NZVN July 2012

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Hey, Stuart chose the title for the launch of Smoke 2013at DVT in Auckland, not me! If you’re not familiar withthe term, it comes from the way magicians trick theiraudiences into believing something that’s not real, by theuse of a smoke screen or mirrors hiding a rabbit whichwill miraculously appear out of thin air. To see if therewas any likelihood of prestidigitational subterfuge causingspontaneous release of cash at this event, I questionedtwo of the audience members before the spectacularbegan. Firstly, Nick Zieltjes from New Plymouth.

Ed: Nick, you’re in the oil industry are you?

Nick: No, we’re not, but we are into training andcorporate resource development. A lot of the work thatwe do is high level training resources – not only video,but interactive web based learning, things like that.

Ed: What products are you using at the moment in thissort of area – Adobe?

Nick: We’re a fairly big Adobe shop, we’ve gotinstructional graphic designers, we’ve got editors, we’vegot compositors, postproduction Pro Tools,working in those areas and we’re looking atwhat we’re doing down the animationroutes at the moment. Currently we’reusing After Effects but we’re looking at whatthe options are from there; looking at theanimation as supplementary to the videoaspects, to go where the video can’t go; alot of high level animation showing howmechanical things and suchlike work andactually incorporating it into an animationdesign. There’s so much on the market andthere’s so much change in the industry, it’sabout trying to make informed decisions,because the old dollar is harder and harderto get back these days. That’s why we’rehere.

Ed: The dollar return is importantbecause you can spend a lot of money onanimations and the customer says “oh thatlooks nice”?

Nick: That’s right – I was just laughing withStuart earlier on because, when I firststarted in television, lens flare wassomething that we didn’t want, and now wehave to put it in in post as part of aspangley effect.

Smoke & Mirrors at DVT

JULY 2012 Vol 182

Anurag Jauhari and Nick Zieltjes.

Ed: So you come along to these shows to see what’snew … have you ever been to an Autodesk show before?

Nick: No, not Autodesk. Admittedly, my background ismore on the camera/postproduction side, probably moreto the camera side to be honest, but being a facilitiesmanager and part of the decision making process, I’vegot to go back to our principal directors of the companywith informed decisions about where technology in theindustry is going. It’s their money I’m asking to spend,so I need to ensure that I’m actually giving them returnfor their investment. I know that here we all have thatproblem and work on that problem …

Ed: Even if it’s our own money?

Nick: Even if it’s our own money – even worse so if it’sour own money! It’s about keeping up with where thingsare going and I’ve worked with Stuart and the team atDVT for quite a while, I’ve got a lot of my gear throughthem, and when I actually talked to Chris the other weekabout setting up a Maya system, he said look this is

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Jason: Yes, they’re all very good … Fusion ( whichis a node-based compositor ) is fairly new to us, we’veonly had it for 1½ years, but we’re finding it quite good.

Ed: But don’t you find that once you’ve got aparticular platform, it’s sensible to keep it?

Jason: It is. I find the biggest challenge is actuallygetting people to switch platforms and utilise a differentone.

Ed: You’re dealing with old people are you?

Jason: Well I’m probably the oldest! So gettingpeople off, say, an Adobe product and getting themonto, say, maybe a different sort of compositingplatform or motion graphics platform can be tricky,unless they have the software there in front of them ontheir workstation.

Ed: Are you finding limitations with Adobe product?

Jason: No, not really. I think the only limitationswith the Adobeproduct wouldprobably be theoperator, ifanything.

Ed: So thenwhy would youlook for some-thing else?

Jason: Pri-marily becauseAutodesk pro-duct is so good –it’s always reli-able and it’sgreat software.

Ed: Do youthink Smokeenables you todo things betteror quicker thanyour currentsoftware?

Jason: To tell you the truth, I’d have to get themachine and software in and trial it to give you anhonest answer on that one.

Ed: So you’ve come here to have a look at what’s onshow tonight and then you could make that decision totrial it in your workplace … that’s where you’re going totell whether it’s going to work for you?

Jason: Yes, exactly, we’ll have to trial it in theworkplace to see if it’s going to work for us.

Ed: You’ve tried it yourself?

Jason: I’ve never actually operated Smoke, but Ihave used a lot of editing platforms, so I sort of knowwhat I’m looking at. The advantage of the Smoke is ithas a proper 3D compositing ability, which very feweditors do – well actually none do that I know of. WithSmoke, you can import 3D scenes or objects from, say,Maya or 3D Studio Max, and manipulate them on anediting timeline.

Ed: So you’ll actually then have more of an Autodeskworkflow than an Adobe workflow?

Jason: Yes, exactly, it would be a completeAutodesk workflow.

Ed: But you’d keep the Adobe there for the old folkswho know how to use it?

Jason: I think in this day and age when you’ve gota workstation you have all the software on it, sowhether you’ve got your Smoke, or your Maya, or your

coming up, come and have a look at Smoke, see what itdoes and see what you think. Perhaps this is where weneed to be and at a good price point apparently.

To be honest, I’m still a wee bit in the dark about how itall works. I understand the concepts of it, but wealready have an editing platform, so am I addinganother editing platform? What are the advantagesthat this is going to give me – am I throwing the babyout with the bathwater for something new? There’s alot of questions to be asked and as I said, thecompositing animation side is not my forte, but I needto understand more about what we’re doing. We’recurrently in a system that we’re looking to upgrade oursoftware; we’re currently running CS5 and we’re lookingat upgrading to CS6. But I’ve also got Avid MediaComposer sitting in the background that’s being under-utilised, so it’s about making these business decisions –what do I do from here; biggest bang for buck … butalso what’s the best form of integration and the easiestworkflow that I can achieve for our guys with minimumdowntime?

At the moment, for what we do, Adobe certainly fitsthat bill with Flash integration, HTML5 coming on board,the interconnectivity of all the products within the onesystem makes life extremely easy. Versus, and I’m notslagging Avid, because it’s a great product – but it’s amultiple third party plugin to get similar results. Also, Ithink for where we are, Avid is probably more of atelevision series tool and we’re not really down that sortof avenue any more. But certainly it’s a product thatwith my background, Avid was the way to go back then.

Ed: Have you got any of your current editors orgraphics people who are familiar with Autodeskproduct?

Nick: Yes Anurag who is up with me tonight, he’sactually Maya trained and is very much an animator.That was his core functionality and he’s worked formajor productions in India years and years ago, butliving in New Zealand now. He’s the guy who’s working,he’s the end user and I’m looking to his advice aboutwhat we can and can’t do. So as an operator, he’seducating me from an operator’s perspective and I willthen incorporate what he says into the high end bigpicture to make our informed decision to make arecommendation. So it’s vital that I have him here,otherwise it’s like asking me what the next cameraformat’s going to be – who knows? I need people herewho can help me make the decisions.

Ed: Yes, after a few beers you could buy anything?

Nick: I’m still driving back down to New Plymouthtonight, so I won’t be drinking. We drove up thisafternoon for this, and now we’ll drive back downtonight.

Another dedicated soul at the event was JasonHeffernan.

Ed: Jason, you run a motion graphics department?

Jason: Yes, the Broadcast graphics department atSky Television.

Ed: But you’re not using Autodesk product at themoment?

Jason: Yes we use Autodesk Maya and Autodesk3D Studio Max.

Ed: Okay, but for motion graphics, what are youusing?

Jason: Primarily Adobe product, which is AfterEffects, Photo Shop, etc, and we also use Eyeon Fusion.

Ed: So they’ve been good for you up until now?

more on page 6

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Rob: Yes there was; in fact I remember because I usedto use Edit, and that was under the Discreet banner inthose days. It was originally D-Vision and then, whenAutodesk acquired Discreet, Edit was in the portfolio ofproducts already and it was someone’s decision to endthat. It was when Final Cut was just starting to makeinroads into that market and I think managementrealised that we just weren’t going to get adequatemarket share.

Ed: And I guess Edit was a “no exit street” – itwasn’t linked to the graphics products that were beingproduced alongside, it wasn’t linked to Flame, it was aseparate entity and so now this editing product inSmoke has come out of Smoke rather than beside it?

Rob: Yes. In fact I remember some fantastic featuresthat Edit used to have that I always hoped Smokewould adopt, but because of the architecture and itslegacy, that’s never happened. But I think, seeingSmoke growover the last10 years intowhat it istoday, it real-ly is an editornow and I’mglad they’vedone whatthey’ve done,particularlyfrom mybackground.Because Ihad an edit-ing back-ground, Iknew thatyou can’treally separ-ate the visualeffects, par-ticularly incommercials,video effectsand editingalways gohand in hand.I rememberbeing a filmeditor where I would go to an online facility and getsomeone else to finish the job for me.

The thing about a box like this is it allows a film editorwith a real editing background – even although hemight not have the experience dealing with high endvisual effects – those guys know how all that sort ofthing is done. They know the concepts, they know howto brief a finishing artist to get what they want. Butthis box allows those people the ability to be able toactually do it themselves. They’ve already got theskillset, they’ve just got to know where the buttons are.

Ed: And how did you find your Auckland audience lastnight. Were there any hecklers? I saw Garry Frenchthere and he’s known for his heckling?

Rob: No, there was no heckling whatsoever.

Ed: Stuart put a gag on him did he?

Rob: The thing I’ve always found with New Zealandersis that they are extremely polite, not like the Aussies.

Ed: I think Garry French actually might be Australiansomewhere in his background.

Rob: Well that would explain the heckling.

3D Studio Max and your Premiere or your Eyeon Fusion– every single product is good at some things and badat others, so it’s best these days to have the whole lot.

Ed: If you can afford it?

Jason: Well the hardware’s not that expensivethese days, and the software comparative to say 15years ago, is very inexpensive.

Ed: But you’d have to say that – Stuart’s standingright beside you?

Jason: Well put it this way, a Quantel Editbox in1998-99 was roughly $600,000. The same power thesedays ( if not more ) will cost you 50K.

Ed: Yes, it makes sense.

Now for a word with Rob O’Neill, Smoke artist andpresenter for the event.

Ed: Have you been with Autodesk a long time?

Rob: This is actually my 10th year. Prior to this, I wasworking for a reseller, not unlike DVT – not as good asDVT though, they’re excellent people to deal with.

Ed: They make nice coffee.

Rob: They make excellent coffee.

Ed: Although I haven’t had one yet … oh, Stuart’s justgoing to get me one. Well, if you’ve been with thecompany for 10 years, they either must pay you a lot,or you must really like the product they produce?

Rob: They never pay you enough. I’d have to say it’sthe latter. I was a Flame artist for a number of yearsbefore I started doing this and prior to that I was anonline editor, an Avid editor and a film editor andthroughout that evolutionary process, I eventuallystumbled onto a demo of the Flame back in 1993 and Ijust thought My God this thing’s awesome, this is likemy graphic skills and editorial skills in the one box.Since joining Autodesk, they’ve come out with Smoke,and it’s much the same evolutionary process. They’verefined a piece of software to make the editor’s job a lotmore effective and pleasant I think.

Ed: It’s not “dumbing down” the product is it,because I know in some software companies, theyproduce like a “light” version at a lower price and theystrip out a lot of effects, just to piss people off, but thisdoesn’t seem to be that way?

Rob: No, I think what they’ve very wisely done isthey’ve realised there’s a different market now from theone that was traditionally using Flame. Flame wasalways used in the past for very high end expensivepostproduction of commercials and people ( particularlyadvertising agencies and directors ) liked using itbecause it was a box that had so many tools in it, it justgave them creative headroom. They weren’t the toolsthat they would use every day, but if someone just said“you know what, we’ve got a problem with this, whatcan we do to fix it?” generally there was something inthe toolset that would allow you to come up withsomething that no one else had thought of before. Thebeauty of Smoke is that they’ve taken Flame and lookedat the market and said okay, what is it that Flame isn’tdoing particularly well, and one of the aspects wasediting. It sort of did editing, but it was a bit like … I’duse the analogy “like neg matching film.” You cut twopieces of film and then you glue them together andthat’s as sophisticated as the editing got; whereasSmoke, because it uses a timeline, it came from thelegacy of what Avid were doing and other nonlineareditors in those days.

Ed: But of course Autodesk used to have an editingproduct didn’t it … there was a bit of controversy at thetime I remember?

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been at the Autodesk stand at NAB and I’ve seen theproduct, I’ve thought yes, that looks nice but it’s not forme, it’s just too scary. Whereas this, you open it upand there’s a timeline and it’s got icons on it and littlebuttons and you can actually “edit” something. But, ifyou want to go that step further …?

Stuart: Absolutely, Smoke is a high end productthat Autodesk have had for many years and three yearsago when they released Smoke for the Mac, they tookthat high end product, ported it across to the Mac andmade it available at a much more cost effective pricepoint. We’ve been very successful with that over thelast few years, selling it to a range of customers, butmost of the customers who purchased Smoke werepeople who had come from a Flame background. Theyunderstood the complex user interface that it had; theyunderstood the hardware requirements that it needed torun on and everything else.

Ed: Because it still could edit in those days, couldn’tit? You could actually bring in clips and you could putthem together, but you had to know the buttons andthe icons and the quirky way it operated?

Stuart: Correct, it had its own method of editingthat Autodesk put together many years ago, but whatAutodesk realised with Smoke is that they were missingout on the broader audience. They understood thatFinal Cut and Premiere and Avid editors have a verycommon workflow now that they use for editing withsource and programme windows and timelines and binwindows. They understood that people don’tnecessarily want to put up with using complex methodsto import video clips; and they also understood that the

Ed: So they came out with some intelligent questionsdid they?

Rob: No actually we didn’t have a great deal ofquestions. We did have a lot of positive feedbackthough. I noticed in the audience there weren’t toomany people nodding off, in fact there was no onenodding off, but there was lots of nodding of their headsup and down and that’s a very good sign. They don’tnecessarily have to ask questions, but if I can see themnodding, that means they’re liking what they see.

Ed: And if they bring their cheque books out at theend of the session, then you know it’s worked?

Rob: Well I think it’s a little early for that, becausewe’ve released this software now when it’s really onlyavailable to be purchased in September. So I’d like tosee them pull their cheque books out then.

Where you send your cheque is DVT and I followed upwith Stuart Barnaby the next day.

Ed: Stuart, you obviously listened to Rob becauseyou’ve just given me a demo on how the Smoke 2013works, and you’re rather competent?

Stuart: Oh thank you. The wonderful thing withSmoke 2013 is that they’ve changed the frontend userinterface to make it look very familiar to anyone who’sever used Final Cut or Adobe Premiere or MediaComposer, so for me to be able to sit down in front ofSmoke 2013 and do a demo is not that hard.

Ed: Oh but I’m still very impressed Stuart – and I seethat this really is a big leap forward for Autodesk. Thisis an editing product as well as a compositing tool andeverything else and, in previous versions when I’ve

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Smoke will already have the Adobe CS6 tools, they’llalready have Media Composer, or they’ll already haveFinal Cut. That’s cool, you can run all that stuff at thesame time. Of course Smoke is really very friendly withthose applications as well – you can import Photoshopdocuments with all the layers and work with them inSmoke, so by all means, use those other tools. You canbring in Media Composer projects, Premiere projects,Final Cut projects and open them in Smoke. So ifyou’re happy editing in Final Cut or Media Composer, oryou’re getting material delivered to you in thosesequences, just do that, that’s fine and then just importthem into Smoke when you’re ready to do yourfinishing. So many workflows are possible.

Ed: From what you demonstrated, I can see thatsomebody who is used to using Premiereand After Effects, and bringing thoseAfter Effects compositions into theirPremiere timeline, in a package, acontainer or whatever and then beingable to jump backwards and forwards –Premiere, After Effects – this issimplified, this is just all now in onetimeline and once you get to understandthe node principle, the way the nodeswork ( which I think I’ve done in about 5minutes ), it’s a good proposition?

Stuart: Absolutely. Node basedcompositing systems like Shake, Nukeand Smoke work differently to layerbased compositing systems. Layerbased compositing that everyone isfamiliar with in editing applications likePremiere and Final Cut Pro have existedfor quite some time. You take track oneand then I put something on top of it ontrack two and then do something else ontrack three – that’s the way they tend towork. When you do layer effects in AfterEffects or Photoshop you can have a

layer which has just got an effect on it, like a blur but itaffects all the layers underneath it.

Smoke has got all of that and if you want to use Smokeas a layer based compositing system, then by all meansyou can do that. However the problem with some ofthese applications is at some point you hit a brick wall.For example you may want to do various things butbecause you have a layer effect on track six and that’saffecting all the ones underneath it, it might preventthis. Smoke breaks those boundaries down by allowingyou to use a node based compositing system instead.You never hit a brick wall with Smoke, you’ve alwaysgot more fuel in the tank, so it’s really powerful.

Ed: I see that the major advantage is that it’s all inone package, whereas I know in some applications, youhave to go out to third parties to do some of theseeffects. That arrangement works but you can get thatsituation where, for example, you might upgrade youroperating system, or some part of the package isupgraded, but the other parts aren’t – there’s your brickwall?

Stuart: That’s right. One of the things that Smokeaddresses nicely is the multi application, multi pluginworkflows, which exist today and when they work, theywork well. Say you’re using Final Cut for editing andthen After Effects for some compositing and then you’reusing DaVinci Resolve for some grading. People will payyou for grading, they’ll pay you for editing, but theydon’t pay you any money to get the material out of yourediting system and conform it in a way that’s going tothen get it into the DaVinci Resolve system. They don’t

price of the product was at a premium because of itshardware requirements. You had to have $40,000worth of hardware before you started, it had to run on aMacPro, had to have a Quadro 4000 card, had to have aKona 3G card, had to have fibre channel or SASconnected high end storage.

Autodesk has addressed all of those issues with Smoke2013. The first thing they did was to change thefrontend user interface to put in a thing they call the“Media Hub” which is just a fancy file browser for beingable to import your material into the library - exactlythe same as a bin window in any other programme.They also changed the timeline to make it look almostexactly the same as Final Cut and Premiere and MediaComposer, so it’s the same editing application that

we’re all using at the moment. They also kept the highend visual effects tools that were already in Smoke withthings like the Master Keyer for doing chroma keying,the Colour Warper for doing high end colour gradingand the Action 3D compositing environment – it’s allstill inside Smoke, but they’ve also added in Connect FXwhich is a wonderful tool that you can use to join allthose elements together. They’ve done an enormousjob with Smoke to make it much easier to use, butkeeping the high end tools that they already had. Nowit’s certified to run on a Retina Display MacBook Pro oran iMac using Thunderbolt video tools for getting videoin and out and Thunderbolt storage. The cost of theproduct is dramatically lower in terms of its hardwarerequirements – and they’ve lowered the software priceas well.

Ed: So, all in all, now it’s a very cost effectivepackage for anybody who is looking at an “all in one”editing programme, but you say there are still someareas where you’d want to keep your Photoshop andyou’d want to keep some other peripheral programmes?

Stuart: Yes, I mean Smoke’s value proposition isthat it’s a high end grading tool, it’s a high endcompositing tool …

Ed: If you want to use those features?

Stuart: Yes … it’s a high end editing tool, it doeskeying like no other, it’s very powerful across the rangeof products, but the nice thing about the Mac is nobodyruns one application at a time, you can still runPhotoshop and other applications at the same time. SoI would imagine most customers who would jump into

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You can’t see the future, you don’t know whatsomebody else is going to come up with in six months,but for now, for a lot of people, this is the way to go.However, there are other situations?

Stuart: Absolutely. We sell and represent a widerange of products and, of course, because weunderstand all of the different products, it gives us agreat opportunity to be able to talk to our customers,find out what they’re actually doing, what cameras arethey using, what formats are they shooting, what typeof postproduction system are they currently using, howare they delivering their content – is it for web, is it forthe iPad, is it for broadcast, is it a high end commercial,is it a television series? All of these different workflowsrequire different tools to do the job and so …

Ed: Require different tools to do the job well andwithin a budget?

Stuart: Absolutely, we’re very conscious of first ofall making sure that the quality of the productions thatour customers are producing is the best possible,they’re doing it as productively as they possibly can,with the minimum wastage of time. That allows them tofocus on their creativity; you know really crafting aproduction that’s fantastic. For example, if you weredoing a television series with collaborative editing, AvidMedia Composer is a pretty strong proposition for beingable to put that type of show together. In that case, wewould highly recommend five seats of Avid MediaComposer running in a collaborative shared storagesystem, so that they can all be working on the samemedia and the same project at the same time. Itmakes a lot of sense. But then of course, once eachshow is edited, they’d then want to finish it and that’swhere a seat of Smoke alongside that would work verywell. And of course Smoke will import Final Cutprojects, Avid Media Composer projects, AdobePremiere projects, no problem. So you can actually editin whatever editing application you’ve got and bring itinto Smoke.

But, like I say, we represent many different productsand they’ve all got their place in the marketplace and Ithink the great strength of DVT is our ability tounderstand our customers’ workflows, to ask the rightquestions, and then to be able to provide the rightadvice and tools that they need to get the job done.

Ed: Is it all getting more complicated – life?

Stuart: Oh look this technology is such fun. Imean the things that get us out of bed in the morningare the customers we deal with and the technology. It’sjust fantastic.

Ed: Well for me it’s coffee and hot toast. NZVN

pay you for taking material out of your Resolve systemand working it back to get it into your editing system.Heaven forbid they come back and want to change ashot or two at the eleventh hour, as typically happens inour workflows today – and that’s where it all comesunravelled. And then of course you’ve got pluginsinvolved, and there’s complexity in that when it works.When suppliers come out with a new operating system,or Adobe comes out with CS6 but the pluginmanufacturers haven’t done that yet and then CS6doesn’t work with some flavour of some otherapplication you’re using. It can get very complex.Smoke dramatically simplifies that and what Smokegives you ultimately is time. It gives you the freedomto be able to play with your productions and be ascreative as you possibly can, not worrying about havingto stop at 3 o’clock because you’ve got to spend thenext 2 hours rendering from one application to another.You can continue playing and being creative with yourproduct with as much time as you need.

Ed: Training is available?

Stuart: Training is available. DVT are available toprovide one on one training if that’s required, so theentry level training there’s no problem and of coursethere’s extensive training material available online on aYouTube channel that Autodesk have set up specificallyfor Smoke, which it is very complete. It takes youthrough every nuance of the product from whoa to go.At your own time, and your own pace, in your ownfacility, you can sit down and easily learn Smoke all theway through. And the great thing is that with the newinterface we already know how to use the product – it’sa timeline, a source and programme window and a binwindow. It’s really not that hard to get up and runningwith editing, and I can imagine most customers that getinto Smoke, if they spent two hours with us and therest of the day themselves, they would be quiteproficient editing inside Smoke. In terms of getting intothe compositing environment, again a small bit of timespent with us and we can get them up to speed withthat too. So it’s not hard to learn. It’s a complexproduct, but it’s very intuitive and very simple to getinto.

Ed: And just like the Adobe CS packages, you just goto help and bingo you’re straight on the YouTubeSmoke learning channel and everything’s there and youjust search for what you want. Easy as.

But as always Stuart, this isn’t “one ring to rule themall” is it, because I know over the years there havebeen various products that have come through the DVTstable that you’ve said “this is great, this is fantasticand everyone should have it” but that’s at that time.

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Secure DataHolograms

at NABAt last, really secure deep archive data

storage from Holographic Storage

Systems hVault.

Ed: We’ve talked about long-term

archive, we’ve talked about things going

“belly up” when you try and put a hard

drive back in the caddy after a few years

on the shelf and it doesn’t spin up, but

optical discs do. They’re limited in their

storage volume, but Bland McCartha,

you’ve solved that problem – well, you’re

on the way to solving the problem?

Bland: We’re on the way to solving

the problem, yes. This is disc storage

technology, but it’s not like the typical

optical discs that you’re familiar with, it’s

holographic disc, where we take two

pieces of polycarbonate with a

photosensitive layer in between similar

to a DVD but a bit thicker, split a single blue laser beam

into two, a reference beam and a data beam and focus

them into the photosensitive layer which creates a 3D

hologram of data. It’s like a data page, sort of like a

big QR code or a 2D barcode, but it’s 1½ megabits of

data per flash of the laser.

So unlike optical discs, or magnetic discs where they’re

spinning all the time, all you do is flash that one spot,

move a little bit to the very next spot, flash it again and

it’ll load 1½ megabits each time. So it can lay down

these patterns of data – 1½ megabits at a time, until

you fill up the disc at about 500 gigabytes. Of course

reading or writing 1 ½ megabits per laser flash is much

faster than spinning optical discs where each flash of

the laser is one bit.

Ed: And it’s basically the same size as an XDCAM

disc, a Blu-ray in a cartridge?

Bland: Exactly, yes. You can see in this case,

which looks kinda like a very large floppy disc, it’s

shuttered to keep the light out, because it’s light

sensitive before you expose it and you write to it. It’s a

“write once” medium. I like to use the analogy of black

and white film, because that’s light sensitive until you

expose it. Then when you develop it and fix it, it

becomes inert and it becomes archival. Well this is the

same thing – instead of blasting holes in a dye layer

with a laser like a typical optical disc, once the

photosensitive layer is exposed to the laser, the data in

that 3D hologram becomes inert and it becomes part of

the plastic matrix.

So the archival lifetime of this is in excess of 50 yearsand the accelerated life cycle testing was done underintense ultraviolet light, brighter than sunlight, 99%relative humidity, temperature cycling between -20Cand +80C, for months and months and months – at a50 year equivalent lifetime, we had zero failures. So weknow it’s a very robust disc and because it’s notmagnetic, it’s not susceptible to magnetic fields, electro-magnetic pulse, static electricity, mold and mildew,sand, saltwater, surface scratches … all in all, it’s avery, very robust medium.

Ed: And the read-write is done by a not highly

technical laser arrangement?

Page 16

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Bland: Right. On the write side, a single blue laser

beam is split into a reference beam and a data beam

that is modulated with the digital data. Where the two

beams intersect they form this interference pattern

which creates the 3D hologram. When you want to

read the disc, you shine a single laser through the disc

and the hologram is captured by a sensor, just like the

ones in a digital camera.

Ed: Because in some systems, the read-write requires

a very complicated spinning head. That’s fine if you’ve

got a machine, but if you don’t have any more

machines, you’ve got data that you can’t retrieve. With

this, you’re really always going to be able to retrieve it,

because blue lasers are easy to make?

Bland: Right – so all it would take to retrieve it is a

blue laser, a little bit of lensing and a camera sensor, so

we use that simple, low cost technology for recovering

the data. Into the far future, you can be sure, just like

today if you want to recover stuff off of film, all you

need is a light and some lenses. You know, black and

white film is a pretty robust, archival medium.

Ed: As long as that film is in good condition?

Bland: That’s right.

Ed: Now the big question, what are the read-write

speeds?

Bland: The read-write speed right now on the

prototypes is 20 megabytes per second … plenty fast for

some people; way too slow for other people. We expect

it to be probably in the neighbourhood of 50 megabytes

per second one year after initial release – it could bemaybe as high as 100 – but it will double every year, as

well as the capacity will double every year.

Ed: But I’m sure you can come up with some sort of

RAID arrangement ( or somebody will ) where you can

read these and write these in parallel?

Bland: Well, because of the archival nature of the

holographic discs, RAID is not needed as it is for

maintaining data integrity when hard drives fail. To get

higher throughput, the systems we will sell will have upto 8 drives that can write or read in parallel to get very

fast I/O.

You can see from the pictures on our website

( www.hvault.com ), that we’re focusing on the large

archive problem, where people have got petabytes of

material already and they’re looking to find a better

way to store it. We put them into these robotic

cabinets similar to a tape library, where we can store up

to 500 discs in one cabinet, up to eight drives. So

depending on what your throughput requirement is, it

can be streaming out of eight drives simultaneously.

Now we don’t have a process at the moment for striping

those, so that you can bring them out as like one stripe

for eight set, but if that’s a requirement, we could

certainly do it. We don’t think it will be. With hVault’s

system, there is no need for the cost and complexity of

RAID that is used with hard drives. It’s just not

necessary.

Ed: That’s it, this is emerging technology and really,

you’re requiring the users of archival storage, or people

who need it, to come to you and say “we need you to

solve this issue”?

Bland: Right, and so we’re going to be flexible.

Things like our network interface … most people want

fibrechannel; some people want infiniband; some

people might want Thunderbolt. Whatever they want,

we’ll make sure that we have the interconnectivity …

Ed: They’ll all want something different?

Bland: They’ll all want something different, but the

idea is … they have a big problem now – the current

solutions of spinning discs have too much power

consumption and the discs wear out so you’re sort of

replacing discs all the time.

Hard discs are great for short term, but they’re not

good for archival; so the only other archival solution isdata tape and the people who are using data tape are

finding out now “well yes, but I’ve had to replace that

media about every three years”, that’s an expensive

proposition. It’s the lifecycle costs that we’re looking

at, where you write to this disc one time and you can

access it within 10 seconds in one of these large

libraries. That’s much faster than tape libraries and

unlike tape, you don’t have to keep replacing the media

to protect your data.

Your initial cost is basically the whole cost, rather than

this initial cost and a replacement, and a replacement,

and a replacement cost of tape.

The one thing we have learned from customers here, is

that their storage problems are getting bigger by the

day and they are in need of this type of technology.

Current technologies like hard drives and magnetic tape

cannot cope with the exponential explosion of data.

Ed: You’ve sold me.

Page 18

NZVN

Page

Lectrosonics forSound Techniques

Stephen himself is going to tell usabout the latest from Lectrosonicsat NAB.

Stephen: Lectrosonics has got

one new product this year, and

that’s an upgrade of its waterproof

transmitter. You’ll see in the

photo that it’s completely

immersed in the goldfish bowl andthe item is working. Lectrosonics

has had a transmitter, the MM,

around for several years and

they’re used a lot in New Zealand,

particularly on those action shows

where a lot of water is involved –

people kayaking down rivers and

that sort of thing. You can

imagine the risk if the transmittergoes in the water.

So this is basically an upgrade ofthe MM and I believe the modelnumber is WM and what it does isit incorporates the newer style of Lectrosonicstransmitter with all the controls on the outside, using atouch membrane switching system. So whereas with

the MM you’d have to undo it and adjust the switchinginside, on this one, you can actually adjust all theparameters from the outside of the device, whilekeeping the batteries in and keeping it waterproof.

Ed: And it’s within the frequency range that we’reallowed?

Stephen: Well we get them made in the blocks thatare usable in New Zealand, yes.

Ed: That’s a good thing to have?

Stephen: Well the problem with that is we still don’tknow exactly what those frequency blocks are, but wehave a pretty damn good guess!

Ed: Are they changeable on this … if they did get itwrong?

Stephen: Well inbuilt, there are obviously still 256frequencies you can choose from. But if it happened tobe in a block, look I don’t know, but I guess you couldget it rechanneled. I think where we would advisepeople to buy should give them a degree of future-proofing, but if someone decides to go their own way,or we decide we were wrong, we’d do everything wecan to sort that out.

Ed: And the waterproofing features go as far as theconnectors into the device, both for the aerial and forthe microphone; the standard microphone is notcompletely waterproof, but there are versions available?

Stephen: Yes, there are waterproof microphones andany microphone can have the waterproof connectoradded to it, but you couldn’t swap your regularmicrophone on your transmitter and plug it directly intothe waterproof version.

I’m trying to make this clear … you could use anymicrophone, as long as it was wired for the transmitter.Lectrosonics don’t specifically make a waterproofmicrophone because people would like to use theirfavourite microphone with it.

Ed: It’s just then a case of getting the waterproofconnector correct?

Stephen: That is correct. NZVN

Page 20

“Bowling ball v. bowl” - and we liked the beard.

It really was underwater for four days.

Page

Adam: It’s security probably, more than anything.With Avid, each drive only has one media files folder onit and everybody knows where those files are; whereaswith Final Cut, it’s much more flexible than that, soprojects can quickly become messy if you have multiplepeople working on them. It’s pretty rare for a job toeven have an edit assistant anymore, so it really worksin our favour when we can keep media managementpredictable. When we were researching all the differentonline systems like Quantel and Smoke and the like –we found a little known Avid product called Avid DS,which is, in fact, their most powerful programme andwas originally designed by Softimage. I found it to bemuch more usable than Avid Media Composer andSymphony and the like, in that any user can look at anAvid DS timeline and quickly read what has been doneto it, how the tracks are laid out, what the effects are –and so it has like a mix of all the best things of Final CutPro, in that you can interact with clips on the timeline;After Effects where it’s got layer modes and mattes

Page 22

Avid at the High EndWhile in Wellington, I had the chance to visit at theGibson Group with Richard Kelly from Atomise. Wespoke with Richard and Adam Sondej, Online Editor andColourist.

Ed: Richard, what do they do here?

Richard: Well the Gibson Group is one of our keyclients and they’ve got an extensive postproductionworkflow right from offline through to a full Avid DSonline suite and Avid Media Composer for their offline.These guys are great; they turn out some excellent highquality product and Adam is a guru for the technicalaspects of what everything needs to be to get it out toair. When you asked about people to come and talk toin Wellington, Adam was the first man I thought of.

Ed: Now Adam, is it only Avids around the place?

Adam: We also have Final Cut Pro systems andthat’s part of the reason that we went with theMacintosh base platform forour Avid offline software, sothat we could keep abreastof Final Cut's capabilitiesand be able to work on FinalCut jobs.

At first Avid was the onlyreal choice. Despite beingattracted to the cost andflexibility of Final Cut ourearly tests weren't reallyworking out for us. Oureditor base was morecomfortable using Avid, butwe were never really thathappy with the flexibility ofthe programme. We boughtinto the Mac hardwareplatform so that we had theoption to switch to Final CutPro if we wanted to in thefuture. The Macs were alsopretty simple to loadsoftware onto and tomaintain. We also alwayskept an eye on Final Cut,but it’s never quite got to apoint where we’ve wanted itto be.

Where we needed to share the systems betweenmultiple editors on the same project, from the mediamanagement point of view, the Avid system was muchsafer for us with its more constrained set of parametersfor how it works. That really suited us, because lesscould go wrong. But over time, Avid has stepped upwith being more flexible with the number of formatsthat it handles and the features of the software as well;that’s kind of worked for us and we never got to thepoint where we felt that Final Cut had more to offer usthan the Avid platform.

Ed: For many people, having a single editing platformis all they need if they’re not collaborating, whereas inyour situation you have, as you say, a number ofeditors all working together, sometimes on the samejob, you need that collaboration, you need that clearstable workflow and you also need that mediamanagement, and that’s what Avid offers?

Adam at his DS desk.

which can be applied directly onto clips. It’s also got anode based effects system, like Shake and Nuke, whereyou can build complex effects quickly and simply. DSalso best supports Avid conform, so I can bring in, usingAAF or AFE the exact Media Composer session, with myonline media from Media Composer. We ingest all ourmedia into our offlines at online quality and then we canconsolidate that down with handles to Avid DS. In myDS timeline, it all appears conformed with no syncissues, all ready to go. We haven’t actually done a tapeconform for a couple of years now – we’ve beenadopting the tapeless formats like XDCAM and some ofthe field recorders like the nanoFlash as well as the REDcamera system for our high end jobs … and that sort ofbrings us to our current big project which is the movieFresh Meat.

EPIC had just come out locally when we wereresearching cameras and there were particular

Page

requirements of the shoot where they wanted the highresolution of the 5K EPIC system, but also to be able todo slo-mo effects which was not available at high res onthe RED One camera system, the older RED camera.These were some features that the company reallywanted to embrace, but it was hot off the press and wewere pretty nervous about using it, but as with any ofthese modern workflows, just about every job thatcomes your way now is a new research project. Thereare so many different formats that you can choosefrom; ALEXA, the new Sony format, RED EPIC – youknow there’s a constant barrage of cameras andformats and workflows that both give you features, butcan also be very limiting and in some cases not work atall.

Ed: But Avid would have told you that the RED 5KRAW was not a problem, it’s provided the codecs so youcan edit that on your DS timeline without a problem?

Adam: There is that, but when it’s hot off thepress, it is bleeding edge and we’re often pushing theformats beyond where they’re happily normally used.For instance, on the Cloud feature – Gibson Grouprecently designed the 18 metre LED screen installationfor the Rugby World Cup for a promotion for NewZealand Trade and Enterprise, which had a horizontalresolution of 2,880 pixels, approx 3K. Normally filmsare still 2K and we had a custom LED modular screenbuilt in China, that had the resolution required for thegiant installation. We needed a way to be able to playback the film for the screen in real time, for onlining,and when we asked Avid “can we play back 3K in realtime?” they said that at this stage DS couldn't, but theyhoped to be able to support this in the future.

Ed: So when he’s talking “Avid” Richard, is this Avidor is this you?

Richard: This was Avid – this was Adam and I on acon-call with the two gentlemen who are the productmanagers and designers, coders for these products, andwe found ourselves in the interesting position of beingthe first to try a proper high res workflow above 2K. Itwas good fun, yeah, great – we must do it againsometime!

Ed: And it worked?

Adam: Well, as I say, Avid told us that they didn’tthink it would, because Avid plays the safe approach,they want to stick with industry workflows; they don’treally want to push the systems to where they fall over.It worked fine for the offline stage where we converteverything to DNX and we use the RED Rocket

transcoding system, so that the rushes get converted toAvid Media. That’s all fine; but in online, we needed tocheck that our 3K files looked good at their nativeresolution. In order to do that, we had to go beyondthe Avid approved drive storage system and buy a highperformance RAID from JMR that had just beenreleased. They promised us that it was capable of thatperformance and when we actually got it into thecountry, we found that Avid DS could not only play it at3K, we were getting the full 5K off the REDuncompressed playing back in real time at 1200megabytes per second.

Ed: Did this make you happy Richard?

Richard: It made me very happy when it was allworking – very, very happy. It was an extremely “outthere” workflow at the time and thankfully it’s allactually been all qualified workflow now, so we know wedid the right thing.

Ed: I’m sure JMR were happy to hear that it wasworking well too?

Richard: JMR were very happy.

Adam: They were pretty confident about theirproduct from the start. We had to go out on a limb toget what we wanted, but luckily, they were confidentenough to do it on a “sale or return” basis. What wefound was, despite the online hype of RED cameras, wehad instances where we found defects that were visibleat high resolution that weren’t visible at low resolution.So to see the media in its full native resolution playingback in real time was very useful to us. There was onlya very, very small percentage of clips that had aproblem but that’s the nature of the game now, thatyou have to adopt something so quickly off the shelfthat it hasn’t really been fully battle tested. That’s alsotrue of Avid who are trying to keep up with all theemerging camera formats. So it’s very critical for anyproject you have to test it early, take it right throughfrom your shoot, to your online, to your film, make sureit’s going to work and then you can be pretty confidentthat anything you come across the way, is justsomething that is a small glitch that can be fixed, butfundamentally you’ve got a good workflow.

Ed: Now, speaking about the workflow, if we can goon here to a bit more about media management,because from what I understand, this is something thatRichard’s really helped you with. You’ve gone off tape –and I know you love tape, I love tape, but hey we’vegot to move on, because I’ve seen Adam’s stack of 1inch tape that he’s got in one of his suites, and it’s a

Page 24

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Page 26

beautiful stack, it’s dusted regularly. So, going awayfrom tape, you’re into that solid state media, you’re intodata, was this a nervous experience for you?

Adam: Actually it was and you hear the horrorstories of people losing all their dailies from bad set

practice and the like, but if you’re careful with your

media management, always keep two copies from every

card as backup and then backup to a server and then

on to LTO, then you’re safe. But until the media is on

LTO I don’t really feel that secure at all. But from a

workflow point of view, we’ve found we have virtually

no timecode sync errors, which always used to be thedreaded time in online, that you’d go to conform the

tapes and none of the syncs matched up, because of

timecode break errors. So we really quite enjoy and

embrace the new digital format, but from an archiving

point of view it is a nightmare. When a job hangs

around in high res, it chews up maybe 5 terabytes of

storage and you find yourself buying a lot more storage

than you would have initially planned, just because of

not being able to put the tapes on the shelves and goback to them when you need them. But, on the whole,

it is working very well for us, yes.

Ed: So Adam, are you going to stick with LTO tape asyour deep archive?

Adam: Yes, it’s pretty much the only format thatwe can see surviving into the future, in that theQuantum LTO system guarantees to be backwardscompatible through tape to tape versions, so even whenthe new format of LTO comes out, they’ll still be able to

support your older tapes, at which point you can choosewhat’s important and restore it and copy it over to thenew format. We were thinking about using hard drivesas the archival medium, but we’ve found that harddrives left to sit on the shelf do tend to not come backto life after a certain point in time, whereas we’ve hadmuch better success with LTO. Everything we’veattempted to restore has always restored fine; it’s beena strong format; it records really quickly, we canbackup 8 terabytes over a weekend or restore thatmuch, so it’s really pretty quick and useful. It is stillironic that you’re going from a tapeless format to atape, but there you go.

Ed: Yes, there is life in tape. But the current project– I see a very clear crisp picture there on the screen. Isthis part of something that the Gibson Group is doingright now?

Adam: Yes, this project’s called Fresh Meat. It’s acomedy horror we’re releasing later in the year. Thatalso had high res technical challenges. We bought thetechnology from Atomise for the Cloud project whichwas the 3K we’d finished for the giant screen, but this isfilm. The Cloud film was shot on RED One and then,when we went to do Fresh Meat, we were hoping to getone EPIC and one RED One, but we found that theydidn’t have a common recording format at the highestcamera sensor resolution, nor was the colour sciencecommon to the two cameras. So we ended up havingto get a second EPIC for the B camera shoots.

The film uses a lot of slow motion effects and thatworked beautifully with the EPIC, but also, shooting slo-

Page

mo at a high frame rate, chews a wholelot of data. We researched thoroughlywith Park Road, who are outputting thefilm to both film and to DCP, and theywere very helpful with choices of datarate that we can use for recording withEPIC. We’re doing the colour grade atthe Gibson Group and then taking it inDPX format to Park Road for output.

During the camera test stage, we shotoff some 5K 2:1, took it into the online,put it through the offline process,conformed it in online and took it back toPark Road and had a look at that in theirDCP suite and were confident that wehad a working system. So there’s verygood support in New Zealand forfilmmakers to use whatever technologyor limitations that you have ( noteverybody can afford to grade at ParkRoad ) to take your project and still havean excellent result at the end of the day.

Ed: So what’s been your involvementwith Fresh Meat Richard?

Richard: Technical support I guess is really what it’scome to. The equipment that we put in was all put inprior to Fresh Meat and certainly had a good run-inperiod with the Cloud project and from then on, I justmaintained my involvement with Adam and Rex Potier,Gibson Group's Facility Manager, and the editorial staffhere and just help them make sure everything keepsgoing.

Adam: We wanted to set up an online where wecould hold the whole film in a single timeline, so I havea 90 minute RED project linking back to 5K files. I’musing uncompressed 444 HD proxy files which are hugefiles, but that enables me to have real time colourgrading in my project and also to view …

Ed: Hang on – so you can actually colour grade aproxy file and then, when you output the original, it willdo the same colour grade on the original, full res?

Adam: That’s correct, yes. For instance, here I’vegot a graded section off the timeline and I can play thatthrough in real time and if I wanted to check that in my2K resolution ( which is our deliverable format ), then Ican just switch on my 2K viewer here, process, andview at 1:1 pixel what the final film will look like in Realtime. We’ve also got all the vignetting and extra effectsthat you may want to utilise for blurring backgroundsand the like available to us as well.

The film has about 200 effects shots … we’re using alocal posthouse called Dusk, who have worked with usin the past, and they come in as DPX files. We also doworkflow tests with them prior to start, to output andimport their files to make sure it all works. Pretesting isjust so critical to the smooth flow of the project. So, asyou can see, it’s quite a flexible system and it reallysuits us. We’re always open and always looking – we’rechecking out Resolve and the like and we had our eyeson Apple and Color for a long time, but then we werequite concerned about Apple’s decisions with changingto Final Cut Pro X and stopping development of Color …

Ed: Well you weren’t the only ones – but Avid havestuck by you?

Adam: It’s heading in the direction we hoped. Westill see the Media Composer as a good offline system.It’s very fast, responsive, clips and sequences loadinstantly, but it’s pretty limited for compositing.

Ed: Now Adam, at the top end, to be fair, at the sort

of level you’re working at – the feature film level,

everything RAW, Media Composer would have its

limitations, but Avid have got the DS to cope with that?

Adam: Yes – we see Media Composer as a

fantastic offline tool, but you need a good online

application to finish your projects and, for us, Avid DS

definitely does the trick. We do everything frombroadcast to our museum jobs – like a large component

of the Cloud project that I mentioned was finished in

DS; it handles the high res fine and with going out on a

limb a bit with unsupported storage, definitely gave us

the benefit to give us the performance that we need,

whereas the Avid specs themselves were a bit too

conservative, being based more around the needs of

high definition broadcast.

Ed: And that’s it Richard – obviously they’re doing

something here at that top end level, but Avid have got

the product that can cope with that, whereas for most

people, Media Composer would be perfectly adequate?

Richard: Media Composer’s a great product for a lot

of people but, when you get to the level at which Adam

works at the Gibson Group, it’s another story.

You know, you’d never be able to put Adam back onto a

Media Composer, he’d never be happy with that featureset. That would be the same for anyone who has

actually used a DS. Once you’ve made that step up it

brings up a different level of artistic ability and also

technical ability into a workflow, that a very high end

job does require.

Ed: And as we discovered at NAB, there’s a good deal

going at the moment?

Richard: There are always good deals going. DS is

not one of those cross-grade deals that you’re thinking

of – that’s Symphony, which is a different product line,

but yes, DS is a very cost effective tool now. Certainly

in the years Adam’s been working on it, there’s been a

massive price reduction and also capability increase in

it. So it’s definitely a product which is current …

Ed: It’s something you could show somebody if they

wanted to see it?

Richard: Absolutely, yes.

Page 28

Richard and Adam.

NZVN

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Portabrace atNAB2012

We are here at Portabrace and wehave Casey Krugman, the new designleader.

Ed: Casey, you’re even wearing aPortabrace tie which I understand youmade yourself?

Casey: Well I didn’t make itmyself – I tried to make it myself andthen one of the wonderful womenthat I worked with stopped me andsewed it for me off of a pattern thatshe knew. They make sure that Idon’t hurt anybody or myself arounda sewing machine. So it’s good youknow, you’re working with womenwho have been in the business for 20-30 years and have been professionalsewers even longer. It’s great to stepout of the production world and beable to sort of speak a commonlanguage at the end of the day aboutwhat we need to complete the design.

Ed: I understand you’ve recently come intoPortabrace, but you’ve been very well versed with theproduct for a long, long time as a reseller elsewhere.So you have a passion for Portabrace – would you saythat?

Casey: Oh I could wholeheartedly say that. It’svery funny, the first couple of months that I wasactually working at Portabrace, I walked through aislesand aisles of the cases waiting to be shipped out and Iwould just run my hand along feeling the Cordura. I’mkind of a nerd for Portabrace …

Ed: You’re the perfect man to be a designer, and Iunderstand you’ve come up with a number of newdesigns in just the last two weeks?

Casey: Yes, we were very busy before this NAB.One of the big ones, which was something that I carriedover from being a shooter, came from the annoyance ofconstantly having to breakdown all the rigs for 35mmadapters with rod support systems and matte boxesand everything, so that I could fit everything in any ofmy cases, or having to put them in Pelicans or any sortof hard cases. And so one of the things was, can’t wedo something where we can just “drag and drop” andput it in there and be done with it? And so that’s whatwe did … we’ve come up with a variety of different sizesin our new rig series …

Ed: And you call it “Shoot Ready”?

Casey: Yes, these are all “Shoot Ready” cases.You will literally be able to drop in your case … thisgentleman here actually has one of the Red Rocksupport systems with everything on it – matte box,camera – and you’d literally just be able to drop it intoa case, fully ready to go. So it’s a quick draw for themodern cinematographer. You know for the broadcastguys, it was always nice for the quick draw becausethey could drop it in or down and just be done with it;and cinema people have never really had that.

Ed: I notice it’s got a bump in it?

Casey: Yes, this was one of my big dreams, to dothis and now we’ve gone sort of crazy and we haveeverything from very small regular size cases to thatbeast over there that’s about 40 plus inches long, whichwill hold your entire kit and roll around with you.

Ed: And I guess it takes a whole range of camerasand bits and pieces because of its size, but also becausethe shoulder mount rigs are pretty similar?

Casey: Yes, there are a lot of commonalities thatgo along them – all of them are going to have handles,all of them are going to have the counterweights on theback of them. They all have basic similar sizes, so thatmakes it easy … and with the DSLRs, those are allpretty much in the same form factor that they’ve beenin for 500 years at this point! And with these newercameras, like the C300 and FS700 and the new EPIC,you know all of these guys – the camera shape is goingfrom the handheld’s traditional little guys; now they’rebecoming this very oddly sort of almost boxy shape –it’s almost like re-entering the old time photo world,where they had the flip up for the Rollies and the oldHasselblads and others.

Ed: And is this a new design of shoulder brace here,or chest brace or something?

Casey: Oh no, this is for our audio cases. Whatyou do is actually just wrap this around your back, andyou would have your audio cases up front. So thiswould be a very simple option and then it would comewith one of these belts right here, and this is the mostbasic version of our audio harness. We have ones thatare more packed with memory foam, or much moresupport for your heavier rigs and such.

Ed: Okay, so that’s one … what else have youdesigned?

Casey: Well the DSLR line has been expanded.We’ve been trying to do more custom casing for theDSLR, so we have a smaller one which is going to be fortwo lenses and the body with the standard zoom lens;and on the front, there’s actually a little slit right whereyou’re going to be able to slide a small monopod or avery small tripod in and secure it on to the front, if youneeded to run.

Ed: But they’re all in black – what’s happened to thePortabrace “blue”?

Casey: Nothing’s happened to the Portabrace blue,but we’re featuring our new black and copper accents.We can still get it to you in blue, all of our cases are stillavailable in blue. There are a couple of things here and

Page 32

Casey showing the good fit.

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there that aren’t in blue anymore – the rain slicks –because no-one was buying blue rain slicks, everyonewas buying black rain slicks, so we’ve moved into that,but for the cases, you will be able to get it in blue.Then for this guy, this is the bigger version of the MS-DSLR, this is the No 2 … it has a touchscreen part ontop for many types of tablets; you can still get to thetouch through the vinyl, and it’s still waterproof, and ithas a little sun hood that pops up – you just fold thatright back down, go round to the front, you have roomfor two bodies or you could have a body and a longerzoom lens and some other accessories. You can get atit from the bottom and also from the back – just dropright in and grab it out like that. So you don’t evenhave to go through the whole thing of going throughdifferent layers and casing and everything like that.

Ed: Now that’s a clever design – is that one of yours?

Casey: The back actually evolved from a case that

I was thinking about. I have these flights of fancy that

are much like this Cordura tie that I’m wearing.

Ed: There’s a “flight of fancy” at the moment over

there … she was looking the other way before.

Casey: It’s Vegas baby. But I had an idea for aspinning case where you could just literally spin itaround and open up different things and then spin itback – but then that evolved into this. So it’s all thesesorts of things that just sort of fly in one after another.

Ed: And that’s it – I mean two weeks is pretty cleverto go from design to giving it to the ladies and awaythey go – and I guess they have some input too; Iguess they’ll say to you “no that won’t fly, try this”?

Casey: They do and they are very nice about it,

because sometimes I’m like “well can’t we just do this?”

and they look at me and say “well, yes, if you do not

want to use your hands for the rest of the day” and

they’ll suggest “oh there’s better ways of doing that” or

“oh, you mean like this” and they’ll bring it back to a

design that I had not even known about because it had

been discontinued before I really started getting into it.

So, you know, there are all these things – just yearsand years of experience that are sort of melding in toone another where I’ll come up with ideas andsometimes I’ll actually sit down and sew at a stationand try and draw it out; and when I sew they all sort ofchuckle at me and think “how adorable is that” but youknow it’s a lot of fun, and it’s a good way of learningand seeing what you can really do.

It’s the difference between seeing and doing. And the

biggest one of the year is going to be that soft

backpack.

Ed: Ooooh, show me the soft backpack. So you

hadn’t been able to do one before or what?

Casey: We never really did one before and then it

just got to the point where so many people were

requesting it ( myself included ) that we finally got a

chance …

Ed: But they could have gone and bought it from a

number of other manufacturers who are making soft

backpacks?

Casey: But it wouldn’t have been Portabrace; it

wouldn’t have outlasted their cameras. You know the

Portabrace bags that I have, I’ve switched cameras

more than I’ve switched bags. But with this backpack,

you have Velcro along the sides here, so you can attach

different dividers and lens cups and things and

accessories, but just in case you need a little bit more

room, it’s actually expanded 3 inches on the front and

you can expand it 6 inches down. And you think, youknow, well there’s only three walls on it, this thing’s

never going to stand up again, but it does. And then

you have your little tripod on the side of it; you have

room for over a 17 inch laptop; and then if that wasn’t

enough, you also have iPad / Tablet / batteries. You

have an expandable pocket …

Ed: For your lunch?

Casey: For your lunch – the Sub sandwiches getbigger every year! You have your little MOLLE web( which stands for MOdular Lightweight Load-carryingEquipment ) right here so you can move things in andout if you want to; also simple little D-rings so you cando it; and this is built with our same air-meshharnesses that we use on all of our large backpacks.We didn’t put the little belt on it, because the thing wasthis was actually so small and really designed to be verylight, so we didn’t think it was necessary. Surprisinglyenough, a lot of the design team goes out on a walkevery day for about 30 minutes and we actually tookthis out one day with about 25-30 pounds in the back ofit and everyone tried it, everyone walked uphill anddownhill and all around, and everyone found it verycomfortable. So now we’ve really started doing a lot oftesting as well when it comes to these – just makingsure that it actually is as comfortable as we want tomake it.

Ed: That’s the sort of thing the US military would likeisn’t it … you could do it in camo?

Casey: We can do it in camo; we can do it incoyote, we could do it in any colour you’d like – I meanwhat’s better than that! NZVN

Page 35

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