: Well now we’ve got over that, it does sound asthough Ian and James know what they’re talking about,so obviously you sort of had a little epiphany anddecided “well, I like depth of field, but there’s got to bea better way” and that way you chose was?
Ian: With a bit of research, we came across theFS100. To us, it’s the next generation on from DSLRs.Sony never did make a DSLR that did high definitionvideo and we always used to whine about it and say “Iwonder why that is?” because we both shot Sonybefore.
James: We both had Alpha DSLRs – I had the 550and Ian had the 200. We were forced to go and get the7D and we were kind of like “oh I don’t really want togo to Canon, I quite like Sony” so, yes, we got to goback to Sony.
Ed: Because Sony make video cameras?
James: Now they do, yes.
Ed: I detect a certain “35mm” bias here readers, butanyway we’ll move on.
James: Yes, so we were watching a video and Ican’t remember exactly what trade show it was at, butthe guy who designed it said “Sony’s made this as theDSLR killer.”
Ed: So you decided this was going to do everythingfor you?
Ian: Not really.
Ed: Oh, so there’s something else you would havepreferred, but this fitted the budget?
Ian: Yeah – the F65 was a little bit out of our range. Imean, it’s nice to dream about having an Alexa andthings like that, but there’s a reality that you just can’tafford it when you’re starting out.
Ed: So, bangs for your bucks, you looked at it anddecided FS100, talked to Chris at DVT and there it issitting on the shelf? What have you done with it so far?
Ian: We took it out for the initial “let’s go have a play”and shot some visual stuff; went for a walk round PtChev, a little bit of “okay, this is some stuff, how’s ithandling, pans?” We found that we don’t have rollingshutter issues so much, it is still there very minimally,but a lot of the problems were fixed, so that was nice tosee.
Ed: So problems comparing this to the 7D?
Ian: Yes. This is all coming from a 7Dmoving up to FS100 point of view, so thingslike you don’t have so many issues with therolling shutter; it is still there being a CMOSsensor, but not having to worry about if I’mshooting on carpet – if there’s carpet in theroom, it’s not going to go crazy. And it’s justsimple things like that. So a lot of theproblems were fixed and ironed out. It’s justsomething you don’t have to worry about anymore.
Ed: And I see it’s got a microphone on it?
Ian: Yes that’s helpful. Usually we do haveanother one plugged in but use the “on-board”
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Ian: Yes, initially we invested in some Canon glass tomaximise the features of the 7D, but also graduallybuilt up a stock of the old M42 mount Pentax lenseswhich are really nice and they have a really nice look tothem. The only issue with those – most of them areonly stopped down to F16 and when you’re dealing withwhat the equivalent on the 7D is to the FS, which isISO500, you have some exposure issues. So it’s a caseof using NDs most of the time if you’re going to beoutside; it’s not so much if you’re in a particularlycontrolled environment.
James: Even for shooting a wedding, like we wereon Saturday, definitely a few NDs.
Ed: So all in all you’re happy with your purchase?
Ian: Very, very happy, yes, it’s a great camera.
Ed: And Chris has been good to you?
Ian: He’s been really, really great; he’s been a reallygood contact and …
James: DVT in general.
Ian: Yes, just turn up and they’re really helpful. Wewent to the Aftermath event and that was reallyinformative. Just a really good resource. I’m happy todeal with them all of the time, they’re great people.
Ed: Well I wouldn’t settle for less. NZVN
empties out of Auckland, to give us a bit more spaceand freedom to move.
Ed: Does it involve girls on beaches?
Ian: No it involves old men.
Ed: Oh, that’s not my genre. But you’ve also gotsome other commercial-type work planned. Iguess you must have looked at the camera andthought now this particular format, this way ofshooting, is going to be ideal for … and thereare genres there. As you’ve said, there’s theshort film type, but how do you see thisworking in the commercial world?
Ian: Because it’s a very diverse camera, it’ssomething you can use to fulfil a number ofroles. It is a large sensor camera, so you dohave the depth of field, without the DSLRissues, but the way we approach most things isfrom the angle “I’m doing this commercial job,I’m treating it like I’m making a film for myselfanyway.”
So if you’re going to be doing something whereyou need to be able to have the larger depth offield, then you have the versatility of what youcan do with your lenses of course – there’soptions there – and I think just going back tothe 7D, it was something that we decided when we gotit, like we’re not really going to put a zoom lens on this.We’re trying to stick as much to prime lenses thoughit's a personal thing for us.
Ed: When you’re a purist you want primes. Now isthere anything you think Sony could have done betterwith the camera?
Ian: There’s always a wish list.
Ed: What would you wish for? More buttons?
Ian: No, there’s enough buttons, it’s fine.
James: I could show you the pieces that ourhandhold mount is now in. It would have been nice ifeven just the time developing that was spent onanything else. I don’t know, it’s not really a handicam,it didn’t need a handle like that.
Ed: Maybe they expected you to put it on a tripod?
James: I don’t know that this camera would havebeen directed at anyone that didn’t have a tripod … Idon’t know … I see no reason for having a handicamgrip on it anyway. Other than that, other things theycould have done better – I don’t actually know. I thinkit’s pretty much exactly spot on for the price it’s at.Maybe a longer cable on the microphone but that’sgetting pretty picky.
Ian: The microphone cable only reaches one of the
two ports.
Ed: But I guess the good thing is that you must have
invested in a bit of glass to go with your 7D and you
can still use that?
“Missed it by that much.”
Page 13
measure invented by ITU within BS1770/1771 and isnot the same as dB but the industry seems to beaccepting of talking about loudness units in dB based onthe LUFS scale. You need to look up what the technicaldifference is, but it is the loudness measure as opposedto a peak meter reading.
The main problem they seem to have in the UK now, iscommercials coming from other parts of Europe wherethere is high compression, especially at certainfrequencies within the sound mix. The EBU formed agroup of professionals to come up with a set ofrecommendations around the ITU-1770 standard. Thatgroup was called PLOUD and that was chaired by FlorianCamerer. So at IBC last year they announced R128.Between then and now they’ve announced furtherenhancements to R128 and some of thoseenhancements ITU have accepted back into 1770. Sowe now have a 1770-2. The other interesting part wasfrom Karsten; because DK make loudness meters, theyknow all the tricks to fool them, to make the loudnessmeter show a particular loudness, whereas in fact thesound that is coming out is appreciably (in other words,not measurable but subjectively) louder. One of thepoints he talked about was complicated, but basically,there’s a big difference between analogue audio anddigital. In some ways, if you set up your analogueaudio in a particular way, when it’s transcoded to digitalor vice versa, you can have an appreciable change inthe loudness of that signal. One of the ways of doingthis is by changing the stereo phases. Another is byhaving a period of quiet within the short commercialwhich means that the loud parts, when you averageover the whole commercial, the total loudness is less.
Karsten pointed out there were actually three parts toloudness. There was the total loudness measure, which
Loudness in Europe – united or not?I went to a panel discussion on loudness sponsored byDK Technologies. The lead speaker was KarstenHansen, the CEO of DK, and he was joined by threeother panellists from the UK.
Raja Sehgal who is the sound director at GrandCentral Studios, a major facility in London, andsomeone who has been mixing cinema andcommercials for many years;
John Bolton, operations director of IMD which isan electronic delivery company similar to Dubsatin New Zealand where they take commercialsfrom production houses and then send them inbulk to broadcasters around the UK; and
Barney Connell, operations manager of Channel 4television in London.
I could actually start with the end result here and thatwas that for loudness measurement, to get it right, youhave to do it subjectively. This was clearly explained byRaja, the sound engineer, who has their main studio setup at a particular level and that level doesn’t change.When they’re working in there, they mix to what theyappreciate to be the best sound for their TVcommercials. Now, of course, this wasn’t always thecase and this is why, over ten years ago, they all gottogether – the broadcasters, the production companiesand interested parties – to sort out what they should bedoing. They eventually agreed to a set of standards.Even though these aren’t “official standards”, they haveadopted them and basically it seems as though they’veset the peak level at -20LUFS and they havereintroduced dynamic range into the sound mix.
Note: a LUFS is not the same as a dB. LUFS stands forLoudness Unit Full Scale. The Loudness Unit is a
Digital Video Technologies (NZ) Ltd | Phone: 09 525 0788 | Email: [email protected] | 45 Fairfax Avenue, Penrose, Aucklandwww.dvt.co.nz
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Darren Gallipeau from Digital Rapids Canada.
Page 16
actually processing the data in the Cloud. Well they’vegot sometimes very sensitive material ( maybe it’s anunreleased movie ) where they want to transcode thedownstream formats, well they have a reluctance toactually send that out “into the wild” as it were for thattranscoding. For situations like that, you can still usethe concept of a Cloud and we kind of refer to that asan “on premises Cloud”.
So that’s a situation where they have their own systemsthat are being pooled together in a Cloud and whatwe’re allowing them to use is dynamic licensing to
Digital RapidsAn October overflow for Protel brings us toDigital Rapids and we have John Carson.
Ed: Now Digital Rapids delivery, not a hugenumber of changes since NAB, but continuousdevelopments. Some companies charge theircustomers for software upgrades, others do itfor free – what’s your arrangement?
John: It depends on the version of softwarethat’s released. Major releases are usuallychargeable; maintenance releases are freewithin the version that you have.
Ed: That’s good to know.
John: There’s like major and minor releases,so it just depends on the release.
Ed: And the big news at this IBC is Kayak?
John: Correct – Kayak running with DigitalRapids Transcode Manager 2.0. Kayak isessentially a new framework where you havecomponents that you can use to build dynamicgraphs for essentially generating workflows.Kayak is the framework that’s starting withTranscode Manager and will eventually be putin place in all of our products actually – the way we’lldevelop all the products going forward will be with usingKayak underneath as the engine.
Ed: What sort of facility would be using the Kayakproduct?
John: It’s actually just complementary to all of ourproducts, so anybody who uses our existing products, itwill fit in within the same products. It’s sort of like anunderlying infrastructure to how we process things.
Ed: Almost like Windows?
John: Yes.
Ed: Any other little developments?
John: MediaMesh … we’re going to be releasing a newversion soon. We just rewrote the play-out engine andwe wrote a new web submitter which is the web portalfor submitting files into the MediaMesh. So that’s new.Since NAB I think we released a new version of theStream software – 3.6 I think was released since NAB.So that adds support for some of the newer hardwaresthat we released, and a couple of new codecs.
For what’s happing in “the cloud”, we have DarrenGallipeau from Digital Rapids Canada.
Ed: I guess you’re from the Montreal end of Canada?
Darren: No, it’s actually just my surname, I’m fromToronto proper. In fact my mother’s from NewZealand! All my relatives are New Zealanders andAussies.
Ed: Oh my goodness, there you go. Now the bigquestion for me is Cloud Computing and I see “DigitalRapids Hybrid on Premises – Cloud Computing” and myquestion is about the safety of the Cloud. My fears aregroundless when it comes to Digital Rapids?
Darren: Well I’m not going to go so far as to saythey’re groundless – they’re a little bit different whenyou’re talking about Cloud transcoding, so we’reactually talking about processing data within the Cloud.Just slightly different than the traditional use which issimply storage in the Cloud. The storage in the Cloudidea – it’s fairly good, because you can talk aboutredundancy with very little impact. But there’s aconcern when you’re talking about very sensitive studiocontent in the Cloud. So say somebody like SonyPictures is looking to do Cloud transcoding – meaning
John Carson, a software engineer from Digital Rapids.
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Page 18
it’s a framework that all of our systems aregoing to be based off in the future – thatincludes our live encoding, our transcoding,but we’re going to be offering Kayak as aframework as a product. By that I meanwe’re going to offer it to OEM customersand partners to develop their ownapplications with. So the Kayak framework,when you see the term “powered by Kayak”it’s really a transcode manager that’s usingKayak to perform this functionality. Thenwe’re going to be taking streams, so thestreams e-encoders and we’re going to be“consuming” as it were the Kayakframework to achieve the things that it cando – still to the same ends, that we’relooking to actually transform or encode andingest and stream out content, but whatKayak allows us is a flexibility that beforewas impossible mid-stream.
Ed: Wow. So in terms of providing a framework, justexplain that a little bit more?
Darren: Sure. So the Kayak framework, as it’spowering all of our products, has the option of beingused for third party purposes and there’s basically twodifferent ways that we’re offering that. At the customerlevel and at a basic level, we’re going to allow users tocreate individual components for use within the Kayakframework. So it’s an SDK that we’re going to beoffering people that allows them to develop thosecomponents within the Kayak framework, and then theycan use those newly created components alongside ourexisting repository of components. The other option isthat they can take the entire framework, use their ownparticular components or a collection of ourcomponents, and then wrap a White Label, as it were,application around it. So maybe it’s a particularlydedicated use or maybe it’s actually directly competitivewith our application, but we’re happy to do thatbecause, for us, we’re still getting a licence sale out ofit, and that’s really sort of the model that we’re goingwith here.
Ed: That’s a very flexible way of working?
Darren: It is, it is – partly it was driven from ourown needs within our product space …
Ed: Also I guess the fact that you can’t think of everysituation where a user might want to use your product?
Darren: Well, absolutely. There’s other sorts ofsituations too, where we don’t necessarily see ajustification in the market for a particular componentdevelopment within our own cell, but let’s say our thirdparty partner says well I’ve got this particularlycompelling component that I can use, and I want tothen develop that component so that you can sell it anduse it, so they can sell the component, but then wemake a sale out of it because it might meet theircustomer needs. So it will meet it in both differentways. In fact, selling our technology to competitors isnothing new. We do our own card development and wesell – and continue to sell – to competitive customers.And by that I mean they produce turnkey systems andsolutions that sometimes peripherally and sometimesdirectly compete with our core product line, but we’restill making the product sale in the form of our card, sowe’re happy to do that.
For Digital Rapids products and information
contact the friendly staff at Protel.
Auckland ph. 09-379 8288
Wellington ph. 04-801 9494
[email protected] : www.protel.co.nz
facilitate the use of those individual systems that makeup that Cloud for transcoding tasks. Then you’re notfacing the security risk by sending out that content, butyou’re also not facing the high upload penalty. Soyou’re talking about content at the studio level that’sincredibly high quality and those are incredibly largefiles. They can be into terabytes for a feature film, andthat kind of upload is very expensive and very timeconsuming. So it’s much more feasible to just send itout locally in your intranet and then use an on premisesCloud to perform it.
Ed: And that is a case of you’re using the computerpower that’s available at the time, which could comeand go depending on which computer was being usedfor what purpose?
Darren: Well that’s largely true, yes. You’rebasically using the available resources at the time – andthat’s the biggest value add that I think most of thestudio and postproduction houses see with the option ofactual remote Cloud transcoding. Because what theygenerally do is they provision a set of their ownequipment, they invest in it so they have a large capitalexpenditure; let’s say they purchase 100 machines, 100servers that are processing their content, but they see aspike in their need. Well it’s expensive to go andprovision another 100 machines or 50 machines or 10machines, because you have to go through theinstallation and the support and the rack and thephysical space, where they might only need it for aweek or two. So that’s where the option of the Cloud ina flexible and dynamic way is very appealing. That’swhat we’re offering – the ability to actually say “I havemy pool of local resources that I’m going to betranscoding”, but scale it dynamically into the Cloud.So whenever you need the additional resources, we canprovide you licences in the Cloud and allow you to useCloud resources for your computing.
Ed: So it looks as though the sort of product thatyou’re supplying is not something that comes in a box,it’s something that really does need some dealer backupand support?
Darren: It definitely can … we do sell it ashardware, so that’s an offering that we have, but wealso sell it as pure software. So pure software isactually the more commonly used productisation fortranscode manager and, of course, when we talk aboutCloud transcoding, it’s absolutely software based andeven at that point almost a service offering.
Ed: Does that all come under the Kayak name?
Darren: Kayak itself is actually a framework, sowe’re promoting the framework fairly heavily because
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Page 21
dolly that could do curve and crab without squeakingwheels. I didn’t patent any of this, but the dolly was socomplicated that nobody’s been able to copy it eversince!
The unfortunate thing with the dolly was that I got too
many orders and I had no experience in manufacturing.
The Last Picture Show by Bogdanovich was shot on that
dolly, the BBC had some, they were in France, they
were all over and we had a hard time making them.
Ed: But at that point your passion was still the
camerawork?
Dedo: Yes, yes, yes – and thecompany was there and we had acamera rental operation.
Ed: And you’ve continued that,because downstairs, I see you haveproduct from other companies, such asCentury lenses and others that you’reselling in your shop here?
Dedo: The rental was the onebusiness that we had apart from filmproduction. I produced films mainly forAmerican television and I had contractswhere I kept all the non-US rights andthat kind of financed the company. ThenARRI started to become quite aggressivein rental so Sachtler sold his rentalbusiness and so did we. ARRI wasrenting a 352C with 3 Cook lenses and atripod and a changing bag for 35 Marksand giving 50% discount.
Ed: Somebody learnt to corner themarket early?
Dedo: Yes. So then we went intoimporting equipment. A long time beforeit became famous, we offered O’Connorheads, Rycote windscreens and later on,the Aaton cameras. One of thespecialties for us was high speed film –16, 35, 70mm. I spent a long time in all
Behind theScenes atDedolight
On my way home from IBC,I paused in Munich for avery brief stop at thebeerfest and a longer visit atthe head office of DedoWeigert Film GmbH. Dedohimself was present and thefirst question I asked was ...
Ed: Dedo, where is yourfirst light?
Dedo: I have no idea –somewhere around. Butthere’s not one “first light”and there’s not one idea.We could fill a museum withall the lights that didn’twork.
Ed: Aaaaa, but there wereplenty that did work, luckilyfor us. Did you begin yourdesign career with a light?
Dedo: I’m a camera-man and I’ve had thisunfortunate affliction to play with technical things. In1961, I built teleprompters; in 1966 at Photokina, Ishowed the first European made fluid head. Theoriginal Miller head was before this but I built the bigone for the NPR camera with silicon fluid which wouldwork in cold weather. I showed it to my friendWendelin Sachtler and he liked the idea, because beforethat he’d been building gyro heads. There were otherideas that were added to it by a Munich engineer calledThoma, but we had the first one. We also built the firstfrequency controlled zoom drive ( which in those daysnobody had ); I built a very complex small lightweight
Dedo with his latest marvel of design and engineering.
A dolly built for two by the look of it.
more on page 24
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Page 24
cameras, where several University opticdepartments had said “it’s physicallyimpossible” and six weeks later wedelivered them. We built a one-eyed 3Dsystem for the University of Heidelberg;we built the first high speed videofluoroscope for early recognition ofcancer cells for the University of Ulm; webuilt a high speed video recording anddata recording system, where wedeveloped all the data recording to take8 channels of data and put them into thevideo signal of the high speed video.The Germans decided that they had tostudy “what is a high speed train.” Now,the Japanese had had high speed trainsforever; the French had built high speedtrains, but the Germans had to find out“vot is a high speed train?” so we builtthe system for them. This consisted ofseveral high speed video cameras, forexample, looking at the pantographthrough a zoom lens that went threetimes around the corner, like a doubleperiscope.
Ed: Oh, so you could see the way it bounced on theelectrical pickup wire?
Dedo: In rain and snow and ice and so on, how itwould behave. Another subject was microchip bonding,where you have to shoot in high speed one squaremillimetre, from a large distance of 45cm away, and sowe built distance microscopes with which you could,from this distance, photograph one square millimetre.You might think one millimetre is nothing, but to keep itin focus from beginning to end of this one squaremillimetre is not so easy.
So we built three different lenses, differentmagnifications and with it, since the movement wasextremely fast and the high speed video wasn’t fastenough, we had to couple it with a flash system whichwas flashing with a flash duration of one-four hundredthousandth of a second – and let it flash 400 times persecond. And that was pretty cute. That was called theDedostrobe.
Ed: So really, that’s your first light?
Dedo: No, that was just a kid playing in thesandbox.
Ed: Oh, okay.
Dedo: And we had with us an optical engineerwho was in his mid-80s. He was a projection specialistwho had been with Osram and, together with anAmerican partner, the guy to develop the short arcxenon with Dr Kugler at Osram and Fred de Hubry ourguy, he had great experience in projection systems.With them together, we designed all kinds of strangeobjects and all these Research and Developmentcontracts were nice, they were well paid, but theywalked out of the door and they didn’t leave anythingbehind.
these factories to learn how to repair the cameras andfor some years, we were the most important high speedhouse on the Continent.
Ed: What sort of speeds are we talking here?
Dedo: We’re talking about 16mm intermittentmovement up to 500 frames, continuous movement upto 10,000 frames; 35mm claw driven cameras – 12claws, 4 register pins, 360 frames per second and eachtime the film stops, it’s held flat by a vacuum; perfectimage stability, perfect image quality, unbelievable.And, of course, one of the parts that we had noexperience in was selling such cameras to the military –70mm cameras, 35 continuous movement prismcameras up to 2000 or 3000 frames.
Ed: What date are we talking here … roughly?
Dedo: That’s the mid-70s. We introduced the firsthigh speed video in 1981, which was an industrialsystem for motion analysis and we became the mostsuccessful sales organisation, pretty much worldwide.This was from a Japanese company called NAC and thenone day they told us “sorry, we sold our business toKodak and you are no longer needed.” So then westarted with another company called Red Lake andagain we built those sales very successfully, until oneday they told us “we have merged with Kodak, you areno longer needed.” So now we’re with Vision Research,the Phantom cameras, so that’s still a domain.Occasionally, we still rent high speed film cameras, butthe days of selling such cameras are over. Some fifty70mm high speed claw driven cameras that must havecost $300,000-400,000 were sold about a year and ahalf ago by the American Air Force – 50 pieces and theywent at $48 each.
Ed: Did you have many research engineers working
directly with you on those developments?
Dedo: With the high speed cameras, we were
selling equipment that was made by others and we
were servicing it and we were training the technicians to
accompany the cameras for shoots – mainly TV
commercials.
Ed: But you were also developing things, as you say,
along the way – other products?
Dedo: At the same time, we had a properResearch and Development department. We builthighly specialised optics for the 70mm high speed
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Page 26
can you please tell us who is going to buy them?” And Ihad no idea, but obviously I should answer thequestion, so I pulled out a name that I had heard of,Haskell Wexler, who is one of the greatest stars ever incinematography.
I took the lights to Hollywood and I went to DougPentek who was running Hollywood Rental and he said“well who should use these?” and I said “HaskellWexler.” He said “has Haskell seen them?” and I said“well, no” and he said “okay kid, jump in the car.” Sowe threw the kit in the car, we drove to where Wexlerwas shooting. He stopped for over an hour to look atthe lights and then he said “can I have a kit?” and hehad an office together with Vilmos Zsigmond and Idropped the kit there and they never opened it. It tookanother five years until I got an enthusiastic letter fromHaskell Wexler which said “I’ve discovered Dedolights!”
Ed: Does that tell you something about Hollywooddirectors?
Dedo: Not really, no. Others took to itimmediately.
It is typical that a top starcinematographer will neverhave lights. Why shouldhe? Lights come from rentalhouses; lights come fromWarner Bros or Paramountor Universal set lighting andthey don’t have their ownlights – but they all haveDedolights, from AlanDarveaux to Vilmos Zsig-mond to Haskell Wexler toJohn Alonzo, Steven Poster,Julio Macat and so on.
So, when we look at theKodak poster of “da-da-da-da-dum”, I can say “he, he,he, he has his ownDedolights.”
Ed: So they basically takethe standard rental lights tolight the scene, but then usethe Dedolights to just addthat sparkle?
Dedo: Maybe the rea-son is that this is the only equipment that’s so smallthat their wives allow them to keep them in the garage,because it doesn’t take much space. John Alonzo whoshot Frankie and Johnny, Chinatown – many top, topfilms – he was also teaching at AFI and the studentswere complaining bitterly … they said “he’s teaching uslighting; we wish he would once make a session that isnot about Dedolight.” Yes, he was addicted to it andused them where no sane person would use them andhe made it work.
Ed: So you went from there – you had the standardlight that we know and then you decided, well, you cando better in other areas too?
Dedo: Then we started building larger lights. Withthe little lights, our spiel, our trick, our approach is touse low voltage lamps, because they give us double thelight output to start with, and a good optical system.That’s what we do – we build optical systems that workbest with a point light source. The low voltage lampwas smaller than the high voltage lamps and, inaddition, it happens to give double the light output – 40lumen per Watt, whilst the standard halogen gives 20lumen per Watt. Secondly, it costs a quarter in relationto the light output; and the third aspect is that it lives
Ed: Did you have anybody at this stage telling you“you need to focus more on the business side of this,rather than just the engineering perfection”?
Dedo: Nobody has successfully been able to tellme that until today!
Ed: Oh, so I’m the lucky first?
Dedo: I’m an obsessed cameraman and todaystill, all my dreams and nightmares are about imagesand how to make them best and, to some extent, I feltthat the company, as it was growing, was destroyingmy job, so I felt like I was a victim, until I learned toaccept that role. Shooting films in over 40 countriesand feature films, commercials and art films made mylife so incredibly rich that it allows me to sit behind adesk and shuffle paper. If somebody would have toldme that in the beginning, I would have jumped off thetower and ended it right there – and I still feel like thatevery day, but I can survive it and, in the meantime,we have a wonderful team. So with this wonderfulResearch and Development team, one day we said “why
don’t we build something that we can keep?” So webuilt the Dedolight which originally, yes, we tried lowvoltage, it was a 6 Volt marine lamp that we ran at 22Volt. It worked wonderfully.
Ed: For a while?
Dedo: Not so bad, not so bad … and theneventually came this double lens system, which thendeveloped into the double aspheric system.
Ed: So some of that lens technology that you startedto put into the Dedolight was what you’d developed foryour high speed cameras – or was it totally different?
Dedo: No, totally different. While travelling roundthe world, I had worked with Lowel light and I admiredRoss Lowel immensely for his ingenious ideas. We hadthe only light where I could feel that it was developedby a working cameraman. But I wanted to kind ofaugment that with a small light that I could hide, thatwould have a very long reach and high output, just towork in conjunction with all the other light sources –originally as a mobile light.
When we built the first 400 Dedolights, Fred and othersgot scared and they built a big pyramid of those andsaid “Dedo, can we show you how many 400 lights is –
You can’t build sets like this.
Page 27
But what is more than that is the character of light issomething that very few professionals ever see.
I took this low voltage light to England and one of mygreat heroes is Duncan Brown who said “what’s this”and I said “can I show you?” and he took the light as ifhe’d grown up with it and he explained the light to me.He explained it 2 or 3 times and I had built the darnthing! But he showed me what was so beautiful aboutthe character of this light, and it took a while until Icould see that and I’d been living with it for a long time.So there are not many people who can feel light andunderstand the character of light and there are manyaspects to it … it could be the colour spectrum; it couldbe the light distribution, but there’s a little bit more to itsometimes. To control light and shadow with higherprecision than anybody else – that’s another part thatwe excel in and that’s something that the optical systemblenders themselves do.
Ed: But then you’ve also got the requirement for cost;you’ve also got the people who want to use these lightssaying “oh yes, but they cost so much” so that must bea battle now?
Dedo: On the low voltage lights, to buy, they arelet’s say, 15% more expensive than an equivalent lightin blue and silver, but the lamp costs one-quarter. Thelamp lives three times as long and the lamp doesn’t getdestroyed by shock, knock, vibration. So by the timeyou’ve changed the lamp 9 times, you’ve already savedenough to invite your girlfriend for dinner. By the timeyou’ve changed the lamp 49 times, you’ve saved moremoney than you need to buy another light head fromus. So nobody should tell us that we’re expensive. It’sthe most economical system on earth if you want to use
longer – double or triple as long; and the fourth aspectis, if you knock it and kick it, it doesn’t die … whereasthe high voltage lamps, if they get a knock or vibration,they die. So for mobile lighting, that’s a seriousadvantage; that makes the system the most economicalsystem. But then, when building larger lights, we hadto use the same lamps as everybody else, HMI lamps,halogen lamps, and then we had to add more. So whatwe added was two added motions for the focusing. Allstudio lights ( that’s what we relate to ), all Fresnellights, have been built exactly the same since early1900, no change. There’s a front lens which is aspherical lens, part of a circle, and a reflector and alamp; and the reflector and the lamp move – end ofstory.
Even the Chinese copies of ARRI lights use these verysame lenses from the same factory, because Schottdoes it best. We were the first ones to add a secondlens, so a small Fresnel light will focus 1:3; a bigFresnel light focuses 1:6. We start focusing 1:25, whichmeans further reach, higher intensity, better efficiencyin spot. You can place the lights further away, hidethem in the set and beat the square law – when youmove closer to the light, it gets hot; when the light ismuch further away, you can move 3 feet and it doesn’tchange so much.
Ed: Exactly, so at a great distance you’ve got theright intensity, but you don’t have the heat that’sreached at that point and …?
Dedo: There’s less heat because it’s a moreefficient system, but our lights themselves do get hot.
Ed: But also the air in between would act as a greaterinsulator for the heat rather than the light?
Dedo: Yes, but the main subject,the main part of the religion that weadhere to, is the control of the light. Sofirst the character of the light and that isvery difficult to describe.
Ed: In summary, I’m seeing that youwant to keep the same bulbs, you wantto keep the same light source in thisdevelopment, because that’s whatpeople are used to, that’s whatavailable, but …?
Dedo: In higher wattage, thereisn’t anything else available. Yes webuilt a higher wattage, low voltagesystem, that they used for all the specialeffects work on Harry Potter, but that’snot only the light output – the amount oflight – it’s the character of light, andthat’s harder to describe than thecharacter of people, because thecharacter of people shows itself and lightis invisible.
Ed: But surely, you want as even alight as possible, because, once you’vegot it even, then you can distort it towhatever effect you want, but if it’sdistorted to start with, it’s very hard toget it even?
Dedo: Yes – so it’s light distribu-tion with no hot spots and no rings …
Ed: And then you can play with it?
Dedo: And a very defined beam …outside the beam we have nothingwhereas all the Fresnel lights have a lotof stray light outside. So that is onepart that can be described; it can beshown in the light distribution curves. Yes, it’s a jibarm.
Page 28
package, it is lighter. The equivalent ARRI kit is 35 kilo;ours is 14, so the back of a cameraman is a consumableitem and we also take care of that; that’s a verypractical aspect if you don’t want to spend your moneywith the chiropractors. And it offers much moreversatility – we can do background projections whichnobody else can do, and it’s all in this small kit.
It allows you creative lighting from a handbag and, atthe same time, because of the low cost of the lamps,the re-lamping cost to run it, the operational cost, islower than any other light source.
Ed: But now we’ve moved into LED as exemplified bythe latest offering which we’ve just seen at IBC, that
it. If you just want to buy it and never use it, put it onthe shelf, then go buy the colour that you like best –blue and silver or black and yellow or whatever.
Ed: But it must be an aspect now that you have tothink about, because in those early days, you weremaking very specialist equipment. Then the lights werefor very specialist purposes and in some ways, themoney wasn’t actually that important, because it wasfor that top end. Nowadays, Dedolight is to a muchwider audience of users …?
Dedo: The low voltage lights are at home with thesmallest video teams because they’re the mosteconomical system on earth. It is smaller – the
more on page 31
Page 31
manufacturers to develop LEDs to whatwe need, and to some extentexperimenting and trying how to usetheir LEDs to the best advantage. Butthere are still some limitations.
The white phosphor LED today has arelatively bad colour rendition. In theold days we’d learnt the colour renditionindex should be above 90. The sun is100, halogen is 98, a Kino Flo lamp is92, an HMI is around 92 – we have ametal halide discharge lamp that is atungsten lamp, also 92 – and most of thefamous LEDs are in the 70s. That’s alight quality that no serious butcherwould use to light his meat, becausepeople should buy his meat, it shouldlook attractive; and we are supposed tobe professionals, we light meat all day,and the skin tone is very sensitive. Soyes, we can cheat and get by with whitebalance, but not quite right, and we canuse a lot of filters and with filters, youcan cut peaks in the colour spectrum,but you can never fill a hole in the colourspectrum. So now we have to learn that
there is not one CRI value any more – there’s R1, R2,R3, R4 – all the way to R14 and with every whitephosphor LED you have a very great deficiency in theR9 value, which is a red value.
You can overcome that only if you mix, for example,various colours of LED – red, green, blue and white, likeeverybody in the theatres and TV studios with the four
looks like it’s ushering in a totally new line forDedolight?
Dedo: LED is one of three “hype” words – 3D,DSLR and LED, yes. We’re busy in all three aspects.We have the wonderful 3D system; we have a lot ofDSLR rigs and, of course, we are very intensely involvedin the research of LEDs. We work with four different
The Munich showroom.
Page 32
Ed: So are you making your lights a little bit future-proof?
Dedo: No, the future is what we can offer today,but what future is behind today’s future? God knows …and the intensity at which research is done in LEDs isabsolutely incredible and the claims what LED can doare absolutely wonderful. Cree says “we have an LEDthat puts out 231 lumen per Watt” but in reality, theyput out 40-60, which is less than any fluorescent lamp.A Philips fluorescent lamp in an office can put out up to110 lumen per Watt when it goes hellishly green. AKino Flo, which is more balanced colour, puts out 80lumen per Watt and also lives a few thousand hours. Ametal halide lamp, the ones that we are using, are6,000-12,000 hours … that’s in a museum four years.One big American television channel had several studiosequipped with a famous brand of LED panel lights andas far as we heard, they just kicked them out, becausethe consistency of light output was not there with thefirst generations of LED. It is supposed to get better,but how many people have done tests over 50,000hours; and the consistency of colour rendition also goesdown the Jordan with use and if you have sensorsystems that watch out for the different colours to mixthem right, how long will the sensor be consistent? Sothere’s a lot of “ifs” in there, but at the same time thedevelopments are very exciting and, yes, the colour ofthe Osram PrevaLED is absolutely astonishing and cleanand we can stand fully behind it. But it still has someshortcomings – just as an example, Osram, before theend of this month, will come up with a new generation;and the next generation is for the end of the year. Ifwe can offer something that really has value, maybe amuseum can keep it for 5, 6, 7, 8 years and that’s notbad. One of the most famous brands that we also helpto build has a colour rendition index of around 74. Theones that we sell now have 84 and put out 35% morelight and use half the wattage. People say, “well then Itake the one with the higher wattage.” Why? “Becauseit must be stronger.” No, ours is half the wattage and35% more light, so it shows a real drastic developmentin LED technology and God knows what we’ll have nextyear.
chamber lights, halogen lamps and filters, and you canmix any colour. But with LED you need one extracolour; you need amber. So red, green, blue, white andamber – you mix that and you can get ( if you’re lucky )pretty clean colour rendition.
Ed: Okay and having said all that, you’ve come outwith a brand new LED light source?
Dedo: The first one that we saw was from ElementLabs in the USA. They built something called the KelvinTILE which was mixing all these colours and in thosedays, produced the cleanest colour rendition that wecould dream of. But it was heavy, expensive and theone shortcoming was it put out no light, true. So today,we have systems that are much cleaner in colour and,without the diffuser, put out 10 times the light and costless. So this shows the incredible development of LEDs.
Ed: So you’ve developed past the white phosphor?
Dedo: It’s not us. This is the people that we workwith and, of course, we too … like, for example, for themuseum lights which is Raffael’s specialty, Osram cameup with a new LED. They have many LEDs, but theycame up with an LED called PrevaLED and that is anarray of a lot of mint white LEDs mixed with red LED.There’s a little reflector around it and a window on thereflector and a sensor behind it that watches out for thered. Each one of those things has its own programme,because they still come out different, so its ownprogramme balances the red to the rest and that givesus clean colour rendition. But if you put it in an opticalsystem, it looks like Oktoberfest, because they have alot of red dots all over.
So “yes”, LEDs live long but will they be used for a longtime in the professional world? For street lighting andarchitectural lighting, easy. Put them in automotiveapplications, perfect. But when you buy a laptop today,are you going to go first to your solicitor and say “Iwant to change my last will, I want this laptop to beused by my grandson.” You know after 3 years yourneighbours laugh about you because they say “what doyou want with that old thing, it doesn’t run the newsoftware, throw it away.” The same thing is happeningto LEDs every day now.
The progression of the Dedolight.
Page 34
Ed: When looking at these lights, we really are limitedto a single colour, though you say you are developing abi-colour light?
Dedo: Well a variable colour light, yes.
Ed: But within that, there are going to be two chips,so you have one or the other, or you can mix the two?
Dedo: They are chip arrays of many tiny, tinymicroscopic chips and some of those are more reddish,some of those are more bluish and then you drive themall – you address each one of them – through theelectronics.
Ed: But in the case of the normal tungsten type lamp,where you can change the bulb to give you a differentcolour, it’s not such a simple matter in an LED?
Dedo: You can’t take a halogen light and put adaylight lamp in there. It doesn’t work. We’re the onlyones that have a discharge lamp, an HMI daylight lamp,that we can replace with a tungsten discharge lamp,with 80 lumen per Watt – very high light output.
You can have a light that can change colour because ithas both chips, but my feeling is that for mobile use,the bi-colour, being able to go from tungsten todaylight, which we’ll have on the little light, will be veryuseful. So you can cover a daylight situation or atungsten situation and adjust the colour to whateveryou need or feel like; whilst in a studio I think eitheryou have daylight or you have tungsten.
Ed: You decide on how you set up your studio whichone you’re going to have?
Dedo: And you’re not going to change colour.There are lights that are meant to give you changeablecolours as effect lights, the moving lights, the Varilight,the Clay Paky, Martin – all of those can give you all thecolours, yes.
Ed: Because as we’ve seen, if you rely on a filter infront of that light, you’re cutting down the intensityquite considerably and, I guess, adding distortion?
Dedo: When you split the chip array into havingso and so many blue elements and so and so many red
Ed: So you’ve taken the best LED that you could findfor your new lights and then you’ve built a new case?
Dedo: We need to do that next month and nextmonth and next month.
Ed: Yes, but you’ve built a different casing around it,so this new light – does it have a name?
Dedo: It’s called a Dedolight 4.0. Why do wehave this silly point in there? Because I’m expectingthat we’ll have 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4 as the LEDs change.The wattage may be changing, the light output may bechanging, the colour quality may be changing.
Ed: But it is a radical change in design for a Dedolightisn’t it? You’ve gone from two lenses down to a singlelens?
Dedo: Not on all of them. On some of them westill have multi lenses.
Time to take a look. We’re just going into thedemonstration room and we’re having a look at theDedolight 4.0 and Dedo is saying that the bestcomparisons are really to your own light, so in here, wehave other Dedolights which we’re comparing to as wellas some from the competition in blue and silver.
Dedo: This is this light in flood and it gives us avery clean, even light. Right now, this is a 40 Watt LEDand now I’ll compare it with a 150 Watt light from afamous competitor. That’s the 150 Watt light, yes … so… and you see ours.
Ed: Well yours is brighter.
Dedo: Yes, okay the daylight looks brighterbecause it’s higher colour temperature, so here we have… is that in flood?
Dedo takes a light meter reading on the wall at thispoint.
Dedo: So the competition is 160 Lux and now wedo the same with our light. We cover a wider field moreevenly and we have more illumination.
Ed: That’s about 220-230.
Dedo: Yes, but if we go to light the same areathat the other light waslighting then we are doublethe light output over … Thisone spot here, look at it,that’s 400 in spot, whereasthe ARRI light …
Ed: ... it’s not very “spot”?
Dedo: And now youspot ours …
Ed: And we have a realspot. There’s a greatdifference in the design ofthis new light isn’t there?As you say, there’s onemajor lens but there still isactually a second lens inthere?
Dedo: Yes, yes – anddepending on which versionswe’re going to build, it willbe different again. Now thisis a bigger one.
Ed: This is a larger studiostyle LED light that looksvery “filmy” in the way itopens up.
Dedo: That’s the elec-tronics here. Little and big but both LED.
Page 35
the higher efficiency that we gain as we go to the frontand approach this further.
Ed: And only possible with precision engineering?
Dedo: When we started this wonderful old man
was drawing rays and we can show you that, yes. He
would take a drawing machine and he would draw a ray
and when it hit the glass, he would calculate the
diffractive index of the glass and then say “now it
continues at such and such an angle.” When it exits the
glass, he calculates again and he draws that part and
then it enters the next piece of glass and he calculates
again. So he could draw like 30 rays in a day.
What Chin can show you is that today, we can calculate
a million rays in about three minutes. This doesn’t
design lights, but it helps to kind of proof-run a light
without building it. When you learn how to deal with
this software, it’s learning how to adapt it to the
different light sources. This is endless years of practical
experiments and going back to the computer, practical
measurements, back to the computer, until you learn to
better define the light source. If you can’t do that, all
the results will be wrong.
So this is what he’s done over years and one day I went
to him and I said “Chin, you’re a genius” and he said
“no, I’m not a genius, I just work a lot.”
So a lot of what we do is a lot of dedication and detail
work and if you do that long enough, you can go deeper
into the matter than others may have the patience or
enthusiasm or motivation, ever to do.
elements, you can’t drive all of them at the same time,so you’re again losing some output. Or you can relythat the total heat will always be only with half thechips in daylight, or half the chips in tungsten, so youcan get away with a lower capacity cooling system,because you use this half or that half, or you mix bothof them to a limit.
Ed: There’s still a lot of work to do?
Dedo: Yes, but some people say that I have atendency to try and get these things developed to thevery end and I think in this case, the daylight versionwe should be ready to sell in about six weeks and I’veordered the first 10,000 parts sets, so I trust that theywill sell. Meanwhile, we’ll develop the next and the nextand the next generations.
Ed: Right, we’re just having a look at the insides of –what’s this light here?
Dedo: This is a 400 or a 575 Watt daylight fixture,which features two aspherical lenses which are relationcomputed and they have to work in every position ofthis, which is not easy because there’s two addedmovements. In the traditional Fresnel, you would havea reflector and a lamp, like we have here, that don’tchange their distance, but together they travel againstthe front lens; whilst here, when we go to spot, wecome to a certain point when that part continues totravel; whilst when we go to flood, again there is anadded movement. So this is what we call a “zoomfocus” – it’s three movements in one and that allows usto have tighter, more defined spot, wider flood, with anenhanced output, because when you go wider the litarea should get darker, and it doesn’t. It just shows
more on page 38
Phone (09) 3024100 Email: [email protected] Website: www.kelpls.co.nz
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Page 38
this is an F1.6 lens and if you say “I
want such a lens with no distortion, no
halation, perfect contrast rendition, high
resolution”, then an optical designer will
say “with the new software I have, that’s
easy, I can do that, give me half a year.”
But then you say but such a lens, for
example for an ARRI camera, costs
$15,000 and nobody’s going to spend
that money to put it on the front of a
light head, so this has to be like a $500
lens.
This means you cannot use expensive
glass types; you cannot use too many
aspherical elements; and then the
designer usually would just open the
window and jump out.
Ed: But Chin’s still here?
Dedo: He’s done it and a lot of
these things are really remarkable
masterpieces that take things a little bit
far. It’s not only the weight that’s
impressive, it’s the optical performance
which is pretty stunning. Nobody else has ever done
anything like it. Not many people need it; it would be
crazy for other people to do it. We’re the only ones
who are crazy enough to do things that nobody needs!
Next month we shall meet Dr Depu Chin and see how
he can draw two million beams in a ray diagram.
Ed: There is an expression that goes “10%
inspiration; 90% perspiration.”
Dedo: Yes and with Chin together, we’ve designed
lenses for our projection systems that other people
would have thought impossible. This is for projection of
a Hasselblad format image as a high transmission lens – NZVN
A close view of precision engineering.
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PRODUCTION | POST | VISUAL EFFECTS
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Page 41
Mike: That’s correct. We have a 3 rack unit box whichhouses the master control, the CG and the video serverin one box. We have an option to have two channels inthat box, both of those channels are two separatemaster control switchers, separate video servers , andtwo separate 2D CGs inside that one box. We see themain use for that as N + 1 channels or redundancychannels. These can be redundancy channels forexisting infrastructure, or they can be redundancychannels for a ChannelMaster system with the full-blown 3D graphics.
Ed: So I guess in New Zealand, the market is prettysmall, but with the digital spectrum becoming availableand things being shuffled around, I imagine this is agood time for somebody to set up a small TV station ora number of channels?
Mike: Yes, and this solution would be a very cost-effective way to do that. The other area we see it beingquite common in is disaster recovery – not just in NewZealand, but worldwide. We have many customerstalking to us about solutions for disaster recover.
Ed: Does it run off batteries?
Mike: (Laughs) A good UPS system, yes.
Ed: Or Mike on a bicycle pedalling hard?
Mike: (Jokingly) Yes – we’ve got good solar cells aswell.
Ed: And in terms of power consumption?
Mike: There’s more than power consumption too as faras savings in this “green” world; we’ve got small rackspace footprint, the air conditioning savings, all ofthese are things that broadcasters are currently lookingat, and solutions like ChannelMaster help them to be“green”.
Ed: Now in terms of development, you say that thishas been developed from the stand alone product so Iguess there’s been a fair bit of sort of sharing of thetechnology?
Mike: That’s correct. The circuit boards and theintellectual property we’ve been working on for the last25 yearsin our CGs have moved to our master controlswitcher, BrandMaster and now to ChannelMaster, ourchannel in the box. These same circuit boards we’vealso used in our ChannelMaster, with the addition of
Pixel PowerA late entry for Gencom’s IBC reportsees us at Pixel Power with MikeO’Connell.
Ed: Mike, a bit of a similar story hereto Broadcast Pix – you’ve got a productthat is a TV station in a box, that reallydoes everything, but there is acompetitor out there that is a low-costoption. Again, you’ve got the quality?
Mike: Yes, that’s right. Two years ago,we took our graphics engine and weadded master control functionality to it;well now we’ve added a video server aswell and we have a product called“ChannelMaster”. ChannelMaster is achannel in the box; it’s got our high endgraphics that we’re renowned for andwe’ve built up over the last 25 years,and we’ve added an automation solutionto it as well, called “Gallium” and thatwill control ChannelMaster to give you atotal integrated play-out solution.
Ed: So for years you’ve been building the individualbits and pieces that go into a broadcast channelsolution; now you’ve added the final parts and put thewhole lot in a box?
Mike: That’s correct. For the last dozen years, most ofPixel Power’s business came from branding downstreamof a master control switcher or a router output or aserver output. Now we’ve added the simplefunctionality of a master control room or a play-outfacility, by adding master control switching capability.At the next level, we’ve taken it so we’ve got the videoserver capability and as I said the automation as well.But one of the differentials between us and our majorcompetitors out there, such as Miranda iTX or Snell ICE,is that we are a hardware solution, so we have a truehardware master control switcher, we have truehardware codecs inside for the MPEG signal; we alsohave our hardware control panels, so the operatorshave a hardware panel that they can integrate liveprogrammes or remote feeds into the channel in thebox solution.
Ed: And being all in one box, it means it is muchmore cost-effective?
Mike: It is, this is a lot more cost-effective than goingout buying a stand alone video server solution from themany providers out there, a master control switcher, acharacter generator, and an automation system. All ofthose add up to a lot more money than what aChannelMaster Gallium solution does. The other bigdifferential that we have with ChannelMaster is thatwe’ve designed it so any automation system can controlit. For the broadcasters out there now who havechannels on air with an automation system, they canactually add a ChannelMaster chassis and use theirexisting automation to drive it. You don’t have to gowith our automation solution, unlike the other vendorsout there.I If you like the iTX solution, you’re locked-into their automation and their channel play-out ; thesame with the ICE solution. With us, you can pick –you can use the automation system you’ve currentlygot, or use ours, or go and buy a new third partysolution if you like.
Ed: I imagine this product can have a number ofchannels in it, is that correct?
“ inspiration. partnership. support ”
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Page
replacing a couple of them with a newer circuit boardthat does both the old and the new functionality.
Ed: And in terms of operating it all, I see that on the
screen it looks like Windows 7, so what part does the
Windows operating system have in the whole
functionality of this product?
Mike: Windows 7 is the operating system host, but on
top of the circuit boards we have in there, we run our
own operating system, which has taken care of all the
management of the data and the signals. Windows 7 is
not managing that or the graphics whatsoever.
Ed: And in the very unlikely case of Windows 7
crashing?
Mike: We have relay bypass functionality and watchdog
functionality; if you lose power your input signal will
appear automatically on your output connector going to
your router or your TX chain; and likewise, if the
operating system fails, our watchdog bypass will do the
same functionality.
Ed: And does it call you on your cell phone to tell you
“quick, get down to the station”?
Mike: Well our Gallium server can actually send you an
email or give you a call on the cell phone as well.
Coming soon ...
Ed: And do they use your voice Mike?
Mike: No – we’ll have a more elegant native homeland
voice!
Page 43
NZVN
it's in the bag.
www.panavision.co.nz
Tim (09) 3608766 318 Richmond Rd, Grey Lynn, Auckland [email protected]
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