In the 25 years that I've been a design engineer I've built quite a bit of kludged together equipment. Some of which was very sophisticated. I've also had my fair share of operational failures. Wireless is particularly insideous as it will work just fine in your studio and then fail in the field.

After a few years of working as a professional videographer I also realized that my equipment had to be reliable. It's not like there's nothing else to be worried about at a shoot or that you can shout "CUT" and fix your gear. Of course, the r-THREE came about as much because of unreliable or unavailable second shooters ... but that's a different story.

Some of my best customers are folks who have, in the past, built their own systems from bescor or sunpak heads with taped together video feeds and LANC controllers who either had failures in the field, got tired of setting up their large bundles of cables to run no more than 50' (The r-THREE will easily do up to 600') or didn't like the jerky performance of the pan/tilt.

To date I've kludged together a number of wireless solutions and so far none have been either cost effective or reliable even ignoring the battery issue. I keep searching.


Phil
phil@grizzlypro.com

Phil,

Thanks for that eye opener. I wasn't aware it was a marketing ploy on their part. I know of a similar problem with UWB Ultra Wide Band, not really the technology, but because of government regulations on the amount of power they can use causing the rapid drop off. If they require this of all free radio space devices then there probably is no consumer device that will be suitable, pity.

Here is a suggestion for a product. I see you use cat5 for wiring, have you seen this:

http://www.intelix.com/pr/050606_V3AD_Balun_PR.html

It sends HD component and audio over Cat5. They have many other useful devices for video production wiring also. I wonder what sort of digital standard they use to send the data.

That HC1 HDV Sony suffers a lot for pro use because of exposure mechanism and HDV format, but would probably be very good for stationary use in auditoriums through your system and component. The use of wide aperture Lens (even slr) with condenser adaptor for low light, would make them cheap HD POV cameras. Compared to the price of normal HD POV there might be a market for that, especially among groups dumping a weekly live event to a TV network that can accept the component feed and compress it themselves.

Another thing is that there is some demand for a cheap way to record the uncompressed component from the HD cameras among the indie crowd. We are not even sure what modes will be given by the HC1. We don't know if it will give, 4:2:2 60fps like some of the other consumer HD, or whether it will do true 1920*1080 output.

A cheap system that recorded from component and gave a huffy lossless compressed 4:2:0, 4:2:2 and 4:4:4 output to user supplied hard disks, and via Gigabit Ethernet to laptop, would do most people.


Thanks

Wayne.

Wayne,
Thanks for the input. HD is something I've intentionally avoided worrying about for the time being but will be looking into in future products. Re the balun, the r-THREE uses a similar scheme to send the video feed back. The device you reference uses a passive transformer and thus drops a bit of contrast in the process. I've used an active driver/reciever pair to get a little bit better performance. The drivers that I used should work well for HD.
Regards,
Phil
phil@grizzlypro.com