PLAYA VISTA, CALIF.—The demand for new conent has created an unprecedented opportunity for all involved in production. We launched Vista Studios to meet this growing need in the most comprehensive, cost-effective way: by providing turnkey technical solutions that allow our clients to focus squarely on creating content.

Everything about our 30,000 square-foot 4K studios takes next-generation standards into account. From infrastructure, live production, editing and finishing, to management and workflow, and on to playout and delivery, formats from the latest to legacy are fully supported.

CAPTURING THE BEST

Image acquisition is a primary consideration, and for that reason we selected the Ikegami UHK-430 4K Native Portable CMOS cameras. We believe that the camera is central to the quality of the finished product that our clients demand: Make the wrong choice, and all the other efforts you put into the production could go to waste. The personalities, staging, and lighting rigs can be brilliant, but they require the right camera to capture it all effectively.

The stunning imagery of the Ikegami UHK-430 is at the center of our high-performing 4K core, stemming from a design that incorporates 24 million pixels onboard three 2/3-inch 4K CMOS sensors. The result is a picture with great color saturation and warm tones, creating video we characterize as “extremely vibrant” and “color-dense.” Format flexibility was very important to us—these cameras are equally at home in UHD or conventional HD formats, and in HDR or SDR.

Despite the many options these Ikegami cameras provide, we were able to press them into service immediately at Vista Studios with minimal learning curve. When we deployed the UHK-430, what we got on both the camera operator and video shading side was “business as usual”—in a good way. Sometimes when you take on a big technological shift you worry about a thousand different things that could go wrong, but when we got the Ikegami UHK-430 it felt like a non-event: The camera operators shot perfectly and the video operator was able to shade everything beautifully. We produced flawlessly on the first day of deployment, and that’s exceptional.

FACEBOOK AND ESPORTS

These cameras’ first few productions put them in front of a lot of people, right away. A few examples of content that they captured include “Make Up or Break Up” on Facebook Live, which happened to be the first live multi-camera show in the history of Facebook. They’ve also been deployed for productions including “Movie Night with Karlie Kloss” for Freeform, “History of Horror” for AMC, “MasterClass” sessions, projects for FX and EA Sports, and much more.

Video content that’s centered on eSports is a booming market and the UHK-430 has been a huge hit with our clients in that vertical. Usually, when you point a camera at a monitor wall, which we frequently do for e-gaming shows, you’ll get noticeable aliasing, moire-ing and often other artifacts being picked up. But you don’t get that with the UHK-430—it can shoot a massive monitor wall with clean color saturation better than any camera that we’ve tested. The result is as if the signal from the gameplay were going in direct: the camera captures monitor walls pristinely without artifacts.

Whether your company is new on the scene, like Vista Studios, or has been in the mix for a long time, the service you get from your vendors makes a big difference. I’ve experienced Ikegami’s support firsthand during my three-plus decades in broadcasting and video production, so I knew what to expect. Whatever we need, Ikegami’s staff is totally responsive.

Fold in the fact that the Ikegami UHK-430 is available at an attractive price point, and you’ve got a total 4K camera package. It’s been essential to a very fast start for Vista Studios.

Randall Heer is founder & partner, CEO of Vista Studios. He can be reached atrandallh@vistastudios.com.

For more information on Ikegami, visitwww.ikegami.comor call 201-368-9171.

NEWBURY, ENGLAND—Some of SAM’s technology has made its way across the pond to the west coast as Los Angeles-based broadcast and production facility Vista Studios has grabbed 4K and IP gear from SAM. All of the technology will be used for Vista Studio’s 4K production studio.

Some of the SAM imports that Vista Studios is deploying are the Sirius 850 multi-format router and IQ Modular intelligent infrastructure. The Sirius serves as the studio’s core routing infrastructure and offers operational flexibility and power with SAM’s Advanced Hybrid Processing technology and monitoring capabilities with the router’s MV800 multiviewer. Dedicated multiviewer output slots in the Sirius router allow the MV800 to provide alarming and monitoring. The IQ Mix cards are used to receive IP sources from outside the building, with the ability to convert the sources to SDI for downstream processing and encapsulate back to IP if necessary.

The Kahuna 9600 production switcher was brought in to work with UHD. FormatFusion3 technology in the switcher can convert input and output signals to UHD, and each M/E outputs UHD as well as HD simultaneously. It also has both SDI and IP inputs and outputs.

Vista has standardized on an automation system that utilizes SAM’s Morpheus automation and Momentum MAM technology to ingest, segment and playout channels. The workflow can integrate with a network’s own traffic system or can be used with a manual playlist imported into Morpheus.

Additional tech added to Vista’s studio includes ICE channel-in-a-box for ingest, QC and playout of a full network feed or segments with full branding capabilities. Alchemist XF format and framerate conversion software was also included.

The new Vista Studios facility is currently under development.