Klaus Cam Aerial System
The Klaus Cam, an aerial camera rig designed by Klaus Obermeyer of Aéro Film and Scott Howell of CineMoves, is a three-axis, gyro-stabilized head that hangs on a cable below a helicopter, making it possible to fly a camera through tight and treacherous surroundings that would be dangerous or impossible to navigate with other types of rigs.

Because the apparatus is suspended far beneath the transport helicopter, even the widest lenses can be used without risk that the camera will catch a glimpse of the aircraft above.

The inspiration for the Klaus Cam came in 2000, when Obermeyer and Howell went to Greenland to do a Chevrolet spot. “The Klaus Cam was a product of necessity — actually, a product of desperation!” recalls Howell. “We showed up in Greenland, and none of our equipment did.” To make it possible to shoot dynamic footage of glaciers, Howell cobbled together a rig using a 2'x4' piece of wood, a 1,000' film can and a lot of duct tape.

“I was just happy to cover a desperate situation,” says Howell. “But Klaus lives and dies by the idea that if a little is good, more is better, and he said, ‘Let’s do something different with this.’” Obermeyer’s first thought was to take advantage of Howell’s rig to fly some super-wide lenses. “There are aerial [situations] where you can’t use a 12mm or 10mm, let alone a 6mm or 8mm,” says Howell. “We put a 6mm lens on there and got some of the most incredible shots, and from that moment on, it became part of our repertoire.”

Since then, Obermeyer and Howell have continued to develop the rig, collaborating with pilot Craig Hoskings. Now a fully stabilized three-axis head, the rig is set up so that it’s possible to remotely control a camera’s focus, aperture and speed. “We can start very wide running at 2-3 fps and then ramp up,” says Obermeyer. They’ve flown a variety of cameras on the rig, but they have mainly used the Arri 435 and Arri 35-3.

The cable that holds the Klaus Cam can be lengthened or shortened, depending on the project. “We’ve done everything from 30 to 150 feet,” says Obermeyer. “You might want a longer cable to get the rotor wash or noise farther away from the camera, or you might want a shorter cable to get finer control.”

Because so many of the jobs Obermeyer and Howell do are logistically challenging, an important goal was to make a system that could travel easily and not need a lot of support. “I’ve seen so many products out of Hollywood that try to go too sophisticated,” notes Howell. “We kept this super-simple, super-rugged. We spend a lot of time in the Alps and Switzerland; you’re not going to get a big grip truck in there, so you have to be very ‘commando-ready.’ I can travel with the entire rig in three decent-sized Pelican cases.”

For Howell, some of the most interesting uses of the Klaus Cam have been those that appear simple. When a car is driving on a dry lakebed, for example, the camera-car method would kick up a cloud of dust and obscure the picture vehicle. But with the Klaus Cam, a clean shot from in front of and looking back toward the car can be attained. It’s possible to lower the camera from a helicopter and keep it right in front of the car as it drives, and because the helicopter is so high above, dust isn’t kicked up. “It’s a simple frontal shot, but you haven’t seen it in that environment,” says Howell.

Obermeyer says the impetus for the ongoing development of the Klaus Cam will come from the jobs people bring them, and he’s hoping for productions that will enable him to really push the system. He and Howell have experimented with an amphibious version of the rig, which would make it possible to do shots in which the camera starts deep under water, then climbs into the sky. “We’ve only touched on this rig’s potential,” says Obermeyer. “We’re just looking for great excuses to do something revolutionary with it.”

For more information, contact Lance O’Connor at Aero Film, (310) 396-3636 or visit www.aerofilm.tv.

RAID-ing Storage
Last month, while reviewing Final Cut Pro HD 5.0, I had the opportunity to work with the new Medéa VideoRaid FCR2X Fibre Channel RAID array. I am often technologically befuddled by ATAs, SATAs and SCSIs, and I’m still wondering exactly what a parallel port is parallel to, so I had a great deal to learn while evaluating the Medéa FCR2X array.

Even though my documentary project required 2.5TB of storage to complete the edit, my executive producers and I elected not to go with RAID storage. Instead, we went with a collection of external 7200 RPM (ATA-100) hard drives, five 400GB, one 300GB, and one 200GB. Five of the drives were connected to the Mac G5 via FireWire800 (IEEE 1394b), and the last two were connected via FireWire400 (IEEE 1394a). Two of the 400GB drives were “daisy-chained” together, as were the final two drives (300GB and 200GB).

This rather convoluted scenario was dictated by economics. We spent just over $2,500 for 2.5TB. A RAID array of the same size runs 3x or 4x higher than that, and adding a RAID controller card to the computer necessitates an additional expense. With our setup in mind, I was excited to have an opportunity to compare the more expensive RAID array to my formidable collection of external drives.

Although it might seem difficult to evaluate a hard drive — it either works or it doesn’t — I discovered I could not rely on the Seagate 300GB external drive I used on my project, because it would “go to sleep” if I didn’t access it every five minutes or so. Then it would take up to 30 seconds to spin up and read or write data. With video footage in a timeline, this meant that whenever I came to a clip from the Seagate and the drive was “asleep,” it stopped the playback dead in its tracks.

To evaluate uncompressed 10-bit 1920x1080i 23.98psf footage for the Final Cut review, my main FireWire drives (Hitachi Deskstar 400GB ATA/IDE 7200 RPM in Macpower Tytech IceCube 800+ FireWire enclosures, built by Melrose Mac in Los Angeles) simply weren’t fast enough to properly play back the high-resolution footage. FireWire400 (IEEE 1394a) is capable of up to 400 Megabits-per-second data transfer. FireWire800 (IEEE 1394b) is capable of up to 800 Megabits-per-second data transfer. There is an important distinction between Megabits per second (expressed Mbps) and Megabytes per second (expressed MBps): one byte is eight bits, so a FireWire400 connection is capable of up to 400Mbps but only 50MBps. As a rule, the computer industry converts Mbps to MBps using a factor of 10, so a FireWire400 connection is presented as 40MBps.

These numbers can certainly be confusing. The data rate numbers of various video formats also vary depending on whom you ask. One source notes DV video at a data rate of 30.1Mbps (3.76MBps), while another states DV at 25Mbps (3.125MBps), and yet another puts DV at 28.8Mbps (3.6MBps). When I’m faced with inconsistencies like that, I usually take the “worst-case scenario” and consider that my answer. Because the Hitachi Deskstar drives are ATA-100 and capable of up to 100Mbps (12.5MBps), they work wonderfully for DV, which only needs 30Mbps (3.76MBps), but when you introduce uncompressed 10-bit 1920x1080 at about 1,064Mbps (133MBps), FireWire400 and 800 simply can’t handle the data rates to capture and play back the hi-def footage properly.

Enter the RAID array. RAID offers much higher data-rate capabilities. For the Medéa FRC2X, those data rates can be up to 2,560 Mbps (320MBps). Ironically, when I pulled one of the 10 hard drives from the FRC2X, I found it was almost exactly the same drive I was using in my FireWire enclosures! The drive inside was a Hitachi Deskstar 250GB 7200RPM ATA-100 drive. The only difference between the RAID drive and my own FireWire drive was that mine was a 400GB drive, and the RAID was only a 250GB. How, then, can the RAID be more than triple the speed of the single drive? 

That’s where the whole concept of RAID comes in. Redundant Array of Independent Disks is a collection of standard hard drives fitted into an individual housing with a RAID controller. There are two major benefits to the RAID configuration. One is that you achieve faster data-rate transfers by forcing the grouped drives to act as a single drive; this is what allows the Medéa array to offer sustained data rates of up to 320MBps (2,560Mbps), more than 25x the speed that the individual Hitachi Deskstar ATA-100 drives can produce alone. The second major benefit of a RAID array is that data is stored redundantly on the various disks. Although this reduces the overall storage capacity, it means that if one of the disks in the array fails, it can be replaced without data loss because the data is copied elsewhere on the array and can be seamlessly reassembled on the fly while editing continues.

 There are several configurations of RAID systems (RAID Levels 0-5). RAID 0 incorporates no redundancy but groups a number of standard drives together to gain speed. RAID 3, the most common in postproduction, is an array of disk drives in which one disk is dedicated to “checking” the system integrity and data is distributed over the remaining drives in the array.

The Medéa VideoRaid FRC2X array includes a preventive-maintenance system called RAID Patrol, which monitors the disk media for errors. When it does become necessary to replace a drive, users can simply swap out the bad drive module without having to power down the system, and the array will automatically begin reconstruction of the drive in the background while the editor continues to work. It seemed a bit contrary to remove the drives from the back of the unit rather than the front. Although drive replacement should be a rare thing, why should I have to get behind the array to pull a drive?

The 1.6TB FCR2X array I worked with was filled with 10 250GB hard drives. Although this would mean 2.5TB of disk space, because of the RAID redundancy factor this is reduced to 1.6TB. It is, of course, a tradeoff made for security and peace of mind. These drives can be upgraded to get up to 3.2TB. The arrays are also scaleable and interconnectable to achieve storage capacities of up to 120TB, which translates to roughly 166 hours of uncompressed 1920x1080 10-bit video. 

FCR2X features Medéa’s proprietary Multi-Stream Technology (MST), a sophisticated, embedded, stream-handling algorithm that works in conjunction with the system’s onboard caching RAID controller to support simultaneous real-time playback of multiple streams of uncompressed standard-def video. However, this is a feature I was not equipped to evaluate. 

Each half of the FCR2X has a built-in 4-port Fibre Channel hub that allows for direct connection of up to four workstations so the array can be simultaneously accessed by up to four operators working with the same data. It is designed to integrate with a variety of capture cards from Blackmagic Design, AJA Video Systems, NewTek and Pinnacle Systems, as well as provide support for editing up to eight streams of uncompressed standard-def video or a single stream of uncompressed hi-def video on complete systems such as Avid’s Adrenaline.

The array is rack-mountable (3U), but I would certainly want it out of the edit bay because of significant noise and light factors. The array’s excessively loud fan (cooling 10 hard drives takes the wind power of a small jet engine) is annoying, and the obnoxiously bright blue LED lights along the face of the array are extremely distracting. However, with the fiber-optic cabling option, the array can be placed up to 300 meters from your workstation, completely eliminating these concerns from the equation.

A listed feature is that the drive provides redundant power supplies (two power cables, one to each half of the array) to provide further security against lost editing time in the event of a power failure, but this would mean that each half of the array would have to be powered through a different circuit, and I don’t see that as a typical installation. Perhaps the feature is intended to protect against internal power failure, but this would seem to be an incredibly unlikely occurrence.

For my applications, the drive performed beautifully. It was easy to configure, was immediately recognized by the Mac G5, and wrote and read information flawlessly. There were no dropped frames, no delays and no error messages. Although the cost of the VideoRaid ($7,799) is 4x higher than the cost of my 2.5TB of external drives (not including a $500-$2,000 Fibre Channel controller card in the computer), there was no ridiculous mess of cables. (My current system has seven power cables and seven FireWire cables; the FRC2X has two power cables and two data cables.)

Also, the extra money gets you more than 25x the data rate possible with individual drives, RAID redundancy data protection, multi-workstation connectivity and large scalability that simply cannot be achieved with individual external drives. 

For more information, contact Medéa at (949) 852-8511 or visit www.medea.com.

HD Expo Calls for VariCam Commercial Entries
HD Expo will serve as creator and producer of an interactive DVD featuring commercials that have been acquired on the Panasonic VariCam HD Cinema camera. The DVD will be an invaluable resource for advertising agencies making the transition to HD and seeking examples to demonstrate the capabilities of high definition and the VariCam camera.

The DVD will contain the advertising categories of automotive, tabletop and fashion, and will include interviews with many of the directors of photography. In addition, it will include a reference guide to rental facilities and resellers of the VariCam in the U.S., providing creative directors with contact information for the ad agency, production company, director and director of photography for each spot selected for the DVD resource guide. The DVD will be distributed in the spring of 2006.

“With HD Production expanding rapidly, we’re confident that the advertising community will join this revolution,” says Kristin Petrovich, CEO and founder of HD Expo, which is producing the DVD in partnership with its marketing wing, KMP & Associates. “This DVD will give examples of high-end commercials that were shot on the VariCam to show agencies and production companies the quality and efficiencies available in high definition.”

HD Expo has announced an international call for submissions, with awards sponsored by Panasonic for the following categories: Most Creative, Most Stylized and Best Experimental. Additional sponsors of the DVD and awards are being sought. Judging of the spots will be done by industry notables in the advertising and entertainment fields, and the winners will be announced in the summer of 2006.

In addition to the awards, HD Expo, Panasonic and participating sponsors plan to host an event showcasing the winning and runners-up commercials. For submissions, contact Kristin Petrovich, (818) 842-6611, E-mail: [email protected], Web site: www.hdexpo.net.