GEAR CAMERA ROBOTICS
SPORTS SUPPORT Kit from Camera Revolution – automated dolly systems and telescopic cranes – is useful for coverage of live sports like rugby
less primitive, and it’s a process which Michael Geissler, founder and CEO of Mo-Sys Engineering, remembers well. “When I founded it, producers were swearing about motion control systems. There were a lot of frustrations, and I thought, ‘there must be a simpler way’. We designed a system where everyone on-set had their jobs back. The grip was pushing the dolly, the focus puller was focus pulling and it was recording. You say record, stop, play back or let’s do it again – but don’t fiddle around with spline curves. The idea was a film shoot where, if you don’t like it, you do it again.” In the two-and-a-half decades since Geissler’s innovation, cameras have become at first smaller, then larger again, and always with that film-to-television crossover very much in evidence. “Our new remote head, the L20, has two different versions: one for film and one for broadcast, though each can be used for both. It’s one of the highest-precision, zero-backlash camera heads, and we’ve had this for years. We’re trying, for the first time, to combine the enormous precision we have in the L40 into a really small package, which is actually not much bigger than a high-end PTZ head.”
Decades of experience in hardware notwithstanding, Geissler quickly moves onto software and the sort of systems integration that separates live broadcast from high-end film and television drama. “A typical example is in VP, with LED walls. We have a product called MoViewer,” he continues. “With multiple cameras in front of an LED wall, you have to find a way to switch the background wall image out, but then the other, off-air cameras won’t have an image. The director has nothing to look at, which is weird for a camera you’re about to switch to.”
Pre-existing approaches might have involved timing multiple cameras to capture frames sequentially and displaying the appropriate background for each one at just the right instant. The problem is that the achievable precision of an LED video wall, using pulse-width modulation, depends on how long each frame is displayed for. The more cameras, the shorter the display time for each. “For eight cameras, you have to timeslice each frame into slices that are one-eighth of the exposure time. You need eight times more light, and
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