20 TVBEurope
NEWS INBRIEF Beyond HD:
Double financial backing for TVbeat
TVbeat, a London start-up that provides realtime television ratings, has secured $2million funding. UK-based Episode 1 and Czech-based Credo Ventures have backed the firm to develop its realtime TV analytics stream. With the funds, the company hopes to expand its presence in new markets and further develop its platform. Its analytic capability covers pay TV platforms including cable, satellite, VoD and OTT, as well as IPTV.
Having piloted its services to broadcasters, advertisers and pay TV platforms in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia, TVbeat founder Robert Farazin plans further expansion in Europe this year. Of the recently-secured funding, Farazin commented: “We are thrilled to see Episode 1 and Credo Ventures recognising the huge potential that our platform offers the media industry.”
www.tvbeat.com
Globecast delivers London Live
Globecast has been selected as the content delivery service provider for London Live, a new TV channel dedicated to London scheduled to launch on 31 March 2014. Globecast will provide turnkey connectivity for London Live, including satellite capacity and uplink, for UK subscribers of the Sky DTH satellite service. London Live is London’s first dedicated 24/7 TV entertainment channel, offering Londoners the latest in arts, news, current affairs, sports, and events. London Live is owned by ESTV, which won the London television franchise auction in February 2013. The channel will be available on Freeview 8, YouView 8, Sky 117 and Virgin 159 as well as being available in non-linear digital formats.
www.globecast.com
4K Challenges
format, and have to figure out what distribution format to use. It is possible to shoot 4K on a GoPro, but it will be at 15fps, and highly compressed (MPEG-4). “A producer will say: ‘I own this 4K camera, therefore this must be the best camera to shoot this project, because I don’t have any money.’ So, post is confronted with dealing with a highly compressed format with a producer who doesn’t have any money to buy storage,” he added. Chapman often shoots
material that could be newsworthy, such as tornadoes, so he particularly likes the F5/F55’s ability to shoot both Raw 4K and HD XDCAM 4:2:2 compressed at the same time, giving an ideal format for news use without having to do any conversion. “These are very challenging conditions to shoot in, with high winds, rain, dust and dirt. I don’t have time to change lenses, so can’t use primes.” He often uses a Tamron 18-270mm EF-mount zoom lens (the camera can also take a broadcast B4 mount, PL-mount or Nikon mount), which is optically stabilised. As the stills cameras that it is designed for use higher resolution sensors than 4K, such lenses are very suitable for 4K use. “There is a little bit of a
compromise, but sometimes you have to make a compromise to get a clip,” he explained. A tornado may last for only
a very short time, “so you have minutes, sometimes even seconds, to get a shot. To get the best shots, you need to be in front of the tornado, as behind it there is rain and you won’t see anything. So, you haven’t long before you have to move off to the next location,” unless you want to be caught up in it. He uses the EI mode on the camera to shoot flat and that creates the look in post.
Jordan: “When you are working with 4K, it affects your entire system”
www.tvbeurope.com April 2014
He had the budget to buy the F55, but as it only records compressed 4K on board, he would still have had to buy Sony’s external 4K Raw recorder (as Raw is so important to him), which would have been beyond his budget. Therefore, he bought the F5 and Raw recorder instead. “The F5 really does 99% of what the F55 does. It’s a very capable camera,” he said. The cameras can shoot 4K at up to 60fps, or 2K at up to 240fps with the Raw recorder (180fps otherwise).
Data management With more data to deal with, managing that data can be more demanding, but isn’t something to be feared, even on a budget, said Boyle. He did a five-day shoot on a Canon C500, recording 4K Raw to a Convergent Design Gemini recorder, resulting in 1TB of rushes per day, with everything double backed up. Each night he transcoded everything through his laptop into DNxHD 36 using lookup tables in Blackmagic’s
Resolve. The next morning a shuttle drive was ready to go to the editor. “A data management guy, who was an assistant editor who had never done the job before, was backing up on site all the time, copying all the files we used to multiple hard drives.” He also produced QuickTimes and H.264 files for the website. “It was mega low budget.” After getting the EDL from the Avid editor, “we used a 27-inch iMac running Resolve to auto- assemble it, and I graded it on that. I then fed it into my Dell laptop to put titles and sync audio in Premiere, and rendered out DPX files, which I put into DCP Builder to make a Cinema DCP 4K release master,” he explained. “If I can do that, any post house can do it.” A few days before BVE,
Chapman was shooting in South Africa, using the Sony FS700 (recording to the Convergent Design Odyssey recorder), editing the 4K Raw files on his laptop in the hotel and airport using Premiere CC and Resolve on his way back to show them at
the Expo. The Sony 4K Raw files, which are compressed, take up 500GB per hour. “It is very manageable, and it really isn’t that expensive to do,” he said. If he is delivering in HD, he can re-frame and stabilise the shots first, without losing any resolution. Last year, Boyle shot UHD 3D tests for Sky, to see if it was possible to shoot to a normal production schedule. It was. “The only issue was the amount of data [eight times HD]. It swamped them completely,” he admitted. “We need to make sure that our system for editing 4K is fast enough, big enough and deep enough to support it,” said Jordan. “For very heavy CG jobs, with lots of compositing, you want uncompressed formats,” said Isaac, but a lot of work Glassworks has done recently has been with ProRes, “and DoPs are very happy to work with that format,” which can also be part of its DPX workflow.
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