CAMERA ROBOTICS GEAR
T he word ‘robot’ covers a lot of ground, from sci-fi villains to automated car-factory welders. In film and TV – and particularly in the increasing crossover between them – there’s a growing world of automated devices and associated systems that let broadcasters do cleverer things than ever before. However, live production remains hard, and the techniques of single-camera drama often have to run to keep up with broadcasters’ needs. Sergio Brighel is vice president for robotics and prompting technology at Videndum Production Solutions, a company with a deep background in camera support for broadcast. “Where the industry is leading at the moment,” Brighel begins, “is towards automation. Automation is being driven by the cost reduction happening across the industry – pressure from social media, YouTube, VOD platforms.” Brighel’s ideas encompass much more than just hardware. He says that, with live production inevitably relying on a wide range of processes and systems, integration is key. “Orchestrators already exist, but they’re not that different from a washing machine program. Everything changes with a rigid schedule. What we want to do is introduce flexibility to account for the unexpected, so that presenters can deviate from the schedule and accommodate surprises during interviews, debates, talk shows or breaking news. AI is the only way to accomplish all of this.” That would involve all the robotic equipment that companies like Vinten have long been building, but with much greater integration than has been the norm. “If it’s just me before the camera, it
AUTOMATION IS being driven BY THE COST REDUCTION HAPPENING
across the industry ”
could record my camera, prompting and lighting settings, audio set-ups and all sort of other things,” Brighel says. “In the second phase, I would suggest machine learning – deep learning. The system could be trained to emulate a certain directing style and suggest the next moves. I think there’s a horizon of time between three and five years for that.” The beginnings might already exist in the guise of Vinten’s VEGA platform. “The built-in foundations of VEGA allow that to happen in real time,” Brighel explains. “It’s a modular architecture, and one of these modules is an AI from a company called Seervision – now part of Q-SYS. With them, we developed the first techniques for automatically tracking people in front of the camera, and we started planting the first seeds of this digital assistant.” Eventually, the decisions made by even the cleverest systems still need to be supported by hardware. Brighel foresees a meeting of the ways between traditional camera robotics and modern enthusiasm for integrated PTZ devices. “I just published a series of white papers: in one of them, I sketch out the possible future for PTZs. The Sony FR7 is the first of a completely new style of PTZ where you can replace the lens. We might even want to replace the entire camera head – full-frame with a 2/3 head – or move the same device into different physical domains without being constrained. “It’s what I call modular robotics. In my view, it’s the future of this field of automation.” As fields mature, the user experience usually becomes
FLUIDITY IN WORKFLOWS Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water made use of camera robotics (above); a Vinten FHR 60 set-up (right)
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