NANJING, China—SWIT has launched the Powercell camera battery series for photographers and videographers who require professional-grade battery reliability from their Sony, Canon, Nikon and Fujifilm camera systems.

The Powercell series offers slot-in compatibility, affordable pricing and charging features that make it easy to always have a charged battery ready.

The new batteries, compatible with the industry’s most prestigious camera brands, mark a significant transition for SWIT, bringing the rigorous engineering standards usually reserved for high-end broadcast environments and scientific space exploration programs to the broader prosumer and professional mirrorless camera market, the company said.

Designed as a direct slot-in replacement, Powercell batteries are 100% compatible with the original camera manufacturer’s specifications for power supply and charging. They allow users to swap batteries in seconds while maintaining the exact shape, form and communication protocols of the original batteries.

The battery series matches the performance of original batteries while extending functionality for today’s shooting needs. The batteries use premium cells from Panasonic. This, together with SWIT’s experience serving the needs of professionals, ensures a steady power output even during high-intensity burst shooting or high-bitrate 4K and 8K video recording.

Integrated USB-C smart charging means users can charge their batteries directly via USB-C for efficient, safe charging from dedicated chargers, power banks, in-vehicle charge adapters or laptops. There’s no need for bulky proprietary chargers.

Real-time power monitoring on the battery body, via instantly visible built-in LED charge indicators, gives users an intuitive sense of the battery’s remaining power, ensuring crews will avoid unexpected downtime during long production sessions.

Safety remains a cornerstone of the Powercell design. Each unit features a reinforced, flame-retardant housing designed to withstand the rigors of field use.

The Powercell battery series has a suggested retail price ranging from $35 to $49, depending upon camera. They are now available worldwide through authorized partners and e-commerce platforms, available on Amazon and open for pre-order on B&H Photo.

More information is available on the company’s website.

SEATTLE—While citizens have had to spend much of the past year in place, broadcasters haven’t had that luxury. As a particularly news-filled 2020 gives way to an even busier 2021, well-equipped news production crews are on the constant hunt for gear that will help them cover the news while staying safe. 

LIGHTING

Strict observation of social distancing has had a particular effect on lighting for interviews according to Art Adams, cinema lens specialist at ARRI, who added that the company's new Orbiter is just the ticket for socially distanced interviews.

“Orbiter has the best color, and also gives you the best specs and flexibility,” he said. “It’s kind of a ‘Swiss Army Knife.’ You can use them for quick interviews, or for theatrical and motion picture effects, or for chasing the color of the sun.”

Because the Orbiter is a hard light, it’s necessary to soften its output. “Typically I might try to use Orbiter with a four-foot medium Chimera, even a six foot octagon, which is probably bigger than most people would carry,” Adams said. “You want to create a big, soft source. The smaller the light source is, the more the shadow matters. But the bigger the light is, the more forgiving it tends to be.”

Adams noted that sometimes shooting interviews is a volume business, where there’s no time to tweak lighting between sessions. “People come in, sit down, and 10 minutes later they leave, you don’t have any time in between,” he said. “So the softer the light source is, the better.”

Reporting during the pandemic is forcing ENG crews to spread further apart, according to Litepanels product manager Michael Herbert. “It’s making guys doing these interviews and doing the lighting setups for them, having an increasingly large need for adaptability,” he said. “You’ve got people sitting six or eight feet, or even more in other circumstances. It varies by state, by studio and by building almost.

“When redesigning a lot of our products with the output in mind, you want to have more than you need,” Herbert continued. “That way, if necessary, if you have to move your lights, if you have to move everything further apart, you can always crank the light up to compensate for that.

Litepanels had this in mind when developing the Astra, which looks like a typical panel light except for its Total Internal Reflection (TIR) lens system. TIR puts a lens on each individual LED.

“The lens grabs all the light coming off each LED and pushes it all forward within a 44-degree beam-angle,” Herbert said. "This means that from a relatively low power fixture, you get a really punchy light source.”

CAMERA SUPPORT

Keeping reporters and their subjects apart via social distancing has re-emphasized the importance of tripods when reporting in the field.

The pandemic has also accelerated the trend of the one-man-band reporter, according to David Sheppard, international sales, distribution and channel manager for Shotoku. “[Reporting] has been streamlined down to where one person has gone out with all the equipment, set it up and even done the interview as presenter,” he said. “And with Covid it’s kind of accelerated that trend.”

In response, Shotoku introduced two new lightweight tripods and fluid heads, the SX200 and SX260. “We’re the lightest in class with carbon fiber legs,” Sheppard said. “And it ships in its bag all assembled, so all you’ve got to do really is pop it out of the bag, put the camera on it, adjust the legs and you’re ready to go.”

The heads feature “Viscam drag” (the company’s continuously adjustable fluid drag system) on a stepped system for effortless and speedy drag selection, Sheppard added.

“We’ve engineered that feeling in these heads into the drag system that’s actually continuously adjustable,” he said. “It’s the same as our studio quality heads. There is no ‘1, 2, 3’... it’s infinitely adjustable. It’s got this nuanced control that people like.”

Jose Larios, sales manager for Libec Sales of America, said there’s been a lot of demand for quick deploying tripods, which led the company to redesign their T650 to the 650EX.

“It has a [sic] other features, including the sliding plate range,” Larios said. “You’re able to use the slide plate just like more professional video heads that allow you to counterbalance the weight by moving the camera back and forth.”

It’s also very quick to set up, Larios added. “You literally take it out of the bag; the pan handle is already attached to the head. When you deploy the tripod and head out of the carrying case, the head is already attached and a knob adjusts the pan handle into the position you want before using.”

Libec recently redesigned another of its quick deploying camera support system, yielding the TH-M monopod. “One upgrade is that the quick release can be attached and detached from the side,” Larios said. “And the new model allows the pole to be locked in not only a vertical position, but also on an angle.”

Kyle Dann, product manager at Vitec Production Solutions, part of Vitec Group plc, provided yet another reason to have a camera support system that’s easy to deploy. “Deployment speed is very important because it gives confidence if you’re quick and efficient in setting up the interview,” he said. “And saving time in setting up is important because it gives you more time to work on your lighting and get the interview done as quickly and efficiently as possible, while maintaining distance.”

Among Vitec's rapid deployment solutions is the Flowtec tripod and Sachtler aktiv head. “The SpeedSwap system delivers the fastest way to switch between tripod and slider and other support systems in seconds," Dann said.

POWER SUPPLIES

With fewer places to gather (particularly indoors) between live reports, news crews have also faced increasing challenges in maintaining charged power supplies.

“When Covid hit, we had an onrush of broadcast customers reaching out because they had to adapt to a relatively new workflow from an ENG standpoint,” said Steve Turner, product manager and senior manager of strategic relationships, Vitec Group plc. “What that meant was a lot of refreshing of old kits and ‘How can I make my life easier when I’m stuck in a news vehicle all day, without being able to go back to the station?’”

The company responded with the Anton Bauer Titon 240 battery, its highest capacity onboard battery, at 240Wh.

“Just for a ballpark estimate if your camera runs 25W—which is typical these days, even less—that’s about eight hours per battery,” Turner calculated. “So if you’re able to outfit a photographer with four batteries and a charger, then they are more than set for the day.

"All Titon lines now incorporate a smart USB, so it’s fully compatible with charging of cellphones, as well as the industry standard power tap for Anton/Bauer,” Turner added.

PAG takes a different path toward capacity through its PAGLINK technology, according to Bob Carr, sales director for PAG America. “Because of PAG’s linking technology, we can link up to eight 150Wh battery packs. So you’re talking about up to 1,200Wh of power.”

PAG battery packs are available in three sizes: 50, 99 and 150Wh. The first battery pack clips to the back of the camera, and one after another of the packs clip piggyback on to the one before it.

“You don’t have to put anything between batteries you want to link, just plug two or more batteries together,” Carr said. “The camera draws off the battery with the greatest charge. You always have the ability to hotswap as you shoot, so there’s no need to ever stop shooting.

“You could put a power hub in between any of the linked battery packs, which will allow you to have five more connection points,” Carr added. “They’re switchable so you can have five USBs, five V-taps, five LEMO two pins.”

New PAG batteries going forward will have the ability to be serviced and re-celled by major customers and regional offices.

Many reporters are now doing more of their planning and reporting from home or anywhere than at the station, forcing better preparation, according to Kevin Crawford, vice president for engineering at Frezzi.

To help news crews prep for longer workdays, Frezzi redesigned and retooled its FB240 240Wh battery pack.

“It’s designed to run all day without recharging, and has a power tap and an integrated USB tap to charge cellphones and other USB charged devices,” Crawford said. “They’re pulling other peripherals off of that FB240. It’s good to have that big bucket, because everybody’s going with LiveU's now, and all kinds of extra devices, so it’s good to have that big bucket.”

The new FB series of battery packs has a ruggedized case, which is serviceable and resistant to drops up to four feet, Crawford added. “That means if there ever is a problem, we could swap out the case. That’s a big thing. I think we’re the only ones in the industry to do that.”

Tomorrow’s broadcast equipment rooms may look more like today’s data centers . As broadcast equipment technologies move closer to information technology-based systems, the way in which we design, build, monitor and account for operational costs is expected to change in near lock step with the technology we’re going to be building—or already are. With operational costs continuing to climb, items such as power, cooling, real estate footprints and even redundancy are likely to be watched more closely than ever in the past.

Many of the considerations for cost monitoring and control are somewhat obvious. For example, the overall power usage of each equipment rack determines the amount of cooling required; but that’s not the only factor in understanding cooling and the power that it takes to drive that cooling. As these spaces begin to look more like data centers than broadcast central equipment rooms (CER); the techniques used by data centers to control factors like Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) become sectors we will continually need to manage.

VIRTUALIZATION ATTENTION

Efficient utilization of the myriad servers now being installed in the CER can have direct impacts on balancing the power usage and practicality of each system they support. This is why “virtualization” is getting more attention now than in the past. Many of the services used in the broadcast plant are seldom turned up to full capacity. Products that were once available only in a dedicated box are now being ported to a software-only domain where they can be loaded onto on-premises, common off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware—or even placed into the cloud.

Since the main point is to get the best use out of each device, there will eventually come a point where groups of servers, which have dedicated functions—but only run 25–35 percent of the time—will become consolidated and managed by systems that allocate the services on a needs-or-demand basis.

For example, if the functions of three servers are running at peak only 35 percent of the time, it is potentially possible that you can take those services and run them on a single server by throttling the workload and managing the utilization from a virtualized, pooled resource perspective.

UTILIZATION FACTORS

Media asset management systems and news editorial systems are notorious for throwing all sorts of servers into their workforce, but really not getting much more than 50-percent utilization during average work periods. Granted there are times when certain functions require those servers to run at nearly 100 percent; but that’s when the virtualization environment makes its best showing.

Assuming there are 30 servers in a broadcast facility (and that, frankly, is now a low number) for this example, picture the server mix as a group of 10 servers doing ingest, another 10 doing processing and the last 10 are parsed between output-conforming and shuffling media to/from storage. Ingest is likely to be unpredictable, so expect those 10 servers to be dedicated 80–90 percent. The processing servers are entirely workflow-governed. Processing probably gets the lowest utilization (or “loading”) percentage, say in the neighborhood of 20–25 percent.

Finally, those servers dedicated to do output-conforming and media shuffling aren’t much better at resource utilization than processors, so they run, for example, at only around 35–50-percent loading.

It doesn’t take a lot of rocket science to see that the idle time of better than two-thirds of the servers is greater than 50 percent. So why not consolidate the services to less servers and begin to cross utilize the hardware by finding software that can distribute the loading across only 20 servers?

If the services of processing (i.e., transcoding or proxy or quality control) and those used for output-conforming could run on the same servers, then the utilization efficiency of those 10 goes from 20–50 percent up to 55–75 percent. This leaves plenty of overhead to turn up one set of services during a peak time, or turn down other services and shift the application resources to other servers that are less loaded.

SPREADING EFFICIENCIES AROUND

If you could distribute this concept across even half of the servers in a modern IT-based facility, the utilization efficiency increases and the amount of wasted power consumed by the servers when doing “virtually nothing” goes way down. In the average data center, about 50 percent of the power consumed goes to the compute side (i.e., servers doing their job). Over one third of the power goes to cooling those servers with the remaining 17 percent of the power going to other items including lighting and losses due to electrical wiring (as “IR-loss”) and such.

Fig 1: Monitored power distribution unit (PDU) or “plug strip” with serial or Ethernet monitoring, which reports the voltage, current and power factor for each outlet; and the inlet power for utilization comparison and loading per device. What can be done to monitor and control these (in)efficiencies? One solution is to install PDUs (power distribution units, aka “cabinet distribution units”), in the data center, which can monitor each power outlet and each branch circuit (Fig. 1). This data is fed to a building management system (BMS), which can then keep track of each device in the CER by time and consumption in many dimensions.

In this model, it is also important to measure the current, voltage and power factor at the inlet side of each power strip using a technique known as “per inlet power sensing.” This lets the BMS understand power in versus power used.

PEAK LOAD OR LOW USAGE

Once monitoring is configured, each device can be tracked against time and workload. Since the power draw on a server is proportional to the amount of computing that occurs, a simple power monitoring application—typically found in a BMS—can then determine when peak loads or low utilization occurs. Over time, as opportunities come to transform the “single function per device” into a “shared resource,” there may be a point where shifting certain services to different times or reallocating the functions of a pool of servers to a virtualized set of services can change the power efficiency utilization curve.

If you live in an area where part of the commercial utility bill is based upon “changes” in demand, the leveling of the power usage across the most expensive power periods could make a difference in your overall utility bill since power loading and cooling could be spread more uniformly across the day or night. Reducing the changes in the power delivered can make quite a difference over the course of a billing period.

These concepts may not seem especially easy to understand or may not make much sense today, but over the long haul and as conditions change, the practicality in adding power and building monitoring capabilities could make a difference in the operational costs of the CER or data center. Most new “greenfield” facilities are already putting the extra monitoring capabilities in place today, knowing well in advance there may be secondary advantages that will come into play years later.

Karl Paulsen is a SMPTE Fellow and chief technology officer at Diversified. For more about this and other storage and media topics, read his book “Moving Media Storage Technologies.” Contact Karl atkpaulsen@diversifiedus.com.

WASHINGTON—NAB’s Content and Communications World is bringing the Starz, as executives from the cable network and members of the creative team from its show ‘Power’ are scheduled to speak at the upcoming convention.

‘Power’ creator and executive producer Courtney Kemp Agboh and Starz senior vice president of production Melissa Harper will sit down for a conversation to provide an inside look at the risks and rewards in producing a drama series, as well as offer insight into the creative and logistical processes behind producing a series set in New York City.

Agboh’s credits include shows ‘The Good Wife’ and ‘The Bernie Mac Show.’ ‘Power’ is preparing for its third season on Starz, all of which Agboh has served as the showrunner for.

In addition to ‘Power,’ Harper has overseen production on Starz shows including ‘Black Sails,’ ‘Outlander,’ ‘Da Vinci’s Demons,’ ‘Boss’ and ‘Spartacus.’

CCW 2015 will take place at the Javits Convention Center in New York from Nov. 11-12. Agboh and Harper’s panel is scheduled to take place on Nov. 11.