the BROADer issue

Canon 5D Mark II used to shoot 'House' season finale

In a move that should be considered a major endorsement of video-enabled digital SLR cameras and a further step in the path towards entirely file-based media production, Greg Yaitanes, the Director of the popular medical drama 'House', starring Hugh Laurie, has revealed that the last programme in the current season was shot using the Canon 5D Mark II.

Yaitanes wrote on Twitter 'I'll answer any questions you have about the Canon 5D that we shot the finale on. Yes, a stills camera that shoots amazing HD. Go!', and the questions he received yielded the following information:

• They captured to 16GB CF cards, which stored about 22 minutes at 24 fp
• They used all the Canon prime lenses, plus the 24-70 and the 70-200 zoom
• They found that images were richer, and the shallow focus pulled the actors' faces into the foreground, though focusing was harder than with cine-style lenses
• By going for a hand-held feel or using a small tripod, they were able to shoot in much tighter spaces

'House" DoP Shane Hurlbut has already shown the capabilities of the 5D Mark II in his short film 'The Last 3 Minutes'.

If you're wondering about the signiicance of this development, here's a quick 'House' fact for you to chew on, courtesy of Wikipedia:

"In 2008 'House' was distributed in a total of 66 countries. With an audience of over 81.8 million worldwide, it was the most watched television show on the globe and far surpassed the viewership figures of the leading TV dramas the previous two years."

The current season finale airs in the US on 17 May.

Aspera helps NorthernNet with media file transfers

I wrote recently on the BROADer issue and the new EACS Media website about how NetApp and Aspera had helped with the storage and transfer of media files between James Cameron's production company Lightstorm, based in Venice, California, and Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand.

Another use of Aspera for high-speed file transfer has made it onto the macworld.co.uk website.

NorthernNet is a system of 17 Media Access Bureaux (MABs) located in business, cultural and education sites across the North of England such as the University of Central Lancashire (pictured). Clients pay £60 an hour to use an Avid or Final Cut Pro edit suite that comes complete with an array of ingest and output options. As well as, or instead of, booking the facility for an editing or finishing job, users can access an high-speed data transfer system to transfer files that are up to 20 x faster than FTP  - 1GB of data in about 80 seconds.

Informed Sauce wrote the NorthernNet user manual, which was  commissioned by the project's systems integrator Altered Images. The manual has been written to help newcomers to understand how to get the best the facilities' professional editing, encoding and media transfer technology.

NetApp & Aspera ease 'Avatar' file storage & transfer

In this article on The Register website, Chris Mellor sets the record straight on the colossal media storage system that Weta Digital used during the production of the stunning CG & visual effects in 'Avatar'. 

While rival manufacturer Isilon claims to have provided the necessary infrastructure, Weta Digital is actually a NetApp customer. NetApp's own Val Bercovici has also written about Weta's use of NetApp storage on his Exposed Blog.

Chris Mellor's article also explains how FASP-based technology from Aspera (which is faster than FTP, HTTP & CIFS, with their inherent bottlenecks) eased the process of transferring enormous 3D files between James Cameron's production company Lightstorm Entertainment in Venice, California & Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand.

Last night's RTS Technology Innovation Awards 2009

After a long day in the saddle working on various projects, I spent yesterday evening at BAFTA for this year's RTS Technology Innovation Awards dinner. It was a late night, which is why it's taken me 'til lunchtime to post this update.

Confession time. I told a little white lie on Twitter during the evening. I didn't share a lift with Michael Caine as he entered the building for a screening of his new film 'Harry Brown'. His minders wouldn't let me in, and I had to walk up the stairs while he travelled in style & conserved his energy. Good job all this swimming's working & I'm feeling fit.

Anyway, the evening went very well, and the company was excellent.

I was one of the judges for the 'Raising The Bar' & 'Under The Bonnet' categories. My fellow judges - Simon Fell (Chair), Andy King (BBC FM&T), Roland Brown & John Ive (NBC Universal's Andy Lucas was absent) - and I were on a table at the back, presumably to keep us out of trouble. But we did get a mention in dispatches for giving up our time to review the submissions and meet to vote for our choices. It's always nice to be appreciated.

Martha Lane-Fox & Brent Hoberman were the guests of honour and handed out the awards. Both made pretty good speeches, and Brent couldn't resist plugging his new venture mydeco.com, which borrows a lot from the John Lewis website, and adds a social communication element to the online shopping  experience. This is something I spent time working on with another company over the Summer. I'll be interested to see how it goes, as it can be a tricky concept for vendors and buyers to get their heads around.

The 'Raising The Bar' award went to BBC R&D for the Ingex Automated Tapeless Prroduction system, incidentally, and the 'Under The Bonnet' award went to another initiative involving the Beeb's R&D dept.; the development of DVB-T2 (AKA Freeview HD in the UK), which looks to have been a phenomenal feat of project management & logistics, as well as a technological conjuring act.

For a full list of the winners and nominees, visit this page on the RTS website.

Why are you going to IBC this year?

I have to confess, I've not seen or heard much to get my juices flowing yet, but an update on the official IBC 2009 Twitter feed suggests that there are at least 100 embargoed IBC stories waiting to be told, so you have to expect those to contain something significant. I heard a rumour that Avid will announce something to turn the heads of FCP and Premiere users, but that's about it, really.

All a bit quiet and unspectacular, at least so far.

The issues surrounding the management of media assets and published content are never far from the top of media companies' agendas these days. Though it's the workflow, the business strategy, the process management and how DAM fits into an organisation's culture (without disrupting it or distorting it) that are more important than the tech. 

It's OK to have a great suite of products that are like snugly fitting puzzle pieces and a crack team of 'professional services' commandos on standby to help deploy a customer's (shudder) solution. Today's skil - and this is a role where independent consultants can excel - is helping a management team sell a new system, a new way of working, and the inevitable knock-on effects, to the staff. 

I'm guessing there'll be quite a few of us at IBC singing from that hymn sheet.

Stereo3D will inevitably be the talk of the show. If anything, given the small amount of content that's available and the limited amount of exposure it gets on screens large and small, there'll be too much talking, not enough viewing. 

I'm sure we'll be introduced to a ton of new rigs and stereoscopic 3D production hardware, as well as Stereo3D enhancements to new & existing content creation systems, but it's the display technology I'm looking forward to seeing. I'm curious to know how soon it will be before real, proper, stable 3D that doesn't make your stomach churn hits living rooms and public spaces.

And finally, for this update. Is the DI market becoming dominated by a few big players who can offer productions complete grading, finishing and 'film out' services and so freeze out smaller service providers, as suggested in this well-written piece by Broadcast's Will Strauss? If it's the case, you have to wonder what traffic around Hall 7's DI technology vendors will be like.

Tyrell CCT opens new branch in London

Today sees the official opening of the UK subsidiary of Dublin media technology reseller Tyrell CCT.

The new venture, which is being run from offices in Poland Street, is staffed by Mark Lynn (right) and Nick Soper.

For more information, here is the official announcement on the Tyrell CCT website. Congratulations and good luck to the Tyrell team.

Final Cut Pro users get Finalcutters online community

Martin Baker of Digital Heaven has launched a new community site for Final Cut Pro users, Finalcutters.

It's packed with FCP-related news, debate, product information, tips, tricks and opinions. If you're interested in joining in the FCP fun, visit the Finalcutters site.

Shining Tech CitiDISK R258 & the Twitter effect

Just in the last few hours, I have seen several Twitterers write approvingly about this new tapeless DV/HDV video recorder from Shining Tech, which made its debut at NAB 2009.

RED Ted effervesces at NAB 2009

I really enjoyed this video interview from NAB with the irrepressible Ted Schilowitz, Leader Of The Rebellion at RED (pictured, at another event). It was shot by Guy Cochran using the Canon 5D Mk II hybrid 21.1 Megapixel DSLR / 1080 HD video camera, incidentally.

The interview covers the demand for high-res stills and moving images from the luxury goods sector, particularly for internet use, the latest technology from AJA that's helping drive the digital cinematography market, especially the Ki-Pro ProRes box. Ted also explains what's happening with the forthcoming set of RED prime lenses, and the tech demos RED did at NAB alongside some well-known (but unnamed) "major motion picture lenses".

I had a similar experience to this when I interviewed Ted on the 'phone earlier this year for an article on Stereo3D production on pages 24 & 25 the March edition TVB Europe magazine.

NAB 2009 closes: to sleep, perhaps to dream

Day 4 of NAB 2009 seemed, from the tweets I saw, really very quiet. Lots of talk of heading for the airport (and it being a relatively painless affair), and of having spent time with some great people, and of product highlights.

For @calisurf, the Ki-Pro from AJA was the pick of this year's show. For many others it was definitely the I-Movix Sprintcam Extreme SloMo camera. @nathangwilliam writes "My favorite part of the NAB show was getting a demo of Kaltura open source video sharing platform. See http://Kaltura.com."

@underpk and @stu both post updates about seeing a new Adobe rotoscoping tool called Magic Matte, and Nathan posts a couple of images from the presentation he saw. Can anybody shed any light on that new product?

There are a load more tweets to go through... I'll get to them in the morning.

NAB 2009 Day 3: It's hot ... but quieter than last year

The temperatures in Las Vegas have been soaring into the Nineties, but attendance has dipped from just over 105,000 in 2008 to just under 90,000 this year.

There's a bit of 'Spinal Tap'-like optimism in some of the tweets I've seen about the quality time with visitors and fewer time-wasters compensating for a lack of numbers, but the mood amongst NAB 2009 Twitterers is generally pretty upbeat.

Some more news from the show floor.

Actually, this first story happened well away from the show floor, at the AJA party to be precise, from where @Krazpr posted this fantastic pic of the vivacious Kiki Stockhammer, ahem, "rockin' the pole"! If, like me, you've not been at this year's NAB ... gawd, what have we been missing?!

Following up on the update from earlier today, could the iPhone ProPrompter be the fab teleprompter product referred to?

I really like this review of NAB 2009 by Bobby Owsinski - @2bobby - on his blog in which he talks of "an air of quiet evolution in the new products" at the show, a lack of "swag" to take home, precious few parties to attend, and almost no free magazines bins at the entrance - 6 or 8 where there used to be 50 or 60. On the product front, his favourite was "ioDrive by Fusion iO, a solid state drive that connects directly to your system buss, bypassing the bottleneck of the normal PCI I/O architecture. As a demonstration of how fast it was, 16 servers were accessing a single drive, which output 64 MPEG-2 files of DVDs to 16 screens all at the same time. That's 1024 DVD streams ALL AT ONCE! Wow!!".

There's a lot of mumbling and grumbling in the Twittersphere about Apple's no-show at the Supermeet and the absence of Final Cut Studio 3 from the show.

Lastly, for this update, one of the hot little items at this year's NAB is Syncsy, an inexpensive file transfer service to replace slow and sometime shaky FTP. Syncsy launched at the show and is described on the front page of the website as:

"the next step in file transfer services for businesses needing a higher degree of security, speed and manageability. Syncsy.com allows you to fully automate the process of sending large files and folders. It is a perfect replacement for FTP and Web Uploads/Downloads for situations that demand a higher degree of automation. For example, consider the following business file transfer scenarios:

Sending approvals with repeated updates to customers Enabling your clients to send you files for processing Distributing clips and dailies Connecting remote offices for regular updates

In each of the above scenarios, files are transferred on a frequent basis with numerous updates. Rather than having to perform manual transfers, Syncsy.com can seamlessly monitor for changes and syncs new content without any manual steps."

News from NAB 2009 Day 2: Hot weather & sore feet

Sifting through tweets from Day 2, I've read a couple that indicate attendance is down, with one pessimist saying he's been told it's by as much as 50%.

Looking at news from the show floor, Randi Altman from Post magazine seems to have found or been shown some interesting stuff. Here's a sample of Randi's tweets:"Snell's Kahuna HD switcher for 3D stereo targets live to cinema projects", "Matrox CompressHD uses MAX technology to accelerate creation of H.264 files for mobile, web and blu-ray", and "Sony shows new XDCAM camera ... PDW F 800. Native 24p,multiformat recording, variable frame rate for slomo, quick motion".

Randi's also reported on Flare, Autodesk's new low-cost, software-only companion to Flame, and the new 64GB P2 cards (less than $1,000 for an hour of 1920 x 1080 HD). As I said, Randi's been very busy. Still, she did get to go to dinner with Oscar-winning 'Slumdog Millionaire' editor Chris Dickens yesterday evening, which should have been a cracking way to end a long NAB day. To read more from Randi, follow @post_magazine.

FreshDV has put together a nice set of video reports from the show floor, including quick visits to the Cinevate (who get lots of mentions elsewhere on Twitter) and Panasonic booths, and a look at the new JVC 4K prototype camera mentioned in yesterday's post.

@dekekincaid attended an "interesting adobe presentation essentially about using fcp to do base edit and then to premiere & ps & ae encore to conform/finish".

@Andrewlock found a portable teleprompter based on an iPhone. As he says, what a great idea? Which company is marketing that product?

I've seen mixed reports on the Stereo3D HDTV exhibits, with some raving about the display technology and others finding it so-so. Generally good feedback on the Stero3D production technology, though.

I'll leave it to @metjohn to sum up Day 2 at NAB @009 with a tweet on his day in the South Hall; "Whew... did the South Hall at the NAB today. Imagine 20 Target stores under one roof. Then make that two stories tall. 1.3 million sq ft!".

Indeed!

News from NAB 2009 Day 1: Las Vegas Twitters

I've been following a few dedicated NAB attendees via Twitter as they plot their way around the vast expanses of the Las Vegas Convention Centre. Here are some highlights so far.

Will Strauss (@willstrauss), Technology Editor at 'Broadcast' seems quite impressed with the Sony Location Porter, which allows users in the field to convert content from a camcorder or a live feed into an H.264 stream and broadcast it via 3G. Will points out that it's not exactly new, and there are alternatives out there, but it still looks very appealing. Another spot from Will is JVC's new 4K camera with a live signal output. As he puts it, "That's potentially one in the eye for Red. Not that they'll care too much".

Object Matrix (@om_nick) and Squarebox have announced a tie-up that sees the former's MatrixStore technology for tiering and clustering inexpensive storage hardware integrating closely with the latters CatDV DAM system. For the full story, click here.

The jury appears to be out on the new Avid corporate identity, which is a bit retro for some tastes, but which others feel shows the company getting back in touch with its NLE roots.

I spotted this on the CalDigit Twitter feed, if it's any use to somebody who's reading this while at NAB: "We're giving away 5 CalDigit VR minis at NAB. But you have to visit us at booth SL13610 to get your raffle ticket."

Engadget has this interesting post about the new 1,000 fps I-Movix SprintCam v3 HD camera on show at NAB for the first time. In fact, I've just read through a number of other Twitter updates, and lots of people seem to be raving about the SprintCam

Two people I follow posted this somewhat random tweet at exactly the same time: "Adobe Story is an app for creating, editing & optimizing scripts for films, broadcast & rich media, public beta in late 2009.".

Autodesk is streaming demos live from the NAB booth on its AREA website, according to @somenice.

@JasonRaneses points to this announcement from Western Digital of its new 2TB Enterprise-class HDD.

The Pro Video Coaltion (@provideo) were on their toes on Day 1. They've already posted this update, which includes a picture of the AVID booth, showing that logo. There's also a quick look at some very advanced 3D holographic technology.

I'll post some more stuff from Day 2 as I spot it...

Tapeless Procam makes Easter move to new premises

Last weekend, as we tucked into our roast lamb and chocolate eggs, staff at London camera hire and crewing company Procam dodged the Easter rain showers to move the company lock, stock and barrel to new premises about 500 yards from their previous home.

Once they'd settled in, I popped down to South London to visit the company's Andrew Black and get a guided tour. I used the opportunity to record this podcast, in which I find out more about Procam's investment in tapeless cameras and belief in the future of file-based workflows.Download Procam Guided Tour April 2009

Pioneer set to push Blu-ray disc capacity to 400GB

According to TV Technology, Pioneer are not only launching a hybrid Blu-ray, DVD+/-RW and CD writer on the market early in 2009, they're also bumping up Blu-ray disc capacity significantly.

The new 400GB discs will initially be read-only, but they will be backwards compatible with current players.

Prepare yourselves for the 2009 release of every episode of (fill in your favourite long-running, seasonal TV programme here) in a sensibly-priced Blu-ray box set.

The writable version of the disc is another matter. If the discs and drives are not too expensive, the new format will attract the attention of people managing both domestic and large-scale media archives.