Toolbox

Canon U.S.A., Inc., announced the CJ12ex4.3B portable 4K 2/3-inch broadcast lens, billed as the world’s first 4K wide-angle lens for use with 4K broadcast cameras featuring 2/3-inch sensors. This will be the first in a new line of 4K broadcast lenses intended to support a range of 4K ultra-high-definition (UHD) productions.  Designed as a portable wide-angle 12x zoom lens, the CJ12ex4.3B is ideal for Electronic Field Production (EFP) and Electronic News Gathering (ENG) broadcast applications covering news, sports, live events and filmmakers creating documentary projects desiring 4K quality.  Canon is also developing a portable, longer-zoom 4K lens that will further extend 4K UHD production capabilities.

“Through rigorous research and development, Canon has developed these portable 4K lenses to provide producers and broadcasters with outstanding optical performance to support newly emerging 4K broadcast productions while also offering superb optical performance when used on existing HDTV cameras,” said Yuichi Ishizuka, president and COO, Canon U.S.A., Inc. “With a 96.3 degree angle of view, our best-in-class wide-angle lens will allow broadcasters to capture more of the scene in stunning 4K quality.”

This portable wide-angle lens provides the optical excellence needed for 4K broadcast production. It has a 4.3mm wide angle (96.3 degree horizontal angle of view) and minimum object distance of 30 cm. A built-in 2x extender allows more telephoto operation without sacrificing 4K image quality.

This wide angle lens supports framing of scenes containing large amounts of image detail--for example, a wide end zone-to-end zone shot.  Editors can then select a 1920 x 1080 crop from within the 3840 x 2160 camera original with full HDTV image quality.  Alternatively, the 4K UHD camera video can be downsampled to HDTV offering enhanced resolution by virtue of that supersampled original.

The form factor for production shooters will be very similar to shooting with Canon’s HD lenses in size, weight and controls.  Its light weight of 4lbs, 10oz. and compact size make it ideal for shoulder-mounted ENG applications.

Three 20-pin connectors, capable of reading out the high-precision position information of the zoom, focus and iris are provided as a standard feature. Virtual operations are also available in the full servo mode, and use of a 16-bit absolute value encoder in the digital drive unit helps eliminate the need for any initialization, meaning users can simply turn on the camera and begin shooting. The lens is also compatible with standard HD zoom and focus demand controls.

Canon is also developing a new longer-zoom 4K portable lens as an important addition to the new 4K 2/3-inch broadcast lens lineup.  Like the new CJ12ex4.3B wide angle zoom lens, this new 4K portable lens, under development, will realize a high level of imaging performance while also featuring a weight and body size that achieve the same level of mobility as conventional portable HDTV zoom lenses. Supporting both indoor and outdoor use for a variety of applications, including sporting events, live telecasts, serial dramas and television commercials, the new 4K portable zoom lens will enable shooting across a range of focal lengths, from the wide-angle capture of entire sets to close-ups of distant subjects, in either 4K or HD resolution.

The CJ12ex4.3B portable broadcast lens is scheduled to be available in December 2015 while the longer-zoom 4K lens is scheduled to be added to the lineup in the first half of 2016.

TV Bahia, a regional broadcaster in Brazil, has partnered with Grass Valley, a Belden Brand, to bring greater efficiency to its news workflow, effectively reducing the total cost of operations for its newsroom environment. A TV Globo affiliate, TV Bahia has invested in GV STRATUS and K2 Summit 3G Transmission clients to gain a collaborative, evolvable and agile platform with a common user experience across all media production applications.

“When evaluating news production solutions, we focused on three areas: efficiency, scalability, and business agility, and GV STRATUS and K2 Summit aligned perfectly with the technical requirements in our existing workflow,” said Romildo Fausto, engineering & tech director, TV Bahia. “Our team is eager to improve processes to reduce costs, but also do more with our existing resources to create higher production value broadcasts. We’ve invested in Grass Valley’s products in the past and once again, we’re pleased with our decision.”

A full set of production tools in one application, GV STRATUS is designed for simplicity and speed and provides customers better management of on-air operations and news production media workflows in their increasingly competitive business. Its task-driven tools operate in a variety of environments and can be specifically tailored for each user’s function—an important feature for TV Bahia’s varying levels of demanding workflows and operations.

GV STRATUS will accompany two K2 Summit 3G Transmission clients, built for broadcast and distribution services with mission critical, 24/7/365 reliability. The K2 platform offers a unified infrastructure to acquire, manage, package, and deliver content across a diverse range of broadcast media requirements and applications with ease. Not only will this enable more efficient operational models, but it will help TV Bahia break news much faster to the public.

“As broadcasters continue to explore new ways to increase the efficiency of their news operations, it’s important for Grass Valley to offer solutions to help customers reach their goals,” said Leonel da Luz, VP of sales, Latin America, Grass Valley. “This solution was thoughtfully engineered and well positioned to help TV Bahia become more efficient today, with the ability to expand in the future.”

Readers who scanned the user manual for a new Samsung smart TV may have been surprised to learn their household conversations could be recorded without their knowledge.

State Assemblyman Mike Gatto certainly was.

"The passage was almost word-for-word comparable to a passage of the book '1984,'" Gatto, D-Glendale, said, referring to a line in the privacy policy that said conversations, including personal or sensitive information, could be captured and transmitted to a third party if users turned on wireless voice recognition.

After taking a lashing in the media and online, the company changed its user manuals in February to make it clear that its smart TVs do not record or store conversations. Samsung says it will only record voice commands if a user clicks an activation button and talks into the remote or a microphone.

Still, Orwellian anxieties have already taken hold, and Gatto's Committee on Privacy and Consumer Protection is pushing a bill to rein in spying TVs before the problem becomes worse.

His AB1116 is the first legislation of its kind in the United States, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. After unanimous passage in the Assembly, the bill now goes before the full Senate before the Legislature finishes on Sept. 11.

It would require that users be explicitly informed when their smart TVs are installed that the devices could start collecting conversations.

It also forbids TV manufacturers and related third parties from using or selling stored conversations for advertising purposes, and would allow manufacturers to reject law enforcement efforts to use the feature to monitor conversations.

Samsung declined to answer questions from The Associated Press and has not taken a public position on Gatto's legislation but said in a statement that it supports consumer privacy.

"Protecting our consumers' privacy is one of our top priorities. Our TVs are designed with privacy in mind," the company said in a written statement.

Despite the bill's limited scope - it requires prominent notification but allows manufacturers to decide what is sufficiently explicit - Gatto said he has struggled to garner support from the technology manufacturing industry and said it was "news to us" that Samsung now supports it.

Privacy experts say the changes, while important, may not go far enough to protect consumers.

Potential uses for the information could go "way above and beyond advertising," said Jim Dempsey, director of the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Law and Technology.

The information collected could still be used to make psychological or cultural assessments of people for insurance or customer relations companies, he said, noting that human resources companies already use automated systems to profile callers based on their voices.

"It could determine what kind of offers you get made," Dempsey said.

The legislation is also technology-specific - a potential issue as voice control spreads to other technologies such as cars, Dempsey noted. He said the bill also makes no mention of how long conversations or transcripts may be stored by the third party.

Storage is so practically impossible that it isn't necessary to make it illegal right now, Gatto said.

The bill does a lot of things right, said Lee Tien, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a group that advocates for the protection of civil liberties online. The legislation notably acknowledges the risk of spying by law enforcement but may place too much faith in consent policies, he said.

"Notice is not consent," Tien said.

Dempsey agreed.

"It's not like you're going to change your behavior in your house just because there's a little icon on the screen," he said.

SmallHD, known for groundbreaking, compact, full HD on-camera monitors, is giving away a set of color grades that recreate the unique look of seven different iconic films while publishing multiple video tutorials explaining how to get the most out of these looks during both production and postproduction—all 100% free of charge.

“Color grading will soon be critical to every shooter’s workflow,” said Wes Phillips, SmallHD CEO.  “We’re giving away this free pack of looks and color grading educational material to provide a fun entry point into the world of working with 3D LUTs.”

Provided in a small downloadable .zip file, the color grades come in the form of 3D LUT files (3D “lookup tables”) originally designed in DaVinci Resolve. Visually iconic films such as Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, The Matrix, and Moonrise Kingdom are among the seven free color grades.

Designed to help teach filmmakers who are not yet versed in the use of color grades, the tutorial video outlines the capabilities and advantages of applying LUTs or “looks” to footage during actual shoots. The tutorial is tailored for developing new looks on the popular free DaVinci Resolve color grading software. The video tutorials and 3D LUTs download are both available on the Community section of SmallHD’s website.

Filmmakers have long known that recording flat or LOG video, with its low contrast image, offers great advantages to the postproduction process by preserving as much data as possible. However, viewing this flat video can make it tricky to gauge color and exposure, and can make critical focus difficult. Further, looking at raw images can also be disconcerting for an on-site client, where the filmmakers have to constantly explain what the imagery “will look like in post.”

The solution is applying 3D LUTs to the video shown in the on-set monitor, without altering the footage recorded from the camera itself. 3D LUTs are pre-defined profiles applied to the monitoring of a camera to give a representation of a corrected image or an image with a specific gamma curve. Creating a custom LUT is a step further. It can be an on-set tool providing a representation of the final desired image.

SmallHD offers seven different 3D LUTs, each emulating the look of a popular motion picture. As a starting point, a shooter or DIT readying for a specific location can apply one of these looks to test footage from the location using the DaVinci color grading software. That look can then be modified so the test footage has just the look desired when it is out of post-production. SmallHD clearly explains the process, step by step.

Displaying the on-set video with the look applied is made simple with SmallHD’s newest firmware upgrade to its 500 Series of five-inch Full HD monitors. The firmware upgrade enables the monitor’s output to carry the LUT information to other monitors on-set. This feature will be resident in future monitors developed by SmallHD and likely other manufacturers will follow suit.