For much of the history of broadcast television, the state of the art has often advanced gradually, and evidence of a trend has only emerged in the fine details of technology and technique. More recently, though, some potentially far-reaching ideas have been easier to identify, with networked video and HDR becoming more widespread as barriers to entry fall.
If the 2025 NAB Show has a predominant theme, it is a spike in interest around cinema techniques for broadcast, according to James Coker, founder of Funicular Goats, a multicamera cinematic production solutions shop. Speaking days after returning from the Super Bowl, where he held engineering and technical responsibility for cinema cameras, Coker says he thinks such techniques are becoming more of a norm.
“I know a lot of people are trying to do it; I’ve been doing this for around 15 years,” he says. “I was an engineer for eight or nine years doing cinematic multicam, and people lean on me to put a team together to make these projects happen.”
Streamlined Technology
Motivation is straightforward, Coker says, even as technology advances. “A lot of the big directors want to put on an amazing-looking show and it gives them that next step up,” he says. “I’ve taken out everything you can think of. When I first started, we used different tools to get it done in the same kind of fashion but not as flawlessly as we’re doing now. Now, I can go on to a live event and I’m not extremely concerned. We’ve streamlined the technology. When I get the opportunity to pick a camera I tend to steer them toward [Sony’s] Venice 2.”
Lens and color-processing choices are a matter for discussion. “I’ll work with the director,” Coker continues. “If the show wants a vintage look, we’ll get vintage glass. I use a lot of the old Cookes; on the next show I’m using Panavision glass.”
At the same time, modern conveniences are helpful, particularly Fujifilm’s capable 25-1,000 mm PL-mounted box lens. “That’s a different story—when we’re doing concert films in a stadium you may have 140- or 180-foot throws, because you can’t get closer from the front of the house,” Coker says. “Before we were using a 3:1 from Panavision.”
At the same time, broadcast manufacturers are addressing the demand for Super-35mm directly. Grass Valley Director, Product Marketing Klaus Weber describes the company’s debut, to be shown in Las Vegas.
“The LDX-180 has a new, large single imager,” he says. “[It has] the processing power of the 150, but instead of three imagers we have one Super-35mm imager. It’s not adopting an imager made for cinema camera or stills, camera … it’s a new imager developed for this camera.”
Fitting that into a familiar workflow demands visual compatibility with existing cameras, Weber says, and the company has ensured that “the processing can stay the same; the color matrices and all the HDR/SDR processing can stay intact. Now we can mix and match with the three-imager camera, the 135 or 150.”
The aim here is compatibility rather than identicality, given the intent is to produce a unique look. “There will be some colors or situations where one camera will look different to the other if you compare them side by side,” Weber adds.
Nevertheless, he confirms, “It means the camera shader who sits on his creative grading panels and has, on the left, a 110 to shade, and on the right some 135s, there are the same controls, the same features, and one production can mix them with few challenges.”
Growing Up With the Tech
Blackmagic Design has approached the broadcast market from a different direction. One recent innovation has involved a dual-lens camera designed in conjunction with Apple to capture footage for its Vision headset.
Blackmagic’s keenest customers have sometimes grown up with its products, Director of Sales Operations, North America Bob Caniglia says. “What we’re finding more and more is that these kids who started with these things—they’re now in their 40s, and they’re making the decisions,” he says.
Caniglia’s involvement arises from his prior association with da Vinci Systems, the company that built Resolve, which has become something of an entry route for new people, he says. “I had a broadcaster say recently how many people are using Resolve—anyone who entered the company in the last 10 years, that’s all they use,” he says. “The legacy people still use other things, but there’s an avalanche of Resolve talent coming through.”
With a portfolio of Super-35 mm and full-frame cameras, the company has found itself well-placed to capitalize on the popularity of big chips for broadcast.
“Ursa Broadcast G2 has cinematic qualities,” Caniglia says. “It has a 6K sensor, it comes with the B4 mount attached but an EF lens mount is included with it, and that camera continues to get a lot of good use. Our resellers often bundle it with a B4 lens—Fuji came around and said, ‘Can we bundle these?’ and Blackmagic doesn’t sell direct so we introduced them to our team.”
The company’s roots are in input/output and conversion, and Caniglia describes how recent ideas have made setup quicker and easier. “We introduced some new ST 2110 products which will be able to provide power with a single Ethernet cable. If you bring the four-input base station, and four cameras, and plug them in with four Ethernet cables, that’s a significant time savings.”
Recent releases have been most clearly targeted at high-end cinema, although Caniglia describes a broadcast market which will find a use for almost anything.
“Many of our cameras are used in 4K in venues because they’re filling the screens with 4K. If you’re using it in HD you can get up to 150 frames,” he says. “Now, the new 17K camera is already being requested because of the ability to shoot such a wide area and [crop] in to get 4K out of it, much like the
12K cameras.”
Red for Broadcast?
There is perhaps a parallel to draw between Blackmagic and Red Digital Cinema, which also finds itself providing equipment for a market in which it was not originally involved. Having teased a broadcast-oriented system for its cinema cameras at the 2024 NAB Show, Red says it will demonstrate the new hardware in full this year.
Jeff Goodman, vice president of product management at Red, describes it as “a module which goes on the back of the camera and allows you to operate in an SMPTE broadcast environment. There’s a monitor on the back, return video … The other thing that took a lot of work, and credit to our engineering team, we created a new [color] pipeline—you put the camera into broadcast mode, and shade the camera from an RCP the same way you’d shade any other.”
Perhaps unusually, the company is keen to discuss something which might be called a “parallel workflow” feature designed to get the most out of live production that might also be recorded. The new system, Goodman says, “supports Red Connect, our 10-gigabit connection, which allows you to do live 8K, ST2110, or to take the R3Ds off in real time, live to headset applications, live to domes such as Cosm and others. You can think of it as like what you're writing to the media on the camera you’re writing to the network.”
Red’s recent acquisition by Nikon has also led to lens-mount options likely to be popular in both single- and multicamera production. “We’re announcing a Z-mount version of our Komodo-X and Raptor-X,” Goodman says. “Z has a shorter flange depth, so there’s a lot of lens system opportunities which will allow people to use lenses they already own. The first-party one we’re going to provide is the titanium Z to PL adapter, and Z to PL with electronic ND which allows you to control it through the camera system.”
The company’s approach, it seems, encapsulates much of what has garnered industry interest in cinema cameras for broadcast. “If you shade in broadcast color mode, record the R3Ds and you go to post later, you have the option to switch back to the cinema color workflow,” Goodman says. “You’re adopting a cinema camera for a few reasons, one of which is shallow depth of field but also the high dynamic range.”
Overall, the move toward cinema cameras is a drift rather than a rush, probably gentler than the move to HD. Even so, the competitiveness of broadcast, and the ever-rising expectations of an audience accustomed to high-value OTT drama, has made that drift somewhat continental in nature—gradual, certainly, but impossible to deny and just as hard to resist.
