NAB 2012 Kit Review used by BroadcastShow

Bob Pank#

Author: Bob Pank#

Published 1st June 2012


NAB kit review:-
So pre-NAB we are all very busy organising interviews with 70 exhibitors over 4 days covering 4 halls and in our case around 28 miles. Late last year we developed an online interview booking system at www.broadcastshow.com which allows exhibitors to book one or more 15 minute slots, enter stand information and questions they may like asked during the interview. Over the month preceding the show the fill up and we are left with a spreadsheet of who to see and when to see them. Thankfully the “slot booker” is intelligent enough to know which days we will be in which halls so dashing is kept to a minimum.
Our NAB BroadcastShow teams consisted of Emma who looks after the bookings and is affectionately referred to as our “tom-tom”; Jon, who after 4 shows is now known to many exhibitors, our presenter and then myself behind camera. Matt is also on hand as our “fixer” to borrow last minute equipment which we’ve either forgotten or didn’t deem necessary at the time of departure!
Let start at the ground and work up.
We are very fortunate with having the support of some of the industries leading manufacturers and this review is a small way of saying a massive thank you to those whose names will follow.
Prior to NAB Panasonic shipped us the new HPX-250, their P2 HD handheld camera recorder with 10 bit, 4:2:2 independent-frame full 1920 x 1080 resolution AVC-Intra recording. They were also good enough to throw in the box four P2 cards, 3 batteries plus charger, P2 reader and enough cables to get us out of trouble. The specs of the camera are widely available so I won’t go into that here other than to say it’s lightweight, robust and together with an excellent light gathering lens performed very well in a wide mix of indoor situations. We used 3 or 4 P2 cards per day and offloaded these via the P2 reader each evening. Battery power surpassed my expectations with each lasting for around 90 minutes.
The support for the camera was provided by Vinten and we were delighted to be one of the first to get our hands on the new Vinten Blue 5. We didn’t have a chance to test before arriving at NAB and picked it up from Vinten’s ever helpful and hugely knowledgeable Product Manager Peter Harman on the Sunday before the show complete with dolly. The Blue 5 works with payloads between 2.1 to 5kg so is a perfect fit for the HPX-250. As per the specification we can confirm its silky smooth movement and when set up correctly the Perfect Balance technology is just that. It was rock solid and never let us down throughout – a great piece of kit.
Some parts of a show floor are well light, some are natural light others are dark and in general no two stands are the same. A light that is powerful and adaptable enough to cope with the myriad of situations we tend to find ourselves was found almost by accident as we interviewed Litepanels early on the first day. They rightly insisted we light the interview with their new Croma light and it never left the camera for the next 4 days! Although it has external power options we used the internal battery option and with six good AA batteries (we tried cheap at first and paid for it) lasted around 2 hours. Large controls on the side give brightness and more importantly light colour control that quickly enabled us to line up an any shot with minimal effort.
The Croma was mounted solidly on a K-Tek cold shoe extender, this then gave the option to mount other items such as the Atomos Samurai. Why, might you ask, are we using a Samurai when the HPX-250 records in broadcast quality on P2? Well we do a lot of editing on FCP and Premiere and wanted to speed up our workflow so taking an SDI from the camera into the Samurai allows us to take advantage of the new Atom OS3 version of firmware which was released at the show with features such as peaking, zebra’s and metadata to name but a few. It also meant that the material recorded on the P2 was a back-up to the Samurai which gives that extra layer of peace of mind when shooting one-off interviews with the likes of Steady Cam inventor Garrett Brown.
Audio was provided by the Sennheiser 8060 mic and as this is the audio issue of tv-bay we have a full review of this and how it performed on page XX. In a noisy show the directional capabilities were truly outstanding. As headphone wearer i have to report the HD 25-2 II headphones were simply wonderful cutting out external noise and delivery true crisp audio when needed.
The only thing missing from our setup was a gimbal cup holder and this was loaned to us by Polecam so we could fight over which one of us put our bottle of water in it!
So there we have it, from the ground up the kit we were able to use at NAB was a true pleasure to use and just not so much of a pleasure to give back! Take a look at the NAB event page on www.broadcastshow.com to see the interviews and catch up with what you may have missed at NAB 2012.
The only issue we had during the whole show was the shoe mount (a cold shoe in the case of this camera) when mounting a large light on top and vibrating with dolly usage over

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