If you want to contemplate the future shape of the film industry, or rather, the shape of the future industry, buy a calendar. Not just any calendar, but Camera Girls 2012.

The 19 year old writer/director creator of the calendar is Lauren Billingham who you could say modelled her 13 minute student film,

Illusion, on a real world production experience.

“Because we ran out of time I had to borrow money to make the film and now I am paying it off,” says Billingham.

Merchandising, branding, innovative financing, call them what you will, the calendars were made during preproduction to raise money for the film with Billingham’s fellow women students from South Seas Film and Television School adding more than a touch of glamour to distinctly unsexy film equipment with the assistance of nothing more than black heels and precisely placed camera accessories, clip boards, and arms.

Billingham’s South Seas course specialising in directing and screenwriting began in January when she flew to New Zealand after completing a diploma in film and television and setting up a youth production company Extreme Emotions in England.  Travelling the world is nothing new for the outgoing Kiwi passport holder who spend her early teens with her family on a boat sailing the world.

Illusion is her final student project; a drama about an older man who enlists the help of an escort for a night  as he tries to hold on the memory of a woman he loved many years ago.

Budget creep

Ironically, the more support Billingham raised from the industry the more the size of the production grew, with almost all the 16 crew being other students working as contras for their own projects.

“It was supposed to be a student project, but when you look at Illusion you can say it’s really not that much of a student project anymore because it had so much amazing input from industry companies,” says Billingham.

“I was really lucky because through the Camera Girls 2012 calendar I got a lot of responses – Panavision gave us a Red MX to shoot on, The Dolly Shop gave us a dolly, track and a jib, Andy Schurr helped with sound equipment, but the more free stuff we got the more the production costs went up.

“There was the cost of the vineyard location at Karaka Point Vineyard – it is beautiful, but that added transport and accommodation costs,” she says.

Civilised hate mail

Not everyone has been supportive though.

“I had my first bit of hate mail, although it was quite civilised, and sent to WIFT (Women in Film and Television),” she says.  Billingham has been an intern at the organisation during the year, helping them organise events and do office work with the payoff of a golden networking opportunity.

“The mail was from a woman in the film and television industry, she felt I was bringing women back into the dark ages, and we were looking like sexual objects, but we weren’t – she hadn’t even seen the inside of the calendar.”

“It’s the only bit of bad news I heard through the whole project,” says Billingham cheerfully.

“I need now is to sell is about another hundred calendars, and I am free of all debt.”

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The big difference between good LED lights and poor quality LED lights is their ability to render colour – the colorimetry. The robustness, the built-in features, focusing, the life expectancy, the heat management all play a part too, but who cares if a luminaire puts out crappy light to begin with?

But many of the manufacturers selling LED lights to the video and television market don’t reveal information about the colorimetry of their products.  Not a good sign.

The trouble is that LED’s in their most basic form produce light with an uneven spread of light frequencies – commonly a spike of blue or green range that can make your sexy talent look like a corpse.

The best quality manufacturers overcome this limitation by choosing good specialised LED components to start with, and by grouping individual LEDs with different colour characteristics into emitters, and then tuning the output of individual LEDs in the emitter for the best result.

There is an easy way to get a handle on the colorimetry of a luminaire without resorting to your own spectrum analyser.  Look at the colour rendering index.  CRI is a single number that tells you how the spectrum of the light source matches an ideal tungsten or daylight light reference.  A high number is good and a CRI of 100 is a perfect match.

Perhaps that is why many manufacturers don’t publish that number.

A quick troll around spec sheets on websites of manufacturers who are selling LEDs panels and on-board camera LED lights for video production turned up only two who disclose a CRI number.  Well done, Arri and Dedolight.  Top marks goes to Dedolight who show a detailed spectral distribution graph and colour rendition graph.

It matters.

Kevin Riley, a drama director of photography and lighting rental company owner, says when he uses LEDs on set he avoids using them as frontal, skin tone lights.

“I use them for a kicker light or back lights or something like that, when you can get away with a bit more colour differential.  If you use them flat on to the skin tones and you’ve got other ambient light sources they often don’t match.

“I used them on the Legend of the Seeker when I was shooting in canvas tents and I didn’t have the headroom to rig a conventional hot running lighting fixture between the actor’s head and the top of the tent.  I could put up a lightweight LED fixture, say clamped to the tent pole, and it could safely make contact with the canvas.  Then I had some light into the top of the dark hairline to create differential to the background.”

If consistent LED light sources are used through out an interior set studio, you might be able to white balance the camera to compensate, but this can be a hit and miss affair.  White balancing is about trying to reproduce white light from a mix of primary red, green and blue, and the camera can’t be expected to accurately reproduce skin tones if, say, the blue sensor is saturated by a particular narrow frequency spike.

In any case LEDs are more often used in conjunction with other light sources.

“The trick comes when you’ve got a face that’s receiving true daylight from one side and the other side has got your LED with a colour spike in it,” says Riley.  ”Then suddenly you’ve got something that is very hard to grade, or very hard to white balance out.

“The challenge to the specialist LED lighting manufacturers is to produce units that are much closer to matching natural and tungsten light sources.”

In other words, units that have a high colour rending index.

Here’s what we found (no particular order):

Arri Castor Series:  CRI =90

Anton Bauer ULHM-LED on board :  CRI not disclosed

Kino Flo:  LEDs “coming soon”

Litepanels 1×1 series:  CRI not disclosed

Gekko Kelvin Tile: CRI not disclosed

SWIT S-2000 On Camera: CRI not disclosed

Rotolight RL48-B Stealth ring light: CRI not disclosed

Sony HVL-LBPB On camera LED: CRI not disclosed

iKan  iLED 312 On Camera: CRI not disclosed

iKan ID 1000: CRI not disclosed

Dedolight Ledzilla Mini LED:  Spectral distribution graph and colour rendition graph

Dedolight Felloni Tecpro LED panel:  CRI up to 84 (up from 74)

Zylight IS3 panel: CRI not disclosed

Rosco LitePad series: CRI not disclosed

SWIT S-2000 On Camera:  CRI not disclosed

Other fixtures to watch:

Arri L-Series Fresnel:  CRI > 90

PRG The Ohm spacelight panel:  CRI  > 92 @3200k

All retrieved 23 Sep 2011

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Seven o’clock Sunday evenings, TV One, is the dream slot for any New Zealand TV producer, says the director of The Food Truck, a show that recently held that space over eight episodes.

James Anderson, a partner in production company Two Heads, directed the show about a chef who tries to convince the public to buy healthy snacks from a fast food truck.

“We’ve done a lot of TV shows but this was the first time we have been in prime time, especially on TV One,” says Anderson.

James Anderson

So they weren’t going to blow it by miscalculating the choice of HD cameras, settling on a Panasonic AF102 and a Canon 5D MKII, both new investments  for the company.

“The whole HD specification thing has been a nightmare for any producer in New Zealand,” says Anderson.

TV3 accepts cameras with sensors under 1/2″ as HD and are relaxed about lower data rates and the less demanding 4:2:0 colour space used by some cameras.

“But that’s what TV3 will accept for HD, whereas TV One are on ‘BBC’ specifications,” says Anderson.

“We want to make HD shows that we can sell overseas.  We are going to get more money back from it and also we want to show something that will blow people away, so I respect TVNZ for going with that, even though it makes it very tough to meet all the specifications.”

Tough

Anderson says the reason it is tough is the budgets. There is no premium for an HD produced show, and this limits the money you can spend on cameras.

“It’s all part of the contract really, they give you the standards they accept. The main ones are the megabits per second and the 4:2:2 colour space.”

For HD, TVNZ specifies a minimum of 50 Mb/sec data rate for GOP (group of pictures) recording codecs, reflecting the ‘BBC’ approach, which has now been adopted by all major UK broadcasters.

But within a programme the HD specifications allow for 25 percent of up-converted SD material – including material shot on cameras that, even though they are promoted by manufacturers as HD, don’t meet the HD broadcaster’s specifications.

The purpose of this clause is to allow for the practicality of shooting stunt or POV shots where a full size camera would be too risky, and to allow the inclusion of archive material without infringing the HD quality specs. Incidentally, it leaves flexibility in the choice of second camera.

The truth is that out of the box, neither of the cameras chosen for The Food Truck qualify as broadcast HD because both record 4:2:0 with a data rate below 50 Mb/sec.

The solution?  Use the Panasonic AF102 with a 4:2:2, 100 Mb/sec off-board recorder and simply make sure the Canon 5D shots didn’t exceed 25 percent.

Excited

“The Panasonic was our workhorse but it was very important for us to get those very sexy looking close ups of food,” says Anderson.

“We wanted to people to see the food and get excited about it, and that is where the Canon 5D came in.”

He says they worked around the limitations of the camera, keeping it on sticks to minimise the risk of the rolling shutter effect and the difficulties of focus pulling with a very shallow depth of field.

The reason they didn’t just buy two AF102s is the look.

“The AF 102 is outstanding, it is a great workhorse and we needed it for the stuff like a person talking to camera. But if you put the two cameras together for close ups the 5D wins hands down,” says Anderson.

The downside of mixing and matching two completely different cameras is that it adds to grading time, says Joe Lawry, who graded the show as well as shooting some of it.

“The gammas don’t match and you spend a lot of time grading skin tones,” he says.

“It kind of sucks because there was times when the Panasonic did look better than the Canon and you would sit there trying to ruin the Panasonic’s look.  But then there was times when the Canon was better than the Panasonic.”

“It is a trade off, obviously the Canon cameras cost hardly anything but you can’t push the footage as far and you can’t work with it as much. If you nail in the field, it will look great. But as soon as you go slightly overexposed or slightly underexposed, when getting it back you definitely start to sacrifice a lot of quality.”

“With two of the same matching cameras, grading a half hour show probably takes a day.  I spent probably two days per episode on this one.”

But this is all technical stuff.

Michael Van De Elzen

For Anderson, The Food Truck was a different kind of success – in part because of the likeability of the main character, Chef Michael Van De Elzen.

“You kind of want to wrap him up and take him home,” laughs Anderson, ” We got really good ratings and TV One were very happy.”

Lawry too, is pleased with the result.

“I am amazed, every week when it aired, I got at least two comments saying how good it looked, so I was very happy.”

www.twoheads.co.nz

www.joelawry.com

The Food Truck – TVNZ on demand

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The Food Truck, shot on a combination of Panasonic AF-102 & Canon 5D, HD

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The Television New Zealand (TVNZ) charter has been finally extracted like a bad tooth that has been afflicting the company for years. This cure will have little, if any impact on what is actually shown on screen.

At least that is what the Minister of Broadcasting, Jonathan Coleman would have you believe.

If he is correct and the content remains the same, the independent production industry can relax knowing the flow of commission work from government owned broadcaster will continue undiminished.

Parliament passed the Television New Zealand Amendment bill a couple of weeks ago, repealing the charter and turning the company into purely commercial entity that would, incidentally, be a much easier sale proposition. The only remaining operational parameter in the act is that it must produce high quality content.

You might be scratching your head to make sense of the Minster’s statements because the point of the Television New Zealand Act 2003 charter was to make a difference to what was shown on screen after a few years of prior operation as commercial state owned enterprise. The charter had provisions similar to what you might expect a pubic service broadcaster to have and sat alongside the commercial objectives of the business. It should have made a difference on screen when it was introduced and dropping it should make a difference.

Commercial pain

If it caused as much commercial pain as Dr Coleman makes out – bad enough to go to the trouble of pass an act of parliament to get rid of it, you could reasonably assume that TVNZ, against its commercial better judgement, was forced schedule programmes that were too expensive to produce and/or didn’t pull in commercially viable ratings.

But TVNZ wasn’t forced to show anything, and New Zealand on Air offers subsidies largely to turn locally made programmes into a reasonable bet for the broadcaster.

This leaves another possible reason why taking away the charter won’t make any difference:  TVNZ chose to ignore the charter part of its founding statute.

Ironically, if this is true, there will indeed be little impact on what is shown on screen and it follows that there should be little impact on the production community and the amount of work that TVNZ commissions – unless it switched to producing programmes in-house.

It could legally do this now because the requirement in the charter to ‘support and promote … the independent New Zealand film and television industry,’  has gone.

However TV One programmer John Wright, responding for TVNZ, says there are no planned changes to the amount of commissioning from the independent community, nor are there plans to expand in-house production capacity.

“Local production is critical to TVNZ success, it is our desire to commission as much local production as we can afford. New Zealanders love seeing themselves on TV. Look at the reception viewers gave Nothing Trivial; it made the strongest debut for a local drama in more than a decade,” he says.

According to Wright changes to programme scheduling and content will be minimal.

“The difference is that there will now be even greater focus on broad appeal content that is commercially viable,” he says.

“That said, however, there are no plans to change existing local production programming in off peak timeslots such as Sunday mornings.”

Another plan

Perhaps there is another agenda driving the charter repeal. Dr Coleman says the reason for the bill is that

Minster of Broadcasting Dr Coleman

it leaves the state broadcaster free to concentrate on being a successful television company without the constraints of an unrealistic dual mandate of charter and commercial objectives.

According to Dr Coleman TVNZ has struggled to return a consistent dividend to the Government although over 90 percent of its funding is already commercial.

He didn’t say this out loud, but removing the charter kicks away a handy excuse which the board of directors and management can trot out to blame poor financial performance of the company.

Another interpretation

There is yet another interpretation: Dr Coleman’s forecast is fudging and given time TVNZ’s content will indeed change under the new regime.

To get a handy, albeit rough, benchmark of what to expect from television channels with nothing but commercial imperatives we need look no further than MediaWorks operators of TV3, C4 and Four.

New Zealand On Air has an $80 million kitty to fund programmes and relieve the channels of much of the commercial pain and risk of showing locally made programmes.

As it happens the pot includes $15 million that used to be given to TVNZ to subsidise their charter obligations. It was given to New Zealand on Air when TVNZ were caught using the funds on blatantly commercial programmes.

Last year TVNZ’s two channels received $35 million more than the three MediaWorks channels.

Apart from drama and comedy, notable differences in charter type of categories were  Arts/Culture, Documentary, Children, and Special Interest where TVNZ’s two channels received in total about $18.5 million more than TV3 C4, and Four added together.

Working on the back of an envelope this means if TVNZ cuts back Art/Culture, Children and special interest programming to MediaWorks levels about $18.5 million less New Zealand on Air funding will be required.

40 percent less

Since about $7.5 million of that was made in house by TVNZ anyway, that’s about $11 million gone from those genres for the independent programme makers and about 40 percent less local content in those genres on screen.

If you are an independent working in those charter genres you might prepare yourself for say a 30 percent reduction in work.

Of course, this is rough and ready reckoning and if TVNZ does not want to schedule those genres it is pretty well inconceivable that this New Zealand on Air money would sit around unused.

One way to spent it is to apply bigger subsidies to more expensive types of genres and programmes.

Or as John Wright at TVNZ puts it: “The mix of commissioning will only alter in that there will be a greater focus on ideas that have broad audience appeal.”

Plan

For all that, the real affect will only become clear as TVNZ produces its Statement of Intent, the plan that is signed-off by the government and which it is then judged.

Right now TVNZ can’t say when the revised Statement of Intent will be produced. A spokesperson says the date for this process is determined by government officials, and they are awaiting word from them on when this will be.

In the mean time watch this space – or rather, watch your screen.

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The new Final Cut Pro X is now available to the public for less than a third of the price of the discontinued FCP 7 suite it replaces.

But if you had to edit a television show with FCP X today, you would probably be struggling because, aside from the name, the new application doesn’t really share a lot in common with the Final Cut Pro we know.

This a Version 1.0 – a completely rewritten 64-bit application designed to work for the future as Apple sees it.

Gone is support for tape-based formats – no batch capture, no print to tape. Interchange between applications is also currently unavailable – no EDL, XML or OMF export, and even Final Cut Pro projects can’t be imported (although iMovie projects can).

Project based media and bins have been dumped. Instead, all media is visible in all projects and sorted into Events in the Library – which could quickly become problematic if you have multiple projects for multiple clients.

FCP X also shifts the editing paradigm we are used to. There are no longer source and record monitors (or viewer and canvas). Instead source clips are previewed in place in the Library or within the main video window.

The concept of tracks has vanished too, replaced by the Storyline. When new clips are added to the timeline the old ones are either shifted out of the way, or the new ones create a new layer on top – move a clip around the timeline (Storyline) and other clips will automatically move out of the way – a feature called the Magnetic Timeline.

Potentially helpful

It’s not all doom and gloom for Final Cut Professionals though, as the new FCP X is introducing some new and potentially very helpful features. Some of the new features may become more valuable for professionals as FCP X matures.

Background rendering and transcoding is something many editors would love to see across the board in NLEs, and FCP X delivers.

Clips are analysed as they are imported for various ‘fixes’ that can be manually or automatically applied later, allowing one-click colour or audio improvements and image stabilisation with no waiting around

In stark contrast to the massive third-party ecosystem around earlier FCP versions, FCP X stands alone, but in time that’s sure to change. Some of the features that Apple has chosen not to include themselves could very easily be tackled by third-parties.

Unlikely

The outcome of all these things is that it is unlikely we’ll see any network TV or feature films edited in FCP X until at least version 2 (whenever that might be) and I suspect we’ll see people in that market look elsewhere as they consider their future post-production investment.

On the other hand, a technology savvy editor can now access some features that might only have been expected in pricey pro applications in the past – for example the colour tools in FCP X have obviously taken a lot from Apple’s Color application.

End of life

Meanwhile FCP 7 has become “end of life” meaning no further updates should be expected. This leaves current FCP users in a difficult position – continue with a now unsupported FCP 7, adapt to the new world of FCP X or look at moving to another platform.

After all, FCP 7 has been showing it’s age and limitations for quite a while, especially with newer file-based formats.

While there’s no need to do any of those things immediately – FCP 7 won’t stop working overnight – it is a decision that will have to be made at some point. However Apple are further forcing the issue, having ended sales of FCP 7 as FCP X was launched – already established FCP users now have no ability to expand.

But what should an FCP editor do right now?

The best thing might be to play with it and see what you to like, and what you don’t – at only US$299 in the Apple Appstore (NZ$399 locally) it is a lot less than you might pay for other toys.

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It would be a trifle unfair to criticise Sony’s new FS100 for not having some of the costly features of a high-end camera.

The new camera is from Sony’s NXCAM budget range, with a list price expected to be NZ$8.5K  (Under US$7K) for the bundle including an E-mount 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 Optical SteadyShot  Sony auto focus zoom lens.

It is a fair game to compare it to a Canon 5D Mk II though, and sure enough one was produced to sit side by side with the Sony FS100 when a group of camera and sound Crews.TV members met recently at Spoon Studios in Auckland.  It’s a venue often used by Crews.TV and this time the session was to look at a pre-production FS100 sample loaned by Sony.

There are lots of spec sheets, press releases and reviews that will give you the details of the camera and cover the image quality, but for this group the discussion turned to three main usability issues, once the amusement of being able to shoot around corners wore off.

Despised HDMI connectors

The monitor cable at the back of the FS100 camera came loose – because that’s what HDMI connectors do.

“I plugged an HDMI monitor in,” says steadicam operator Joe Lawry, “and wiggling the HDMI cable connector on the back of the camera killed the signal.

“It might be fine in a studio situation on a tripod, but I don’t think I would want to use the FS100 with an external recorder out in the field running around with a shoulder rig.”

Unlike the fragile mini-HDMI connector on a Canon 5D, the FS100 HDMI connector is a full size connector, and it might be possible to find a locking type of HDMI connector that can fit, but in the end HDMI connectors were designed for AV connections, not location use.

The FS100 might not be a high-end camera but it’s hard to imagine that using a robust HD-SDI connector would have put it out of its target price bracket.

But for all that, the signal the FS100 sends down the HDMI cable is in a different league to a Canon HDMI output.

On a Canon 5D MK II once you plug the HDMI connector in for monitoring, it blacks out the operator’s viewfinder – the camera LCD.

In contrast the FS100 is a real video camera with a real EX style LCD viewfinder that is a proven system that works properly, and on this camera doubles as a menu touch screen.

The signal out of the HDMI connectors is wildly different too.

The Canon 5D MK II HDMI signal is reduced to SD quality when the camera is recording and has a red recording indicator in the picture making it useless for off-board recording.

On the other hand if you want to boost the codec quality on the FS100 by using an off-board recorder, you won’t have any difficulty doing so, the signal is free from viewfinder indicators and is perfectly good HD.

In fact editor Dylan Reeve, with thanks to twitter, points out that the very latest versions of the FS100 brochure offer uncompressed HDMI RGB 4:4:4 as well as the original 4:2:2.

“For almost all purposes a 4:2:2 output is sufficient and more practical,” says Reeve. “But the ability to get a RGB 4:4:4 output does open up options for things like VFX where any chromatic sub-sampling is undesirable.”

The FS100 HDMI data stream comes with embedded time code meaning an off-board recorder can automatically record when the camera records.

Add all this together and the result is that the budget FS100 camera can be pushed into the realm of HD broadcast quality.  (At the same time  - let’s not forget – you could buy higher spec camera in the first place.)

Brick-ish form factor

“My first impression was that it looked like a very un-ergonomic brick and that it would be difficult to use,” says Nick Treacy, a sound recordist who also rents out a portfolio of cameras.

“I was wrong,” he says. “The more we handled it the more we realized that it had its own agenda, and it was quite good.”

These days the FS100 isn’t the only brick-ish camera around as DPs shooting with everything from Red Epics to Panasonic AF102s will tell you.

But with so many Canons around, a new breed of accessories has popped up and as one DP put it: “I now realize that I can use a virtually identical built-up rig to turn any of these block shaped cameras into nice shoulder mounted rigs. I have a custom Zacuto rig (for a 5D) that I know the FS100 would drop right onto – no worries.”

Audio big tick
Meanwhile, for sound recordist Wendy Adams the FS100 was a pleasant surprise.

“This is leaps and bounds over the 5D,” she says. “It’s not perfect but the level controls are recessed to avoid accidental resetting, it has XLR connectors and the menu is easy to line up.”

She found the session with the camera informative even if there wasn’t a chance to shoot with it.

“I really like how we all went in there expecting to dislike yet another DSLR contender,” she says.

“Instead we found ourselves looking at the pros of what this camera has to offer.”

Sony New Zealand says the first cameras are expected in New Zealand by the end of June.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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TV3 - Mediaworks New Zealand

TV3 insists that new prime time show Underbelly New Zealand (The Land of the Long Green Cloud) will be delivered in HD but says they are fairly relaxed with their HD technical requirements.

In this case, relaxed means employing an acquisition workflow that would not qualify for broadcast HD under recommendations issued by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) – an association of 110 or more broadcasting organisations from around the world.

The six one-hour episodes of Underbelly NZ attracted $3.9 million funding from New Zealand on Air’s Platinum fund for high-end programmes and are in production at the moment.

MediaWorks TV, the owner of the TV3 network, says they expect that a programme commissioned in HD has been shot in HD, edited in HD, and it must be delivered on an HDCAM tape.

Underbelly NZ is shooting on Sony F3 cameras that don’t by themselves meet EBU recommendations for HD acquisition, but originally boosted their capability with off-board recorders. These compact recorders are mounted on the side of the camera accepting an HD-SDI output from the camera and automatically recording when the camera recording begins. They typically record at 4:2:2 codec at 100Mbps, but the latest versions are actually capable of recording 4:4:4 uncompressed video. Either way, they are in widespread use as a way of boosting cameras like the Sony F3 well into the scope of any European and U.K broadcast recommendations.

However, after a while, the off-board recording approach was dropped.

“It was proving too expensive and time consuming for the production and causing delays and problems on set,” says Althea Myers, MediaWorks TV publicist.

The production changed to shooting with the native internal recording on the Sony F3 cameras, which is a 4:2:0 codec at 35Mbps on SxS cards.

“We discussed it with our engineers and distributors, and we will still deliver to all required specifications and the change will have no visible impact on look and quality,” says Myers.

Of course as a commercial broadcaster TV3 is under no obligation to meet any particular set standard and the production company can’t be criticised for making legitimate commercial choices to suit the broadcaster.

Still, if the difference in codecs has no visible or quality impact then it looks like nobody told the off-board recorder manufacturers who have built substantial business around selling gadgets at US$3K or more per unit all over the world –precisely to improve the quality of 4:2:0 codec cameras.

It is true that the quality differences of this magnitude might be too subtle for  the average viewer sitting at home with their HD set top box plugged into their 20 year old CRT analogue television.

But if those people are not in the minority they soon will be;  in the past 12 months alone New Zealanders bought close to 400,000 TVs up from 200,000 TVs the year before – presumably all, or nearly all, flat screen HD television receivers, many of them in bigger sizes  that highlight any picture deficiencies.

On the production and transmission side, TV3 says that it will be a long time before their HD transmissions are all acquired in HD – they admit that even today they still get Beta SP as a delivery format.

But at the same time high-end programmes imported from countries where HD requirements are tighter can look pretty good, giving viewers a handy yardstick for the quality they should expect from domestic HD broadcasts.

It is entirely up to a television network to position their channel, and their individual programmes, where they will on the quality spectrum.

But as the EBU recommendations put it:

Technical quality becomes an issue for the home audience when there are evident variations in the quality of different sources available to him. It is self evident that TV channels presented in an inferior quality will be judged dis-favourably to those presented in a higher quality.

 

Additional Information

External Recorder Comparison Chart

European Broadcast Union

TV3 New Zealand

New Zealand On Air

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By itself, a Sony EX3 might be a great camera but it’s not HD broadcast quality.  Not in the U.K, not for Discovery Channel, not for Television New Zealand.

The HD technical delivery standards documents that explain this are drawn up by the broadcasters themselves, perhaps so they will never have to hear the “it looked good when we shot it”  defence of  programmes that turned out to look inferior by the time they were watched on the average home’s television.

If the ordinary viewer is to see the quality they can reasonably expect from a programme marketed as HD,  the acquisition formats need to have sufficient quality headroom so they don’t fall apart when they go through all the processing, conversion, compression involved in a broadcast and transmission chain. That’s before you get to the decoding and processing that take place within television receivers that may themselves be struggling with variable signal quality.

The HD standards and quality issue has been stirred up recently within the television camera community in New Zealand because of a series called  North that was commissioned and broadcast by Television New Zealand (TVNZ), the state owned broadcaster.

Presented by Marcus Lush, the prime time documentary series is a showcase for some of the North Island’s ‘gorgeous’ natural and urban landscapes. And it’s popular; the final episode aired not long ago, attracting ratings only a few thousand shy of TVNZ’s flagship One News.

HD Prestige

Like many other broadcasters around the world, TVNZ broadcasts HD  and has invested heavily in an HD infrastructure, but many programmes are still not acquired in HD. To be fair, TVNZ is upfront about all this, and only genuine, native HD programmes get the HD logo in programme guides, programme trailers and the credits.

But according to TVNZ they relaxed their own standards when it came to North.

Spokesperson Megan Richards explains that the series was commissioned as an HD programme but shot on a Sony EX3.

“While it doesn’t meet the letter of the law of a published minimum spec for HD, the resolution is high enough to qualify for HD,” says Richards.

But for many cameras falling into the EX3 price bracket, resolution is not the area of concern; the codec is.

Sony EX3 cameras record 4:2:0 long GOP codec with a data rate of 35Mbps which doesn’t meet TVNZ and other international broadcasters’ criteria for what qualifies as HD.

“It is fair to state that while North did not meet the 4:2:2 standard it was well shot, lit and post-produced and that any quality loss relative to 4:2:2 was minimal,”  says Richards.

“This is not always the case however, and the decision to accept it as HD was a one-off and should not be seen as a precedent.”

But with continual budget squeezes, one so called non-precedent can easily lead to another –  and this could happen if  TVNZ  looked at North and came to the conclusion that  4:2:0  35Mbps looked just fine for a prime time HD show after all.  It might even have them thinking that they had set the bar too high in the past.

Mistake

A Sony EX3 with letus and Nanoflash, photo courtesy of Ben Ruffell

But that’s not entirely right,  as CREWS.TV members subsequently found out.  Director of Photography Jacob Bryant,  posting in a CREWS.TV forum, said that North was shot on a Sony EX3 but the recording was via the camera’s HD-SDI 4:2:2 10 bit output to an off-board nanoFlash recording  100Mbps MXF 4:2:2 HD.

This is a fairly common work around that propels the Sony EX3 camera past the minimum 50Mbps data rate well into the acceptable range of  TVNZ  and other international broadcasters’ published quality standards criteria.

As it happened, Bryant also enhanced the look of the show with Zeiss ZF lenses on a Letus lens adaptor, giving a 35mm style depth of field effect associated with larger sensors.

The EX3′s 1/2 inch sensors meet the TVNZ specifications and the U.K. standards too, although some standards documents state that most cameras with sensors under 1/2 inch do not qualify as HD.

It is unknown if TVNZ quality control systems would have noticed a problem during ingestion if the footage was indeed originated in 4:2:0, and in any case by then would be little that could be done about it, other than removing HD badge from marketing materials.

“In essence we operate a trust model where we rely on the integrity of the production company,” says Richards.  “This is a small market and they wouldn’t want to jeopardise their relationship with TVNZ by falsely claiming something was HD when it was not.”

Issues remain

Given these facts, whether or not North deserves to be marketed as HD turns out to be a fuss about nothing,  because although the camera doesn’t qualify by itself it was beefed up with some good recording kit for the shoot.

But it does seem TVNZ  is willing to drop the standards if they prove inconvenient, and this leaves the underlying issues simmering for another time (and some other stories).

At the heart of it all are two questions: What is the acceptable standard for something to be commissioned and marketed as HD? What will be implications if those standards are eroded?

Typical standards documents get revised from time to time but that doesn’t mean the standards should drop, in the rest of the world outside broadcasting, new standards usually get tougher.

The current TVNZ document mirrors overseas broadcaster documents, particularly those previously issued by the BBC.  It’s called Technical Standards and Documentation Guide for Television Programme Delivery– TVNZ Standard S57-4-2009 Production. It is dated March 2009 and engineering sources at TVNZ say it is under revision at the moment –  the reason we have not posted it.

According to Richards the document is not intended to be a prescription written in stone in any case.

“The standards document is the guide. Variation can be negotiated, but only for specific circumstances and where appropriate to the particular programme and genre,” she says.  ”It is subject to change as technology arrives and when specific productions operating in unique circumstances require.”

At least TVNZ are up front about the issue. There is another approach that some other networks adopt – which might avoid the issue in the short term, but doesn’t make it go away. In fact it may accelerate the erosion of HD quality, and in turn erode the value their channel’s brand.

The approach is, of course, to have no standards.

Photo of Sony EX-3 courtesy of Ben Ruffell  www.ruff.co.nz

This website is brought to you by the support of the CREWS.TV membership and its member sponsors

The smell you never forget: Covering the War in Ivory Coast, April 2011

By Christian Parkinson

The smell of decaying bodies is a tough one to forget. I’d seen dead bodies before, but not in the number that they littered the battle zones of Ivory Coast. My colleague Andrew advised me to breath through the mouth – easier said than done.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The town of Duekoue had just fallen into the hands of the troops backing the elected President of Ivory Coast Alassane Ouattara – a masscare followed. It’s hard to say exactly who killed who and why. All sides have been pointing fingers and no one can decide how many bodies have actually been found. I arrived with my team a few days after the event, the first foreign journalists to make it this far west, past the dozens of check points that line the road from Yamoussoukro. Luckily there was a big UN presence and as soon as we arrived in our beaten up Toyota 4×4 the Moroccan UN troops took us to see the bodies being collected for burial.

The dead were everywhere, covered in black plastic by the side of the road. I jumped out of the car and began to film. I worked on instinct, trying to not to think too much about what I was seeing. The sound of the bodies being loaded onto a flat bed truck seemed incredibly loud in the heavy, eerie silence. They were handed up from the ground and then slid across the metal floor before bumping to a standstill.

A Moroccan Officer reprimanded a group of Ouattara soldiers at a nearby check-point – “No more killing” he told them angrily. They looked sullen, denying any responsibility. I just kept filming, sucking the images into the camera, hoping that by documenting this I was somehow making a difference, telling a story that needed to be told.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That night the Moroccan troops allowed us to use there officers mess in the UN base as an edit suite and a place to sleep. They looked after us well, bringing us coffee, bread and even a plate of Arabic sweets. They were good guys, eager to help and not upset by us taking over the one place where they could come to watch the football and forget where they were.

This was my fourth trip to Ivory Coast in the space of a year. My first had been fun, a football film in the run up to the World Cup. But quickly things had deteriorated and the last few trips had all been to document the countries gradual journey towards war. Abidjan had been a terrifying place for foreign journalists since the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo had refused to recognize his election defeat and in January my team were stopped and threatened with death at a particularly nasty check point.

In recent weeks the forces of Alassane Ouattara had swept through much of the country and had advanced deep into Abidjan itself. Just getting in to the country to cover the story had been a huge effort. We had flown to Bamako in Mali and driven for nineteen hours to get to Bouake, the capital of the northern portion of the country.

After filing our film on the massacre in Duekoue we headed towards the front line in Abidjan. The road towards the city was deserted, market stalls that would normally be sprinkled along the route, abandoned. Finally we came across the main staging point for Ouattaras soldiers at a Shell Garage in an area called Gesco. We found hundreds of fighters exhausted and sprawled in any shade they could find as they tried to sleep. We advanced further along the road, more bodies littered the route, rotting and covered in maggots. Civilians brave enough to venture out looking for food and water were so terrified they had they hands raised in surrender the whole time – even when being interviewed by my team.

That night the film that we made was the lead story on the BBC Ten o’clock News – we’d finally helped people notice this story and how important it was.

Abidjan was so dangerous that it was impossible to go any further into the city. In a deeply cynical move Laurent Gbagbo and his surviving die-head fighters had turned the city into a charnel house, a place of death, where everybody was a legitimate target. We tried to arrange a military convoy to take us to the Golf Hotel where President Ouattara had been based for months, protected by the UN. Thirty seconds after we left, we were forced to turn back when the fighters with us reported seeing wounded on the road and said it was to dangerous too proceed.

We spent five days on the edge of town filing stories. We stayed at a Bar/Guesthouse about twenty kilometers from the frontlines. It was basic, I shared a room with Correspondent Andrew Harding. The toilet stank, forcing me to hold my breath every time I went inside and the bed sheets were crawling with insects. But they cooked us an evening meal every night and had cold drinks – a welcome moral booster after filming in the sticky humidity of West Africa. Unfortunately one of my kit bags hadn’t arrived when we flew from Johannesburg to Bamako in Mali – it was the bag with my survival equipment. As the week wore on I missed not having a decent travel towel and sleeping bag and regretted the loss of my solar phone charger and water purification tablets.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Equipment was beginning to suffer from the heat and rough treatment. One of our BGAN’s stopped working, meaning we only had one to file both radio and TV. As I was filming one afternoon I noticed my lens was moving around in its mount. I kept tightening it with no improvement. Then the back focus started to slip substantially. In a panic I removed the lens and discovered that all the screws holding it together had worked there way loose and it was coming apart. I didn’t have time to fix it then and there and was forced to shoot one of our pieces on my Canon 5D Mark II. The picture quality of the 5D is fantastic but it was a relief when I was able to fix the lens with a screwdriver later that night. Returning to the ergonomics and ease of use I have with my Sony DSR 500.

Eventually on 12th April, Laurent Gbagbo was captured. We were in a town well north of Abidjan and were able to capture the amazing spontaneous celebrations. School children flooded into the street waving branches and singing while adults danced and pounded on car horns filling the town with a cacophony of noise. It was a brilliant ending to two challenging weeks. It’s been a hard time for Ivory Coast but I hope now things can slowly start to return to normal and that the healing can begin.

This Story is by Christian Parkinson, you can read more about him on his blog

This website is funded by the members of  CREWS.TV and the generous support of its sponsors.

It’s been a long time coming, and there was some serious controversy about how it came about in the end but it has finally happened – Apple have announced and demonstrated their newest version of Final Cut Pro. There are some big changes, but is Apple right about the future of post-production, and by extension – production?

Rumours have been flying about FCP X since it was first revealed in February that a product had been shown to a select group of industry professionals. Much of the speculation was focused on the idea that Apple would make some pretty dramatic changes in the new application such as doing away with the standard Source/Record interface and dropping support for tape-based I/O. These sorts of changes have led many skeptics to pre-emptively dub the new release iMovie Pro.

So with all revealed it the FCPUG Supermeet in Las Vegas today, how does the early speculation pan out? The most undeniable fact is that it is different. In fact it is almost an entirely new application. It doesn’t look like the Final Cut Pro we know, and it doesn’t work like it either.

The big headline points are very good – it is now a native 64-bit app, rewritten from scratch to get the most from Apple’s newest hardware and software., taking advantage of Grand Central Dispatch to use all the available CPU cores. Also it seems that the Albatross that was Quicktime has been lifted from around the neck of FCP now, opening up the doors to supporting a much broader range of formats natively, from MXF to R3D RAW. With a new resolution independent timeline up to 4K and features like background rendering and ingest it’s also tuned for a quick editing experience with a little waiting around as possible.

Many of the new features could be summerised as “automation” – on ingest/import clips can be automatically colour corrected, have audio treatments applied and be analysed for stabilisation and rolling shutter correction – all non-destructively. Also clip audio can be analysed to allow automatic multicamera and dual-system sync.

Metadata is a key feature in the new application. Instead of traditional sub-clipping to break clips down into smaller parts it is now possible to add keywords to specific segments of a clip. FCP X will also examine clips and, using person-recognition, automatically record the number of people in a shot and the basic shot size (CU, MCU etc).

While this appears to be a new beginning for Final Cut Pro, it seems like it may be the end for the Final Cut Studio. Many of the core features of other Studio applications, such as Color, have been moved directly into the main FCP application and seem unlikely to continue on their own.

For professional users there is still a lot to consider – many features seem very attractive, but there are a lot of unknowns and possibly a pretty steep learning curve. It’s still unclear if the rumour of the death of tape from within FCP is true, but there was certainly no mention of it one way or the other. With only a prepared demo to show the features of the new FCP X it is difficult to know precisely how the new application will suit those working day-to-day in broadcast and professional post-production, there are certainly some features that could make life a little more difficult if they can’t be easily disabled or controlled.

Apple, as is their tradition, saved perhaps the most surprising and, for many, most exciting thing until last – the price. FCP X will be available from the Mac App Store in June 2011 for US$299!

Until the hands-on reviews and test start to come out it’s hard to make a professional judgement on how attractive the new software is, but one thing is for sure… The game has, again, been changed. With new and innovative features being rolled into FCP the demand for those technologies won’t go away and the pressure is on the competition to step up with some serious reinventions of their own. Adobe has just announced the Premiere Pro 5.5 with some basic upgrades, and Avid’s Media Composer 5.5 is also only recently to market, so it seems unlikely we’ll see 6.0 versions from either company for at least six-months by which time we’ll know for sure how FCP X has been received by working professionals.

(Feature image via Twitter from @Adamtheeditor/Adam Bedford)

A Sneak Peak — FCP X