Cera-Jane Catton

Avid announced that coverage of the 2016 Cannes International Film Festival was powered by the Avid MediaCentral Platform. Avid Elite partner VIDELIO – Cap’Cine once again provided production and post-production facilities for broadcasters Canal+ and Orange, and for the official Festival de Cannes TV and web content.

Two Avid AirSpeed | 5500 servers were at the heart of operations, streamlining the entire workflow from capture to playout. These two servers enabled the acquisition of clean and dirty feeds, which were sent in real time to an Avid ISIS | 5500 collaborative storage system. The content was available immediately to editors working on Avid Media Composer editing stations, creating highlights packages, trailers and short programmes, which were then sent back to the AirSpeed | 5500 for playout. The media was also made available to an FTP platform for web editors creating content for the official Festival de Cannes website, YouTube and Dailymotion channels, as well as the festival archive.

The Avid solution enabled the production team to work on and save the footage in HD, with images available in real time. In addition, the integrated playlist tool and IsoSync (a synchronisation application of multi-channel recordings) offered a simple and effective workflow for operators. The Avid workflow ran continuously throughout the festival.

For more information visit the Avid website.

Axon Digital Design, international supplier of broadcast network infrastructure solutions, will exhibit at this year’s Angacom, from 7 to 9 June 2016, in Cologne. The company, whose clients include major broadcasters, network operators and service providers, will highlight a range of award-winning products for monitoring, reporting and control.

Axon will showcase Smart DVB, its platform for live MPEG-2 and DVB transport stream reporting. Launched earlier this year, Smart DVB is a complete suite of tools to monitor, report and analyse live MPEG-2 and DVB transport streams. The Smart DVB suite enables owners and operators to ensure health, conformity and quality across the digital distribution chain and to drive performance at the highest level. Visitors to Axon’s stand at the show will see how leading organisations such as Arqiva, M7, Astra, NPO/BVN are already successfully using Smart to monitor and analyse the quality of their DVB operations and boost performance.

Axon will also demonstrate its popular Cerebrum control and monitoring system, a control solution for mobile production, news and studio live production, master control and remote production. With a broad range of features and offering support for a wide range of third party devices – including routers, production switchers, servers, receiver decoders, multi-viewers and waveform monitors – Cerebrum is perfectly suited to complex production environments, simplifying multi device monitoring and control onto one easy-to-use interface.

Axon will present recent examples including e.tv in South Africa, Shanghai Media Centre China and UK broadcaster BT Sport’s 4K coverage of the UEFA Champions Football League, where Cerebrum is significantly reducing production workloads by enabling tasks, which previously would have taken hours to complete, to be achieved in minutes.

Axon offers several 4K modular infrastructure cards to deal with typical 4K demands in the baseband video segment: up/down/cross conversion, four quadrant management, audio/video delay, Dolby encoding/decoding, and more. A demo at the stand shows how easy a delay caused by audio de-embedding in one HD segment of a 4K signal can be corrected with Axon’s Synapse U4T140 card.

For more information visit the Axon website.

KFX Technology will show their new product, the KFX-Ronford Baker Motorised Slider at Cinegear Expo in LA taking place 2 to 4 June 2016. KFX Technology was chosen by Ronford Baker to collaborate on motorising their sliders after impressing them with the engineering of the KFX Aurora Remote Head. The Aurora Remote Head is reportedly precision engineered, easy and intuitive to use, with more than enough power for the most demanding applications, and already has an established success and reputation in the movie industry worldwide. Recent productions include Mission Impossible 5, Spectre, Star Wars the Force Awakens, Insurgent, Daddy’s Home, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones and Victor Frankenstein.

KFX Technology’s CEO Steve Scammell said, “KFX Technology, now based in New York, emerged from Kontrol Freax Ltd, a company that was among the first to offer lightweight motion control to the UK film market. Eventually working world wide from USA to China to Indonesia, Kontrol Freax worked with the BBC Planet Earth Team to bring Hollywood production values to natural history programming. KFX’ second collaboration with the BBC Natural History Unit saw us design a bespoke lightweight motion control system for use on the Frozen Planet TV series.’

“The experience gained from creating technology that works reliably and is easy to use in those extreme conditions were put to use in the development of the Aurora Remote Head and now the slider motor. Plug and play design and ease of use are at the core of our design philosophy as well as reliability,” said Scammell.

“Now the Aurora Remote Head and slider motor work together to form a three axis system remotely controlled through just one cable. The five minute set up time for the head and slider allows for more flexibility on set to create more unique shots without lengthy rigging time, using the slider and head in either overslung or underslung mode.’

KFX Technology will also be demonstrating at the show an early version of their new Repeat Software for the KFX-Ronford baker slider and the Aurora remote head.

The KFX/MYT Velvet Rremote Head:

The KFX/MYT Velvet Remote Head is a super compact remote head with enough power to move even larger camera packages around with ease. It has a capacity of 50lbs/22kgs. Using backlash free gearboxes the MYT Velvet is incredibly smooth in operation, with zero lag from the operator’s perspective and spot-on starts and stops. This new system is based on the popular MYT Velvet pan and tilt Fluidless Nodal head combined with KFX Technology control system with its simple, one cable plug and play operation. The MYT Velvet has a simple joystick control console that has the usual KFX functions for setting speed, end stops and direction. Options are available for pan bar or hand wheel control.

The KFX/MYT Motorised Constellation Camera Skater Dolly:

The first collaboration between KFX and MYT began with the motorisation of the MYT Constellation skater dolly from the MYT Galaxy Line. The MYT Constellation is a camera skater dolly that runs on regular speed rails, an industry standard which allows very long runs to be achieved in comparison to regular fixed bearing camera sliders. This allows for motor controlled tracking shots up to 300 feet/90m. As with all KFX products this motor unit is compatible with the MYT Velvet Remote Head as well as the KFX Aurora Remote Head.

Controls for this system offer the same options as those from the MYT Glideline.

All the new KFX/MYT products come with the KFX plug and play controls, which are recognised within the film industry for their simplicity and robustness.

For more information visit the KFX Technology website.

AMIRA Software Update Package (SUP) 4.0 shares many but not all of the new features of ALEXA Mini SUP 4.0, the most important of which for AMIRA shooters is the new Super 16 recording mode. Unique to AMIRA is the multicam mode, refined with SUP 4.0, which provides an open interface for remote-controlling multiple AMIRA camera images across a network by using standard remote control panels.

ProRes S16 HD recording

Feedback from customers around the world made it clear that there is widespread interest in using Super 16 format lenses with the AMIRA. In order to meet this demand, ARRI is introducing a ProRes S16 HD recording mode with AMIRA SUP 4.0.

The new mode takes a Super 16-sized crop from the sensor and scales it to a 16:9 HD picture in any ProRes codec. The image circle is 15.1 mm, which is slightly larger than the traditional Super 16 image circle of 14.5 mm. Many lenses designed for Super 16 will cover the new recording mode without any vignetting inside the image area, but testing is always advisable.

Super 16 optics are still widely available at rental houses and are generally underused. The new S16 HD recording mode will make economically priced, high-quality lenses available to AMIRA productions and also extend the return on investment from those lenses for the rental house.

Although the S16 HD mode is limited in image quality, due to the smaller sensor area and also the optical performance of the lenses themselves, it offers distinct advantages to various sectors of the industry. Sports productions are looking for smaller lenses, especially zooms with a better ratio of zoom range to size and weight than 35 mm can offer. Documentarians are keen to make use of lenses they know from having previously worked with the Super 16 format. In fact anyone shooting handheld (For which the AMIRA is designed) has a vested interest in working with the lightest and most compact lenses possible. In all such cases Super 16 lenses offer a cine-style alternative to EF mount stills photography lenses.

For TV series the factors of size, weight and cost are also relevant, but cinematographers will additionally find the new S16 HD format appealing for purely creative reasons. Working with vintage Super 16 lenses provides an opportunity to create looks that bring a sense of life and texture to the digital image in a totally organic way. Prime lenses such as the ARRI Ultra 16 series will be of particular interest for these productions, as they offer higher image quality than Super 16 zooms.

Besides allowing the use of Super 16 lenses, the S16 HD mode can also be used to effectively extend the focal length of 35 mm lenses by a factor of 1.8. For productions such as nature documentaries that work at long focal lengths, the advantages of getting a closer view of subjects will outweigh the compromise in image quality. Since the S16 HD mode can be activated quickly, it also provides a method of responding rapidly in situations where a longer focal length is required but there is insufficient time for a lens change. While the same effect would be achievable in post, many productions might not have the time or money in post to do it. The in-camera route also gives greater compositional control to the cinematographer and makes precise framing easier.

Multicam mode

Available for all AMIRA models, the Multicam mode is an option for multi-camera shooting environments such as music concerts and live events, as well as TV soaps and other fast-paced scripted productions.

Essentially, Multicam is a simple and flexible interface that can be used with virtually any transmission system required. It allows the image parameters of multiple AMIRA cameras to be remote controlled using a Sony Remote Control Panel, including iris settings. Multi-camera setups can comprise AMIRAs only, or can combine AMIRA with other third-party cameras.

For more information visit the Arri website.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. announced the launch of its new Super Ultra High Definition (SUHD) TV line-up, which combines the latest in cutting edge innovation and aesthetics.

The latest range of Samsung TVs have been released hot on the heels of the company’s triumph as global TV market leader for the 10th consecutive year, while also being in its tenth year of dominating the local South African TV market, according to one of the world’s largest market research organisations, GfK.

The new Samsung SUHD television series comes equipped with second generation Quantum dot technology, which is renowned for its durability and extraordinary, lasting picture quality. This generation offers increased efficiency of the Quantum dot materials and an improved colour mapping algorithm. This enables the new SUHD TV to express brighter pictures and purer colours.

Matthew Thackrah, deputy managing director and head of consumer electronics at Samsung Electronics South Africa, explains that the material used for this cutting-edge display can reproduce the purest and most accurate colours as individual nanoparticles. “These are smaller than one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair and deliver the cleanest and most vivid colours yet.’

“Samsung has applied the “HDR 1000’ technology to this device, which can present content with extremely high picture quality, as it expresses HDR with a peak brightness of 1000 nit – the standard for premium material produced in Hollywood,’ said Thackrah.

“This allows viewers to enjoy visuals in great detail, whether the image is dark or bright. In addition, it can recreate brighter hues at a lower energy consumption than the first generation SUHD TVs.’

Thackrah added that Samsung understands that while the demand for the latest generation of technology continues unabated, today’s TV is more than just an electronic device. Consumers today view TVs as pieces of furniture that contribute to a home’s interior decor.

“What consumers want is art in the living room – a beautiful TV that fits seamlessly with their living space and furniture. Samsung’s SUHD TV aims to deliver innovative, boundless aesthetic appeal with its 360-degree design, which ensures your television looks good from all angles and any position it is placed within the home. This design approach is not limited to just our premium models, but includes our entry-level TVs as well.’

Furthermore, the enhanced Samsung Smart TV platform allows users to enjoy a sophisticated Smart Hub powered by Tizen, which provides an effortless viewing and navigation experience as it transcends the boundaries between various TV user environments. The Smart Hub will auto detect all connected devices, such as decoders, gaming consoles or home theatre and audio accessories. These additions are managed through a centralised visual dashboard on the first screen, which requires the use of only one TV remote to control multiple connected devices, eliminating the need for multiple remote controls in the living room.

– Source: GFK