{spotlight} feature reports

IBC 9 th – 13 th September 2005

(Or penicillin not required!)

Apparently there are many reasons for visiting Amsterdam, some of which cannot be printed here being less than salubrious, but thanks to the Glasgow Film Office, I was able to visit IBC – The main European Tradeshow for the Broadcast Industry.

Anyone contemplating going to IBC 2006 book now!!! Amsterdam is completely full for the few days of the show and accommodation is impossible to find. Things were so desperate that at one point that I considered hiring a car to sleep in! To say that I left it a little later than I should to book accommodation is an understatement, so when one of the many booking websites showed availability at a central 2 star hotel I had to take what was on offer.

In Amsterdam where real estate is at a premium you can tell the class of a hotel by the angle of the stairs. The steeper the stair the less floor area it takes up. The swanky hotels have the kind of gradient one has become accustomed to in the UK, however my bedroom on the third floor of my hotel was reached by climbing up a ladder more akin to the north face of the Eiger. Going up was bad, coming down on Sunday morning after a Saturday night out was nearly terminal.

The trade show itself is in the RAI, Amsterdam’s much larger version of our SECC. It takes up the entire 11 halls and the exhibitors range from one-man booths offering solvents to clean labels off video cassettes to huge displays from companies like multi-nationals Sony, JVC, Apple and Microsoft.

IBC also offers the opportunity to network with other like-minded souls from all over the globe. Perhaps I am an anorak, but there is something exhilarating about being at the sharp end along with 43,0000 other visitors, all involved in the same type of industry, it is the scope of IBC that is its great achievement. Featuring over 1,000 companies it showcases the latest technology and foremost business ideas in broadcasting and media. Well worth the sore feet!

As managing director of JAe Ltd, about to move into new premises in Morrison Street near Pacific Quay, it was important that I made it to IBC to keep abreast of any significant new developments in the technology, the industry standards and in the people. In particular I was looking at enhancing our grading and finishing capability for film. Our intension with our new facility is to offer a cinema with a full size 2K Cinema DLP projector where films can be graded on a cinema screen. To complement this I was looking at grading systems to add to those already offered by our DS Nitris

JAe Ltd has been working with HD for a couple of years now. We have our own HDcam camera, decks and editing systems. I thought very little could surprise me about HD but it came as a bit of a surprise to find that there are at least 37 varieties of High Definition, if you consider tape format, frame rates, and frame sizes! Why is this important to the Scottish Film Industry? Well, the buzz surrounding the recent arrival of the HDV format cameras has led to a degree of confusion. According to Sony they have shipped over 37,000 Z1 cameras. Production companies are snapping them up as fast as they can. The down side is that, at present, there is no professional deck capable of playing back these formats in a finishing suite. The only way to play these tapes back at present is via the camera. The pictures and deck control are via a firewire connection. The digital accessories company, Miranda showed a nifty little gizmo that plugs into the camera that gives a usable video and audio signals output for high end edit systems and allows the camera to be controlled like a standard deck using a 9 pin 422 protocol. Good to bear in mind!

On one of the many Avid stands they demonstrated the effects of multi-pass processing on various acquisition formats from HDV to HDcam. Astonishingly, the Sony HDV format has a whopping 40:1 compression applied to it to compress all the pixels onto a tiny DV tape, it may come as no surprise then that after a few passes the image starts to seriously degrade. What this means in practise is that if you do significant processing on your images in their native compression don’t expect them to stand scrutiny. Again, no surprise that the lower compression of HDcam was more robust and that the more expensive edit systems offering uncompressed processing knocked spots off the cheaper competition. You get what you pay for kind of sums it up.

My other mission at IBC was to track down the latest in routers. Routers or matrices as they used to be known on this side of the Atlantic are boxes which route pictures and sound from edit suites to decks and back again. JAe Ltd needs a big router for our 14 edit systems but try as I might I cannot make this subject interesting so suffice to say there are loads of companies selling them and I found one that I liked! Now I just have to pluck up the courage to tell my wife that we would like it!

I love Amsterdam, the people are fantastic and they put up with the annual invasion of TV and film boffins with good grace and patience. We take over their trams, trains, pubs, restaurants and hotels. For me IBC is a kind of short-term crystal ball to judge where the industry will be in a year. A lot of the systems and products shown at IBC are not released to the market for months. You can see trends and witness genuine innovation. It allows me to plan the year ahead from a technology point of view, to keep us ahead of developments. All we need now are the films and programmes!

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