Streaming Media's Gear of the Year, 2013-14

Anthony Burokas' Picks

Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera

We find ourselves at the precipice of production, where high quality, better-than-HD video has become very affordable and easily attainable, where editing tools are more approachable and easier to use than ever before, and 4K production is starting to make inroads into our daily lives.

Nearly every camera on the market today records HD by compressing it into one codec or another. It may be the near-universal AVCHD, or a higher-end codec that provides greater bit depth and lighter compression to provide higher quality for your finished product. But those high-end systems cost a lot. Or they did, I should say, until Blackmagic Design shipped its Pocket Cinema Camera (below) offering raw video for less than $1,000.

Raw video captures what the sensor sees, with as little intervention as possible. This provides greater detail, greater dynamic range, and—not surprisingly—much higher data rates, which means a more involved workflow when it’s time to get the video out of the camera. But for the price of a high-end point-and-shoot camera, without requiring any third-party software like Magic Lantern to enable raw on the camera, the Pocket Cinema Camera enables you to record some of the best, highest-latitude video possible.

On the back end, software tools are evolving to handle the raw/Cinema DNG output of the Pocket Cinema Camera in a more fluid way, with fewer “workaround” steps. It’s a new process, so it’s not yet the drag-and-drop easy workflow we've achieved with the more established codecs. But these are new capabilities at this price point and the available tools are adapting to make the workflow easier and more intuitive.

While BMD’s Pocket Cinema Camera is tiny and thus not the easiest camera to use, it does offer audio in and video out to enable you to build a capable setup around it. Think of it as a great sensor in a case, to which you need to add everything else. But for the price, there is nothing out there that comes close to offering the images that the Pocket Cinema Camera places—quite literally—in the hands of users, for under a grand.

NewTek TriCaster 40

When it comes time to add a second or third camera, then you need to start thinking about a video mixer. When HD started taking over the production environment, I lamented the lack of affordable HD video mixers (http://bit.ly/1jc0Gh6). Blackmagic Design changed that with their sub-$1,000 ATEM Television Studio. I presented a session on sub-$5,000 video mixers at Streaming Media Producer Live last November, and when directly comparing the features of all these video mixers, it became clear to me that there is one standout solution: NewTek’s TriCaster (TC) 40 (below).

The caveats are that it is still a software-driven product. While you can use a normal computer keyboard, adding the external control surfaces for video switching make it more intuitive, tactile, and mistake-proof. Also, the TC40 has component video inputs, not HDMI or HD-SDI. But you can convert HDMI/SDI to component and, when compared to HDMI, component cabling can more easily handle longer runs.

The key features that first jump out are the fact that the TC40 will accept video of any size and frame rate, and mix them together. The TC40 also has an internal playback deck, the ability to simultaneously record the program output in a different format, multiview source monitors in the program interface, audio mixing, and a whole lot more. The TC40 also features a built-in titler, multiple ME layers, and internal 3D sets. These internal sets turn a very basic greenscreen into a polished, expensive-looking background.

Lastly, in addition to the video out (for IMAG) and internal recording, there’s the third output of the TriCaster (hence the “Tri”): built-in streaming capability. Your streaming deliverable can be a different size, frame rate, or data rate from your master record and your video output. How’s that for flexibility? There are numerous other small details for more specific needs, such as the ability to take live score data for sports events and tie that in to the TriCaster for automatic updating of graphics.

Note that the latest MSRP for the TC40 v2 has pushed it above the $5,000 threshold, but it’s still widely available at $4,995. And when I look at everything else in that $5,000 (and less) range, nothing comes close. Best of all, Newtek has been building and refining the software video mixer for over 23 years. That’s a very long time in this industry. NewTek does both the software and the hardware, so you can rest assured that it’s a solid system with components designed to work together, and not something cobbled together from various third-party products.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC

What the TriCaster doesn’t do, however, is edit. I, like many in the industry, made the transition from Final Cut Studio to the Adobe Creative Suite when Apple killed their Pro Apps as we knew them. I was initially reluctant to move to Adobe, as Adobe itself was transitioning form a boxed product (Creative Suite 6) to an online “app store”-type solution called Creative Cloud. But very quickly, the capabilities of the Creative Cloud license became useful to me.

Creative Cloud (CC) (below) is a license to the end user to use Adobe apps on whatever machine you have in front of you—Mac or PC. This alone is a huge improvement over owning a physical copy. I own CS5 for Mac, but getting the CS6 crossgrade to PC (I also switched to PC for editing) would have cost me $699. I opted to join CC at the introductory rate. The CC license covers both Mac and PC. Within days, I was using this capability to speed my work and make me money.

I was freelancing on set and they were using Final Cut Studio 3 on a pretty recent 6-core i7 iMac. However, exporting video from Final Cut Pro 7 used only half the cores to 60%; the other half were at 30%. It was wasting time and processing power. I loaded my CC license on their Mac and was soon exporting using all 6 cores at 100%. It cut my export time by more than half.

At home, my new PC developed a hardware issue which left it unusable for a short period of time. I was in the middle of editing a project for delivery that week. I removed the PC’s internal hard drive, copied the video folder off the PC drive and onto my Mac, installed Premiere 6 on my Mac, opened the project file, and everything was exactly where I left it. The playhead was even where it was when I last saved. I exported and made my delivery schedule with time to spare.

Now, it seems annoying to have to pay monthly for your software. Many people were not upgrading to each and every version of Adobe’s $1,800 Creative Suite. They did this to save money. But let’s do the math. Let’s say you, like most editors, upgrade to every other version. Divide $1800 by 3 (for an upgrade every 3 years). Divide that $600 by 12 months and you get $50/month. CC is $49 a month. It’s the same cost, but now has 20 apps, a lot more features like shared web space, fonts, and other add-ons, as well as cross-platform support and remote installation/activation without a pile of discs.

That cross-platform capability enabled me to work around a computer failure, install it temporarily on a client’s computer, and keep my deliverables on time—something that was impossible to do with my physical CS5 discs. So, for the same price as a new box set every three years, Adobe Creative Cloud offers much more.

Sony FDR-AX1

Lastly—speaking of products that give you much more—the release of Sony’s $4,500 FDR-AX1 (below) and the $5,500 PXW-Z100 have solidified 4k for producers in a way that $500 4K TVs and Samsung’s 4K shooting Galaxy Note III cell phone hadn’t. It’s one thing to have 4K at the highest end of production for motion picture distribution. It’s another to have consumer 4K cameras and TVs. But when you enable the prosumer market to easily transition to 4K production, you jumpstart 4K the same way Sony did it for HDV with the HDR-FX1 and Z1U camcorders.

The AX1 gives the mid-level owner/operator a 20x optical lens with ND filters, using H.264 to record up to two hours of 4Kp60 video on a 64GB QXD card in one of the camera’s two internal media slots. No external recorder. No expensive lenses. No tangle of wires to make it work and monitor your source. This simplicity, ease of use, and complete practicality is what will bring 4K into the hands of the people that will generate the most 4K content. Moreover, the camcorder also shoots regular HD with incredible oversampling from the 4K sensor inside.

At the outset, Sony is also including a 32GB QXD card and a full copy of its 4K-capable NLE, Vegas Pro 12, with your camcorder purchase. So you get everything from lens to delivery in the box.

Should you spring the extra grand for the high-end model? It depends on whether you need 10-bit 4:2:2 video at up to 600Mbps full 4K, versus 8-bit 4:2:0 video at 150Mbps QHD.

What's the difference between Full 4K versus Quad HD? Well, 4K is 4096x2160 and Quad HD is 3840x2160. At this high resolution, I doubt the difference is visible. So really, the issue is color space; whether you need 4:2:2 or 4:2:0 will do comes down to how much grading and coloring you’ll do in post.

I expect most people will find the AX1 sufficient. And, unlike with the earliest HDV-era camcorders, the hardware is identical with XLR jacks and video I/O. I expect people who are now looking at $3,000 and $4,000 camcorders will opt to “future-proof” themselves with the AX1. For a little more, they’ll get a very nice HD camcorder that also enables them to start shooting and editing 4K so that when the clients start asking for it, they can deliver it without having to buy or rent a 4K camcorder to do the job.

Also, much as you could shoot HD and deliver DV (as most of us did) at the very beginning of HD, you can shoot 4K and deliver HD. You can even crop, pan and scan, and zoom in post within the 4K footage and still deliver full HD. Then, in a few years, when 4K becomes more of an expectation, you will already have a catalog of 4K content.

2013 was very kind to video producers with better and more affordable tools to shoot, mix, edit, stream, and deliver HD, as well as the introduction of new tools that enable high-end 4K acquisition, editing, and delivery right out of the box.