– Christopher Phillips, managing director, CJP
My colleagues and I are preparing for IBC. And no, it’s not because we are desperate for this year’s ration of stroopwafels and bitterballen.
Fundamentally, CJP is an agnostic systems integration business. To stay on top, we have to know what is happening in technology. And with virtually every vendor in the business at IBC, this is a great chance to see what is new and what is making waves.
We have established partnerships, of course, with companies like GB Labs and their servers (stand 7.A09), Mo-Sys and its excellent camera tracking (7.C16), AOTO for LED display technology (1.D15), Squared Paper for bespoke automation software (8.A98) and Ross Video for the whole panoply of production technology (9.A04). We will spend time with them.
But being agnostic is absolutely critical to what we do, so we will be talking to a lot of other vendors if we see that they have products we need. We always want to create the perfect fit, the right products for each installation.
That means having tough conversations with vendors, not only to see how easy their products are to integrate, but also to talk about availability. We are often up against hard deadlines in our installations, whether that is to get a new studio or service on air, or to fit into existing customer downtimes. We really do not want to waste everyone’s time designing a system around a product that the manufacturer cannot deliver.
What are our key areas of interest? At the moment virtual production is really big for us. Over the last year or two we have built very advanced facilities for a number of universities (our virtual studio and games creation centre at the University of Sunderland is up for an award from AV Magazine).
It is so important at the moment as we are building our own LED and greenscreen studios at our headquarters which will be in action around the beginning of next year. These will be used not just for demos, but also for testing, training and integration with powerful software like Mo-Sys VP Studio Pro, and Xsens and Faceware motion capture technology.
The other reason for being at the show is that as a systems integrator we are, by definition, integrating systems. IBC is the perfect place for us to bring together our customers with the principal technology partners to talk through the details of how we are going to achieve the goals. Getting everyone together often cements a plan and makes sure the implementation goes without a hitch.
If you want to discuss all this further with one of the CJP team, drop us an email. Our schedule may already be tightly packed for next week, but we can always make time to talk about production systems and virtual studios, not to mention live video production and archive digitisation.
