LOS ANGELES—“Korn: Monumental, A Global Streaming Event” was shot in downtown Los Angeles at Stranger Things: The Drive-Into Experience. The immersive concert provided fans with an elevated, larger-than-life performance by the rock band Korn as they were filmed in front of several hundred feet of LED walls with the L.A. skyline behind them.

Korn is an incredible live band, and we had only one take to capture the live performance. For such a visually stunning and dynamic show, we used 12 Blackmagic Design cameras on set, along with a drone to capture the performance. Seven Blackmagic URSA Mini Pro 12Ks, one URSA Mini Pro G2s, one Pocket Cinema Camera 6Ks and three Pocket Cinema Camera 4Ks were situated on jibs, dollies and gimbals around the 200x50-foot rooftop stage. The range of cameras provided ultimate coverage, supporting the band as they delivered a stunning show.

MANAGING A LOT OF LOOKS

While the number of cameras helped properly capture Korn’s high-energy performance, it also meant a lot of lenses and cameras to match and monitor. To help manage this, we relied on Blackmagic RAW and several Video Assist 12G HDR monitor/recorders, both the 5-inch and 7-inch models. Shooting in Blackmagic RAW on every camera allowed us to capture the highest quality possible and make sure everything felt cohesive.

The Video Assist 12G HDR is a tool I know and trust, so it was used to monitor feeds when dialing levels. We also had its scopes and exposure assist turned on as another layer of reference. When it was go-time, we easily scrolled through and made sure all the cameras felt right.

When shooting, the monitor’s HDR screen is our last line of defense in ensuring we like the colors we capture. It’s very accurate and I trust it fully; if it looks good there then I know we’re getting what we need. It’s the last element in our chain and really is such a vital component for monitoring and recording.

The Video Assist 12G HDR also comes with the added benefit of not only monitoring, but also recording. During the Korn shoot, we used my primary Video Assist 12G HDR to record a 4K program/line cut in Blackmagic RAW to an external SSD. The external SSD record feature might be my favorite as simple as it is. The line cut being right there and available for delivery within seconds is something I can’t imagine not having in my workflow now.

Kevin Garcia has spent the last decade capturing festivals, music and documenting travels around the world with some of rock’s biggest acts. Over the last year, he’s been streaming and directing shoots with bands in order to bring live performances right into people’s homes, making them feel as if they’re right alongside the bands as they perform. He can be contacted at Kevin@Mixonesound.com.

For more information, contact Blackmagic Design at 408-954-0500 or visit www.blackmagicdesign.com.

CADILLAC, Mich.—The 24-hour news Diginet NewsNet debuted its new on-air look from its new studios, the headline news channel announced this week.

Broadcasting from a new facility under construction since May, NewsNet has deployed a variety of new technology, including LED lighting that changes colors for different dayparts, multiple video monitors and a state-of-the-art weather center, which will allow for more in-depth forecasting, the broadcaster said.

As part of its makeover, the broadcaster has revamped its “NewsNet Mornings” morning show, which is hosted by Samana Sheikh.

“The new ‘NewsNet Mornings’ provides an even fresher, more energetic look at the morning’s headlines than our previous ‘Morning Edition,’ but we’re just getting started,” said NewsNet President Eric Wotila, “In the coming weeks and months, we plan to show off even more of the features of our new facility, all of which will allow us to bring viewers even more news, more often than ever before.”

The broadcaster also has changed its afternoon lineup. Previously, “NewsNet Midday Edition” aired from noon till 7 p.m., but now airs from noon till 4 p.m. EDT. “NewsNet Continuing Coverage” now airs from 4 p.m. till 8 p.m. EDT, the broadcaster said.

“Charlie Tinker will continue to cover the latest national headlines throughout the afternoon hours, but both ‘Midday Edition’ and ‘Continuing Coverage’ have a whole new look thanks to our new set, and a new graphics package which debuted today,” explained Wotila.

Besides its national broadcasters, the new NewsNet facilities will make it possible for the network to produce local news cut-ins for affiliates—many of which have limited of no news production capabilities.

“With the launch of our new facility, we’ll soon be expanding on the local content production services available to our affiliates—making it extremely economical for small stations to add not only 24/7 national news to their subchannel lineups, but create their very own, localized 24/7 news channels as well,” said Wotila.

Stations interested in learning more about NewsNet affiliations or subscriptions can request information by emailing: email affiliates@yournewsnet.com.

AMSTERDAM—Philips is unveiling its first 5K monitor. The Philips 275P4VYKEB display has a pixel count of 14.7 million at 5,120 x 2,880. Philips said the new 27-inch display also is equipped with what it calls “PerfectKolor” technology that ensures factory-calibrated 99 percent Adobe RGB, 100 percent sRGB color space and 1 billion colors.

Philips noted that its latest 5K technology adds 1,000 horizontal and 700 vertical pixels of display area compared to a 4K monitor, allowing for an extra CAD tool window, for example. The PLS-LCD monitor features flicker-free technology, a 178-degree viewing angle, 10-bit color support and 12-bit internal processing. It also includes a Webcam, microphone and built-in speakers. 

The new display also supports USB 3.0 with a transfer rate of 5 gbps. It also allows fast-charging of a device simultaneously with the data transfer.The new Philips 275P4VYKEB display, with an RRP of £1,169.99, will be available in Europe at the beginning of April.

WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.—I remember the moment well—I was color restoring a classic motion picture when I paused to get a cup of coffee. My junior colorist, who was new to the business, asked me, “what if there was a fire and you could only grab one thing in your color suite. What would you save?”

No hesitation. I pointed to my Flanders CM250 grading monitor. “Why that?” he asked. “Why not something else, like the control surface?” “Because,” I answered, “my grading monitor is the heart of what I do. And this one is gold.”

The CM250 is a 24.5-inch multiformat OLED grading monitorPROVEN TRACK RECORD
For years I have only worked on, and with, Flanders Scientific grading monitors. My long association with Flanders began when I apprenticed as a colorist in a shop that used a Flanders LM-2461W. The senior colorist who taught me the craft explained that he trusted Flanders because of its color critical evaluation. It had great uniformity for virtually any signal format and also had a wide gamut 10-bit panel and the best white uniformity and off-axis performance.

The senior taught me to grade using scopes, then reference the grade with the grading monitor, and finally, confirm with my eyes. If any of those three is out of sync, he used to tell me, your color will be off. That’s how critical a grading monitor is to any color suite.

We colorists are a breed apart. We love what we do because it’s our passion. And of course, we enjoy our toys: the software apps, control panels, scopes, and so on. It’s all necessary to help us make the projects we work on look the best they can be.

But the grading monitor? For me, it’s mission critical.

When I finally became senior colorist I had an opportunity to recommend the LM-2461W to my new employer. In fact, I helped build the color suite around the monitor.

NEXT GENERATION
The LM-2461W is no longer in production, so when we built a second color suite I called a few of my fellow colorists who suggested I take a look at the Flanders CM240. It has many of the broadcast basics we have come to depend on: a Blue Only mode, monochrome mode, markers, safety areas, H/V delay, and tally lights. But it was the Flanders tradition of color accuracy that sold me; my eyes were convinced.

When it came time to start my own color grading business I talked at length with the Flanders team. There was only one choice. The CM250, the flagship monitor in the CM series, is a 24.5-inch multiformat OLED with lots of advanced features including 16 selectable scopes, focus assist, timecode display, and more. The monitor’s live side-by-side viewing is killer and is accessible from any input and across mixed formats.

It is stated quite prominently on my Website why I trust Flanders Scientific: nothing but the best will do.

My business motto is six words: color correction, color grading, color perfect. That might as well describe the quality, dependability, and tradition of Flanders Scientific.

Flanders is a name I trust. And have for years.

Jim Wicks is a recognized and well-respected colorist. His work is seen in movies, on Blu-ray, television, and the web. Jim can be contacted atjim@jimwicks.com.

For more information, visitwww.flandersscientific.comor call 678-835-4934.

BURBANK, CALIF.—VTP is a prominent reseller and integrator of popular professional products such as 4K cameras, displays, and many supporting content processing software and hardware tools.

In preparing for our most recent camera test for our 4K camera workshops last summer, we discovered that our HD plasma screens were no longer adequate for testing the images we were producing. One test sequence involved 70 successive visual effect shots, taking up more than seven minutes of screen time; for that we needed a large, flat panel display with ample full frame on to off contrast to view the visual effects at the intended BT.709 color, exceeding the current DCI standards for contrast.

Boland’s BVB55 monitor offers high contrast imagesCONTRAST IS KEY
When the Boland BVB55 first arrived at VTP for evaluation, we were immediately intrigued with its contrast and full-screen brightness capabilities. We believed that its contrast potential could support perceptual quantization using external LUTS for depicting increased dynamic range.

With its high contrast, we felt we could perceive the sharpness of the 4K detail we were seeing in the theater in the monitor’s native 1080p raster, or by viewing quadrants. Within its optimal viewing angles, we found that the Boland monitor was reasonably consistent with the sweet spots of gamma and gamut compared to our plasmas.

Moreover, we found it exceeded the contrast of our plasmas on full frame and large area brightness, and without the edge color motion artifacts or scene to scene brightness fluctuations that had shown up on the plasmas. These issues popped up when we were trying to determine if there were motion artifacts in the plasmas from the image sequence being observed, or if the problems were emanating from the content. The BVB55 responds in the direction of achieving tighter specifications with the use of external color calibration tools and hardware such as SpectraCal’s CalMAN Probe or Konica’s Minolta.

Among its many professional menu features is a 1:1 mode for HD, which is useful for spotting high-resolution images that may be improperly scaled for HD viewing without the appropriate filtering for the angles of hard edges.

GOOD TO GO
The lightweight Boland BVB55 is a workhorse suitable for production just about anywhere you can set up a viewing room, and no matter where you are in the production process. Most functions can use it in some way. It offers more consistency over smaller OLED panels, producing better images on its larger 55-inch diagonal panel size, along with the grades and look management that have been approximated on the set or that need to be applied to your content.

In professional hands, does something need to be perfect, or good? We believe the Boland BVB55’s signature characteristics can be weighted and that it can be an important “go to” monitor for interested professional eyes and practical considerations.

Chris Bone is the chief technology officer for Videotape Products (VTP), a hardware and media solutions sales and integration company. Chris is a graduate of the University of Southern California, with a degree in cinema production. He is an active member of SMPTE and a past president of the Society of Television Engineers. He can be contacted at 818-566- 9898.

For more information, visitwww.boland.comor call 949-465-9911.

BURBANK, CALIF.—We do a lot of run-and-gun work on “West Coast Customs,” a Fox Sports show on customizing vehicles. To capture the action without interrupting the workers in our garage/studio we do a lot of handheld shooting with the camera in a rig. The SmallHD 502 monitor—when combined with the Sidefinder optical loop eyepiece—helps me work quickly. The image is so right-on that I can often set exposure just by looking at the monitor.

SmallHD 502 monitor mounted on camera during “West Coast Customs” shootCLEAR AND SHARP
The first thing I noticed about the monitor was how clear and sharp the picture was compared to our previous on-camera monitor that wasn’t HD. As my eyes get older, I appreciate how much SmallHD helps me do my job shooting. In Sidefinder mode, it provides the highest resolution image I’ve seen on any eyepiece. You can read all of the 502’s menus and can swing the monitor out from the eyepiece to view it directly.

For an upcoming episode, we shot the installation of a stereo into a Slingshot three-wheeled vehicle we’re customizing for Shaquille O’Neal. I used the Sidefinder when I could get the camera up to my eye, but a lot of the installation went on under the car. So I quickly swung the 502 out from the eyepiece and articulated the monitor to see my pictures when holding the camera under the car; I did the same thing shooting with the camera overhead. You can change the configuration so fast that you don’t miss a beat. And since everything I viewed was full HD, it made it easy to focus.

The Sidefinder mounts so solidly on the 15mm rails on the rig that I can press my eye firmly against the rubber cup around the eyepiece and use it as an additional point of support.

CUSTOM FEATURES
The 502 has a great feature set, with exposure and focus assist tools I can call up on the screen. The monitor’s “Pages” feature lets you group several on-screen tools into a preset, which you can quickly access with a flick of the joystick. I use the peaking and zebra bars often to judge exposure, so I’ve got them on a Page. I also like to view the audio levels on the screen. When our DP Kristoffer May picks up the camera I’ve been using, he can call up his own Pages preset so he can work the way he likes to.

I’m excited about the use of 3D LUTs and the ability to run downstream monitors from the 502’s output. Next time we shoot a commercial with our RED, we’ll be able to show the client what the picture will look like when it finally comes out of post.

The 502 monitor/Sidefinder can cover every camera on which we shoot. With both HDMI and HD-SDI in and out, I can use it on the RED, Canon 5D, or Sony EX3.

And last but not least, the 502 uses LPE6 Canon batteries, which we already have. I can put two of those batteries on the monitor when I start to shoot in the morning, and they last all day. So I don’t have to worry about turning the monitor off between shots. I just leave it on, and when I pick it up it’s ready to go.

Kara Stephens is the producer/director of “West Coast Customs,” Fox Sports’ cable channel show featuring the work of the luxury automotive restyling center. She can be reached atkara@westcoastcustoms.com.

For more information, visitwww.smallhd.comor call 919-439-2166.

BETHLEHEM, PA.—Today’s technologies, including 2K, 4K, HD and other formats, require fairly complex monitoring to ensure standards compliance and subjective acceptance by distribution networks. With monitors from Plura Broadcast, which offers monitors for both field and post-production, I have found a relatively new “standard of quality.”

SEP-224 monitor features loudness monitoring, waveform, vector and audio bar graph displays.INSIDE & OUT
Every production team wants the flexibility of using the same family of monitors in the field as well as in post to ensure image consistency. When a tool like the Plura SFP-224-3G-24-inch comes along, it simplifies everyone’s job. I can’t say enough of Plura’s ability to reproduce images consistently across various display platforms; including Plura 9-inch and 17-inch monitors in the field and 24-inch in the edit suite.

We use either the 9-inch or 17-inch monitor on every field shoot for our weekly magazine show “Focus.” WLVT-TV’s “Focus” generally offers two or three local segments wrapped with a studio sequence. The Plura monitors are used to view both playback and camera video; single or flypack shoots. This enables correlation of the image quality to that seen on the 24-inch monitor in the edit suites.

When the videographer can rely on a monitor to set up lighting and cameras in the field, and both the production/editing and engineering teams agree on the value of the same monitoring product, the director of engineering’s job becomes fun. There is nothing more detrimental to a team than a broadcast operations staff arguing subjective aspects of content.

The fact that Plura’s user interface allows morphing the monitor from “production mode” to “engineering mode” with a single button press is phenomenal. The Plura engineering display includes CALM certificate loudness monitoring, waveform, vector, audio bar graph displays and the ability to monitor the 16 embedded audio signals, making it one of the most useful monitors that I have ever used. (For the record, I have literally seen and used hundreds.) With physical interfaces to RGB, YPbPr, Composite, SDI, fiber (via SFP) HDMI and so on, Plura monitors are at home in any broadcast television or production environment.

TEST & MEASUREMENT FEATURES
I’ve seen many companies add a variety of test displays with low-quality to monitors, resulting in the user purchasing features that aren’t of much use. In general, today’s waveform monitor is used mainly to ensure proper exposure, black level, and gamma. Many video attributes can be corrected in post, however, getting the camera exposure correct goes a long way in reducing the amount of time spent correcting the images later.

Plura monitors have a great quality of rasterization, ensuring very usable waveforms, while also offering the ability to present SDI data in a textual format. This can help with things like start of active video, which is important image data that many operators don’t concern themselves with as much as things like whether or not the camera is operating properly.

The first day I showed a Plura monitor to my production team, they literally would not give it back. They had been waiting for something lightweight and battery- operated, offering features of the most expensive monitors. Unsurpassed quality, simple operation and flexibility; that’s all they’ve ever asked for, and with Plura it’s finally in the house.

Dave Guerrero is chief operating officer for WLVT-TV. A member of SMPTE, AES, SBE and IEEE, Guerrero brings over thirty years of broadcast experience as the leader of the engineering team at WLVTTV, PBS39. He can be reached atDavidG@wlvt.org.

For more information, visitwww.plura.tvor call 602-944-1044.

BEAVERTON, ORE.—Tektronix and Nexidia have announced that they will team up to provide automated analysis of closed caption content to Tektronix’s Sentry video monitor suite using the Nexidia Comply software.

Sentry

In its current model, Sentry can verify the technical elements of closed captions, like whether captions are present, appear at the right time or are properly placed. With Nexidia Comply software, Sentry will now have the ability to that the text in a closed caption is accurate with the spoken dialogue. This will make the Sentry compliant with FCC Title 47.

Nexidia Comply uses patented speech recognition technology to verify the validity of closed captions to the spoken word. No changes will be needed in workflow, monitoring or reporting processes with the integration to Sentry.

The Nexidia Comply software will be available in an upcoming release of Sentry.

Tektronix is a provider of test, measurement and monitoring technology based in Beaverton, Ore. Nexidia develops audio analysis applications for dialogue search and closed-captions and is headquartered in Atlanta.