NZVN July 2014

P8 Avid Audio Roadshow with Protel.

P14 Media Conference in Auckland.

P17 And the Winner is …

P21 Last look at NAB with PLS

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Go www.finnzed.co.nz and follow the link to NZVN for more news.

On a mild June evening, there’s a big ARRI sign all overthe Nutshell building. This is quite a combo affairbecause there are people who have made the effort tocome and look at the AMIRA camera, the ARRI lighting,or just for the free beer. It’s something that’s beenorganised by PLS, ARRI, and Nutshell Camera Rentals.

Ed: Chris McKenzie, what was your part in this?

Chris: We’ve provided all the ARRI lighting heretonight. We had a conversation with Stefan from ARRIAustralia a number of months ago when Paul Richardssignalled that he was going to get an AMIRA, and wedecided that this would be a good opportunity to do a bitof a “dog and pony show” between camera and lightingand get all the fields of interest involved.

Ed: And you’ve done the catering?

Chris: We’ve done the catering and Paul’s done thewine and beer … we must mention the beer, the very

AMIRA in Auckland

JULY 2014 Vol 204

local ( two doors away ) Governor, brewed by AndrewPeacocke. I gather it’s a good drop. This was the rightopportunity to get Stefan across as well; most of theactivity he’s had over here has been with the ALEXAcameras and now the AMIRA, I think, is another goodoffer.

For us at PLS it was an opportunity to get the M family ofHMI Par – well we’re calling them a “Par”, we should callthem “M”s, they don’t have a lens like conventional Pars,but they give you all the benefits of a Par, but especiallythey give you a higher output.

Ed: And events like this are where people in theindustry can have a look at them, see them and think“Wow, that’s something I hadn’t thought of” and then,either come and buy one or two, or they can rent them?

Chris: That’s true. We can rent them, we can sellthem and, as my sales guys said to me “well, who are wepitching to tonight?” I said “well, we’re pitching to theDOPs, because they’re like the architects, they’re theguys who have the vision, they want to understand some

The mainly cinematographer audience listened intently to Stefan’s (left) presentation.

of the tools but, at the end of the day, they say to thegaffer – alright give me one of those.” Video guys aremore hands on. They have a better understanding, andI think the AMIRA is pitched at those guys as well. So itwas a good opportunity to attract a clever bunch ofpeople and give them a taster to say “well, yes, I mustgo and have a look at that properly” and then we’llhappily spend an hour or two with them and take themthrough all the details and everything else that theymay need and other products that they can value add –you know, “would you like fries with that sir?” As yousee, we’ve had a helluva good turnout.

The evening included a camera test by Donald Duncan,an acknowledged “top-shelf” cinematographer on theAuckland scene. Donald told us that he had less thanan hour to get to know the brand new AMIRA, then takeit out on a variety of dates and cut together apresentation that showed some key elementscinematographers would be interested in. Hiscomments indicated that Donald was enthusiastic at thestart and close to proposing by the end! Hey, no girl( or camera ) is perfect but a ratio of 20:3 positive tonegative has got to be a good bet.

The technical details were that he used the AMIRA’snative recording to C-fast cards at ProRes 4444 2Kusing ARRI log-C gamma curve. Most was shot at ISO800 although some night shots were done at ISO 1600and, although there was grain/video noise evident atISO 3200, it was even throughout the tonal range andcomparable to a film grain look.

Donald is used to an ALEXA, and found the comparableAMIRA images compelling but the layout more suited touse by a solo operator. The points that backed this upwere excellent hand-held balancing, a state-of-the-artOLED viewfinder, handy flip-out LCD screen for menu

replied “Hell yes!” and he would like to see many of itsfeatures added to the ALEXA on its next update.

Now for the owner of this German beauty, Paul Richardsfrom Nutshell.

Ed: Paul, you must be a very happy man knowingthat you have got the first AMIRA in the South Pacificover and above the Australians?

Paul: Rightly so. No, it’s great to have the first one andit’s all down to Stefan really – his choice to deliver herefirst. He mentioned that there were various peoplegiving him a hard time for not having looked after theNew Zealand market so we get the win this time. It’s agreat pleasure also to see the reaction of these peoplewho are skilled, mature DOPs and young people whoare wanting to work with a good camera, and thereaction listening in to their conversations is veryinteresting.

Ed: Which must be very heart-warming for youbecause you’ve invested rather a lot in this camera andits accessories and I know you made this decision quitea long time ago, when the AMIRA was just a brochure …you went ahead and made that decision to buy it then?

Paul: Yes, and not buy other product that was aroundat the time. The AMIRA seems to fill a spot in mymarket that, with regards to the current budgets, wehad the options of the sweet spot of ProRes 444, 422,200 frames, a lighter weight body; we’ve got a greatviewfinder, all the attributes of this camera …

Ed: Yes, but that was all on paper. You bought thison paper without actually having seen it and handled it?

Paul: And why wouldn’t you buy it on paper, knowingthe pedigree of the camera and the manufacturer? Yesthere was a delay in delivery, but not that significant.The delight is, you know, internally I’m just glowing and

waiting for people to comeand say “buy another one!”because I think probably,within a short period, therewill be lots of these camerasaround. They will becomeaccepted as being thecamera to work witheveryday. ALEXAs may bechallenged by them oncommercials and drama. Ithink they are underrated atthis stage by the ARRIadvertising, putting themdown as a Doco- stylecamera. In fact they arecapable of doing 90% ofwhat most people want todo.

Ed: But obviously, it hasbeen a nervous time for youfrom that initial order until

now, that nobody else has come up with somethingthat’s even better?

Paul: Another manufacturer? Inevitably there’ll be aCanon that sits on your shoulder like a cat, orsomething or other else that sings every tune going.The difference with this camera is that they’ve done onething well and they haven’t tried to become everythingto everybody. The 80/20 principle – they have provided80% of what everybody wants.

Ed: With a workflow that DOPs will understand?

Paul: Yes. I mean 200 frames is a huge attribute, theswitching on the camera is very simple, the menus are

selection, great user programme buttons allowing achange of frame rate and ISO within seconds and a fullyversatile sound interface. That it does not shoot RAW isprobably not a problem for its intended market of TVCs,TV drama and low budget features. It might be tooexpensive for any local docos, other than high-endbudgets and it feels too heavy for sustained “run-and-gun” operations though it’s extremely rugged with anexcellent build quality.

In the post process, grader Karl Lear was impressed asto how much detail he could pull out of the LogCmaterial. When asked if he liked the AMIRA Donald

Lots of intense discussion took place. Donny is the third from the left.

very simple, you don’t have to go to a menu within amenu, within a menu and a sub-menu and then go“Now where was I, hang on it was down a couple … ohhang on …”

Ed: But what I noticed tonight, in just this short time,

is that people come along, they pick it up, stick it on

their shoulder and it works. They don’t have to add a

whole lot of things to it or figure out which bit doeswhat?

Paul: And that’s the great delight of ARRI product; SR

1, 2 and 3, it was just things clipped together and

worked really well as a film camera; everything around

the camera holds together well, the engineering is

superb, it’s a pleasure to hold and work with.

Ed: It looks very rugged which I guess, for a rental

camera, must be a good attribute?

Paul: Yes, inevitably people will have a go at cracking itand breaking it and scratching it and doing their worst,

but hopefully they have some respect for the fact that

it’s a beautiful thing.

I think one of the key things is the pedigree and the

heritage of the ALEXA, the reduced size, the reduced

weight and the reduction of RAW; you’ve still got that

2.8K sensor producing a fantastic image, and the

colourimetry of the ALEXA is right there, proven by

what you can see in the viewfinder. It’s superb; it’s asuperb image.

Ed: Have you got an answer prepared for the

question that will come along – “oh, but it’s not 4K?”

Paul: Someone said along the way, “it’s not how manypixels you’ve got; it’s what you do with them.”

Ed: Ummm, a good answer to have.

Now, the man from ARRI, Stefan Sedlmeier.

Ed: Stefan, you’ve got a glass of red in your hand, Ihope it’s a New Zealand red?

Stefan: Yes, Pinot Noir. Yummy.

Ed: So we finally got you into New Zealand and wehave two AMIRAs as the stars of this show?

Stefan: I brought our demo camera over so wehave two cameras for people to handle tonight. I’mvery pleased with the turnout and how welcomingeverybody is.

Ed: You are in New Zealand Stefan – you’ve got toexpect that. You must also be very pleased with thedemo that Donald did?

Stefan: Yes, he shot a 3 minute reel, edited it lastnight and it’s fantastic footage shot around Auckland.The night shots, high frame rate footage shot in thecircus, daylight on a soccer field with kids, it just blewme away – without much preparation, out of the boxone week ago; wonderful footage on the screen oneweek later.

Ed: And to me, one of his telling comments was that,when he was trying to think of things that weren’t quiteright, he had great trouble. He came up with three, buthe found 20 things that were really superb and in fact,he said that there are some of those things that hewould like to see on an ALEXA?

Stefan: Yes, of course, but it’s a hardware design,we always listen to our customers and we really try toincorporate the feedback we get. This is why thecamera is as good as it is, because we really listen toour customers’ preferences, feedback, thoughts, wishlist.

A comment some time back was that we should havethe audio level meter on the lefthand side of thecamera, so look where the audio level meter is on theAMIRA, it’s on the lefthand side of the camera. Nodoubt about that, because this is how people operate.

Ed: So where do you go from here? There’s obviouslya rental camera now available in New Zealand throughNutshell, but what’s the next step? Are you hoping thata lot of owner / operators out there are going to see thevalue in such a well-designed and rugged camera?

Stefan: It reminds me a little bit of when westarted off with the ALEXA about 3½-4 years ago andmeanwhile, we have an installed base of 150 ALEXAs inAustralia and New Zealand. You always have to startseeding and always use strategic positions like here inAuckland, where you get a camera for testing, fortrying. Of course, Nutshell purchased the camera, butit is also good to have a customer there. We have soldquite a few and they will be delivered in the next fewmonths and we’re still taking orders of course. What’snew with the AMIRA is that we also have all the TVstudios, broadcasters, News interested because this isthe camera which is suitable for them, ENG style lens,two-third inch B4 mount and ready to shoot.

Ed: And you’ve got a few lights here tonight as well?

Stefan: Yes this is true. I should say that I will tryto be in New Zealand more often. Maybe I come moreoften but for shorter times, but it’s great to be hereeven if it’s just for one night, I really love it, it’s worthcoming over for. The event tonight we did in co-operation with Chris McKenzie, Professional LightingServices, who is our lighting distributor in New Zealand.Along with the AMIRA, I brought along the new ARRI L5-C. This is the little brother of the L7. It’s a 5 inchFresnel, controllable, tuneable LED light. We show theL7, we show the M90, the M40, the M18 and the M8, sothe entire family of HMI and it’s just the place to showboth at an ARRI night at Auckland.

Ed: Now of course, ourreaders see all these in thepages of NZ Video News, butthere’s nothing like actuallycoming and putting yourhands on them and seeingthem for real, and ifsomebody’s missed tonight,they can always go along toPLS and put their hands onthem there and get a fulldemonstration of how theywork?

Stefan: For lighting yes,

for lighting please see PLS –

for the AMIRA camera,

please see Nutshell. But it’s

really true that to put your

hands on is much better

than reading a brochure, ordownloading a PDF. This is

why I always travel with the

camera.

The ALEXA travelled with methrough all Australia and

New Zealand in a flight case which we shipped. TheAMIRA travelled with me as hand luggage in theaeroplane.

Ed: I’m sure we’ll hear a lot more of the AMIRA aspeople get to use it.

Stefan: Thank you very much, yes I hope so aswell. NZVN

Stefan and Paul with the AMIRA to the fore.

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Avid AudioRoadshowwith Protel

I know that I go on about

this but it’s really important

that we are all educated

about the basic technical

aspects of our industry. If

we only do things the way

we’ve always done them, or

we only listen to a small

number of other users, then

we may continue on a

misguided path. That’s why

I urge everyone to make the

effort to go to training

sessions – especially free

ones! A case in point was a

recent show put on by

Sennheiser ( sadly, Auckland

only ) and this one around

New Zealand by Avid in conjunction with Protel.

I’m not an audio specific person but I gained knowledge

that will help me improve the services I can offer to my

video clients. After all, silent video is not much fun.

Now, the questions I asked were based on what I found

interesting so, if you are a dedicated audio person, in

fairness to the products and the organisers, go and see

for yourselves at Protel’s showrooms the next time you

are in Auckland or Wellington.

Here’s what I picked up at the Auckland venue. To tell

us about the S3L console, we have David Sullivan, ANZ

Audio sales manager from Avid Australia.

Ed: Now David, what impressed me about this is that

it’s a little console, but it’s a console with powerful

features?

David: Absolutely. When we released it, it was

version 1 software. The great thing with having a

EUCON based console is that we can add a lot of

features relatively easily, so this is our third release of

software and effectively they’ve rewritten the whole

architecture behind it again with this release of

software, to allow the 64 bit plugins …

Ed: So now it’s going to be running on Windows 8, 64

bit?

David: Yes – embedded, so it’s not like a

traditional copy of Windows 8 so it’s very stable, very

reliable. Our new S6 console is running on Windows 8

embedded as well.

Ed: The other thing that I really found useful is that

this is a console that’s small enough for you to take as

“check-in” luggage on a plane. You can take it to a gig,

you can use it as a live mixer, but then you can bring it

back and use it as your studio mixer?

David: Yes. There’s more and more demand on

the sound guy to do a mix of the show every night for

the band. The bands want it for quality control and

also, one night, they might capture that magic moment

and they want to put it on a tour DVD or something like

that. So having the ability to mix during the show and,

obviously, get a great sound, and then take the surface

back to your hotel room and do a mix down on Pro

Tools for the band, bounce it out real easily and quickly

… it’s a big plus for a lot of touring guys.

Ed: Okay, so you use the console in conjunction with

some sort of recording system?

David: The console comes with a copy of Pro Tools

so it’s automatically enabled to have 64 channels

recording into Pro Tools as well as 64 channels of

playback as well. That comes as standard. It’s the only

system out there that allows 64 in and out just through

a laptop with Pro Tools.

Ed: But at the same time, you’re recording those 64

tracks in an unmixed state as well as a mixed version,

so you can always change it later?

David: Yes absolutely. You can designate the

record source to be from the tops of the signal chain or

Pre/Post fader, the choice is yours.

Ed: You’re talking to a video person here, so I’ve got

to ask these questions … and another one that you

seemed to make a big fuss of is EUCON enabled. Now

what is EUCON?

David: EUCON is a technology that we acquiredwhen we bought Euphonix. It’s an Ethernetcommunication protocol. The best way to describe it toa video guy would be it’s like “MIDI on steroids”! It’s alot faster, a lot more commands. At the moment, thereare 500 plus EUCON commands for Pro Tools. So itallows us a lot of flexibility in terms of interacting withthe surface from Pro Tools and vice versa.

Ed: Talking about Ethernet, you also mentioned thatAVB is a new standard for getting audio and videoacross networks – this is something that the AVnuAlliance has ratified and it’s good to be part of it, sohow does AVB fit in with EUCON?

David: AVB is a big deal and it’s a big deal for

video guys as well. It really is going to be the standard

going forward for transporting audio and video signals

across Ethernet, or in an integrated Ethernet network,

where you’ve got switches and other data competing

with it. Traditionally, with a lot of Ethernet based audio

protocols at the moment, they really don’t cope well

Stuart, David and René at Protel’s old offices.

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when there’s other traffic on the network and really

have to be their own dedicated network. The whole

point behind AVB is to have inbuilt quality of service for

audio and video, which then would allow you to really

start routing audio and video anywhere around the

building, while dealing with contentious traffic as well.

It’s designed to be super reliable; it’s built into the Macs

already, so with Mavericks in Mac, there’s AVB drivers

already built in, ready to go. So even though our S3L,

and the SC48’s were one of the first devices out there

with AVB, there’s going to be a lot more coming down

the line – it’s something it’s good to know about.

Ed: Now you also mentioned virtual soundcheck. I

can understand going into a venue and, rather than

having to set the whole process up right from scratchand get every little channel working, you can cut the

time on this dramatically?

David: Virtual soundcheck is a huge time saver for

the sound guys. Basically, the way it works is you

record a gig from the previous night, bring it into the

new gig, have the virtual soundcheck sending all those

channels via playback through Pro Tools back to the

console. You basically get

your levels for the room

roughly right, the band

comes in and does a quick

line check to make sure all

their signals on stage are

good for them, and then

you’re ready to go with

minimal fuss.

Ed: So this is providing it’s

the same room you’re in?

David: Well no – virtual

soundcheck can be used in

different rooms. It’s just a

way of getting a rough level

ready for the band without

having to reinvent the

wheel.

Ed: Last thing – you

mentioned HDX-powered E3

engine?

David: Our top of the

line audio platform is based

on our HDX card, which is a DSP audio card.

Our previous live system consoles have been using the

older HD card; S3L is the first using the HDX card, so it

has an enormous amount of processing power for audio,

it’s very reliable, there’s 18 DSP chips onboard. It just

means that it gives you a really great clarity of sound

and super low latency.

It gives you the peace of mind that it’s rock solid and

reliable and proven. It also allows us to use all the AAX

plugins which is our new format of plugins which work

with Pro Tools 11, to work on the S3L console as well.

Ed: And there’s a lot of plugins that come free with

the package?

David: Oh yes, there’s over 30 I think now and,

with the AAX plugins coming out, the DSP based plugins

– there’s nearly 200 of them, so you get a lot of choice

when you’re live sound mixing. But also, when you’re

mixing in Pro Tools, you’re using those plugins and then

you can take those same plugins and use them live. So

for a lot of sound guys, that’s a really big thing because

there’s a particular reverb that they really like and then

it’s interesting when they’ve gone to other consoles

they have to use a different reverb to kind of get it

wherever they want, whereas with our system, they can

use the same reverb or whatever plugin between Pro

Tools and between the live system … it just gives them

a lot more peace of mind, and gives them the sound

that they want.

Ed: So it would seem that, if you’re using Pro Tools

and some other mixer, you should really have a look at

one of these – you might be doing a lot more work

when this could be doing a lot better things for you?

David: That’s the whole concept of the hybrid

nature of the S3L system. We designed it for guys who

want to get the best of both worlds, so they want to use

the surface in the studio, they want to take the same

technology live …

Ed: And it’s all combined with Pro Tools?

David: Absolutely – you can’t go past it, it’s great.

And the other Avid presenter at the show is Stuart

Newman who explained the Avid S6 console and more.

Ed: Now consoles are wonderful things but really, the

best way to get to know what the console does is to

come and have a look at it yourself so it’s very

heartening to know that Protel are actually going to

have an S6 console in their new premises. You can

come in and, not play with it, but actually bring in a

session and try it out on this large console. So if you

find that the S3 is a bit too small for your future plansand your growth, have a look at an S6. Now rather

than going into all the fancy details of it, what

impressed me was that it’s something that is modular

and that, because a lot of the features are software

driven, it is future proof?

Stuart: Yes, that’s absolutely right. We don’t

define it as a console as such; we actually define it as a

control surface. We do have consoles like the System

5, but in the nature of the way that the S6 works, it’s

just an Ethernet connection between software, not just

Pro Tools, but anything that’s EUCON compatible, and

the surface. The system is customisable in terms of the

way that you want it to work. So it’s modular in its

nature, which means you can start off small and be a

lot more cost effective with it; it’s a lot better with

ergonomics. We’ve put a lot more in a smaller space, a

lot better visual feedback as well – so colour coding,

scrolling waveforms, input meters right next to the

faders – you know, these are the main things that our

control surface customers wanted to see so we think

we’ve delivered on it.

Ed: You also spoke about Avid Everywhere, because

this is something that we’ve seen developing over the

years with the Cloud, and it’s good to see this in the

audio side because here’s something that will improve

dramatically the collaboration between audio people.

What are the sorts of features that are upcoming in

Avid Everywhere for audio people?

Stuart: Well, I can’t speak specifically to the

features and to be quite honest the final details are sure

to change. What you saw today and what was

presented at NAB is just really a high level overview …

it’s mainly three areas of collaborative features,

improved archiving and metadata, and also …

Ed: Streaming?

Stuart: Well yes streaming is involved in that, but

the third thing is the Avid Marketplace. We’re most

excited about that because it’s going to give our

customers the ability to be able to monetise their

creations very effectively and quickly. It means they

can get what they’ve created out there, people can use

it and they get paid for it.

Ed: So they can put something up there and

somebody can say “yes, I want that as a backing track”

or something and they can do the deal through the Avid

Marketplace?

Stuart: That’s right.

Ed: On the other side of that, I was most interested

that, when you are collaborating, your system might

not have all the same plugins as the one you’re

collaborating with … you don’t have to go out and buy

those plugins straightaway, what can you do?

Stuart: Well the idea is that there’s a thousand

plugins out there and no Pro Tools user has all 1000

plugins on their system – they might have 50, 100 or

200, but if someone is using a certain plugin and wants

you to collaborate with them, we’re developing a way

that you can rent those plugins and instantiate them in

your session without even having to close the session

that you’re working on, so making it very streamlined.

You know, something that a lot of people who are new

to Pro Tools wouldn’t know, but older users would

remember – Avid acquired a company called Rocket

Network around about 2003 – but that technology was

very much a precursor to what we’re doing now.

Rocket Network was reliant on an infrastructure of

network speed, internet speed that wasn’t around back

in those days, but we’ve had the code lying dormant

there in Pro Tools for quite some time. Now we’ve got a

chance to take it to the next level, so it’s something

we’ve been keeping in mind for a very long time. It’s

exciting that we’ve now got a larger infrastructure

bringing video shared storage production asset

management and audio systems together. You’ve seen

Media Composer Cloud and we’re talking Pro Tools

Cloud – that’s all to do with Avid Everywhere.

Ed: PXF – a new format, future proof?

Stuart: PXF, yes, the big headline on that feature is

the fact that it is future proof, so a singular file format

that you can output at the end of a project or a session

from Pro Tools and archive that away and any future

version of Pro Tools will be able to open up that format

and extract what it needs from it.

Ed: It’s not just a folder containing a whole lot of

other types of file?

Stuart: No, that’s basically how our users have had

to work up until PXF becomes a reality, is just a basic

backup of a folder. That could be off a shared storage

system, network hard drive, that sort of thing, but I

think PXF will make it a lot easier to have a singular file

that can be put up onto the Cloud, it can be backed up

by automated hardware and it’s future proof as well.

Ed: I believe by now that you must have the audio

market pretty much sewn up with around 90% of

serious users using Pro Tools. I guess where your

market has to go is to replace the built-in audio tools

that you might get with a

video editing programme. I

know even with an Avid

Media Composer, you’re

going to get some basic

audio functionality, but to

really go that next step, you

need a proper audio tool and

Pro Tools is something that

not just works with Avid, but

will work with any other

editing programme like

Adobe Premiere or with Final

Cut Pro or anything else that

you can export and do the

audio work in Pro Tools?

Stuart: Yes absolutely.

The advent of the AAF, that

can be exported out of Final

Cut Pro, I believe Adobe

Premiere, of course Media

Composer as well … we can

bring in all of that audio

data information in Pro Tools

and get the audio part done. In terms of market share,

it’s been estimated at 85-90% of professional studios

worldwide use Pro Tools and there’s a lot of benefit to

the consumers and our professional customers – they

know if they’re working in that format and they need to

go to another studio, they will be able to walk in and

load it up in their system.

Pro Tools comes with somewhere in the order of 65plugins … you were talking about editing software thathas all the effects and the ability to create, you knowevery version of Pro Tools comes with all these effects.With Pro Tools 11, we’ve totally overhauled the videoengine – so we’ve brought the Media Composer videoengine into Pro Tools and now we can natively play backa myriad of different codecs without it having to beQuickTime. That also improves the compatibility withother editors out there, because we can natively bringin those video files and start working with them withouthaving to do a transcode.

Ed: And I’m sure you’d agree that the most importantpart of any video is actually the audio?

Stuart: Well that’s what George Lucas says and I’ma bit like him I would say.

It’s a bit of a quandary, I mean, I’ve been doing audio

now for around about 20 years and I’m still relatively

young, but it’s very true when they say that when audio

sounds good, no one’s really going to complain,

audiences are just going to expect it to sound good.

But when it doesn’t sound good, that’s when you’ll hear

about it.

Audio guys are kind of like the unsung heroes in

production; if you’re very good, you very rarely actually

get accolades for the work.

Ed: I guess the test for me is, if you turn the picture

off for 30 seconds and just listen to the audio, you can

probably tell you’re not missing much in the story. But

if you turn the sound off for 30 seconds, you might not

understand the connection to the rest of the

programme?

Stuart: Yes, there’s so much emotion especially in

sound tracks in music that will set the mood on what’s

going on in the scene.

In fact, I think that’s what George Lucas talks about

with music – you could take that away and you’d

probably still really not have an idea of what that scene

is trying to achieve in the movie.

The best part about my job is the customers; and New

Zealand, I have to say, has some of the best in the

region, not only Auckland, but of course down in

Wellington with what they’re doing down there in Park

Road. They’re extremely dedicated people.

Ed: Well there’s still room over here?

Stuart: Yes there is isn’t there, there’s plenty of

land still. Hmmmm.

NZVN

Media Conference in AucklandWe are with Gerry Smith, formerly of Prime Australia,now representing a broadcast industry interest groupcalling themselves Media Technologies. They arehosting a locally focused Media Technologies conferencein Auckland on 30 and 31 July.

Ed: Gerry, I understand that this is open to anyone,but I guess you have a particular target market?

Gerry: Well, we’re looking at people in thebroadcasting and the “beyond broadcasting” world –people who operate in both free to air television and thebroadband market. We’re looking at what’s happeningin those spaces. So the target is that group of people –people who are playing in a media space, free to air andonline.

Ed: And this is something that those, even inproduction companies who are doing stuff for television,really should know about?

Gerry: I agree that they should know about it,because the days of just sending a 26 minute half hourtape to a television broadcaster and having them play itare virtually dead. Broadcasters are looking for morethan that – they’re looking for the raw content, they’relooking for something to put online and widen theaudience appeal for the material. So they don’t wantjust a simple tape anymore, they want the metadata,they want access to all the different outtakes and all theexpanded features that they can offer their clients andadvertisers.

Ed: Looking at the list of speakers I see that you’vegot somebody from Kordia, you’ve got Telecom who issupposedly telling us where Telecom is going in theconnected world and their digital plans; but alsosomebody from Australia whose presentation is aboutwhy metadata matters?

Gerry: This is Julia from HWW in Australia. HWWare a company that manage metadata on behalf of thebroadcasters and the content providers. In my time inAustralia, we sent all our material to HWW, theymanaged the metadata and sent it back to all thebroadcasters; and metadata matters, because withoutmetadata in a connected world, you can’t find yourcontent. You need keyword searches – all that stuffrelates to metadata. The metadata is becoming moreand more important in a connected world.

Ed: Now you were also saying that there’s anothermajor technology that broadcasters need to look at andit’s something that’s been adopted in Australia already?

Gerry: Yes. We’ve got HbbTV – Hybrid BroadcastBroadband Television – and it’s been adopted by thebroadcasters in Australia. SBS have just gone live with

their trials; the head of technology for Channel Seven,Trevor Bird, is coming across – he’s going to talk abouttheir plans for HbbTV in Australia. What it does is thatit enables viewers to seamlessly switch between livetelevision and catch-up television on their Smart andconnected TV. So that’s the new trend in Australia; it’shappening there now and I believe Sam Irvine fromFreeview is also going to talk about what New Zealand’splans may be in that space.

Ed: Now to me, this seems as though it would openup the broadcast television market for more of thesmaller production companies who might have thoughtabout doing a narrowcast on a web-based system butnow, if this was adopted, they’d have widerpossibilities?

Gerry: Yes, well you can look at the possibilitiesthat smaller narrowcasters can maybe work with someof the big established broadcasters to have theircontent also available on the HbbTV platform of thatbroadcaster. The broadcaster would have its free to airchannels, its catch-up channels and also access to thesmaller second tier type narrowcasters – that contentcan also be freely available much easier to people withconnected TVs via that platform.

Ed: And for conference attendees, when you’re notlistening to the speakers, you can network?

Gerry: Well, when you’re not listening to thespeakers, we have morning tea, afternoon tea, and agroup of suppliers showing their wares. Lunch isprovided and there will be drinks on the first day sopeople can have a chance to network and talk amongthemselves and talk to suppliers and look at some ofthis technology.

Ed: And they get to ask the questions?

Gerry: They get to ask the questions. We’reclosing the session on the second day with a paneldiscussion which will hopefully be a big question andanswer session and we’ll talk about some of the thingswe’ve seen and heard during the course of the twodays. But also during the course of the event, there’splenty of time to network, yes.

Ed: And when do you give your speech?

Gerry: I give my speech at the opening for about30 seconds – to introduce the Minister of Broadcasting,and then I do the introductions for the rest of thespeakers of the day. But I’m not actually planning alarge speaking role.

Ed: Because you’ve said now that you’ve retiredGerry?

Gerry: I’ve certainly retired. I’m back in NewZealand after 14 years in Australia and I’m enjoyingbeing back here, it’s good to be home.

Ed: Right, so the people who you think should comeand see this are?

Gerry: I think the people who should come andsee it are obviously of course broadcasters in theirspace, and they’re coming along …

Ed: And broadcast wannabes?

Gerry: ... and broadcast wannabes and anybodywho is in that space who is looking to see where theworld is going in the online video world, what ishappening in that space and how that could affect theircurrent operation and their future operations and theirfuture business models and what they could be doingwith their businesses to make their offerings a bit moreattractive in a connected world.

Ed: So in fact, it’s wider than broadcasters, it’s forpeople who are supplying material for broadcast?

Gerry: And that’s the whole idea of theconference, it’s not just broadcast. We’ve themed it“Beyond Broadcast” but what we mean is what ishappening out there in the big wide space. If you lookat some of the stats, the use of video across theInternet is something like 68% of all traffic. And that’swhat’s happening – it’s all about that sort of space andhow video is moving, who’s making it, what it is andwhat opportunities there are.

Ed: And it’s not the same video that people arewatching on the net now – it’s broadened a bit?

Gerry: Yes, I think there’s still plenty of that stuffout there but now it’s a much broader offer than thatniche.

To register please visit mediatechevents.com NZVN

And theWinner is ...

We are all winners on thisoccasion because we havePhil Keoghan from ‘TheAmazing Race’ here. He’sdressed in a check shirt,which sort of goes back tohis New Zealand heritage,and underneath, a New YorkCity Trinity Boxing Club t-shirt – perhaps to blunt theGore-ish image of the checkshirt on top.

Ed: Phil, does your wifechoose your show clothesfor you?

Phil: No ... I have a stylistwho works on the show.The NYC Trinity Boxing Clubt-shirt is something Ibought. It’s an amazingboxing gym right next towhere the Twin Towerswere. We were there for thememorial.

Ed: Now, to catch our readers up, I approached youat the Sony Press event last night, fellow Kiwi and all,because you were on stage lauding the F55.

Well, you should know “who’s who” in this pic.

Phil: Well actually, I am here as a bit of a Sonyambassador, just because Sony worked with me on afilm that I shot last year, which was a film that Louise,

my wife and producing partner, and Idecided to shoot to recognise andhonour a New Zealand cyclist whorode in the Tour de France in 1928.Sony worked with us to help us shootthat film in 4K. It was the firstdocumentary and first time that theF55 had been really tested in the fieldin the way we used it – 26 daysaround France, sometimes shootingmore than 23 hours in a day, in therain, on dusty roads, over bumpyroads, up high peaks, up the top ofthe Galibier, over the Pyrenees, overthe Alps, screaming down hills at 80kilometres an hour and crawling uphills at 10k an hour – and my goodfriend and director of photography,Scott Shelley, shooting much of thefilm backwards for almost 6000kilometres around France.

Ed: Did you get stopped by “lesflics” very often?

Phil: We did actually.

Ed: The French police are known forthat – you just have to ask JeremyClarkson the number of times he’s been stopped.

Phil: Yes, we were stopped – we were trying to follow

the exact route and consequently we messed up a few

times. Some of the roads that used to be just small

roads between towns are now major highways, so we

accidentally found ourselves on some highways where

it’s illegal to ride bicycles and so we were pulled over a

number of times and they were not too happy about it

on more than one occasion. We had to talk our way outof it … I handed them some of our energy bars, you

know, as a way of saying “hey guys, can you give us a

break?”

Ed: And did you use your Kiwi accent, as opposed to

the other one?

Phil: Well actually, we were travelling with an ex-

California Highway Patrol Officer who was riding the

motorbike, so as soon as they found out that he was

CHiPs you know, they wanted to know what hismotorbike was, they wanted to know all his history, so

that actually really helped. I just left him to talk and

charm his way out of it and he invited them for a ride

when they come to California, so they were all happy.

Ed: Right, well back to the technical … you chose theF55 because?

Phil: Well in 2009, Louise and I made a film which wascalled The Ride and we shot it in HD. Initially, we didnot intend to make a film, we were just making videoblogs, and in the field, it was just me and acameraman, our DOP Scott and he rode across Americabackwards shooting this film. The blogs were sopopular online, that people who were following asked usif we would cut it into a film.

So we ended up making a film when we, again, did notintend to make a film. Thankfully, we had the foresightto shoot it in HD and the film went on to actually earnover a million dollars and we gave the money away tothe MS Society. We’ve raised over a million dollars forMS, and that’s why I did the ride in the first place, wasto raise money and awareness for MS. So I’ve workedclosely with Sony for a number of years and, whatended up happening was, we made a theatrical printfrom the HD material to play in theatres, Sony heardabout it, saw the film and they said “listen, if you everdo another film and you have any intention of puttingthat film into a theatre, then you should really consider4K.”

At the time, I didn’t really think that 4K was practical totake out into a documentary situation to shoot, and tobe honest with you, the new announcements yesterday

about what they’ve done to the F55would have really helped us while wewere in France, because there werecertain things that were vulnerableabout the F55 for the type of “run andgun” shooting that we were doing onthis documentary –

(a) the vent was exposed at theback of the handle;

(b) the XLR plugs were on the sideof the camera rather than in theback; there were only two channels ofaudio, not four; the viewfinderconnection onto the side of thecamera came right into the camera ata right angle so it was veryvulnerable; there was no mount foran onboard microphone; and the

Sony would have the largest Press following at NAB.

Phil on stage with the F55.

Phil: They were in different trucks, yep

you got it, but you know, this is one of

the things that has changed so much

from the old days, like when I started as

a film camera assistant and I was

literally loading film. First of all, you

couldn’t see what you’d shot; secondly,

you didn’t know if there was a problem

until you got back and you actually

exposed the film – whether there was a

scratch on the emulsion or whether there

was a hair in the gate. You didn’t know

any of that stuff and then you would do

your best to change the mags as fast as

you could and then store them all away

and you would stress out until it was

exposed and everything was okay –

especially if you were the camera

assistant, because if there was a hair in

the gate or a scratch, that was your

fault. So working with digital media was awesome.

Every night, we had an editor/media manager/driver –

he did a lot, we all wore many, many hats – he would

cut these video blogs and we would post these at an

even lower resolution to be able to go online. Just

working with the files was great because we actually

had our entire movie on one 4 terabyte drive – andthen in the end, I think we shot with the 4K material,

somewhere around 15-16 terabytes of material.

More from Phil and his plans next month.

white balance controls were not where they normallyare in, say, an F800.

Ed: To be fair, the F55 was designed as a cinema

camera but you were not using it as a cinema camera?

Phil: Right, and so we had to make certain adaptations

to the camera to make it work for “run and gun”

documentary, even right down to the shoulder mount.

So yesterday, I was extremely excited to see that

they’ve now configured the camera so that, when

you’ve got it on your shoulder and you reach for the

controls, it’s almost like you’re holding onto an F800.

Of course, you’re shooting in 4K. Now we went withXAVC codec S-Log rather than going with RAW. We

would never have been able to shoot RAW, it would

have been impossible, just way too much material. But

of course, the proxy on the F55 is HD so there’ll be

some places that we’ll deliver this product too that will

go out as an HD film, but what we’re doing with this,

because it has shelf life – it’s not like a reality show

which really does not have a shelf life. A film like this,

as we’ve seen with our other film, can have a shelf lifeindefinitely and so we thought it was worth the

investment, it was worth the extra hassle of doing

something that had never been done before. We didn’t

know how the workflow was going to work; we didn’t

know how the camera was going to hold up … it’s not

like going in a studio at 20 degrees, perfect

temperature, you’ve got all the time in the world. The

reality is, you start off with a small box of a camera and

then you start to add all the attachments onto it – azoom control, a handle, a focus, rods and all of these

things, and all of a sudden you end up with this very

cumbersome looking beast, but when you’re shooting

documentary, you’re shooting something where you

don’t have the chance to stop and futz around with the

camera, you’re moving, you need something that is

robust. The camera never missed a beat and we never

had any issues, we managed the media very well, wehad somebody in the field who dealt with the

downloading of all the cards every day – the SXS cards.

Ed: So it was all onboard recording?

Phil: All onboard recording, the whole lot. We just hadthe little card readers and every night, we would comein and we would download the material and then makea backup overnight of all the material that we shot thatday and we had two cases to separate our material …

Ed: And they rode in different trucks?

Yes, it’s a genuine media scrum to get the best pic.

NZVN

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PLS –Dedolight

Now we’re talking to a manwho also enjoys buttons. Iknow the world has gonetouchscreen and swipe thisand swipe that, but pressinga good button – I say,“there’s nothing quite like it”but the button man of thishour is Dedo Weigert fromDedolight.

Ed: Dedo, we’re here atthe show, lots of people, lotsof lighting product, whathave you got this year thatwows the opposition?

Dedo: Everybody atevery street corner has LEDlights these days, so LED and digital and LCD displaysseem to be what is more needed and more in theforeground than the art of lighting. We’re of coursealso in LED and that is what interests everybody. Ourstrength always was the breakthrough in opticalsystems. The Fresnel light with its spherical lens, lampand reflector has never changed over the last hundredyears. We were the first ones to add a second lens andthen turn that into an aspherical system and then alsoadd two extra motions to the focusing to give extendedfocusing range. At the same time, it’s the character ofthe light, and our focusing lights – we call themprecision lighting instruments – the term “clean beam”is what is important. Totally smooth, even within thebeam, nothing outside the beam. If you want to softenthe edges of the beam, there are 23 different diffusionmaterials, but there’s not a single filter that will sharpenthe beam. So we start with the highest degree ofprecision and that’s where you can find our lights,wherever the highest demands are for precision lightinglike, let’s say, Harry Potter films – there are someDedolights in the film for special purposes, but thespecial effects in Harry Potter are only Dedolight,nothing else. Lord of the Rings same story. InAmerican Beauty, roses play a symbolic role … everysingle rose is lit by a Dedolight and so on. And we’retaking this technology that is being used for the highestbudgets of blockbuster films down to the level of thestreet fighter.

Ed: That’s me!

Dedo: The new guerrilla style producers, as one ofour kids called them. When I started in this business, aBBC documentary team was 12 people. Same work isnow done by two people or even one.

Ed: At this point, I’d like to make a comparisonbecause of course, one of the big buzz words of thisshow is 4K and there’s so many people talking about4K, but I’ve been talking especially to your friends atARRI about their cameras, and they’re not 4K, becausefrom their point of view, 4K resolution is just one part ofthe picture. There are so many other parts to thepicture that make up a good picture, a quality picture, apicture with some feeling to it. Resolution is not thatimportant, and if we make that comparison withlighting, it’s, as you say, “there’s a character to aDedolight that other lights don’t have”. Today’scameras are very highly sensitive and very low lightcapable so you’re not after blindingly large quantities oflight, you want character light?

Dedo: A lot of attention is being paid to countingpixels. Everything is digitised, but when we want to tella story – and that’s what we’re all about – then imagescan contribute to the quality of a story and with lightingand images we can direct attention; we can transportmoods in a way that involves one non-digitisedinstrument that is of utmost importance, and that’s thehuman eye. Learning to see and adding a little othernon-digitised element, the human soul, and passion toyour profession, that’s what we’re all about. Thatcannot be qualified or quantified in figures and pixelsand 422 and workflow.

Ed: And that’s why it’s important to have someonelike PLS representing you in New Zealand, with ashowroom, with a whole range of lights that you can goin with your camera and you can have a look, you cansee for yourself how that light works and the end resultof it, with your camera, what the picture looks like?

Dedo: Yes. It is some concept that I’m followingthat’s the educational approach, which is expensive, ittakes time, it’s a lot of investment, but for me, it’s thebest way to let people experience what they can do toimprove their storytelling, their image quality, how todirect the attention of the viewer, how to be a magician,an illusionist, in trying to create the illusion of a three-dimensional world from a picture that’s seen by a one-eyed camera, which can only give you two dimensions.

So we’re trying to transform that and that is part of thecharm, part of the magic. Light is essential for that,just as much as the dark brother of light. You know,the shadow can also transport emotions and feelings toa huge extent, but without controlled light, you cannotbuild or create the shape to form the impression of yourshadows and it’s the eye or it’s the lens that you’reusing – the glass that is important … the focal length ofit that limits the depth of field, lifts your object of desireout of the background. But with many of the moderncameras, you can’t do that, because the thousands ofguerrilla style producers who bought their wonderfulsuper capable camera at the duty free shop at theairport, they can take pictures without light … even inan American restaurant where I have great difficultiesreading the menu, those cameras can shoot. Theimages look brighter than what your eye can see, butthe interpretation of our eye and the piece of glass inthe camera and its focal length transforms it into thismagic piece of image creation. I felt insulted whenSony last NAB said “our 4K camera, that’s not reallyneeded for television, but it gives the creative freedom

to do your framing in postproduction”. If you don’tknow how to frame a shot, you should have remained ahairdresser. You don’t belong in this profession. Butthis is an old-fashioned attitude of a dinosaur when theimage creators were a small exclusive club, part ofcircus people because there was a risk in it, you neverknew how the image was going to come out after it wasdeveloped. Today you push the button, there it is.There’s no charm, no secret, no magic to it.

Ed: But you can add the magic by the lighting can’tyou?

Dedo: If you look a little bit deeper, all theseelements, what your eye can do, what your soul can do,what your lens can do, what the lights can do, whatyour shadows can do, it’s all part of the tools that wecan use to tell a good story. If the story is no good, thebest pictures won’t help. So it goes down to themotions that are not totally digitised yet. Fortunately,there’s no “plug in” in the computer to fix your soul.The torments of your soul and the creative aspects in allthat has not yet been digitised and it may take a littlewhile until it is. Until it comes to that, with theimplanted chip replacing the deficiencies of our brain –until then, there’s hope for this wonderful profession asold-fashioned and dinosaur like all of that may sound.

Okay, to answer your first question, what we’ve done isthat we’ve taken our revolutionary optical system andwe’re applying it into the LED technology. That’s not soeasy. Firstly, we had to find LEDs that will work withour optics. You can’t take any LED from a multi-LEDpanel light and stick it into an optical system … why,because there are different aspects to it that we didn’tknow about, like “colour over angle”. At the edge of the

flood position, you have a different colour than youhave in the centre. So we had to overcome that …

Ed: Is that because of the phosphor or because of theLED itself?

Dedo: It’s because of the phosphor layer wherethe central ray travels a shorter way than the angledray going a longer way through the phosphor. Whatyou see when it has rained and you see a rain puddle,you see these colours at the edge of it – same thing,quarter lambda shift giving you all the different colours.But when we want uniform clean colour, edge to edge,then we have to overcome this colour over angleproblem and then, once we have the right LED whichtook us five years to build the communication to theLED manufacturers – they didn’t talk our language,because they measure their LED in very expensiveinstruments, $100-150,000 instruments in an Ulbrichtsphere, that’s a white ball that mixes everything up.

Ed: I’ve seen the pictures, yes.

Dedo: Yes – but that has nothing to do withoptical systems, we had to educate them so that we canstart doing the same measurements, talk the samelanguage, have the same understanding and that was along and very uphill road. We now have LEDs, 10 Watt,2x10 Watt, bicolour where you can change – greatadvantage of LEDs from tungsten. And we go further,we go from 2700K to over 6000 for very cool daylight,continuously, no steps in it, no presets, you can chooseanything you want and also, another advantage is youcan dim those things if you have good electronics.Usually LED lights, when you come to the lower end ofdimming, will behave a little bit “digital”. You see thesteps in there and it’s unpleasant. Usually you can live

more on page 25

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with it, but in a studio you don’t want that. So we hadto develop, especially for Disney, a 16 bit dimmingprocess which now can go very smooth all the waydown to zero. That wasn’t easy, it’s very specialsoftware. Now we could even include any kind ofdimming curve like a halogen lamp. Okay, dimming isan advantage, bicolour for the mobile team is a greatadvantage, but for the studio, I think those will bedaylight. Why? Daylight LEDs give you 25% morelight; the daylight can give, on the digital camera, alittle deeper colour perception and the camera loves toshoot with 5000 Kelvin. When you go tungsten at thelower end, you may pick up a little noise. So now wehave, for the mobile teams, 10 Watt, 20 Watt, 40 Watt,90 Watt, 250 Watt LEDs and their power consumption isrelatively low; their light efficiency is very high. Thatallows people to work those things by battery and thatis a trend that we see – that even when you come to doan interview and there’s the plug in the wall, rightthere, people prefer to work it from a battery becauseit’s quicker, there are no cables on the ground. It isimportant that, all of a sudden, the doors to the biggeststudios are wide open. Why? Because our 250 Watt

standard that has been adopted by the EuropeanBroadcasting Union – Alan Roberts is the man from ex-BBC who is behind this, and that gives us a big stepcloser to the way cameras see it. But studio camerasare cameras with 3CCD sensors. Big step forward,great step closer to evaluating LED colour, but you’renot going to take any such camera to shoot yourdocumentary in the Arctic. Those cameras are thesmall cameras and they have different sensors calledCMOS sensors and, the beastly thing is that everyCMOS sensor – even from the same manufacturer –sees LED light differently. They see daylight prettymuch the same; they see halogen light, broad spectrumlight pretty much the same. With fluorescent, it’snearly the same; with HMI nearly the same; with LEDit’s vastly different. A Canon 5D Mark II will see an LEDlight green, but the Nikon does not see green. TheMark III Canon sees it more green, so what camera doyou use? Now we have to take into consideration thedifferent colour responses of different CMOS sensorsand, even if you have, like the little producers with fiveEX3 cameras bought the same year in the same studio… on most of the light sources they agree; on LED they

show different results. So even from thesame manufacturers, same year, sametype of camera, you will see somedifferences.

But the breakthrough that we’ve come tois that we’ve come up to a CRI valuearound 98 and a TLCI value that’sequally high and anything in TLCI that’sabove 85 may need no correction. Butwe go even further, we shoot hundredsand thousands of tests with human facesand even there, we do those tests withScandinavian skin tone, Mexican skintone, Ben from Ethiopia, because they allreact differently to light and colour andthe reflection of light. So to take all thisinto consideration is a nightmare and youcannot build a different light source anda different lighting instrument for doingan interview with a guy from Angolarather than another black guy fromRwanda. Because even in black skin,

you find differences in the reflection of the backlight.Some show that as neutral, some show it more blue,but we’re trying to find a balance and respect thedifferent responses of different CMOS sensors and, thehigher up we go in colour value, the lesser come thesedifferences, the better we can match when we shootone side of the face with a reference light, the other onewith our LED lights.

Ed: You say this is a nightmare but really that’s whatyou do … you’re at that end of the market where youare looking at providing a way to light for that finedetail?

Dedo: At the same time, we have to admit colourin our profession was never precise. It only existed inthe schoolbooks. Tungsten light, 3200 Kelvin, you findin no studio because they know, if they under-volt theirlamps, they last four times as long, so it goes down to2900. Daylight is only in the books. I was shooting inPoland in a town called Katowice. In the Kodak book, itsays, if you’re not up in the mountains, it’s June, noclouds in the sky, 12 o’clock, you have 5600 Kelvin. Ipulled out my old-fashioned Minolta colour meter, it was2800 Kelvin, candlelight colour temperature, a little bitof air pollution. Daylight is a myth that can beinfluenced in many ways. So what do we take as a

LED light, the 12.1 pushes out in flood, double the lightover the ARRI L7 and also, what may be a considerationfor a studio, the ARRI light is 10-12dbs noisier – it has afan. We don’t want the word “fan” so we call it “activecooling”, sounds more moderate, yes? But, activecooling in the studio? You want to be the quietest ever,because when you have 20, 30, 40 lights in there, thatadds up. So that’s what we’re proud of. We have morelight, same good colour quality as the best, and this iswhat we’ve been after. I cannot say that we’re the onlyones on the planet who have the best LED colour, butwith confidence, I can say that there’s nobody on thisplanet with better colour than us. We now reach CRIvalues 97, 98 and HMI was 92. Is that good enough?No, because CRI is an old-fashioned standard from1931; it includes only eight pastel colours, so today wehave to work with “expanded CRI” including R9, thevery valuable red, very important, and R13 skin colour.

Ed: Now just to clarify something, I understand thatCRI is actually a human eye measure rather than acamera measure and shouldn’t we be measuring whatthe camera is looking at?

Dedo: That is why we transfer all thesemeasurements and we do that right here, and we wantall of our agents to do the same, into TLCI. That is a

reference light? Open the roof on yourcar – is that daylight, which day, where,when? So what we do is what ispractical. If we can match halogen light– which we match at 3000, 3200, 3400Kelvin – and if we can match the KinoFlo daylight lamp, which is about thecleanest colour in our business, then wehave a chance to survive in theprofessional world and that’s what we doevery day. In the last five years, we’vecome a big step – that’s why I’m sayingnot only by CRI figures, TLCI figures, butin the thousands of practical cameratests that we do from the ALEXA, theRED, even to the Fuji, Canon, Nikon,Sony cameras – all the way; and thebetter we’re getting, the smaller thesedifferences are getting. And that issomething that cannot really be qualifiedor quantified by the figures that arepublished on the Internet.

The next thing is light efficiency. We want to save theplanet, use LED – they take no energy and give endlessamounts of light. Yes, our panel lights take 24 Wattand they have more than double the light output of theLight Panels with 52 Watt. That’s not sales talk, that’sa bigger difference.

So the efficiency of light is important. But that bringsus to the next subject and that is LM – lumenmaintenance. You equip a studio with LED light, how

much light will you have in two years? So we work withLM80. What can we guarantee – how long will this giveyou light? At 80% of the original light, we are now atabout 20,000 hours and what is beyond that we don’tknow.

The next subject is colour maintenance. Will it give usthe same colour in a year or two? We don’t want tochange the LED every six months; we don’t want tosend somebody up the ladder to change the LED every

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three weeks. So the longevity of colour consistency is avery important subject and that has to do with theoperating temperature in the LED. People think LEDsmake no heat. 85% of the energy in LED goes to heat.But if you have a halogen lamp at 2923 centigrade –what is that 3200 Kelvin – it’s happy, it dances. If youhave an LED at 85 centigrade, it’s at its utmost limit, itloses colour, it loses output. Warm it up further to 100centigrade, it’s dead, goodbye. But if you operate it at85, you’re not going to have much fun with it. So we’retrying to keep it at 65, and that takes modern coolingtechnologies and we’re very proud that everything up toour 90 Watt lights is passively cooled, no fan, no noise.In active cooling, we may be the quietest, but we’re 8Xquieter than one of our most famous competitors. Andthat doesn’t all come overnight and on its own. That’swhat we’re proud of, that’s what we’re presenting, arepeople willing to listen to it … no. Because most peoplethink LED is one big pot of goulash – you stir it, it’s allthe same.

Ed: Well let’s hope we can convince our readers thatquality is important – and not just quantity. Noweveryone wants to know about new product fromDedolight at the show, what are we looking at now?

Dedo: The full range of the five focusingDedolights – 10 Watt, 20, 40, 90, 250 Watt; doubleaspheric optics, good performance in daylight, intungsten and in bicolour. Then we have the panel lightswhere the Felloni 2 that we’re introducing now, gives usfor the same power consumption, 25% more light, andwe’re introducing the utmost in colour, the Dedo Colour

that’s double the output of the AREA 48, gives us 210LUX. Of course, double the money of my light, so forthe big studio, the Ledrama offers 25 LUX per Watt andthe other lights offer 5.5, 5 and 4 LUX per Watt overthat distance. So that’s a difference that is bigger thanthe sales tax. It augments the focusing 250 Watt lightthat was also built for big distance, high light output,highly controllable, big focus range. Now if a TVchannel wants to go all LED, we have already equippedmany studios like the one from the United Nations, AlJazeera studios, Brazilian studios with the Felloni lights,hundreds of them, mixed in with our 40 Watt and 90Watt focusing lights. It’s a nice practical mix dependingon what character of lighting you want in the studio,and now the bigger studios have opened doors for usand we’re now building the same for mobile drama. It’sa heavy light, not for the handbag. It’s a heavy lightthat’s for studios or for lighting trucks, for mobile dramaand we have that in bicolour, the same big range ofadjusting colour temperature and the same high output.

Ed: Let’s just finish off with that bicolour. In talkingwith you and talking about daylight not being always5600K, if you’re in a polluted atmosphere, just forexample, you’re in Beijing and you’re doing a shoot,having something that has adjustable colour is soimportant, because you’re not just going to light ascene, you actually want to match the background lightas well don’t you?

Dedo: Yes, it’s not only in polluted air where thecolour goes down holding the handrail of the Planckcurve, the black body curve. But then, you come into

some office that is lit withfluorescent and you haveabout 4300 “maybe Kelvin”,but a beastly green.

So you add a green filter tothe LED light, like a quarteror one-eighth plus green,you do your white balanceon the image importantarea, like on the face, andthe rest is beastly green. Somatching up and down theKelvin scale is one thing andthen filtering, ortheoretically, you could do itwith multicolour LEDs whereyou choose your colour co-ordinates, but then you needred, green, blue, white andamber – five colours, youneed five controllers andmaybe you need fivesensors to control thecontrollers and that bringspretty complicated technol-ogy like Gecko had

developed in England – a very sophisticated system, butyou pay more in price, you pay for it in light output, youget less light.

Ed: So in that situation it’s better not to use the locallight but to produce your own?

Dedo: The reality today is for the smallest teamyou have to make it match with everything that youfind and then add something that gives the addedcreative value.

Ed: A slight green colour to the face perhaps?

Dedo: Why not.

If you want to avoid green faces in your next Beijingproduction, give PLS a call and try out some Dedolights.

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Felloni. With the Felloni 2, everybody has been veryhappy, but the Dedo Colour is for the highest demandsin colour rendition TLCI and so on; and also for the bigstudios, we have a completely new light called Ledrama.That is a huge multi-LED panel light that has atremendous reach for the big studios. Let’s compare –the Ledrama at 6 metre distance. It gives us 720 LUX;the Celeb 200 from Kino Flo, which is a beautiful light,gives us 60 LUX. So we’re 12X more power efficientover the big distances. The Celeb is beautiful for mobiledrama or anything up to 3 metre distance, perfect,smooth, wonderful, highly controllable, superprofessional light. The Cineo and the BB&S also have160 degree angle light output, which does not makethem very suitable for a large throw. So the Cineo HS,

PLS – ARRIWe’re at ARRI but we’re

talking lighting for PLS with

Stefan Sedlmeier.

Ed: Stefan, lighting, we

could crossover to what we

were just talking about with

the cinematographic look of

the ARRI cameras because, I

guess, it’s a big help to both

sides of the business – you

do lighting, you do cameras,

you can adjust either

according to the knowledge

of the lighting people and

the knowledge of the

camera people who work at

ARRI?

Stefan: This is exactly

right. In terms of lighting, I

think it’s quite important to

understand that, when you

have highly sensitive

cameras, you still need good lighting for setting high

contrast in the scene to really bring background and

foreground …

Ed: And it’s not just bright lighting is it – it’s not now

throwing tonnes of light at it, it’s good lighting?

Stefan: Correct. It’s not about having bright

punchy lights it’s about really setting the scene with the

atmosphere you want to achieve for the audience who

is later on watching the movie or the commercial. In

terms of lighting, I think it’s quite important to

understand that there is a quality aim or a quality

perception in lighting, especially in LED lighting. The

advice I give to customers is, when you judge quality of

LED lights, look through a camera; use a CMOS camera,

it can be a DSLR or a motion picture camera like the

ALEXA, because to the human eye, they all look okay,

they all make light, but you see the bandwidth of the

red, green and blue spectrum and therefore how is the

white generated? Suddenly you see that certain colour

tones are less saturated than others; suddenly you see

that skin tones are not represented as they should, look

through a viewfinder of a digital camera when you

judge LED lighting. We run workshops and we also

compare different manufacturers. We are quite keen on

a good colour rendering index – tungsten never had this

problem because they always had a wide spectrum or

HMI for daylight. LED has sometimes a peak in green

when you have cheap Chinese LEDs – they all make

bright light, but they don’t give a nice spectrum, so

they have a peak around the green, but they have quite

a dramatic falloff against red and blue, so when you film

a colour test chart like the Macbeth Colour Checker and

have all colours, especially the ones which are a little bit

at the edge of the spectrum, then you see that it’s not a

proper exposure, not in terms of brightness, but in

terms of colour rendering. It’s quite important.

Ed: So you’re producing LED lights yourself now –

what developments have there been since IBC?

Stefan: We have a new L7-DT which is an L7

daylight tuneable so it’s a variable colour temperature

daylight LED, the L7-DT and we have a small brother to

that – this is the L5. It comes in three flavours, the L5-

C – “C” for colour controllable so you can tune the light

engine between 2,800 and 10,000 Kelvin. And then we

have the L5-T for tungsten, but it’s also a tuneable

tungsten; and the L5-D for tuneable daylight.

Ed: Does the number give an idea of the Wattage?

Stefan: The number is usually the front lens

diameter in inches of the Fresnel, so it’s a 5 inch

Fresnel. Its equivalent to a 500 Watt tungsten, power

consumption is just 115 Watt, light output is about 500

Watt. Of course LEDs they don’t do much heat, they

are very efficient and the L5 is also very lightweight and

compact and can also be powered by battery. So this is

new, it has a battery input, so it can be powered by DC;

it has implemented DMX control and has the same

colour quality like the big brother, the L7 series. I

should mention that we have a very big passion for

lights. At our factory in Germany, every year we

manufacture 60,000 fixtures – 60,000. This is the

number of lights which we manufacture and distribute.

This is everything from the 150 Watt small tungsten to

the 18K ARRIMAX HMI and everything in between – all

the different models, you can have them in black or

silver, for stage and event lighting, pole operated,

hanging … so any different accessories, DMX control,

studio cool fluorescent, any kind of application, different

barn doors, egg crates and yes, we are still

manufacturing lighting and it is still important also for

architectural lighting, stage lighting, but of course for

storytelling as well. It’s as important as the camera. If

you say your camera is very sensitive I don’t need light,

yes you maybe don’t need light in terms of exposure,

but you need light to set dramaturgy – to use it for

creation of a certain atmosphere in the motion picture.

Ed: And that’s where it’s so good having someone like

Chris at PLS set up in a studio with the equipment that

he’s got, so that he can set up a light to show you

exactly what it does and how it does it and explain this?

Stefan: I’m so happy that we have Chris McKenzie

on board, Professional Lighting Services New Zealand,

because we do good business with him and it’s also a

passionate business because it’s not just about selling

products, but consulting the customers with the right

Stefan at ARRI’s NAB lighting booth.

Phone: 09 302 4100 Email: [email protected] Website: www.kelpls.co.nz

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advice and it’s like a camera or a car, you want to try it

out first. It’s about consulting – look there’s such a big

choice of available lighting, but then Chris works with all

the gaffers and technicians and system integrators and

this is what we need, the transfer of knowledge and to

make information available, to have demo models,

somebody might want to try it out for a week or so, and

this is what keeps me going, this is the passion.

Ed: Is there now more of a shift towards LED with

ARRI lights than the tungsten that you’re traditionally

well known for?

Stefan: The interesting thing is that, since we

launched the LED series like the L7, the total number of

fixtures sold and shipped really went up and increased

and tungsten is still selling strong, because for certain

applications it is still a very attractively priced light,

easy to run. LED lighting for studios, no operator so no

challenge because you can fully integrate it into a DMX

system for variable colour temperature, dimming,

adjustable green magenta tilt, you can pre-program the

set up, a long lifetime and also don’t forget about the

cost saving in terms of air conditioning and power

consumption and no light bulbs to be replaced, no

cherry picker required because you put them up on the

ceiling, if you have them on a

motorised stirrup you never

need to climb up in the rig

anymore, because they’re

basically self-contained, self-

reliant, maintenance free and

fully remote controlled.

Ed: But surely to maintain

your reputation as quality

lighting producers, you’ve got

to make sure the LED produces

the colour and the look that

ARRI is famous for?

Stefan: Yes, it is quite

complex to really manufacture

good LED lights. This starts

with the design and its LED

array, so these are preselected

LEDs which are then

consolidated onto the so called

“light engine”.

We also do a burn-in at the

factory and the lights also get

calibrated. So it is really something which is focused on

good colour rendering index and long-term stability and

we basically burn them in because, in electronics such

as LEDs and power supplies, sometimes you have the

so called “dead on arrivals”, so we help to catch them in

the factory. Now we don’t want to ship them to any

customers; and the ones which last the burn in with

test and check, they will probably last for years. So

quality and long-term reliability is very important and

so far I think for Australia and New Zealand we have

shipped about 100 LED L7 in the different models and

this is still going strong.

Ed: You haven’t had one back yet?

Stefan: We had some back, but these are moreproblems like power supply, sometimes very simplethings, it’s the wrong handling.

In Australia, we have one customer who always pullsthem out by using the power cord as a rope.Sometimes it’s the customer not operating theequipment right, but this is part of the rental businessthat they just damage it; we do a lot of repair for ourcustomers, but sometimes it’s not necessarily a productfailure; sometimes it’s just “physical impact” I shouldcall it.

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