Christian Heinzel’s team at Fifty Frames use AJA Ki Pro Ultra 12G recorders, FS-HDR HDR/WCG converters and KUMO 3232-12G SDI routers to keep a level of certainty in live environments.
Christian Heinzel is founder of Fifty Frames (GmbH) live event production studio in Germany. For him, every live event production or installation his company works on becomes an opportunity to work with emerging techniques and confront new challenges. It's an approach he takes to business generally, seeing his studio push rapidly ahead into 4K HDR and IP live event production and video streaming workflows. Among their current list of clients are luxury car brands, musicians and major corporations across Europe.
Performance Anxiety
“In August, we took on an interesting UltraHD HDR production for a German punk band that included more than ten cameras. It was a massive event, but the recording effort had to be kept secret. “Even around 95 percent of the stage crew had no idea what was going on,” said Christian. “The band’s management team designed the project this way after performance anxiety ruined the last few shows they tried to capture for a DVD recording.”
Nevertheless, by the end of the show, they had captured 75 TB of UHD HDR footage by installing 14 AJA Ki Pro Ultra 12Gs, and then turning their rack around so that the band wouldn’t spot them. Christian said, “Actually, it was an easy decision to use the Ki Pros for the project because I’ve used them for years without any issues. They’re reliable and affordable, especially compared to other options on the market, and I always include them in my production and studio designs.
“Because Ki Pro Ultra 12G is so flexible, I can record a single channel of UHD or multiple channels of HD. By recording eight HD camera feeds with just two devices, I save a ton of rack space. They are simple enough that I don’t need a dedicated specialist for them, which isn’t the case with all gear. Most important, I can access it easily from rental houses when a production requires more than the ten units I own. Ki Pro Ultra 12G is very popular in the production circuit and I know I can secure extra units from almost any supplier.
UltraHD with HDR – a Year of Planning
Fifty Frames started planning a year ahead for the three-day punk concert. It took place in a massive venue on a former airfield in Berlin, and more than 150,000 people turned out for it. “When we got the first drawings of the stage and the LED screens, we realized just how massive it would be,” said Christian. “We knew we’d need to do something really special because it wasn’t going to be a traditional concept.
“Owing to the UltraHD screens, we opted to go all in on UltraHD and tap into HDR to give it that extra visual appeal. To keep the recording secret, we had to place the cameras strategically, some on the roof of the airfield towers and others in less visible spots. Due to the lighting situation, which included changes from bright to dark, and a lot of very unusual effects, SDR wasn’t an option – we would have needed to look after camera shading full-time. HDR, on the other hand, gave us a bigger dynamic range, so we could see there was a lot of light, but it wasn’t overexposed.”
They used a combination of broadcast grade and remote UltraHD cameras, an UltraHD switcher, AJA’s FS-HDR and Ki Pro Ultra 12Gs, and a long list of other kit. Because the cameras were mixed, they all had to be matched. They used the FS-HDR to align the HDR and colour settings on the remote cameras to the broadcast grade cameras. “The device is absolutely brilliant in that respect. It’s truly a Swiss Army knife for colour conversion,” Christian said.
Simple Solutions to Complex Challenges
The Fifty Frames team have tackled many other less than conventional productions as well. While working on an HDR live event project for a major car brand in Frankfurt, they realized their media servers only had HDMI and display port outputs and wouldn't transport the HDR signal.
Christian and his colleague Oliver Derynck worked out a solution together, speculating that if it were possible to convert the signals of the media server to 12G-SDI and run it through an FS-HDR, then they could reconfigure the signal as HDR and run it through the switcher. "We tested it out, and it worked, so we were able to retain the HDR metadata," said Christian. "FS-HDR helped provide a simple solution to a really complex challenge."
For the occasional augmented reality (AR) project Christian's team encounters, he's built custom real-time rendering machines with integrated AJA Corvid 44 12G cards for I/O. "We've done a few AR projects with Zero Density, and they're a lot of fun, although the workflow is different," he commented. "Our systems for these are presently baseband SDI, but the goal is to move them to SMPTE ST 2110."
IP for Live Production
Regarding standards, as Fifty Frames continues to innovate across client productions and studio installs, Christian sees SMPTE ST 2110 as a way to simplify the transport of uncompressed media. He noted, "With SMPTE ST 2110, we expect to be able to work with high bandwidth media as we would with SDI, with no compression, while introducing benefits such as a reduction in equipment to substantial power and performance gains.
“Less equipment means a lighter load for travel, and with the right IP router, I can move 400 UltraHD signals using a 1RU device, which is amazing. Next year, I think we're going to see a lot more SMPTE ST 2110 products surface."
Meanwhile, Christian plans to continue making the most of his KUMO 3232-12G SDI routers to support routing across projects. "KUMO 3232-12G is an affordable way for us to push signals where they need to go, whether to the shaders or for monitoring,” he said. “It does what it's supposed to do, it’s reliable and you don't have to study the manual in-depth to operate it. That's important because my team doesn't have time to fiddle around with equipment – they just need it to work." www.aja.com
