- The new Blackmagic Studio Camera 6K Pro
- Telestream Content Manager: the next-gen solution for cloud storage
Technological Experts: Philip Grossman, Mary Ann Seidler.
Host: Maria Kholodova.
The live broadcast will take place on March 6th, 2023. Production — TKT1957 LLC, Georgia.
Maria: Blackmagic has announced a number of products, including the ATEM Television Studio HD8 switchers and the Blackmagic Studio Camera 6K Pro. The switchers feature broadcast-grade control panels with advanced features such as streaming and recording. The studio camera features an EF lens mount, a larger 6K sensor for improved colorimetry and fine detail handling, ND filters, and built-in live streaming. So, Mary, talk to me about these switchers.
Mary: All I can say is…..wow! It’s like they’ve thought of everything on this. I love that it’s portable so it has a lot of flexibility as to where it could be used. It’s got 8 SDI inputs, 4 chroma keys, and a chalk block of other features as well. What’s also cool is that it has streaming capabilities and Talkback capabilities, and I’m very intrigued by their option for internal cloud storage. My first thought on seeing it was to run it immediately which speaks of how easy it is to use. It has so many applications outside of broadcasting, first of all, for OB vans, sports, and for corporate purposes, which is quite underrated, education, college stations, and small Tv studios. The one thing I’m curious to ask you about is their cameras. Philip, what do you feel about these new products?
Philip: They’ve actually done a lot with their cameras. I think their first cameras are called Pocket Cinema cameras and I think those are pretty amazing sort of 35mm-like cameras that really shot cinematic content. It shot DNG RAW and they just kept growing from there. They’ve had some hits and some misses with their cameras but I think in their studio line, they’re really gauging it towards bringing professional-level capabilities to the masses. You want to have more people who are producing content or have more places to create content? We’ve got to make it easy to create content and the content has to be done professionally. And as you said, on that switcher, it’s very easy to use. When you go into a lot of studios, you see massive switchers with 10,000 buttons on them and you are wondering if it’s going to work but this, on the other hand, is a clean way of producing content. And I think that that, combined with the ability to control the cameras makes it easy for small operations to create very professional-looking content.
Maria: Moving on to Telestream. Telestream will unveil Content Manager, a next-generation system leveraging both on-prem and cloud storage at NAB. It provides a single point of access for content across an organization’s entire storage ecosystem, including cloud and on-prem platforms. So Philip, tell me about this and how it’ll help broadcasters.
Philip: One thing I’ve heard from a lot of customers, clients, and friends in the industry about the cloud is that it’s difficult to manage on the cloud and on-prem. So there’s this Holy Grail need to create a solution that helps you to manage multi-cloud contents because you are going to be dealing with people who are using Dropbox or AWS or Azure plus because you have things on-prem, you’ll want to see a holistic view of everything and I think this is a very good first step towards that. There are some features and functions that I think they can add in later because of their transcoding and their other tool set which obviously has to put things in certain locations, it makes perfect sense to be able to have something on-prem, transcode it to get it into the cloud or the other way round. So it’s definitely an interesting tool and I’m hoping that more vendors will start to build things like this.
Maria: What do you think are the kind of things that it would get used for?
Philip: Since there’s so much remote production going on nowadays and getting content back to the studio to be played in the “control room” which could be either on-prem or on the cloud but all the materials are typically in one location. This would help them to manage multiple locations and get that content that is field-produced or remotely produced into a singular location making it very easy for productions to go forward because having content spread around the world is great for ease of use but horrible from the production perspective. I think a lot of these would tie into their transcoding capabilities and software packages by making it easier to move content from different locations and centralize it. I hope a lot of companies will start thinking along those lines. It’s not an either-or, it’s a both.
