Production AV | LED Screen Hire | Projection | AV Technology

Production AV is an audio visual hire company specialising in indoor and outdoor LED screens as well as high quality projection solutions for events.

Archives for February 2009

Broadcast Video Expo show report

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Broadcast Video Expo ran from the 17th ot 19th of Feb at Earls Court Two. It was the first time that we have been, and with free tickets, we thought it was worth a look!

With it being aimed at Facilities Houses, Broadcasters and program makers, most of the names you’d expect to see were there- Sony, Panasonic, Arri, Apple, Avid, JVC Thomson/Grass Valley and many more. High Definition is very much here now, with pretty much every camera manufacturer offering a multitude of HD cameras recording to both traditional tapes and tapeless formats.

We went with two aims:

  • Get some answers on questions regarding the Panasonic AV-HS400 as well as sussing out alternatives,
  • Start planning a route to a Engineered HD camera system.

Panasonic AV-HS400

Surprisingly Panasonic didn’t have any kit on their stand. Luckily for us, one of the UK distributors had the HS400 on theirs, combined with a very helpful chap from Panasonic that pounced on us when we started looking at the unit.

Out of the box it comes with 8 HD/SDI inputs, allowing you to work in either SD or HD format, and by adding input cards with built in scalers it’s possible to take an SD-SDI input and scale it to meet other HD-SDI inputs enabling a mixed format system. Additional input cards with DVI slots let you take in computer graphics for use in keying situations. Combined with the SDI outputs, and the ability to have the HS400 generate a multiviewer style preview, means that it’s possible to cut down on the number of monitors required to run a show. All this comes in a unit that fits within a 19″ rack, and is not much larger the the MX70.

With very low latencies, the AV-HS400 looks to be a great peice of kit, ideal for events where lip sync issues are key, and where a small form factor with full HD processing are required. One rental company already has the unit, and I think we’ll join them in adding it to our rental stock at somepoint soon.

Engineered HD Camera Systems

Production:av was one of the first in the UK to recognise the Barco CLM HD8 as a new standard in high brightness Full HD projection. We’ve matched this with scalers capable of processing Full HD and beyond (in the form of the Screen ProII’s and Presentation Pro II), and source equipment such as Apple iMacs and Final Cut Pro Studio.

The current weak link is the camera systems. Engineered (i.e. cameras with Camera Control cabling  (CCZ) and Camera Control units  or CCU’s to enable remote control of Black and White Balances, exposure etc) SD-SDI PPU’s and camera systems are readily available, and our choice of camera system due to the quality of the images from cameras such as the Sony D55. It’s possible to do widescreen with these, and through use of scalers it’s possible to  scale the image to HD resolutions, but as the pixels were never there in the first place your never going to improve the image.

It is possible to do HD systems using cameras such as the Sony HVR Z1e, but these lack the ability to be remotely engineered, meaning the camera man has to run the exposure as well as framing the shot, and dealing with the focus. Also there are only a few systems out there that have HD/SDI outputs enabling a complete digital workflow.

BVE was good as it gave us a chance to look at the options out there, and start to plot a route through the fog. Hitachi we showing a new camera system with full HD cameras, fibre optic CCZ’s and CCU’s. With camera body and CCU starting at around £25k, it might start to see full HD PPU’s become possible for the corporate and live events market, with out requiring budgets that small african countries would love to have!

So keep an eye on the site, as we will keep you posted with our progress towards a compelte digital workflow.

As for BVE? I definitely think we’ll go again. It’s always useful to be able to see products and their competition in one place, as well as spotting those useful little products that you might have missed otherwise.

Radio Frequencies for Microphones – things are changing!

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For a long time the ‘Events’ industry (or PMSE – Programme Making and Special Events as Ofcom call it) have used a small slice of the available frequencies nestling around the Analogue TV frequencies to transmit our speeches and talks on Radio Microphone Systems. But Ofcom, who deal with all this have decided to release various ‘channels’ (frequency ranges) for different uses, such as Digital TV.

This has been on the cards for a while now, with the consultation document hitting the streets on the 2nd of Feb, giving us as an industry until April 2009 to let them know what we think.  

The Ofcom report is here- Digital dividend: clearing the 800 MHz band. Currently it looks like the frequencies mostly used for PMSE is going to be auctioned off for alternative uses, with the plan to move the PMSE spectrum to a new section of frequencies. 

So how will this affect the people on the streets? Well if you have a current UHF radio mic system (Ultra High Frequency – generally considered to be 300MHz to 3GHz see here), it’s likely to work on a series of set frequencies, typically 854 to 865Mhz (with 854-862MHz currently requiring a licence being Channel 69). These frequencies will be sold off to enable their use for alternative purposes, meaning that unless you own the licence, you will be acting illegally. However the proposed new PMSE frequencies, most likely to be channel 38 which is currently used for Radio Astronomy, are lower in the ‘spectrum’, with the proposed frequencies being too low for most current radio mic systems to transmit on. 

So it looks like if the proposals are agreed, that we will all need to be looking to replace our radio microphone systems with new equipment that is capable of operating on the existing frequencies while they are still available, and also working on the new frequencies once they become available.

Obviously this impacts us- we sell radio microphones to our customers, and we’ll need to make sure we continue to give them the best possible value for money. Currently if your looking to replace a system that still works, it might be best to hold off until the position on the spectrum us agreed, and the manufacturers start to release equipment that will work on the new channels. That said if you need to replace dead equipment, you don’t really have any other options other than to go with what is currently on offer.

We’ll keep you posted on how things unfold. Sign up to our E-News letter to help keep abreast of the forth coming changes.

Production:av = Change

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I=Change is an ongoing project to see people lives changed. Production:av were part of that on Saturday the 7th of February, providing video support for the i=Change Live event, featuring live music from Jake Isaac and band supported by other artists such as Muyiwa, Guvna B, Michaela ‘BIRTHOFAPOET’, Ryan Carty and Roger Samuel.

The event was a Live Recording, with the evenings proceedings being recorded for a live a album and DVD. Production:av were asked to provide the video recording and live screen IMag (Image Magnification) to the event held in the Salvation Army’s Regents Hall off Oxford street in central London.

Production:av provided 4 High Def camera (two fixed, one moving to cover the stage as well as High Def ‘pole cam’ for aerial shots) production to cover the event for the DVD recording and IMag, with the images beeing mixed, before being fed into the Barco ScreenPROII HD/SDI to enable clean and seamless switching between Keynote Slides from an Apple iMac, cameras and when required the song words Luma Keyed over the camera images. The images were then fed to the Barco CLM HD8 via a DVI over fibre optic system, projecting from the rear of the room enabled by our extensive lens range. Production:av provided a crew of camera men, assistants, vision mixer, and graphics operator, all highly experienced meant that the images fed to the screens looked gorgeous from start to finish.

The event ran smoothly despite the challenges of working in a central London (yeap- the traffic wardens struck despite the parking having been covered by the production manager). We look forward to seeing the results of the evenings work. Keep an eye out for the I=Change tour coming later this year, and we’ll try and get a link to the edited footage when we can.

New Frontiers with Production:av

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We have recently been at the Butlins resort on the south coast with New Frontiers International.  Production:av installed over 500 metres of SDI cabling to carry live video feeds from the main venue to a number of overflow venues.  We also provided video switching and on-stage monitoring within the main conference session.  With a brief to provide a high quality solution for delegates in the overflow venues, we installed Barco CLM 10,000 lumen projectors alongside D&B audio systems within the cinema venues to relay the conference sessions.

The Identity Youth venue also used 5000 lumen projection and video switching whilst the Jaks children’s venue had a number of large plasma screens with switching to show DVD or laptop sources.

Our thanks go to the management team at New Frontiers for getting us involved and we look forward to next year’s event – check out what our clients say about us in our testimonials section of the website.