Gravity Media, the leading global provider of complex live broadcast facilities and production services to content owners, creators and distributors, has promoted Ed Tischler to the position of Acting Managing Director. In this new role, Ed will be responsible for the strategic direction and commercial performance of all Gravity Media’s UK-based operations, which include Media Services & Facilities, Production & Content and Equipment Rental & Sales. This appointment follows the recent move to the single brand of Gravity Media late last year and Ed will take the lead in integrating the former Gearhouse Broadcast, HyperActive Broadcast and Input Media businesses in the UK. In addition, Layla Cook has also been promoted, becoming Gravity Media’s new UK Broadcast Equipment Rental Manager. 

Ed will report directly into John Newton, Gravity Media’s CEO. In the UK he will work closely with James Gander who continues to oversee Gravity House, the Soho post-production facility, as well as the integrated workflows service for live broadcast and feature film post-production and Steve Norris, the new Director, Production and Content. 

Layla will now oversee Gravity Media’s extensive inventory of the latest professional equipment which includes 4K-ready lenses, cameras and live production tools.

Having opened an office in Basingstoke, Hampshire, in 2019, Broadcast Solutions are pleased to announce a new member of the UK team. As of January 2020, JP Delport will join the company and take on the role of Sales Director (Broadcast Solutions UK). With this addition, Broadcast Solutions has now underpinned its commitment to the UK market and is able to facilitate an increasing demand for their products and services with a dedicated team of six experts based in the UK full time. 

Camera Hire, a well-established Australian rental company and a leader in industry camera support solutions, recently purchased 10 CiNX 3 Fluid Heads and 10 Sprinter II 2 Stage Carbon Fibre Tripods from Miller Tripods. For over a decade, Camera Hire has provided professional cameras and supporting equipment for a large range of productions including commercials, documentaries and feature films.

As a long-time customer of Miller Tripods, Bevan Dally, managing director of Camera Hire, knows he can always turn to Miller to provide top-of-the-line solutions for his customer base. “We’ve been using Miller’s ArrowX series for some time now and the fluid heads are excellent,” he says. “The payload range and versatility are very beneficial considering the various types of jobs we support. With the CiNX line, our customers are able to mount a variety of cameras, including Sony’s FS7, Canon’s C300’s, and ARRI’S Alexa Mini and Amira, with ease.”

Thanks to Miller’s CiNX 3 Fluid Heads, Camera Hire can provide its customers with a solution that significantly improves cinematographer’s workflows. “Upgrading to the brand new CiNX series was a no brainer for us, especially because of its ability to mount ARRI dovetail plates directly on the head,” Dally says. “We can now easily provide our clients with a Sony VCT or ARRI dovetail system using the same fluid head, without the need to swap back and forth between multiple plates. With CiNX fluid heads, cinematographer’s can easily and quickly change from one camera to another with a seamless transition.”

The final ISE exhibition in Amsterdam before the show’s move to Barcelona is shaping up to be a big one for video capture, conversion and streaming innovator Magewell. Exhibiting in stand 8-G475 from February 11 to 14, the company will feature the global debuts of new products alongside the first ISE showings of several recently unveiled solutions.

Making its world premiere at ISE 2020, the ultra-compact, power-efficient Eco Capture SDI 4K Plus M.2 card captures 4K video at 60 frames per second over a single-link, 12G-SDI interface for use with popular AV software applications. Four additional models in the Eco Capture family will also be shown, as well as the company’s popular Pro Capture series of PCIe cards and USB Capture line of external capture devices.

Magewell will also showcase the industry’s broadest range of low-latency NDI® hardware converters to help simplify the transition to AV over IP for both integrators and end users. The Pro Convert family now offers six NDI encoder models and two decoders, including the recently-released Pro Convert for NDI to HDMI decoder for transforming NDI streams into high-quality HDMI baseband outputs.

Sony has announced that the Sony BRC Series PTZ remote cameras have been chosen to capture unique close-up footage of the heart-warming story of beautiful lynx cats in the high-end TV wildlife series, Snow Cats & Me.

Produced by Oak Island Films and Hello Halo TV, the two-part series pushes creative and technical boundaries to present an intimate portrait of animals in the wild. With the producer Ted Oakes, Managing Director of Oak Island Films commenting: “This was a tricky challenge: the Sony BRC cameras helped us capture amazing footage that expresses the unique character of these beautiful animals in their natural environment.”

Blackmagic Design today announced that live production workflows, featuring its products for acquisition, control and delivery, have been used on some of this year's biggest music festivals and concert tours.

Artists and events included Little Mix, Billie Eilish, Elton John, Fall Out Boy and Andrea Bocelli, as well as Festival Beauregard, Rocking the Daisies, Aftershock Festival and Sweden Rock.

As broadcast and AV workflows continue to converge, more and more rental and staging companies are now standardizing their video offerings to festivals and touring artists based on hardware solutions from Blackmagic Design. Not only has the amount of video demanded by the entertainment market increased in 2019, so too has the amount of 4K production for IMAG.

Sony has announced that its Simple Live Streaming service, a new proposition for users to streamline the process of acquiring live content, is now available (as of 12th December 2019). The additional workflow flexibility for its palm-sized 4K HDR professional camcorders, the HXR-NX80 and PXW-Z90, can be accessed via a free firmware upgrade to enable content creators to shoot wherever and however they want. 

With Wi-Fi connectivity, Simple Live Streaming enables high quality live streaming to major video sharing websites and social media platforms such as Vimeo, YouTube and Facebook with a single camcorder. Offering simple operation, it further enhances the remote delivery of content quickly without compromising on image quality. 

Norbert Paquet, Head of Product Management for Sony Professional Solutions comments: “The introduction of Simple Live Streaming for the HXR-NX80 and PXW-Z90 streamlines the overall workflow, from shooting to live distribution. Equipped with Simple Live Streaming, the camcorders will have online sharing features, further empowering content creators to concentrate on what they do best – storytelling on the go.” 

24i, the industry-leading, global video experience company, today announced that it has created, and launched a new suite of applications and Subscription Video-On-Demand (VOD) services for US-based video streaming service BroadwayHD.

The premier streaming service for live theatre BroadwayHD is available online at broadwayhd.com, and via a dedicated app on iOS,Android, Apple TV, Amazon Firestick and Roku.

Included among the recent hit productions released on the service are 42nd Street and Kinky Boots, both filmed on the West End by the BroadwayHD team, along with other recent and iconic stage shows such as Cats, King and I, and An American in Paris.

“We’re committed to providing the very best Broadway streaming experience to our growing global fanbase,“ said Stewart F. Lane and Bonnie Comley, co-founders and co-owners, BroadwayHD. “We’re extremely pleased with the OTT solution provided by 24i, which has enabled us to launch our next-generation video service across multiple platforms and devices, introduce new business models and refresh and enrich our user experience. The high performance of this new platform enables us to concentrate on the quality of our content and growing the global audience for BroadwayHD.”

24i has worked in partnership with the subscriber retention management company Cleeng to deliver BroadwayHD a robust end-to-end OTT video solution that accelerates growth by simplifying the management, marketing, and monetization of its content while providing subscribers with a rich, personalized and easy to navigate experience on any device.

New action comedy, School Fight, uses the Shogun 7 HDR monitor/recorder to give the Sony FS7 a new lease of life

How do you make a full-length feature film, with flawless, cinematic values when your camera budget only stretches to the Sony FS7 cinema cameras already owned by the crew? It’s a conundrum the production team behind new action comedy, School Fight, solved by adding cutting edge recording technology from Atomos and Apple to their arsenal.

School Fight is a low budget, independent feature film, but you’d be forgiven for assuming the investment in the on-screen image was far more high-end. This comes from the crew’s unwavering commitment to achieving the highest possible production values by squeezing everything they could out of the camera equipment they had available and a minimal budget.

The concept for the film was the brainchild of seasoned stunt professional Damien Walters, so it’s no surprise that action sequences, fight scenes and all manner of carefully choreographed carnage is all featured heavily. He joined forces with producer Joby Stephens to bring this vision to life in full cinematic glory.

Magewell will launch a powerful new model in its Eco Capture family of ultra-compact, power-efficient, M.2 video capture cards at the upcoming ISE 2020 exhibition in Amsterdam. The high-performance Eco Capture SDI 4K Plus M.2 captures one channel of 4K video up to 4096x2160 at full 60 frames per second over a single-link, 12G-SDI interface. The new card will make its global debut in stand 8-G475 at the event, taking place February 11-14, 2020.

Ideal for use in small and embedded systems where full-sized PCIe slots are not available, the cost-effective Eco Capture family offers systems integrators and OEM developers a robust capture solution with low power consumption for space-constrained applications. The low-latency Eco Capture devices feature a high-speed PCIe 2.0 bus interface with an M.2 connector and measure just 22x80mm (0.87x3.15in), matching the M.2 2280 size specification.

The new 4K 12G-SDI model joins four existing Eco Capture M.2 configurations: a single-channel model that captures 4K video at 30fps via an HDMI interface; dual-channel models that capture HD and 2K video over HDMI or SDI; and a quad-channel HD/2K model with SDI inputs. All five Eco Capture products also support up to eight channels of embedded audio per input.