AIR – BROADFIELD NEWS https://news.broadfield.com Distributor of Live Production Equipment for Resellers Only Tue, 26 May 2026 13:31:25 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 https://news.broadfield.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/bdi-square-logo-150x150.png AIR – BROADFIELD NEWS https://news.broadfield.com 32 32 Advanced Image Robotics AIR 101: Walkthrough & Live Demo https://news.broadfield.com/advanced-image-robotics-air-101-walkthrough-live-demo/ Tue, 26 May 2026 13:31:25 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=35923 Join us for a live AIR 101 session as we explore the Advanced Image Robotics platform and demonstrate robotic camera control, AI-assisted tracking, cinematic movement, and modern production workflows. We’ll cover setup, operation, and real-world use cases for live production, broadcast, education, worship, and more.

Learn more about AIR One HERE

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Broadfield is your source for AIR One Bundle https://news.broadfield.com/broadfield-is-your-source-for-air-one-bundle/ Tue, 19 May 2026 18:00:00 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=35857

AIR One Bundle

AIR One integrates off-the-shelf digital cinema cameras with a sophisticated robotic gimbal and precision control, delivering unparalleled PTZ performance and versatility. AIR One Bundle is in stock and available at Broadfield! Contact your Broadfield sales rep at 800-634-5178 for more information!

Bundle Includes:

  • AIR One smart gimbal with embedded CPU
  • Camera: Z CAM E2-M4 (integrated)
  • Lens: Panasonic Lumix 14-140 (integrated)
  • iPad (10.2″ 64GB WiFi)
  • AIR iOS app 
  • AIR zoom motor and mount
  • 12v-8a power supply 
  • Ethernet cable
  • Quick release plate
  • High-impact plastic travel case + foam
  • 3 months AIRcloud subscription
  • 12 months warranty on AIR One robot
  • 12 months support + software updates

IN STOCK!
SKU: AIR1A2023
MPN: AIR1A2023
$11,495.00 MSRP

Join the Broadfield Live webinar on Thursday, May 21st as Jim from Broadfield is joined by Nick Nordquist and Kevin McClave from AIR for an inside look at the AIR One Bundle.

Click Here to Watch

AIR One Unboxing Video

Watch the unboxing video for a firsthand look at our innovative robotic device and its components.

AIR One isn’t just another piece of equipment – it’s an opportunity.

Production professionals understand the importance of image quality in livestreaming. AIR One brings advanced PTZ functions to digital cinema cameras, setting a new standard for professional live production, while reducing costs associated with traditional production.

AIR One Robotics

Meet AIR One – a robotic gimbal that brings human-like movement and automation to remote camera control. AIR One is a self-contained kit that can be operated from anywhere using only a broadband connection, and will stream live video to any CDN.

Quality
Can record or stream at full camera resolution.

Lightweight
Mount anywhere. Small enough to fit in an aircraft overhead bin.

Camera Agnostic
AIR supports multiple makes and models.

Smart Gimbal
Onboard CPU enables highly advanced shots without ever needing to touch the camera.

Scale Your Livestreaming Video Production

Results you can count on. A budget you can afford. AIR technology is better, simpler, and radically less expensive than traditional video production techniques. Guaranteed. Join the ranks of successful AIR users, from tier one sports teams to independent YouTubers. Contact your Broadfield Sales Rep at 800-634-5178 for more information.

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Remote Production and AI Tracking: The Future of Broadcast Camera Systems https://news.broadfield.com/remote-production-and-ai-tracking-the-future-of-broadcast-camera-systems/ Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:55:35 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=35430 Broadcast workflows are evolving as AI-driven tracking and remote production tools become more advanced and reliable. Modern systems now use visual language models instead of traditional computer vision, allowing cameras to intelligently track subjects, adapt to changing environments, and maintain focus even in complex scenarios like live sports.

These innovations are enabling a shift toward distributed production, where cameras operate as connected devices within a larger network. With features like cloud orchestration, real-time control, and automated tracking, production teams can deliver professional-quality content with greater efficiency and scalability. As adoption grows, these technologies are expected to enhance storytelling while reducing operational costs across broadcast and live event production.

Learn more about Advanced Image Robotics here

Read the full transcript below:

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the script series about how to improve everything and everyone around your live event broadcast and post workflows and the tech stack to do it. I’m Jeff Sangpiel, the post doctor. Today we’re talking about something I’ve watched the industry wrestle with for decades. The sheer operational weight of getting cameras on the air, the people, the trucks, the cable runs, the infrastructure, the cost. It’s one of those problems that always felt like it should have a better answer. My guest today decided to build that answer literally from spare parts in his garage to track his daughter’s soccer games. Nick Norquest is an 11time Pacific Southwest Emmy award-winning filmmaker, a non-fiction storyteller, and a self-described workflow hacker. He co-founded Advanced Image Robotics, AIRIR, in 2020 with his cousin Kevin McClave out of San Diego. Their flagship product, the Air1, has racked up a 2022 NAB technology innovation award, a 2023 NAB product of the year award, and most recently a 2025 pilot innovation challenge win for their air autopilot AI tracking system. Their cameras have been deployed at the Olympics in Paris, Super Bowl 59, the US Senate, UFC, and pro sports events across basketball, soccer, hockey, tennis, and motorsports. all operated remotely, often by a single person over standard broadband. Nick, great to have you on the script. Really glad you were able to make time with us in the run-up to NAB this year. >> Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on, Jeff. >> Awesome. So, let’s start at the very beginning because I love I love me a good origin story. Uh years as a writer, producer, editor, and then you prototyped the first air camera system to film your daughter’s soccer practice. >> So, walk me through that. what were you actually building and at what point did you look at what you had and think wait this is a real product? >> Yeah, that’s a great question. So this basically everything we’re doing with air now was kind of born out of this just kind of epiphany that I had after I built this thing to shoot my daughter’s soccer matches where I went, hey, how we’re doing in things in production is really dumb. Like there’s better ways to move the camera. There’s lighter weight setups. It gives you a great deal more versatility, but it just kind of ended up being like a domino effect out of that. And the original origin is I was uh I was coaching my daughter’s soccer team. She reached a point in her development where she needed to be able to see how she was playing, needed to be able to see the channels, see the play develop. Um, and you need to do that from a high point up in the air. Well, I had a when I first rolled out, I you know, took, you know, I’m like I’ve been shooting for 30 years. I could shoot a 14-year-old girl’s soccer match, no problem. Roll my gear out there, and the results were terrible cuz I was down too low, couldn’t see the spacing. I’m like, “Okay, I need to get the thing up in the air.” Well, I started to try to put that stuff up in the air, and that got very scary very quickly on a, you know, in a pop-up kind of scenario where when you put weight up in the air on a big tripod or whatever, it just, yeah, it it gets dangerous. And so I tried some lighter weight heads and some other things and it just wasn’t fast enough to track the action in soccer. And so I was like, “Okay, I got to break down and buy something to do this.” Looked at the stuff in the market and it was absolutely terrible. Like I referred to it at the time as ancient Sumerian technology cuz it’s literally levers and pulleys and the whole thing twists and and it wasn’t cheap either. It was like, you know, it was like five grand for a setup. And I’m like, okay, I’m not going to spend the money on that. I’m going to hack together something on my own. And that’s kind of how Air was originally born. Took apart a took apart a drone gimbal camera. Uh created a a touchscreen interface to control it. Um because I didn’t want to haul a bunch of control systems, and I’ve always hated a joystick for PTZ. So, uh, basically built this system, went out and started shooting with it and did, you know, couple hundred soccer matches and, uh, there was one point in there probably about halfway through this where I was shooting. I remember the moment now. It was a corner kick coming in from the corner and I started, you know, I pushed in with the touchcreen and did this as the shot came in. I kind of floated back and then drifted in on it as it goes into the box and I was like, “Hey, that looks pretty And I’m like, that’s kind of hard to do if I was bent over the sticks with my eye and the eyepiece trying to pan, tilt, zoom all at the same time. And here I am. I’m sitting back in a chair doing this with it instead. And I went, “Oh, how we’ve been moving cameras is been the same for a hundred years.” Like almost from the invention of the camera, it’s been sticks with a human moving it. That’s just really dumb today. We’ve got much better ways to move the camera and really air is about leveraging this modern technology for camera movement um into practical workflows for broadcast. >> And it it sounds like you came into it as a filmmaker, not a hardware guy. And as a workflow hacker, it sounds like building error was really more a film making problem that happened to have a robotic solution than anything else that needed to be solved. Yeah, it’s kind of funny. We did not when we set out. So, basically what happened here is at a certain point I brought this system and showed it to Kevin, our CEO at some family gathering or something and he was doing work out of uh all over Asia at the time and he’s like, “Hey, I’ll find the factory where they’re making those uh cameras where they’re making that camera gimbal combo, you know, we’ll slap it in a box and put a label on it and um have a nice little lifestyle company.” Like that was the idea. We would sell it to youth soccer teams. Well, what ended up happening was completely different than that. Literally, when we first got accepted into the incubator uh here in San Diego, one called Evo Nexus. Um, day one CO hit and all the lockdowns happened and I was like, we are not selling any cameras to any youth soccer teams for the foreseeable future. I had always had in the back of my mind using the same thing for broadcast because I recognized there’s a bunch of scenarios where I’m using PTZs where it is incredibly cumbersome to set up. It takes, you know, I was doing these things in Florida at the time where I would set up like 10 little mini studios each with four cameras and pull all the cables back through the hallway to a central control room where I’ve got 10 guys all, you know, operating each room independently. The talent level is all over the place for operating a PTZ. You know, some of the guys I’m like, “Hey, you’re on a lockoff. Put it there and then take it.” Cuz frankly, joystick is not really, unless you have the decades of muscle memory, and some guys do. Um, it is very difficult to operate a camera that way. The touchcreen is dead simple. I’ve literally put it in the hands of a, you know, a 10-year-old with five minutes of instruction and he’s shooting a soccer match almost as well as me. Maybe a little too zoomy, but aside from that, it’s very easy to pick up. So, um, yeah. So, that’s kind of the the origins of air are just kind of around that, um, opportunistically applying what we’re doing to broadcast stuff. I started going, “Oh, this big setup problem that I have, all of a sudden, I can plug in, use regular Ethernet infrastructure. All of a sudden, I’ll set up a VPN and now I can control the camera from anywhere.” Um, literally across continents. Um, when we did the uh Olympics in Paris in uh 24, we had a robo set up above the boxing ring and I could control it from here in San Diego, however many thousands of kilometers away that is. No problem. I easily could have shot a boxing match from there. I’ve done concerts from here in San Diego where the the Robo was in Prince Edward Island in the far reaches of Canada, literally across the continent. So geography is now no longer relevant for your camera operation. And what that means essentially is that you can have a small footprint on site for setup and your crew can be dispersed. So this this other thing which we’ve been doing forever, which is rolling a whole army of people and expensive gear to the site, there’s absolutely productions where that’s still required. You’re going to do the Super Bowl, that’s still going to happen. But if you’re doing a D2 game, you don’t have the budget to do that. you still want a very high level of production because people are used to seeing, you know, the the tier one broadcast. You’ve got to find a way to deliver that high quality production at a much lower price point and you just can’t scale you can’t scale down the truck and the people to meet that. So, at the end of the day, what we’re doing is giving producers uh the tools to still be able to produce highquality content, but at a lower price point with fewer people. >> Excellent. Um, let’s get a little bit into that technology for the folks who in the audience who haven’t seen Air in action. >> You’ve described it as treating a camera like an IoT device. Help me understand what the Air1 actually is and what does go away for a production team when they deploy it. >> Yeah. So, at its heart, it’s a it’s a threeaxis gimbal. So, it’s a you can put it up anywhere, put it up high in the air, it’s going to stabilize itself. It also has that wonderful smooth movement that you get from brushless DC motors where it has it feels like a human’s operating. It doesn’t feel like uh like a robot even when our autopilot AI is running it. It feels like a human is operating it. So mounted onto that robot is a digital cinema camera. So you have large sensor micro four thirds comes stock on it. Micro four/ thirds 4K. Um, inside the robot is a essentially a brain, what we call the air station, and that essentially handles all of the connections between the camera and the gimbal and the operator wherever they are in the world. So, at its origin, when it was originally designed, when I first built that original prototype to go up on the pole, I didn’t want to have to use traditional methods of control. I just used regular Ethernet and a touchcreen to control it. So at its from its very beginning, it was designed as an IoT device. It was designed to be controlled over the network. So that then not only removes geography, also removes a bunch of infrastructure you have to put in to connect everything. And at the end of the day, the robot I can control it from anywhere over standard Ethernet with only a broadband. I can stream it to anywhere. SRT goes straight out of it to any endpoint in the world. I can record internally on it up to uh 4K 60 and ProRes HQ. Um and it just is a highly versatile tool for doing any kind of production. We have some customers NBC Sports Bay Area, it goes right into a traditional broadcast truck. We have other customers that are doing, you know, remote control from these distant locations around the world. So, it it is it is uh much more versatile actually than I first expected. Uh when we first rolled this out, I I was not expecting that we were going to get traction in tier one. Our our target was more the the tier 2 market, but because of the versatility of this thing and because you can do stuff like put it up in the announce booth and have it shoot the talent and do a do a live shot back out over the stadium, um that’s not stuff that PTZs are traditionally very good at. um you can you can do it with some of them. They’ve gotten a lot better in the interim, but at the end of the day, your traditional PTZ is still a you know, it’s still a glorified security camera. >> The the other thing that’s very interesting about this is the whole AirCloud piece. You’re not just making a better camera robot. You’re you’re building the whole orchestration layer around it. What does AirCloud actually do that couldn’t be done with someone’s existing switching and streaming stack? Yeah. So, that’s a great question and this is something that I hadn’t I didn’t actually really set out to build when we first started this. But again, because the robot is an IoT device, you can now do all of these things with it that’s very difficult to do with traditional gear. Like for instance, the air station brain can connect up to uh computer instances in the cloud AWS EC2s where we can essentially use the aircloud. You can think of AirCloud like an orchestration layer, like a um a user interface to allow somebody who may not necessarily even be super tech-savvy to be able to set up a complete remy shoot because it’s it’s drag and drop. So basically, you just upload a little picture of your site plan, you drag your robots down on there to wherever you want them positioned around the field. You can put, you know, your people that you want to have access to them. And then same thing for EC2s that you may be deploying for um for switching graphics, replay, all of that stuff. You can drag those on. Autopilot is another one. The autopilot tracking, you could just essentially drag and drop and then when it comes time to deploy those, your your person out in the field can essentially open up their iPad and say, “Oh, that’s my camera.” and they just click on it and it opens it up, drops it into the interface, puts all the settings into the camera, you know, what what frame rate you’re recording at, what frame rate you’re streaming at, your stream destination, so you don’t have a bunch of manual typing in of data. Essentially, it creates drag and drop orchestration is is how it operates >> almost like a like a node structure like we’d have in in post-production back in the day. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Very cool. Um, you’ve got multiple registered trademarks now. Uh, Aired One, Aircloud, Air Station. Where does Air Station fit into all this architecture? >> So, Air Station is just kind of our term for the robot brain. That’s kind of the thing that makes what we’re doing different from a traditional gimbal and different from a traditional PTZ. So, it’s a it’s a computer embedded in the robot. Um, there’s also the controller board for the the gimbal and the axis of movement. And then there’s also a networking stack in there. And the networking stack um to what we were talking about a little bit earlier in AirCloud, I can take all of the data from all of the robots and push it up to what we call the master status dashboard. So on one pane of glass, I can see every robot that’s deployed on my project. or if you’re air and you have the god view, what we call the god view, I can see every robot in the world that’s deployed anywhere and change settings on those things at a click. So, when I’m setting up a shoot and I want to make sure all of the I want to paint and shade the cameras to all match, I have one pane of glass that I see all of those values displayed and can change them all on the fly there. It makes it really easy to catch things that that may be out of sync. >> Very cool. Uh, autopilot seems to be the big move for you folks at Arinet right now. You debuted it back at NAB and 25 and you won the pilot innovation challenge with it. Tell me what autopilot actually does and what the visual language model approach is doing differently from how everyone else has been doing AI tracking. >> Yeah, this is one of the things I’m I’m really excited about what we’re doing. This was kind of in the back of my head when we started Air. I wasn’t really quite sure how we’re going to how we were going to get there or how we were going to improve on regular computer vision stuff, but it’s been just um exceeded my my wildest dreams. Essentially, what we did is um that and really all of this is driven by a need from the customer. So, I want to have robots deployed. I want them to autonomously track action. I want to track players. I want to track the game. I want to track the ball. Um, so in order to do that, traditionally what’s happened is people have used regular computer vision tools and that kind of works okay in some circumstances doesn’t really work very well for sports because you have occlusions where things cover up. Um, they’re not they don’t do a very good job at persistence and all those things. So, as we got into developing Autopilot, we figured out pretty quickly that we needed to do something different with how we were identifying and then tracking these targets. So, we actually went in and created a visual language model. So, you know what an LLM is like chat GPT and all that. They use essentially words are their tokens. With a visual language model, images and pixels are the language that essentially you’re using. So what this means at the end of the day is that when the model goes in and identifies a target, it’s not it’s not like a traditional one where it goes, “Oh, that’s an outline of a human.” It will go in and say, “Oh, this is the thing that I want to track and it picks uh I think our original model was something like two billion parameters around around the target.” So we had it was really funny. We had uh uh one of our investors asked the question during one of the meetings. Uh she said, “So exactly what criteria is it using to identify the subject?” And our devs kind of go, “We don’t really know because it’s actually teaching itself.” And this is the big dividing line. I know there’s been a bunch of hype around AI and a lot of it is just BS. Um the way that I define AI is does it teach itself? Is it actually learning or is it a heristic where you’re telling it exactly what to do? Obviously, you have to put parameters around it. But this is the big thing about our visual language model. Essentially, it taught itself how to identify objects. And then we have another tracking model that taught itself how to track objects. So, it’s it’s actually purposebuilt models specifically for doing sports originally. It ends up working out really well for a ton of other stuff as well, like you know, everything from dog agility competitions to, you know, a booth camera um up in some other kind of sporting event, somebody walking around on stage, whatever. It it really is totally agnostic about what the subject matter is and where it is. The other really beautiful thing about it is it also doesn’t really care what the subject is. There’s a really cool video from NAB last year where I took in last because you can in addition to saying show me the humans and I want to track that human and it will go get that human or multiple humans and track them all keep them in frame. You can also tell it what object you’re looking for a chair a car a dog and it will show you those and then you can pick the one you want to track. You can also if you uh if there’s not a definition for what that thing is, you can just go lasso it. Like you go, “Okay, here’s the thing I want to track.” And there’s this great shot of this guy walks around the corner and I lasso his NAB badge. And you can see very quickly the the model goes in and goes, “Oh, this lanyard is part of the badge.” And you can see it kind of expand its little thing around to track. The thing that’s beautiful about this is the guy goes and turns away completely so that the badge is gone, but it sees a little piece of the lanyard around his neck at the top. So, it continues to track it. And then he turns back around. You can see it picks it all back up again. So, this ability to >> to deal with a target that is changing in appearance over time is something that’s completely unprecedented. Your regular computer vision models just just can’t deal with that. and they can’t deal with like, you know, there’s some stuff with um some tracking stuff we have with Steph Curry at Golden State where you have players, all the Warriors wearing the same uniforms, you know, all look very similar. They’re they’re, you know, going back and forth in in front of each other. Steph is jumping into a pile to get a rebound. And there’s a I think there’s a segment of like nine minutes of the game where it runs where it stays on him absolutely persistently. So, this is the thing that we really need. And at the end of the day, you know, AI, not AI, it doesn’t really matter. Is does the tool do the job that I need it to do? I put it on that player. I want to put it on Steph Curry. I want to put it on LeBron. I want to put it on Lionel Messi and have it stay on them. It >> It sounds like you’re giving the AI agency to figure out how to best do what you wanted to do. >> Yeah. The thing that’s that’s really interesting about it is the way that the model’s trained. We basically say, “Here’s this thing we want to do. You figure out how to do it.” And then when it comes back, generally you go, “Okay, it’s doing that thing.” But when you want to tweak little things to it, um, it becomes yet another training round. And we’re doing things where we’re essentially have a a teacher model and a student model where you teach the teacher and then the teacher teaches the student and then that student becomes a teacher and teaches. So you distill those models down that that two billion parameter model that we had a year ago running on big heavy industrial compute in the cloud we now have distilled down to run on a Mac mini. So that’s what we’ll be showing at at NAB um is the new onrem version of autopilot run on a mini and the parameters have you know radically reduced from 2 billion down to I think we have one model right now that runs at about 8 million parameters. >> So it’s activity agnostic, it’s object agnostic and it’s trainable in real time out of the box. That’s a strong set of features. Where do you see autopilot continuing to develop? Where are the hard cases you’re working on? What are the hard cases you’re working on now? >> Yeah, it’s really interesting. So, we’ve done a bunch of stuff with uh MASL with indoor soccer, uh Clippers, GLeague, um both teams play, but Frontway Arena here in Oceanside, and that’s kind of been our test bed for doing a bunch of this stuff. In addition to the um production team up there using it to do their broadcasts, we have other robots in there that we kind of uh test out some of these other things we’ve developed elsewhere. Um expanding out from that and going to outdoor soccer, obviously biggest sport in the world and World Cup coming this summer. Um it’s it’s really interesting the different techniques that are required to be able to do game follow or identify the ball on the field. So we’ve got some really interesting stuff we’re working on to expand the things that we’re doing indoor to outdoor to that larger field. Having the robots work um synergistically together. Um we call it a hive mind internally where one robot shares its information with the other robot. That’s something I’m really kind of geeked about because that’s going to enable the capabilities to uh grow exponentially when the robots can share a brain essential essentially. Um do things like okay I identified you as the person I’m tracking but you disappeared from my view. I can hand that identifier off to the next robot and it can pick you up because it knows what those criteria are. Um, there’s also some g game follow is one of the areas where we’re expanding out as well because I can track an individual player right now, but to be able to follow a game that requires a different model because you’re you’re tracking ball and a bunch of players and those things. Identifying where the ball is is really crucial um to being able to do that game follow. A lot of the stuff that’s already out in the market, it’s okay. It’s, you know, it runs 85 90%. Um, but for us, that’s not good enough. Um, if you’re gonna rely on these robots to shoot the game, you got to be you got to be multiple nines of reliability. Um, I mean, I don’t I don’t imagine that the robots are ever going to be 100% perfect, but at the end of the day, humans are not 100% perfect. And there are some things, this is one of the really interesting things that has developed in our work with the NHL is there’s some things that the robots can do that human operators can’t. Like um with NHL, what we’re doing is we’re using their existing technology to track the puck and that puck position then translating to the robots and tracking the game. So what that means is that if the puck is on the near boards where your camera operator normally couldn’t see it, you don’t really know where it is. I mean, those guys are really good at reading body language and all of those things up over the top to to kind of figure out where it’s going, but they can’t actually see it. The beauty about interfacing with that puck tracking system is the robots always know where it is, even if it can’t see it. And it can also track super tight in a way that it’s very difficult to do as a camera operator. One of the things I get all the time from camera ops is, “This robots are going to take my job.” And I keep explaining to him the robots are not going to take your job. It’s another tool for you to do your job. So the thing that that human operators bring is their knowledge of the game and the pictures required to tell that story. That’s the skill. It’s not this and it’s not, you know, the manual manipulation of the camera. It is knowing what the shot is to tell the story. And this is what the robots help you to do as a camera operator even better because you can you can turn it loose and it’s always going to be paying attention and it’s always going to be on its target. >> We’re we’re used to covering a game from one side of the arena. So the the motion is always we don’t we don’t break that plane uh the 180 degree plane. But if you got a camera on the other side on a wide shot and it’s tracking the camera and it’s telling all of the other cameras exactly where that is. I mean, that that’s kind of like it’s like having an extra assistant director being able to to tell everybody exactly where everything’s going to be. It’s not knowing where the puck is necessarily, but knowing where the puck’s going to be. I’ve heard that I heard that for years in this industry. One other one other point along that along those lines. At the end of the day, what we’re doing is helping people helping producers and directors better tell the story and more cameras in more positions in places where you may not be able to put a human operator. That’s really where we’re seeing, particularly in the tier ones, that’s where we’re seeing the air ones being deployed. on the reverse side, above goal, you under goal, down in a corner, in places where you’re not you couldn’t put a camera operator there because you’re blocking a sight line. Or in motorsports, you’re going to put them down on a dangerous curve where you want the shot from there, but you can’t put a person. That’s kind of where the the robots are are working. >> Yeah. Or we used to put people there and then they almost got run over. And I I’ I’ve had friends who are operators in motorsports and some of them have some harrowing stories and video of those bare misses. >> Yeah, that can get that can get very scary. >> It can. You’ve described your target as the $247 billion OTT live streaming market. But you’ve also got early customers that are that are wild. You got dog agility competitions like you mentioned uh nature documentarian. I know you discussed it for a fine art we had discussed it actually for a fine arts venue in New York City recently. >> Yeah. >> So, who is air right now and is that who you expected you’d be? >> Wow, that’s a really good question. Um so right now air is a problem solver for producers and production entities that want to either do more with less or want to augment their existing uh production infrastructure in a way that they can’t with current tools that are in the market. Um we’re a pathway to automation. um because it’s an IoT device at its core and because we have the autopilot visual language model tracking, it’s a unique set of tools that enable people to do things that just that just weren’t possible before. Um I absolutely see us growing eventually outside of sports, but right now we have so much stuff going on in so many different sports and we’re a fairly small team. Um, so I I I absolutely see us growing beyond it eventually. For now, there’s more than enough for us to uh take on across a bunch of different sports in a bunch of different parts of the world. I mean, mostly North America. We also have really good partners in um in Europe. In Italy, we have Video Proetti. It’s our distributor there. They just did a a test with a big tennis broadcaster. We got a thing coming up with soccer over there soon. sorry, football over there soon. Um, so it we’re seeing a bunch of stuff happening. Combat sports now. That’s um one UFC is one of our customers, but we’re seeing a number of other um uh combat sport type competitions um that are adopting it. Universities, uh we just did a whole trial at uh Notre Dame. They tested it across I think six or seven different sports. Yeah. to in a nutshell, yeah, we’re we’re further than I expected us to be with the tier ones. Um, I didn’t quite expect us to be as good a fit as we’ve ended up being for them. Um, I would expect us to grow even more across the tier 2 and tier three type productions uh in the coming years. And I think probably within 24 to 36 months, you’ll see us doing some more in some alternate spaces outside of sports broadcasting. >> Tier one leads to the tier one venues as well. So >> yeah, we put you you get end up in the crypto arena for for you know NBA and then suddenly someone’s like, well, we can use that for monster truck stuff, too. Why not? >> Because it’s physically there. Why why not use it? >> Yeah. I think we’re going to see a lot more of that. I mean, we’ve already seen that happen with uh multiple different like tier ones where we’re doing something with the league where now the team wants it for something and now the venue wants it for something. So, uh I think we’re going to see more and more of that. One of the challenges we face there is that the production systems aren’t yet aware that we’re there. Like we still have right right now behind me you see a setup up here at Frontway where they’re doing Arena Football. all of the contract for all that production was already done ahead of time. They didn’t know that there was already a system in place um to be able to do a complete multicam production out of that venue. I think as we become more established and are in more places uh we’re going to see that traction pick up even more. >> Maybe maybe venue certification. We’re we’re certified for this. You just here’s your positions. that it already knows the it already knows the venue and just tell it the venue, tell it to the sport, and off it goes. >> Yeah. The the interesting thing that I’ve learned along this journey is that I I I was a little naive coming in. I’m thinking better mousetrap, everybody’s going to want it. And we’ve ended up having a lot of people want it, but I didn’t really recognize how difficult it is for production workflows to change in broadcast. Right now, there is an incredible amount of technology available, not just air, but across the spectrum that could absolutely revolutionize things that we’re doing in production. The thing that’s preventing its adoption is not the technology. It’s the people. The people don’t understand yet how to take advantage of these tools. And they’re in some cases, they’re so busy doing the production, they can’t pick their head up to look for new things. That’s why shows like NAB are so important and things like the podcast that you’re doing here because it helps people become aware of these other options. But man, the technology the technology across the board right now is amazing. We need to get the people now to come along with us on these uh on these workflows cuz it it it absolutely can energize your storytelling for what you’re doing. That gets into the the question I was going to ask you next about where where do you see the industry landing on crew reduction through automation and it sounds like as folks learn more about what these tools can do they’ll discover better workflows for those tools and and workflows that even you folks didn’t anticipate coming along. >> Yeah. I mean there’s a big there’s a big concern in the industry. Obviously you’re a camera operator. Your robot’s going to take my job, right? You’re concerned about that. what we’re seeing happen is actually the opposite that that rule of economics where when you make something less expensive, you get more of it. So, you know, we’re seeing stuff where with some of the bigger leagues that were doing some lower tier stuff with one camera operator. Now, we’re talking about having five cameras deployed for that because that one camera operator can then do more stuff in a day. They don’t have to travel to the site. Um, you’re using them more expeditiously on on the shoot. there. So I see it I see it being a a combination of of two things. You are going to have a cost overall cost reduction for the productions. There’s no question about that. Everybody is getting downward pressure on budgets. But you’re also going to see an increase in an exponential number of things now being covered and now being covered with multiple cameras. So I think net it is going to be an increase in work for people and an increase in overall spend probably it’s just going to be spread across more productions and I think you’re going to see new people coming into the game because this is one of the challenges. I mean I go out to these venues and I’m looking the camera ops are my age and some of those guys are starting to retire and you don’t really have the kid being trained up in the same way that they were in the past. And this is one of the other things people love about our robots is the kids are on it. Like I can train a kid to use this way faster than I can train a traditional roo because the robo has to unlearn the joystick thing and the kid goes, “Oh, it’s like a game.” Um, so it it’s one of the things that’s that’s good about it is it doesn’t require that decades of muscle memory for how to operate the camera. It’s more about in your brain, do you understand the picture that I want to show in order to tell the story? And then the the technical barrier between the thought and the action, the thing being delivered um is much shorter and requires less technical skill in order to execute >> and it’s more about creative skill at that point. How do I tell the story? >> Exactly. And at the end of the day, that’s what we’re here to do. We’re here to tell the story. Like these things are just tools. Like I mean I’m a tech geek. I’m as much of a geek as anyone. Like I love the autopilot AI. I love the touchscreen. Like I love all that technical stuff. But at the end of the day, the magic part for me is telling the story. I got this shot. You know, I’ve been shooting for 30 years. There’s still some shots, you know, cuz I’m not on a camera every day. There’s still some shots that I miss because I’m a little bit rusty or whatever. I don’t have that problem with the robot or with the AI because the shot is what I’m telling it to do. >> So, you you’ve gone up against some serious incumbents in the robotic camera space and EVS is going to be putting out T-otion at NAB26. >> It’s telemetrics plus XD Motion. Um, >> how do you feel about that competitive landscape, where your opportunities lie, and anything you could share about what you’re bringing to Vegas this year, more than you already have? Yeah, I mean we’re going to see we’re seeing this across not just in broadcast but all industries. We’re seeing this um robotics and automation growing exponentially. A lot of those ones that you mentioned are tend to be more focused on studio based productions, much simpler. Uh the traditional computer vision functions a bit better in those kinds of environments. For sports, you really kind of needed a better mousetrap than what we’ve had traditionally. And our technology at Air is based on a different platform. It’s based on this IoT concept. It’s based on a gimbal with brushless DC motors. Our robot can turn 180 I’m sorry, can turn 800° a second. So it can move like we’ve slowed it down cuz if I move 800 degrees a second, I can’t really see what I’m shooting at, right? Like there’s limited use of that practically if it’s a human operating. But if you have AI operating it and it very quickly needs to get to a position, that kind of speed can be useful. So at the end of the day, what we’re building is not just an individual product, but it’s a solution and it’s a platform to accomplish the tasks um that you need to accomplish. So what we’re going to be showing um here at NAB this year is going to be our on-prem autopilot. So that’s our autopilot um visual language model running on a little Mac Mini right there on the edge. And the reason that this is important is um our existing models that we have deployed all runs on cloud instances. These big heavy GPU computes where um you’re spinning it up, you’re running it for the thing. It requires a connection from the robot up into the cloud. The venue connections, some of them are great, some of them are a nightmare. It’s a complete crapshoot on what you’re going to get. Some of them will be great when you set it up and then you have issues. If you’re doing streaming via SRT or one of those other formats and you have error correction, it’s fine if you get little bumps in that. If I’m trying to remote control a robot for AI, I cannot have that delay. Like a delay of more than 100 milliseconds kills my ability of the robot to track its target. So that’s why we’re bringing the compute right on prem next to the robot is because it eliminates that timing gap. It’ll enable us not only to be more reliable in the tracking, but then you kind of doesn’t matter what the outside connection from the venue is. And at the end of the day, it will allow us to track stuff. >> Also gives you the ability to handle content that can’t be done in via cloud. Security issues and that sort of thing. whole whole host of new things that you weren’t looking at before. >> Yeah, that’s a really good point. Um, one of the uh we were talking to this is yet another area that we um are going to be expanding out in over the next year is reality. So reality programming, they’re switching that stuff on prem contractually. Those signals cannot go out and certainly can’t travel over the public internet even if they’re encrypted like they are in SRT. Um, so that all would have to be handled on prem. Um, we have we had we did actually build uh an onprem um server with the old model with the big GPUs in it and that was really funny because it was it was we had that at a couple of shows and it was as big an attraction as the the actually what the autopilot was doing. People are like, “Oh, look at those GPUs.” Um, but that’s just not very practical for long-term deployment. And we’re trying to do costefficient solutions. Like if we were one of the big companies, probably what we would do is say, “Here’s your $25,000 computer that you need to put on prem instead of here’s your $600 computer that you need to put on prem.” Because, you know, we get like I spent 30 years in the business. I know the budget pressure. Um, we need things, we need new tools in the industry so that we can still make money doing events right now. It’s gotten so tough for production companies and entities to make money on productions, you know, just everything’s getting so compressed. That’s that’s another big thing we bring to the game is guess what? You can do this a different way and now you can make money on that $15,000 show, right? You can do that now and not just do it at a, you know, to cover your nut, but you can do it and make money on it. >> That’s while we’re all about storytelling. We were in this business to tell stories people would like to pay us for. >> Yes. >> So, the NAB show floor, it’s gotten it’s going to be very AI heavy. There’s now two dedicated AI pavilions. How are you going to cut through the noise when everyone’s just grabbing that AI sticker and slapping it on their product name? >> Yeah, that’s a great question. The the AI hype is kind of out of control. It was really out of control last year and we had people slapping it on stuff that just wasn’t at the end of the day. Whether you’re going to label it AI or not doesn’t really matter. It’s a tool. We happen to have real AI. It is really artificial intelligence. It’s not computer vision rebranded with this new label, but at the end of the day is does the tool do the thing? Does it have the capabilities to do the thing that you want it to do? And in this business, the proof is in the pudding, right? Everybody wants to get our robots on site, test them, make sure that they do the thing that we say they’re going to do. That’s true across most technologies in this business. Most people are not just going to, you know, buy it and take it home and then see if it works. You’re going to need to test it in your actual environment to see if it does what you need it to do. Thankfully, we have, you know, a really broad cross-section of sports and examples of that. So, you can see it. You can go to our YouTube channel. Um, it’s YouTube, see it in action because at the end of the day, that’s all that matters. Doesn’t matter what label you put on it. It’s does it does it work? Does it does it do the thing I need it to do? >> Speaking of things doing what they need to do um at NAB this year, if you’re able to get untied from your own booth for a little bit, what do you think is going to be interesting that you want to see at the show for where production and and broadcast and post is going? You know, one of the things I really miss now that I’m in the booth the whole show, I really miss being able to walk around and see what’s going on um at other places. One of the things that I’ve always loved about NAB is the smaller booths, those small innovative companies doing something unique um where they have some tool that really speaks to me as a filmmaker. That was one of the things that I didn’t realize. My background is in production like at 30 years making TV shows, not building product, you know, for other folks. I didn’t realize before I started this that most of the big companies making the gear that I’ve been using my entire career don’t really understand what I do. like they understand kind of and they’ve evolved long enough so that it’s a tool, but generally it’s the user uh adapting to what the tool is instead of the tool adapting to what the user wants. And I think that’s the thing I’m really excited to look for at NAB. We’re now entering into this realm where we can do more bespoke stuff. We’re getting the sports leagues are taking control of their tech stack from top to bottom. We’re seeing that happen. I think we’re going to see more and more of that where we’re going to get we’re going to see more of these kind of solutions but not at the huge expense where we’ve seen them in the past. >> More cost-effective ways to get the same task done. >> Yeah. And customizing tasks. Like everybody wants their I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had on the Well, not I haven’t had a ton, but I get left-handed people to get the iPad and go, I want the Zoom slider on the other side. And I’m like, “Oh, okay. I get that.” You know, you know, like in Europe, they have the I think they do the zoom on the on the right and we do zoom on the left. Um, is that or is it the other way around? I can’t remember. On the tribe. Yeah. On on the sticks. >> So, um, being able to customize the interface to something that’s more appropriate to your workflow. I think that’s the other thing that we’re going to see. It’s not going to be oneizefits-all stuff. we’re going to get more maybe not super granularly customized but at least in kind of general terms more um more bespoke solutions or more flexible solutions. Certainly that’s you know for us that’s one of the things that we built in with the aircloud and with um all of the different um components that we interface with the ability to be flexible and work with anytime. flexibility is is where we all need to be moving forward. >> Yeah. I mean, we’ve that’s the other thing about the business that’s always made me crazy is nothing talks anything. Like, you know, I have this product from this company doesn’t talk to this product from this company. And uh I think we’re entering an era where that’s going to go away because we can’t have these walled gardens anymore. There’s too many other part of the issue part of the thing that’s driving that is there’s too many other good solutions that do network together and software like companion and uh central control that stitch all of these things together. I think we’re going to see more and more of that. We’re taking our API and giving it to people like Scarhoy to embed in their systems to do their joysticks. And ZCAM, the camera that we mount on our robot also is in Scarhoy and Cyan View. like we’re going to see more symbiotic systems where different components from different manufacturers are working together. I think it it absolutely has to go this way because as a a purchaser of equipment, you can’t be stuck inside this box. I’m sure a lot of people are going to relate to that. Oh, we bought into this system from this company and now we need to take advantage of this thing, but it doesn’t play nice with there. So, I got to throw away my $50 million investment in that thing to move over here. That’s very painful. We’re not gonna I I don’t see that as being a viable path going forward. People that we’re talking to people we’re talking to are flat out, hey, can your robot work with this thing? >> Because we have an open API and because we it’s an IoT device. The answer is almost always yes >> and and yes is a great answer. So my last question and I need to start asking everybody this that that I get on here. If you could violate the temporal prime directive and go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice at that moment you decided to turn uh a soccer camera practice shoot thing into a company, what would it be? >> Oh, that’s a great question. Um, that one’s a little a little tough to answer because my knee-jerk reaction would would be raise more money. like literally just cuz it’s going to take longer and be more expensive and you’re going to need things you didn’t anticipate when you’re creating some new piece of technology. You can’t know always completely what that path is. Things are going to come up and having the resources to be able to react to that um is absolutely critical. Having said that, having a shortage of funds to do certain things that we wanted to pursue made us ha absolutely had to laser focus have you know made us have to stay hungry made us have to be absolutely ruthless for focusing on the most important features for customers. So that thing that I would do differently I I I don’t know I I often feel like you go down these paths and you do things wrong and that or make a mistake and that helps you inform a better product at the end of the day. So I don’t think that there are necessary unless there you make a mistake that’s fatal that kills the project entirely. Um I don’t necessarily think mistakes are a bad thing. I think what you need to do is you need to fail quickly and adapt. I mean, that’s one of the great things about us being a small company is we can very quickly adapt and iterate and there’s not a whole bunch of meetings. It’s, you know, me and the devs going, “Hey, let’s do this and that and we’ll fix it in real time together.” So, um, yeah, I think I think having said all that, I’ve now talked myself out of it. But I’d rather have the money and just still stay hungry and still stay focused and have the, you know, more resources to do it. >> The money and the cheat sheet of the answers that you already have that you So, we don’t have to go down that road. Here’s the thing you Here’s the thing I learned. Let me let me take that and and use that now. >> Well, I think there’s a quote from Elon Musk about a bunch of in really talented engineers solving problems they shouldn’t be solving. In if I look back in time to when we started our um our our autopilot tracking, we if we had a bunch of resources, we could have thrown a bunch of whole resources on making computer traditional computer vision better. Um that’s what all the big guys are doing. Like we could have done that. In retrospect, I’m really glad that we didn’t do that because we came up with a newer and better and kind of rethinking um how image tracking or target tracking is done. So, at the end of the day, I don’t know that there are again, unless they’re fatal, I don’t know that there are really mistakes. They’re just how you react to those setbacks. Make them temporary. um be resilient. Uh it’s been, you know, doing a startup. My, again, my background is production, so I’m used to working, you know, 12-hour days, 7 days a week for, you know, 3 4 months while a project is underway. What I’m not accustomed to is doing that for 6 years. So, that’s been a little bit of a that that’s been the biggest challenge. just enough enough hours in the day uh to do the things that I want to do um to, you know, to move stuff forward. It’s it’s really I got to say though, it’s it’s really fun. It’s really fun creating new tools for people to do their jobs and tell their stories. There’s nothing funner for me than when I go down to a someplace where our robots are being used and I see someone using it in a way that I didn’t expect. um or see somebody doing like we were at the Savannah Bananas is one of our customers and we were down they were here in San Diego and it went down and they have it uh behind the behind home plate is where that camera’s positioned and this kid’s been operating it with the touchcreen on a whole bunch of these Bananas games and I watch him later on in the game he pushes in on the pitcher and tracks the ball at manually as it’s coming the pitch is coming over the plate. If you’d asked me if somebody could do that, I would have said, “No way. Too small, too fast.” >> But this guy has figured out a way >> to do that. He’s had enough repetitions with it. And seeing that um that somebody can use it in a way I didn’t expect. That’s that’s super fun for me to see that. >> And that’s why we’re in the business, to have fun. We’re not just here to make money. We If we just wanted to make money, we’d be in we’d be in accounting somewhere. >> Yeah. Banking. We be banking. >> Exactly. >> All righty. Well, to our off audience, thanks for dropping by with us here today on the script. If you found value in the conversation, please hit those like and subscribe buttons down there. Helps us get guests like Nick in front of the right people. Special thanks to Nick and the team at Advanced Image Robotics for joining us. You can meet up with Nick and see the whole line of products in the central hall at booth 4212. And as always, thanks to Avid Technology for the editorial platform that I utilize. Uh, if you’ve got a workflow that’s ailing you, the doctor is in. Drop me a line at contact the postdocctor.com and find everything we do at the postdocctor.com. I will also be at NAB. Reach out and see if we can get some time on the calendar. We will see you next time on the script.

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Broadfield NAB Preview https://news.broadfield.com/broadfield-nab-preview/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 20:30:00 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=35160

Broadfield NAB Preview

Curious about what to see at NAB? Broadfield Distributing has you covered! Check out these three can’t miss products and booths at NAB 2026 in Las Vegas! Contact your Broadfield Sales Rep to learn more!

See how the AIR ONE can Simplify your Workflow at NAB 2026

Live production isn’t easy — your camera system should be. Simplify your workflow, capture more angles, conquer latency, and make every production smoother with our AI-powered camera robotics. Come by Booth #C4212 to see how you can deliver more with the AIR ONE Robotic Camera Kit

See the AIR ONE at NAB in Booth #C4212

AIR One Robotic Camera Kit and REMI Production Bundle

Everything you need for easy live production comes in one box.

  • Combines digital cinema cameras with a robotic gimbal for high-end PTZ performance
  • Delivers cinematic image quality while lowering traditional production costs

IN STOCK IN NY AND CA!
SKU: AIR1A2023
MPN: AIR1A2023
$9,995.00 MAP

AIR AutoPilot™ AI-powered autotracking that gives you physical pan / tilt and optical zoom via real glass. Consistently follow ISO targets or the entire game with high accuracy — no trackers required. Built on our proprietary Visual Language Model, designed specifically for live production, AIR AutoPilot only gets smarter as you use it. Get the shot, every time.

AIRcloud® — Easily plan, manage, and run your REMI shoot from anywhere in the world. Control AIR robots across locations through a single, streamlined platform.


See the latest in Facilis HUB Shared Storage during NAB 2026

The Facilis team will be available for meetings during the show from April 19 – 22. Request a meeting or demo with Facilis today!

Facilis HUB

Shared storage for video editing.

  • High-performance shared storage built for collaborative video editing workflows
  • Supports multi-platform environments with seamless 4K to low-bitrate production

starting at $12,989.00 MSRP

See Facilis at NAB in Booth #N2052

NAB 2026 Reseller Meeting – Save the Date & RSVP

NAB 2026 Facilis Reseller Meeting & Luncheon
Saturday, April 18, 2026 | 11:30am – 3:00pm

Facilis products are evolving rapidly, and we have a lot to talk about in 2026! There will be announcements on new products and workflow tools, plus some exciting product integrations to share with you at the meeting. Don’t miss it! This is the only Facilis Reseller event at NAB – so be sure to attend!


Schedule a Meeting or Demo with Telestream at NAB 2026

Join Telestream at NAB 2026 to learn how they can help you gain an advantage through our end-to-end Workflow Automation and Full-Spectrum Observability. Schedule your personal demo with Telestream at booth #W1503 in the West Hall.

Telestream Vantage Bundles

High Performance, Intelligent Media Processing and Workflow Automation

  • Automates complex media workflows with high-speed processing and AI-driven efficiency
  • Flexible deployment (on-prem, cloud, or hybrid) with seamless integration across your workflow ecosystem

starting at $69,881.75 MSRP

  • Powering the Modern Media Stack: We are reducing production complexity through media-specific platforms that unify core workflows across on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments.
  • Global Ingest for Live Events & Venues: We’ve created a single, resilient pipeline for fast-paced, multi-source production. Whether it’s live feeds, file transfers, or camera cards, we ensure your content is ingested reliably.
  • Practical AI for Media Operations: Our focus is “Automation you can trust.” We deliver production-ready tools—integrated directly into your ingest and production workflows—to replace manual tasks with clear, measurable ROI. 
  • Resilience & Observability: We are closing the “visibility gap” in distributed IP and hybrid workflows. By providing real-time, end-to-end monitoring across ground, cloud, and edge, we ensure you maintain full control over signal, sync, and quality at every link of the supply chain.
  • Ecosystem Built with Partnerships: We prioritize open interoperability and a “build-with” model. By removing the need for custom middleware or manual handoffs, we allow you to orchestrate seamless workflows across your chosen creative tools and environments.

Broadfield Distributing at NAB 2026

Use our exclusive code NS8446 for a FREE Show Floor Pass and join us at the event redefining the future of media and entertainment.

To set up a meeting with the Broadfield Team, please reach out to your Broadfield Sales Rep. We will have a meeting space at Booth # C4318

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How AIR AutoPilot™ Is Redefining AI Camera Tracking for Live Sports Broadcasts https://news.broadfield.com/how-air-autopilot-is-redefining-ai-camera-tracking-for-live-sports-broadcasts/ Fri, 13 Feb 2026 15:00:00 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=34661 AIR AutoPilot™, combined with SMT Oasis, enabled broadcasters to control advanced AI camera tracking modes from a standard laptop with a single click. From puck-follow tracking during face-offs to dynamic team and isolated skater modes, the system maintained precise framing using physical robotics and optical zoom. This approach removed traditional limitations of slow robotics and digital-only tracking, giving sports broadcasters a faster, more reliable path to AI-powered live production.

Learn more about AIR here

See the original post here

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How SKAARHOJ PTZ Extreme Integrates AIR Gimbal Control into Broadcast Workflows https://news.broadfield.com/how-skaarhoj-ptz-extreme-integrates-air-gimbal-control-into-broadcast-workflows/ Thu, 15 Jan 2026 14:00:00 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=34378 This demonstration showed how SKAARHOJ PTZ Extreme unified AIR gimbal control within a professional broadcast ecosystem. Instead of relying on touch-based control, operators gained tactile, frame-accurate control over camera movement, optics, and exposure. Custom Reactor layouts and engineering features simplified complex setups while enabling consistent, repeatable operation. For productions looking to blend gimbal movement with traditional PTZ workflows, the setup delivered a seamless, broadcast-ready solution. Be sure to check out the setup in action:

Learn more about Advanced Image Robotics here

Read the full transcript below:

Today you’ll finally see tactile control of your air gimbal. These gimbals are high quality, very precise, but until now you’ve been stuck controlling them with an iPad. Not anymore. Skyo’s PTC controllers support air paired with a CC cam on top. Essentially, it’s a customuilt PTC camera, combining the best of both devices. And in the true Skyway style, you can mix it seamlessly with any other brand of camera, plus switches, routers, and more, all from the same panel. So, this is the wonderful Jimble from Air with a CC cam on top. I’m just showing you the device from the side here because now I’m going to press a recall button for preset. And this is the back side of it, which you’ll see from now on. So we’ll focus a little bit on how this operates and how the iPad you see now here in the picture can be used to to control it. So basically in a situation like you have been used to you would be dragging across the iPad screen but actually I have control on the PVC extreme right now. So you see I’m able to zoom. I’m also able to tilt a little bit and you saw me panning a moment ago because I have control. That’s what this button says. It says take yield. And if I press it it’s now yellow. It means I do not have control anymore with the joystick but I have on the iPad instead as you have been used to so far. So basically one of these devices will control the gimbal and the camera at a time when it comes to the pan, tilt and zoom axis. Presets are managed on a PDC extreme from these buttons. So if I press the first one then you see it go into the first preset that we started out with. If I press the second one it has been coded to this preset and the third one it goes to this one. It would be possible quite easily for me to just pan over to the camera here on the side. Zoom out a little bit like that and make this a new preset that I’ll store on say number four by pressing and holding it turns green. The preset is stored. If I go to three, I’m there. If I go to four, it goes over to the the Tesla Roadster here. And that is how easy it is to actually store a new preset with the PDC Extreme. Super super easy. Uh, another thing that I want to highlight is our ability to uh, manage focus here on the uh, roller wheel on on the PDC extreme. So, uh, that’s a real nice uh, thing and very very smooth focus on the uh, uh, CC cam air uh, gimble combo here. You can uh, in fact follow this. So, if you look on on the iPad, you see that the number for focus is is shown here on the iPad. And uh I may even be able to actually manipulate the focus parallel to the PC extreme. So there are certain things that both of the controllers can actually access simultaneously. It depends on where the parameter is, but such as focus can be done both places. There’s also iris control. So we have um and ISO by the way. So we have ISO control here. You see the parameter on the PTC extreme right there. So I can control it from here or I can also Oh, I cannot. Okay. Okay. So, that would be one of those that are not um multicontrolled in that way, but you see it’s following along. So, you have a quite nice reflection of what the changes are that you are making. This is the iris knob on the PT extreme. So, this is the most open Iris that we are going to get um on the control panel um or on the camera of today. And um those are some of the features that PDC Extreme gives you right at your lefthand fingertips basically. focus, iris, and zoom on the zoom rugger. Speaking about zoom, which is available both on the joystick and also on the zoom rugger here, it is something that we can adjust in the menu. So, PDC Extreme has a menu structure here where we can go through some parameters. We’ll explore in a moment. And in this menu, the one called air, we have something specific for the gimbal. So, uh actually, if you uh kind of notice then in this menu, white balance, that’s not on the gimbal, that’s on the camera. We’ll get back to that. But in the menu here, the uh settings that you find are for the gimbal. And uh we have the zoom rocker and the rotation. And they are currently both assigned to zooming. So maybe if I change this one for the rotation of the joystick over to air roll. Now with the zoom rocker, I will be zooming. You can see it on the picture. So I’m zooming in, zooming out. But if I now turn the joystick, I’m rolling the gimbal, which is like a fourth axis you normally don’t find on PDC cameras generally. So this is something that you just go and set up inside of the menu on the PDC Extreme any way you want it to do to be. So um the CC cam on top it has u it has its the zoom on the lens is actually controlled from the uh the air because there’s like a lens gear while the focus is inside of the camera and if we um look at those camera parameters that I promised you a moment ago then they are generally spread out on a number of menu items here. So in the home menu, this is where you are invited to actually customize and place the parameters that you would like to have there because many of them are also find deeper inside. You’ll see stuff like white balance and white balance priority. That’s also find in the white found in the white balance menu. But we assume that you want those on the home screen. This is why they are replicated there. While many other parameters on the left side are actually from other menus. In the exposure menu, you have the iris. Um, this would be a duplicate of the iris knob here on the side, but it’s just broken out here. Now, you have a display that shows the number of it. We also have a um another parameter here for um basically offset of the exposure. We have ISO is shown and and that is being shown uh in this um menu. I think actually I would expect it to be slightly different. Oh, it’s a max ISO. Sorry. Um, we have a shutter speed uh or angle. So, we can change that around. And then we have metering mode of the camera, etc. I won’t go through all of these, but going on to white balance. Then we have different white balance settings. Very familiar settings for white balance we find in this menu. So, that’s great. Okay, let’s just go back to auto because that’s a nice place to be for a quick demo like this. We have lots, we have lens parameters we can set. We can move on to the system menu where we have a number of settings that we can also work with. And then we have these specific air settings that are mapped out onto these eight encoders. Again, nothing that we can go through with if um in in any way today. And then we have a menu called test, which is basically something that I have been adding prior to this demonstration just to show that we can also add our own menu items. And that brings me over to the UI of Reactor because Reactor is um the application running on the PVC extreme. This is a self-contained panel. It does not depend on any computer anywhere. So when you buy a Sky product, an essential selling point is that you are basically free. You just have this device. It’s going to talk to both the camera and the Jimble and nothing else is necessary. In this UI, you see it the devices we are connected to on this IP address and this IP address is the camera and the gimbal. Now technically there is only a single Ethernet cable going into the Jimble because air has integrated CC cam very tightly so that the network connection to the CC cam goes through the Jimble. Thank you guys. In many other cases when you have a combo device with Scaroy you basically uh have those separate. They don’t know of each other in many other cases. This is super elegant. So, thank you. But it’s the same for many other devices that if you combine a PT head and a camera on top, you’ll have two devices which are now made into one and mapped down onto the controller. And to the user, they won’t know how exactly this has been combined together. In the configuration tab, you can now change the controllers settings of various sorts. This is where you see the um let’s go to the home menu again. uh real quick. So if I go to the home menu here, you see the settings in the home menu. And let’s say that I want to change like this parameter tint. I don’t want that. So I’ll just be clicking on it. And if I’m in auto mode, so in this menu, if you choose auto mode, it will automatically select the uh behavior that is mapped down onto this encoder in its current mode. You can see if I go to exposure and I click now, I get to something else. So it’s very intuitive in a sense that you can just pick whatever you want and whatever you see here you click it and you get to that parameter and now we can change the behavior to something else. So I want to see if we can change over to um let’s let’s say a focus for instance I want to see the focus uh position. So focus manual focus absolute that sounds like a nice parameter. It’s coming out of the CC cam. But you see me searching for focus gives me uh different options here because um the gimal can also manage focus in certain cases. But I know this this is being done with the camera in this particular case. So I’m going to pick it right there. And did you notice what happens? And what you see on the panel right now that is the focus position. So for an operator who is uh who knows what is the um particular um number that has to the absolute focus position that I need to reach to stay sharply in focus for something. You now have it in a display. It is mapped down there on the home menu. Okay, I want to change something else. Um I can do that. So what would that be? I might want to do uh oneshot focus center. And now actually if I’m pressing this one I’ll achieve the same as what would usually be mapped to a button. But if I’m pressing the encoder I’m activating that. So this is how you can customize inside of reactor to change anything that you see on the controller. You can change that but you can also add layers. So we have something called a user section. In the user section you can overlay things. So instead of changing which has its own like approach to things you can also add a new page my page let’s call it that my page if I create my page and if I go to my page you’ll see that the controller is basically blanking out and going between background my page background my page now on my page I can click on anything here let’s say it’s this button we can find something that we want to put down on this one Let’s make it this one. So, a toggle for a function, whatever that is, is now found on my page. And I’m sure you can imagine how you can build up layers of stuff on top. It doesn’t have to be for these devices. It could be any other device you add out here. And that’s how we integrate at Skyhoy on your panels. So after working with it and imagining what is it that you want, you have a self-contained panel that gives you exactly the control experience that you or your users are looking for. Let’s wrap this video up by showing you the engineering menu. That’s a concept you find on many SkyO controllers. It’s a sort sort of hidden gateway where you press and hold a button that only you know. It really is not meant for everybody and this is why we have hidden it away a little bit. But on the PVC Extreme, it is right there on the lower right corner button. You press the upper edge, hold it for a second and you get into the engineering menu. It will tell you wonderful things like the system IP very necessary and useful for from times. You can also adjust settings for the uh dimming of the display, sleep, other things. But we have pan direction, tilt direction, zoom direction, focus direction. So if I invert these, what it means is that my joystick as I’m now going Oh, let me see. Maybe I need to exit here. Yes. Okay. So now I’m panning in this direction. When I’m pressing left, I’m actually going right. You can see it on the screen. Going right, I’m now panning left. And uh did I do it with tilt as well? So, if I am going up, you see I’m going down. Especially the tilt axis is often one that people want to invert. Uh, of course, if you place it upside down, you might also want, but many PDC cameras, they have that built in themselves. So, that’s not as necessary. Let’s just go back with these. I want to show you trace, which is a unique feature Sky has added. So, if you enable trace and we exit, what we can do is to record the speed steps we sent to the to the device. So, uh, I want to make a little trace here. So, um, let’s just re real quick, uh, recall one of our presets. And then I want to create a trace here on preset number five. So, I press and hold for 3 seconds. And when I do so, it is now ready to record. And notice that the display has a timer and it says zero steps. But as I’m now panning to the side, you’ll see that the timer starts and the steps are increasing. And I’m now and zooming out a little bit. Moving over to this position. Okay. And after standing still here for a short while, I’ll just go a little bit to the right and zoom in and Okay. I’ll just stop here and I press stop. So basically we have recorded a trace now. So if I press it, it’s arming itself, meaning it’s going back to the preset from where it started. And then if I press it, it’s going to play back the steps that I just recorded basically. So we’ll see that it’s panning over. It is zooming out a little bit and it is framing the um Yoda figure and also the car. And then after waiting shortly, it’s now going to zoom in onto the car. So this is something that is uniquely built into SkyO controllers. You find it on PDC Extreme, you find it on uh PDC Fly, PDC Pro. Basically, all our uh or most of our controllers have it built in as something that you can enable. And the precision of it depends a little bit on how um a PVC head like this are replaying those speed instructions that we are sending to it. So, you may also take a few tries to do it. Now, let’s just try to play it back once again. And I also don’t know how precise this iPad screen is for showing us the um the video, but it’s uh finding this framing. All right. And then it’s waiting a little bit. And then it is zooming in a little bit and just panning over onto the car. All right. There we go guys. This is the uh integration with air and the cam on top. We are super excited about this combo device which is unique in the sense that air and cam has this integration. We know that other cameras are also being uh looked at for the air gimal but uh it is specially supported in this case and uh one very unique thing obviously is the roll feature that gives you some creative uh freedom right there. The best of all is that with your PDC extreme you have invested in a controller that will control this one and basically any other PDC camera you can come across. It will give you access to camera settings. So you have shading, you have the axis control all in the same box in the same ecosystem. And you can hook it up with switches so that you have tallies on your camera select buttons and all that wonderful stuff. Thanks for watching this video. I hope that it was useful to you. And if you are looking for content of a similar sort about how to control your broadcast gear, then like and subscribe to this channel. You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and X. Subscribe to our newsletter. You can also reach out to a human being in our sales and support team if you have some questions. We will be super happy to help you.

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From Disruption to Demand: How AIR’s Vision for Cloud and AI Production Is Now Industry Standard https://news.broadfield.com/from-disruption-to-demand-how-airs-vision-for-cloud-and-ai-production-is-now-industry-standard/ Wed, 20 Aug 2025 15:00:00 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=33086 At AIR, the pace of growth has accelerated rapidly, especially in live sports, but also in music, reality, and live events. After years of championing software-defined workflows, dispersed REMI, cloud production, and AI-powered camera tracking, the company is now seeing the industry embrace what once seemed too disruptive.

When AIR debuted at NAB several years ago, the vision was clear but ahead of its time. Despite winning both the NAB Technology Innovation Award and NAB Product of the Year, many attendees were still focused on traditional “old-iron” production gear. Interest was polite, but skepticism was high.

This year’s NAB Show told a different story. Attendees arrived asking directly about AI tracking and dispersed REMI workflows. What was once viewed as radical has now become essential.

AIR’s lean approach, backed by trailblazing customers and forward-looking investors, allowed the company to continue building despite early challenges. Today, that persistence is paying off — as the future of live production aligns with the solutions AIR has been perfecting all along.

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Steph Curry, AI, and the Future of Sports Broadcast with AIR AutoPilot https://news.broadfield.com/steph-curry-ai-and-the-future-of-sports-broadcast-with-air-autopilot/ Mon, 21 Jul 2025 14:00:00 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=32773 AIR showcased its AI-powered AutoPilot system in a real-world broadcast scenario by tracking Steph Curry during an NBA game, demonstrating how their proprietary Visual Language Model (VLM) locked onto Curry even amid fast-paced action and identical uniforms. Unlike traditional computer vision, AIR’s AI understands what it’s seeing, making it perfect for ISO shots and mic’d-up segments in Tier 1 broadcasts. This foundational technology highlights how AIR is redefining camera automation in sports coverage with unmatched precision.

Watch AutoPilot in action:

Check out the full playlist here

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Better Control, Faster Review: What’s New in the CUBE R1 Update https://news.broadfield.com/better-control-faster-review-whats-new-in-the-cube-r1-update/ Tue, 15 Jul 2025 16:00:00 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=32754 The CUBE R1 NDI Recorder has always been a favorite for multi-channel workflows, but the latest update makes it even more production-ready. Now with batch control, individual channel recording, and real-time FTP uploading, teams can move from capture to edit without delay. It’s also more user-friendly thanks to MP4 recording support, with no need to transcode files before editing.

Other new features include variable playback speed for fast review (great for sports and coaching), a streamlined web UI, and stability fixes that make a difference when you’re working under pressure.

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Transforming Training Sessions with AIR AutoPilot AI Camera Tracking https://news.broadfield.com/transforming-training-sessions-with-air-autopilot-ai-camera-tracking/ Mon, 14 Jul 2025 19:47:59 +0000 https://news.broadfield.com/?p=32746 Forget static camera shots, AIR AutoPilot brings dynamic movement to any event, even corporate training sessions. At a recent Grey Monkey Group presentation, Advanced Image Robotics used their AIR One robot and AI-driven AutoPilot to capture fluid, cinematic visuals of Lisa Nordquist’s session, all hands-free. The result? A more engaging viewing experience powered by foundational AI that keeps speakers in frame, even when they walk behind banners or the lighting shifts. No camera operator needed. No stress. Just professional results on a budget. Watch the video for more:

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