Written by Karl G. Ruling is ESTA’s Senior Technical Standards Manager. He also serves as Protocol’s Technical Editor. Karl can be reached at karl.ruling@esta.org.
In November of 2021, PERG held a series of four virtual events, called the Year-End Technology Roundup, inviting representatives from thirty top manufacturers to speak to our membership about what is new and what is on the horizon in camera, lens, and lighting technology. The aim of the event was to enable vendors and rental companies to reconnect in the wake of cancelled or poorly attended trade shows throughout 2021. The following article was prepared for the Winter 2022 Protocol, journal of ESTA. You can read it online at
http://estalink.us/protocolonline (available January 12th). To receive a hard copy of this issue, please email
Beverly.Inglesby@esta.org.”
I miss trade shows. For me, who rarely has a production budget and isn’t shopping, they were a chance to see friends and make new ones, and to see where the entertainment industry is going and what people find useful now. I look forward to being able to attend them again, but PERG offered four PERG Year-End Technology Roundup sessions in November that were a good substitute. Three were like new products breakfasts and the fourth was a panel discussion of the near-future for the video production industry. I found them interesting—and, since I attended them virtually from my home office, I wasn’t restricted to new product breakfast coffee-and-muffins. I could eat and drink whatever I wanted: pizza and beer or crêpes and calvados!
If you missed the sessions in November, you didn’t totally miss them. The sessions were recorded and are now free online at ESTA’s YouTube website,
http://estalink.us/xmcfh. What you’ll miss watching the recordings is the chance to enter Zoom break-out rooms to chat with the presenters. However, the sidebar for this story gives you the presenters and links to their websites, so you can follow up for more information. I’ll not give you a detailed summary here—you can watch the presentations online—but I will highlight what I found interesting.
What I found particularly interesting in the “Lighting and Grip” session on November 14th were the discussions of light color/camera interaction, controlling lighting without a large lighting control desk, and a couple of LED lamps that screw into an E26 socket. The ARRI presentation (in particular) talked a lot about carefully controlling the lighting in mixed reality shoots—shoots with real actors and props in front of a virtual scene, and image on an LED cyclorama. (ARRI also had a pitch for the continuing importance of HMI sources for motion picture production, but nobody showed any new HMI luminaires.) Aputure showed some LED luminaires that can be controlled from an app, and LiteGear’s Spectrum OS2 ballasts allow color and intensity control without needing a lighting control desk. Aputure and Astera both had color-changing light bulbs that will fit a table lamp’s socket. The Aputure bulb can run on batteries—useful for a location shoot in a derelict building—and both it and the Astera lamps offer precise color control. My first thought is that these would be good for effects, and they would be, but they’d be great for carefully tuning the light from practical sources to match the ambient lighting. Cameras do not see color the same way human eyes do. Sometimes cameras miss color differences people see, and other times they exaggerate them. (The mix of light from the windows and the white LEDs in my home office makes some strangely colorful Zoom sessions.)
The November 9th session, “Camera and Camera Accessories,” had several presentations on batteries. Every camera shown was digital and can be battery-powered. LED luminaires are often mains-powered, but many can run on battery power. With a battery system that will work for lights and camera, a production company can shoot almost anywhere with little hassle. Another hassle-reducer was Rip-Tie’s cable ties with RFID. You can wave a reader over a pile of cables going in or out of the shop, and they’re identified and logged. The reader also can find a cable that is misplaced—yeah that one, over there. SmallHD showed a compact, bright, 4K monitor, while First Mile Technologies and Teradek showed low-latency video streaming systems. Together these point toward real-time monitoring, remote monitoring, and remote file storage on “the Cloud.” All these help assure a director that the camera is capturing what needs to be seen and that the images are secure.
The November 11th session on lenses and lens accessories interested me because I had no idea that some people want to customize these expensive, precision optical instruments. The Angenieux (Band Pro) pitch for the Optimo lens series, for example, is that they offer three points of customization. You can add filters or change lens elements to add flare, to change the shape of iris seen in the flare, and affect the quality of the ボケ, a Japanese word meaning “blurriness” but sounding much better in Japanese. (It’s pronounced bōkeh in Japanese, with the first syllable longer, not louder, and something close to that in American.) This is the soft blurriness of the background or foreground elements when a shot has a shallow depth of field. The blurriness can be attractive, interesting, or distracting. The lens presentations attempted to describe lens bokeh as well as sharpness, focus range, and size of the sensor they can cover. Some of the artistic image qualities of lenses (e.g. flare) could be produced in post-production, but that’s another step and many directors want to see what’s being recorded now. There’s a real movement toward doing effects in-camera rather than in post. (At Showlight Mike Bauman described the use of a matte box to create flashing police light flare on the image in-camera. Bauman explained that the cinematographer, Matty Libatíque, likes to have the look he wants “baked into the file,” not added later. See the Summer 2021
Protocol.)
The final session on November 18th was a panel discussion, “Riding the Next Wave of Technological Evolution.” It was basically a rosy prediction of the future for the video production industry. COVID-19 is not going away, but there is a high rate of vaccination in our industry, and digital workflows make it possible to get things done without being at risk of catching or spreading contagion. The pandemic shut down the industry for months at the same time it drove up the demand for movies, television, and streaming services. There’s now tremendous demand for content, and it is possible to provide it. Michael Cioni predicted that the next four years are going to be great, and Stephan Ukas-Bradley agreed.
There was discussion of the benefits and likely future of “camera to cloud” and replacing physical media. Ukas-Bradley said camera-to-cloud is wonderful, and editing on the cloud is wonderful, but it will be at least three to four years before this is mainstream. Brandon Cooper noted that connectivity bandwidth is a limitation, but he saw hope in the expanding 5G infrastructure. “Imagine being able to shoot camera-to-cloud anywhere!”
“Camera-to-cloud” has real advantages, but some of them are psychological. Cioni says it cuts the anxiety of the director, and the director’s anxiety tends to filter throughout the production. Camera-to-cloud is the end of “Oh, what do the dailies show, are we getting this?” Ukas-Bradley predicted that virtual production and LED walls are here to stay (not like 3D, which comes and goes). Virtual production makes COVID controls relatively easy; it lets a lot of the crew stay at home.
LED walls and virtual production have increased the importance of metadata and having it tied to image and sound data at a moment in time. The general opinion was that metadata has to be transmitted in a form that is universal, with well-understood names so we can understand what needs to be sent and used. The chain of custody of the metadata breaks down in many productions and that is bad. Cioni argued for automating metadata and data sharing. Data must not be lost, but production team members often don’t meet each other, so we need another way to ensure that people have the data and metadata, and know what it is, when they need it.
The pandemic had created a content dearth, so now the industry is busy, but Ukas-Bradley said this has made it hard to get enough gear—and who is going to do the work? We need training for people to work with modern technology. Gary Adcock half-jokingly said rental houses need people in house who understand IP addressing. This is basic knowledge, but getting a network to work—and everything is networked—can founder on very basic configuration rocks.
Of course, there was more. It was an interesting and thoughtful discussion of the video production industry and how we can work efficiently and safely. It had me looking into game engines (good for virtual production) and hand-cranked cameras (which don’t need batteries and often had built-in in-camera effects). Game engines were touched on in the presentations, hand-cranked cameras were not, but both suggest that the PERG Year-End Technology Roundup was a stimulating series of presentations—almost as good as a couple of days at a trade show! Check them out at
http://estalink.us/xmcfh.
PERG 2022 Year-End Technology Roundup Schedule
• November 4th: Lighting and Grip
Aputure. Brandon Le (Product Marketing Manager) discussed their next-level LED lighting technology.
https://www.aputure.com/
ASTERA. Jesper Soerensen (Field Rep) demonstrated two new products: PixelBrick and NYX Bulb.
https://astera-led.com
Kino Flo. Frieder Hochheim (Founder/President of Kino Flo Lighting Systems) provided a glimpse into the future of Kino Flo, now that it is part of Chauvet. It wasn’t a product pitch at all!
https://www.kinoflo.com
LiteGear. Paul Royalty (VP of Sales) explained the benefits of the latest Spectrum Litemats firmware updates.
https://www.litegear.com
LumenRadio. Sean Dane (US Sales Manager) discussed “The Next Generation” of wireless DMX products—Stardust, Aurora, and Luna. LumenRadio chips are used in wireless-enabled lighting instruments across the industry.
https://lumenradio.com
Prolycht. Mitch Gross (North America Strategic Sales) presented the benefits of RGBACL LEDs with the Orion 300 FS Spotlight.
https://www.prolycht.com
Ratpac Controls. Nick Stabile (VP of Sales and Marketing) took on the hot topic of data distribution, covering Ratpac’s Data Sphere and Unity boxes.
https://ratpaccontrols.com
Rob’s Rain Hats. Derek Hammer (President of Rob’s Rain Hats and Hammer Lighting and Grip) described a wide range of custom-fitted rain protection for today’s sensitive electronic lighting units, generators, ballasts, et cetera.
https://www.robsrainhats.com
Vitec. Tim Duff (Technical Sales Specialist) talked about the new Gemini 1x1 Hard, Vitec’s acquisition of Quasar Science, and the Apollo App control platform.
https://www.litepanels.com
• November 9th: Camera and Camera Accessories
Anton Bauer. Ted Doubov (Technical Sales Manager) talked new directions for battery technology and AB’s 26 V ecosystem.
https://www.antonbauer.com/en/
Blockbattery. Cody Mendoza (Sales and Marketing Specialist) highlighted the advantages and unique technology of the HCL-1600 battery pro block battery.
https://blockbattery.com/
CORE SWX. Joe Teodosio (Chief Technical Officer) spoke about their new all-encompassing mobile power station, the Maverick, a next generation block battery system for cinema and lighting applications.
https://coreswx.com/
Chrosziel. Timm Stemann (CEO) talked about cable management systems that can be attached to cameras, and various handles and mounts for cameras.
https://www.chrosziel.com/
First Mile Technologies. Bahaa Zantout (Technical Account Manager) and Peter Fairlie (Chief Technology Officer) talked portable connectivity to the Internet, live video streaming, set link streaming, and more.
https://firstmile.tech/
RED. James Lucarelli (Manager of Global Sales and Product Education) describes the powerful new V-RAPTOR 8k camera.
https://www.red.com/
Rip-Tie. Peter Rosenfeld (Manger, Sales and Marketing) demonstrated RFID-enabled cable wraps, RipWrap (an alternative to gaffer tape), and Rip-Tie mini for small cables bundles.
https://riptie.com/
Teradek/Wooden Camera/SmallHD. David Bredbury (Product Manager) spoke about the SmallHD Cine13 4k production monitor and Colin McDonald spoke on Teradek’s Bolt 4k LT MAX.
https://teradek.com/ and
https://smallhd.com/
• November 11th: Lens and Lens Accessories
Angenieux (Band Pro). Randy Wedick (Senior Technical Consultant) magnified the subject of Angenieux Compact Zooms.
https://www.angenieux.com/
Atlas. Dan Kanes (CEO) detailed the unique characteristics of the expressive and dynamic Orion Series anamorphic primes and Orion Silver Edition.
https://atlaslensco.com/
Chrosziel. Timm Stemann (CEO) talked about the Zoomer (FX6 and FX9 Universal Servo Drive), the Fujinon Premista Servo Drive and Chrosziel’s lens test projector and collimator.
https://www.chrosziel.com/
• November 18th: Panel Discussion: Riding the Next Wave of Technological Evolution
The panel discussion focused on the future of remote collaboration and connectivity in production and virtual production.
Brandon Cooper: Visionary FirstMile Technology
Michael Cioni: Futurist, Chief Technologist, Frame.Io / Adobe
Stephan Ukas-Bradley: VP Strategic Business Development and Technology
Gary Adcock (moderator): DP, technology consultant, and speaker on digital cinema workflows.
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| Gary Adcock |
