In Broadcast - April 2018 - 54

54

www.inbroadcast.com | Vol: 8 - Issue 4 | April 2018

InStudio

Playout Sols

cont'd...

Cinegy has been making the most of
its Cloud solutions and its move away
from what it likes to characterise as
'monolithic black boxes' into 'networkattached real-time service appliances'.
Cinegy Air PRO consists of two
elements: a control panel providing
an interface for controlling one or
more playout channels connected
via TCP/IP; and a playout engine that
executes the playlist provided to it
and renders video and audio to air.
Handily, it also sends real-time video
stream feedback to the control panel
interface, eliminating the need for
video monitors as well as SDI cabling
and routing.

In recent months it has also
bundled it up into the Cinegy Air
PRO 10 bundle and made it available
on both the Amazon Web Services
and Microsoft Azure marketplaces.
This gives a good insight into the costs
associated with modern Cloud-based
playout, the software being charged
by AWS at US$1.50 per hour and the
estimated infrastructure pricing (via
Frankfurt) coming in at US$0.906 per
hour for the vendor recommended
instance. Total playout cost: US$2.406
per hour.
Amongst other things, Pebble
Beach has demonstrations planned
for NAB that include the deployment
of multiple virtualised channels
in the Cloud with its Orca, a
virtualised IP channel solution
for playout from the private
or public Cloud. The company
has recently integrated the
NDI IP video standard into its
products too, and this provides
a
low-latency,
light-weight,
frame accurate video protocol,
giving Orca's users less than one
Cinegy Air PRO yours for US$1.50/h via AWS
frame of delay when confidence

to reflect the revenue risk and
bring it back down again once
back in 2am reality programming
territory.
With 17,500 installed channels
around the world, PlayBox is
PlayBox Neo has had more than 40 new features
added to its modules in the past year one of the big beasts of the
monitoring CiaB or virtualised playout
playout world, and continues to
systems over an IP network running as innovate its server-based Neo and
low as 10Mbps.
SaaS-based CloudAir respectively.
Ian Cockett, CTO and Co-Founder Some 40 new features were added to
of Pebble Beach Systems, recently its Neo modules last year, and it too
wrote an interesting article looking has had disaster on its mind recently,
at redundancy in the Cloud, pointing introducing the Neo TS Time Delay
out that the largest providers in module to provide a fully transparent
the market have already thought delay of IP transport streams for
this all through and have multiple, single or multichannel time zone shift
physically separated data centres and disaster-recovery applications.
(see Evertz, above). It's no longer CloudAir, meanwhile, gained a
a case of asking how many '9s' you transcoder capable of handling
want - and want to pay for - in terms multiple file wrappers and formats,
of reliability though (99% is one cost, an enhanced graphics editor template
99.9% is more expensive) as 100% preparation
interface,
improved
uptime is becoming more and more playlist editing, advanced playlist
commonplace.
export to EPGs and automated linking
It costs too, of course, but Cockett of stored assets.
also points out that one of the
It's interesting to note, that it's
wonders of the Cloud is its ability to now just over a decade since PlayBox
scale in many directions, and that introduced a system which gave
includes designing different levels of broadcasters the option of hosting
redundancy for different scenarios. their playout servers at the distant end
Playing out during a major sporting of an Internet connection rather than
event? You can scale redundancy up on-site. Maybe it will catch on...

Sony's FS7 Cameras
Join Fugitive Hunt
T

he production team behind
Channel 4's hit high-tension
fugitive drama, Hunted, used Sony's
PXW-FS7 cameras for series 3 which
aired recently.
Marrying image quality with run-andgun versatility, Sony's large sensor
FS7 cameras were selected for their
flexibility, ergonomics and ability to
deliver cinematic quality on a budget.
Produced by Shine TV for Channel 4,
the factual entertainment show follows
a group of civilians (Fugitives) sent on
the run from a team of former police

Chanel 4's Hunted - Series 3 (Images © Channel 4)

and intelligence offers (Hunters) in a
bid to evade capture for up to 25 days
for a share of £100,000.
Sony's FS7 cameras were used to
film the Hunters at their London HQ,
shooting 12 hours a day, seven days
a week across four weeks of filming,
as well as being used to follow the
deployed Hunters into the field and
bring the thrill of the chase to viewers
at home.
"The cameras out in the field had
their work cut out as those guys are
racing around all manner of locations,

Sony's large sensor
FS7 camera

in and out of vehicles and
often in very compromised
lighting conditions," said
Lee York, series Director of
Photography.
Jeremy
Humphries,
a
camera operator on the
series and owner of Skills2Film, said:
"The FS7, complete with its
Super 35mm sensor allowed
us to use a shallow depth of
field which helped achieve a
different look and feel between
the Hunters HQ and the fugitive

chase."
The
FS7's
ergonomic,
compact and lightweight form
factor was beneficial in the
testing run-and-gun environment
of Hunted. Tom Hutchings, Series
Producer explained: "Out in the field,
so much of Hunted is shot in homes,
helicopters or cars, where traditionally
subjects would not stand up well to
high contrast. Shooting in S-Log means
our colourist constantly had a smile on
his face."
Filming for Hunted, series 3, began
in June 2017 and ran for seven days
a week for four consecutive weeks.
Series 3 aired on Channel 4 from
January 4 to February 8, 2018.
http://www.inbroadcast.com https://playboxtechnology.com/ https://home.cinegy.com/ https://pro.sony/en_GB/products/handheld-camcorders/pxw-fs7m2?cmp=ppc-ngp-11208&aaca=1067584255&aaad=58080151171&aake=%2Bfs7&aama=b&aapl=&aata=&aacr=253100006627&aade=c&gclid=Cj0KCQjwnfLVBRCxARIsAPvl82G64jUc7kcrdPzTyLYn56-qPcniQpm_EnfnJclygAyplCWvXWesmt0aAmb3EALw_wcB
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