OT: Building a broadcast studio with Blackmagic and Bob Zelin

[David Mathis]

Great article and before we know it college graduates will be at home with their parents living in the basement setting up their own studio. Party time, excellent! 😉

[David Roth weiss]

I stumbled upon Bob’s article before you touted it Tim, and indeed it is a cool and interesting new look at Blackmagic’s inexpensive solutions for building out a TV studio that would have been prohibitively expensive in days past.

The fact that one can now outfit a studio with (4) 4K studio cameras for about $10K total, each with a built-in 10″ monitor, is mind-blowing. And, the rest of the BM gear Bob discusses is equally inexpensive and powerful too.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Mark Suszko]

Indeed, an eye-opening account of how one could put together a complete facility. Very comprehensive and I like that it takes into account all the peripheral items (Except lighting, I guess).

I know that there’s an infinite number of variations in how one can do such a thing these days, but I’d like to hear opinions from Bob and others comparing and contrasting the approach Bob took with the “all-in-one” box approach of Newtek.

Granted, Newtek doesn’t offer the breadth of equipment for the entire chain (from lens to line monitor) but they share somewhat of a similar market space for the lower-end broadcaster/webcaster/corporate/government/worship/school markets. And they sell a LOT of them boxes.

[Bob Zelin]

I love the Tricaster and Newtek is a great company. I put a lot of these in as well. But the bottom line is that Blackmagic stuff is cheaper – A LOT CHEAPER – and it’s wildly popular because it’s so cheap. No one has to consider “gee can I afford this” – anyone can afford the Blackmagic gear. And this applies to their scopes, cameras, monitors, routers, multi viewers, standards converters, etc. This does not mean that there are not other great products – products BETTER than Blackmagics (certainly the Newtek Tricaster is a much more powerful product) – but its MORE MONEY – and all the gear from Evertz, Miranda, Grass Valley, Sony, etc. etc. is REALLY a lot more money. And isn’t that what everyone really cares about anyway these days ?

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Mark Suszko]

Well, yes, initially. Though there were two instances in our shop, where the “lowest Bidder” won, that vendors gave us real lemons. One was a Toaster, which never worked right and spent more time on UPS trucks than in our control room, due to a VAR that was below par… the other case was a Premiere workstation with a Pinnacle fx card in it, a special “hotrod” package. We wound up paying Bob Holtzman, THE pinnacle expert/savant, to come look at that one, after he lost out to a lower bidder. Bob’s evaluation was that the thing had the very minimal components in it that could pass the specs, z”on paper”, and they were all put in badly, using substandard practices. The cooling fans for example were put in backwards, trapping heat in the chassis and leading to sudden shutdowns. Even with the fans fixed, the case sides off, and a box fan blowing across it, the processor still overheated and got wonky after an hour or so. This had to have been hard for Bob, seeing as we drove to his place and he initially demo’ed this very powerful setup… and then, his bid didn’t get accepted. A lesser man would have just laughed at us over the phone in our hour of need. But he did come down (for a fee) and advise on some repairs that got the unit limping along until we moved to another platform. That was the first and last time we used Premiere here, but it wasn’t Adobe’s fault. But the bad taste from those experiences steered us eventually into an Apple-based track.

So I would say that while price is the usual major driver over all, the old saying is still true: the cheapskate always ends up paying twice as much.

Price has to be balanced against actual performance, because when a program is a failure, nobody is cheered by someone piping up; “well, at least we didn’t spend too much for it”. No, they forgive a little overage in the budget, if the results are right.

[Dave Jenkins]

We moved from the Trickster to Blackmagic because it’s to much to have everything in one box. We find it’s much better to have a video playback system and a streaming computer that someone can be operating. It’s more flexible for us.

Dajen Productions, Santa Barbara, CA
Mac Pro 3.5MHz 6-Core Late 2013
FCP X

[Mark Raudonis]

Bob Z’s business card should read: Promoting disruptive technologies since 1983!

Great article Bob. Thanks for the info.

[Herb Sevush]

It’s interesting to see where Blackmagic is going – as these individual components were released over the last few years it all seemed so helter skelter – but now it’s obvious that this was the plan all along, to provide a complete end-to-end studio production system. Great article Bob.

Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
—————————
nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf

[Ryan Holmes]

[Mark Suszko] “So I would say that while price is the usual major driver over all, the old saying is still true: the cheapskate always ends up paying twice as much.”

Mark – this is so true. While I like saving money if the gear doesn’t hold up that’s a problem. If it fails, I’m to of a job.

I have a mixture of Blackmagic components at our shop (converters, recorders, cameras), but also some AJA, some SoundDevices, some Convergent-Design, some Utah Scientific, etc. My experience has been that Blackmagic has a much higher failure rate than the other companies listed above. My vendor always warns me when selling me a Crackmagic device (their term, but I find it amusing), “As long as you buy 2, you’ll always have 1 that works. Keep the other on the shelf as an immediate backup.”

I think Bob’s article is great. Very nice work Bob! It’s a nice use of available technologies in order to achieve a desired end. My worry with Blackmagic is that when cost is the main factor in purchasing for a production/post-house, to the exclusive of other factors, and less expensive (or less tightly manufactured) products are sourced the failure rate tends to go up. And the crazy thing is you can literally buy 2 of a given BMD item and still be cheaper than some of the above named companies!

All that said, I’m still looking forward to several of BMD’s product releases this summer like the Video Assist recorder for $500! And Resolve…of course. Having owned their 4K Production Camera I’ll wait a while to see if they make some progress in the camera category before buying in again…

Ryan Holmes
http://www.ryanholmes.me
@CutColorPost

[David Roth weiss]

Sounds like someone else now owns a BM camera you never wanted to see again Ryan…

One of the terrific aspects about the democratization of video and the incredible pricing that BM has helped to bring this industry is that no one is stuck with gear that’s so expensive that a bad purchase can financially ruin anyone these days. And, if we sell something we don’t like, even if we eat 50% of the original cost (which seldom actually happens), so what, no harm, no foul.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.