It looks like the IBC four-day format is here to stay, which I’m a big fan of. Five days was always too long, especially if you tag on the increasingly influential SVG Summit at the front end. But do you think that Thursday – Sunday would be better than Friday – Monday? I doubt that anyone flew out on the Monday for one day, and it was certainly much quieter on the Monday as lots of visitors cleared out on the Sunday night. Was I the only visitor who attended for all 4 days?
No queues to get in on the sunniest of first mornings was joyous, as finally they’ve worked out what NAB has known for years and set up some remote badge pick up sites. Bravo IBC! Now if you could just make the hotel rooms, restaurant menus and on-site drinks cheaper we’d all be begging for the fifth day back. And while you’re at it, if you could copy the functionality of the ISE app in to yours that would be a huge help. Does anyone else use and get frustrated with the show apps?
Just over 43,000 attendees visited this year, up on last year as you’d expect but well below the 56,000 that attended in 2019 before the pandemic. Why do you think that is? For me it did feel busy and buzzy in parts, and there aren’t many busier places in Amsterdam than the Beach bar when the sun is shining. I very much doubt that any actual business was done after 5pm, but memories and friendships are built on time together, so time well spent..ish.
And a word on the hit and miss omni-shambles that is Schiphol. I hope you got lucky, travel reports from friends range from a doddle to a disaster. I thought I’d cracked it by getting the train, but apparently Brexit has messed that up for a little while. It’s the gift that keeps on taking.
As I was preparing to press “send” on this article, news came through that an end may finally be in sight for the writers and actors strike, which would make a huge difference to the businesses of many of our customers. Fingers crossed……
We at Adamantean cover many sectors in the IBC catchment area that have been thriving. Sports production has been at the vanguard of broadcast technology since the inception of the Premier League and this sector shows no sign of slowing up despite the evolution of BT Sports to the BT / Warner Brothers Joint Venture TNT Sports. Live TV seems pretty strong, and concerts and events have been well-attended this year where we help pay for large LED walls and line array speakers. All is “fine and dandy” in these sectors.…
But the writers and actors strike action has impacted all parts of the digital cinematography world. From the diverse freelance community who haven’t worked for months, highlighted recently in this viral Reddit post, to the global camera and lens manufacturers and resellers. It’s been a significant problem that I saw first hand at Pinewood Studios recently which felt like a film set from of a zombie movie.
This lack of work has also been directly impacting the equipment rental companies who have made major financial commitments to buy the cameras and lenses and everything that goes round them. I understand that Panavison among others are on a four-day week and the larger resellers, many of whom have ridden the HETV gravy-train of £200K lens sets and £70K+ camcorders, are busy trying to pivot to mainstream TV, or education, or live production, or Natural History, or any sector that is still buying hardware.
For this sector, the impact is as bad, if not worse than Covid. At least with Covid you didn’t need to explain what Covid was.
Without doubt, the announcement of the potential end of the strike is excellent news for everyone in my network, and should be seen as the beginning of the end of the issue. Details still need to be finalised on what will be a complex deal, and all parties need to sign on the dotted line. And it will take time for content to be made again, and crew and equipment to be back on set in any meaningful way. So, whilst the taps won’t be fully open immediately, at least they’ve put the plug back in.
For those freelancers in need of more than just thoughts and prayers, there is financial and emotional support still available from the Film And TV Charity.
Now back to the IBC exhibition itself, and a good number of things did catch my eye, other than a few Monday morning umbrellas.
With my finance hat on, Spring 2024 will see the first deliveries of the Sony Burano camcorder. Burano, in case you didn’t know, is a beautiful island in the Venetian Lagoon, so when Sony was looking for a name for a camera that was slightly smaller, a lot cheaper , and that didn’t do quite as much as a Venice did, it makes sense. Price expectations are around £22K, and after listening to people who know far more about cameras than I do, it should be popular. It’s already been christened the “Burrito”, so maybe more Mexican than Italian.
BlackMagic had a really clever Davinci Resolve app that allows you to upload proxy media files straight in to a pre-named Resolve folder from your phone, which can be transmitted straight to air as-is, and when the high-res files arrive, the EDL can be added to these to quickly produce a high-res version. The app will even take a 16:9 cropped image from the phone shooting vertically, which makes the camera operator look less like a journalist. A definite advantage if you’re in the middle of a riot / war zone / Millwall v Leeds game. And the app is free!
You know when you buy a new car, and it’s only then that you start to realise how many of them are on the road. I’d never heard of Skaarhoj (apparently pronounced Skarhoy) before I had a demo of the Panasonic Kairos vision mixer. The mixer itself is powerful and flexible, and Panasonic has shared the protocols which has allowed Skaarhoj to make a lower cost, modular control surface which looked fantastic.I liked this idea as the control panel is agnostic and has the internal protocols to work with a Kairos one day, an ATEM the next, as well as any one of a handful of other vision mixer manufacturers hardware. That seemed pretty clever to me. I then noticed Skaarhoj control hardware on 2 other stands within an hour, and another the next day, so clearly my bad for not knowing / noticing them before.
A crucial skill of any exhibitor is the ability to give a 5 minute elevator pitch, getting across the keys points and benefits, and perhaps the odd USP or two. The Skaarhoj salesperson nailed this. With so much to grab a visitor’s attention at the show, a well-honed and practised introduction to the benefits that your product can offer is essential.
Newsbridge also understand the need for a clear succinct initial pitch and seem to have found a sweet spot where their extremely sophisticated, AI indexing software can be explained in a way that makes it equally as accessible to me as a non-tech, as it is to a potential customer who needs a whole different level of technical detail. They are definitely winning and are one to discover if you have a requirement to log and monetise your live sports or news content.
I had lunch with some old friends / customers on the Saturday and one was asking if I’d seen any new small track solutions, which was bizarre as I’d just come from seeing the Panatrack on the Villrich Broadcast stand. The larger of the two sizes can also be fitted with the expertly designed Polecam Autopod which adds a layer of flexibility. I really liked this solution, and if it’s good enough for Muse, then it’ll do for me.
LED technology was prevalent throughout the show, emphasising the continued convergence of AV and HETV, and in particular the demand for volume studios as an additional utility where previously they’ve been most common at large venues as LED walls. Infiled were keen to promote their new RGBW panels and ROE had their new Ruby 1.9BV2 panels on display on what was a pretty impressive stand. The environmental benefit of volume studios is hard to argue with, saving money and time by not flying 100’s of crew round the world, as is quantified in this excellent recent study.
Fuji have broadened their range of Duvo HETV lenses (no, I’ve no idea why they called them that either) with a couple of barrel lenses, a 14-100mm and a 24-300mm. Their extraordinarily expensive and unique PL mount 25-1000 box lens is a huge investment for any rental business but does give amazing images if you can find focus. I did discover a neat focus assist function where the viewfinder shows big squares where it’s in focus, and smaller / no squares where it’s out of focus. This really emphasised to me just how good camera operators have to be. Lead times are the bane of lens manufacturers and customers lives currently with 6 month lead times on some box lenses.
The use of HETV hardware in live sports broadcast to give shallow depth of shots for player reactions is becoming a theme in sports production. If you’ve watched any of the World Cup rugby, you’ll have seen the close-up of the try scorer to get the reaction shot. I know that a lot of TV-purist industry friends of mine don’t like it, but the punters at home do, so expect it to become more common, and I’m told it’ll be a feature of next year’s Paris Olympics coverage. Personally, I love it as it brings me in to the action.
A quick mention for the Motion Impossible Agito Cine that can now handle a 150KG payload for the largest of camera rigs, and is expertly engineered here in the UK.
I’ve known MRMC for years, and I even met Mark himself many years ago. They’ve always been a technically excellent business, and have added some smaller sliders to their range which looked like solid pieces of kit.
And I do like the SNS storage solutions generally, and their MOD portable solid-state-drive personal server in particular. It seems to have developed almost by accident for an internal application, but are proving extremely popular with customers. Are they the broadcast equivalent of Velcro ?
And finally, the extraordinary content that I saw on the. Pixotope stand was really eye-catching. Their huge AR panther jumping around the US American Football stadium is everywhere on my social media feeds. Likewise with Disguise, what can be done with XR and VR is mind-blowing.
Were there more awards given out this year? My LinkedIn feed is full of award-winning posts for best this and best that. Congratulations to you all. I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t win “Best Visitor”. Oh well, there’s always next year.
This is my 50th Linked In article, most of which have been post-tradeshow reviews. And many of you were kind enough to comment that you spend some time reading them. Hilariously, an old friend actually called me a journalist. I can assure you that I’m just a guy, writing about a trade show, and asking you to love reading it.