Back in August Bruce traveled to a farm in upstate New York to work with Stephen Colbert and the fabulous team at The Colbert Report as Stephen continued his series called Stephen Colbert's Fallback Position.
The result from this particular piece was that Stephen was called to be a special witness before Congress today. Bruce and Gonzalo are covering it live, again with HDX900s, for a piece that will air in the near future on The Colbert Report.
Here are some behind the scenes photos from the shoot on the farm:
The Cube is made by a company called Teradek and, as the title of this post says, it allows for wireless monitoring of audio and video from any camera with an HD-SDI out to a laptop, iPhone or iPad via WiFi. There is an HDMI version as well but we picked up the HD-SDI version as we're more excited about the possibilities of using the Cube with the majority of our HD cameras.
The biggest question when setting up a new piece of production gear is always, "how easy is this to do on set?" As with any piece of gear it's something you SHOULDN'T be setting up or playing with for the first time on location. However, it's pretty easy to do and doesn't require a member of the Geek Squad or a 12 year old Japanese schoolgirl. The Cube itself is a piece of cake, power it up, feed it video over HD-SDI, connect the antenna and you're done. Now you need to set up your laptop and, conveniently, there's a video to help you:
You will need to download some freeware called VLC, which you'll use to view the video stream. Once you have that downloaded and installed there's another video to watch that will show you how the final steps to watch the video coming from your camera:
That's it. Seriously.
We've tested the Cube on our cameras here at Visual Edge and can tell you that it works flawlessly on the Sony F900R CineAlta, the XDCAM F800, the HDW-730 and the EX3 as well as Panasonic's Varicam, HDX900 and HPX2000 in all resolutions and at all frame rates.
There is a slight delay in the feed to a laptop, which we've timed as right around 0.5 seconds. The delay to an iPhone was more fluid and less workable, timing out at somewhere between 4 -13 seconds. The good folks at Teradek are aware of this and are working on resolving the issue, which is rooted in Apple's devices.
The possibilities are quite staggering. Producer can't make the interview due to a last minute flight cancellation? Stream the feed straight to them and they can see what you're shooting over the internet. Marketing companies can stream events out live to an audience or a news organization can get footage to the studio and on the air without a truck. Record the stream onto your laptop and the producer can walk with high quality video files to review on the train home and prep for the edit. Or, at it's most basic level, have the producer sitting comfortably with their laptop open watching what you shoot while you wander around grabbing shots.
I may well be in love. Give us a call to give it a test drive and you may well be, too.
