SmallHD develops and manufactures a stunning range of on-camera and production field monitors for cinematographers.
With their monitors providing exceptionally intuitive user interfaces coupled with advanced real time video transformations and analysis tools, all packaged in beautifully designed and practical form factors, SmallHD are leading the industry in a bold new direction.
The Challenge
As cinematographers at heart - having won two American NFL Super Bowl TV commercial competitions - the team at SmallHD are intimately acquainted with the challenges and rigours of creating exceptional film.
Born out of their frustration with low quality in-field production tools, SmallHD have set out to create a better line of monitors, addressing the issues everyone faced - weak battery life cutting scenes short, painfully heavy equipment, unintuitive user interfaces slowing down production and a lack of meaningful video tools limiting creative vision.
Trying to shake up an established market isn’t easy, and needs some heavy lifting on the technology side to make it happen.
“The team at Spore Lab have been incredible to work with.
SmallHD was a small company with a big mission when we started working with Spore Lab. We needed big time engineering talent who could untangle the giant mess we had created, and that’s exactly what they did.“
Dale Backus, Founder & CTO, SmallHD
How We Helped
Drawing on our experience with Linux development and customisation as well as a myriad of open source technologies, we’ve provided software development assistance on a range of SmallHD products. Working closely with their team in North Carolina, USA, we’ve helped with:
Low-level software support for new hardware platforms
Providing support for dedicated on-board hardware peripherals
Establishing core application-level frameworks
Software performance optimisation
Advanced high speed image processing pipelines
Build systems and firmware handling
“I’ve worked with them on and off over the past 5 years and they possess the rare technical talent of not only being able to tackle the toughest of challenges with extreme competency, but also understanding the task at a user-level.
This has eliminated a tremendous amount of churn in the development process and SmallHD has benefited greatly from this.”
Outcome
Keeping their cinematographic roots central to the company has paid off. SmallHD has continued to produce industry leading features to solve real issues their users faced, leading to an impressive array of awards year after year:
2019 NAB Product of the Year Award, Hardware Infrastructure for their CINE 7
2018 ProductionHub - Awards of Excellence for SmallHD FOCUS Bolt RX and TX
2016 NAB Best of Show Awards - SmallHD SmallHDR production monitors
2015 NAB Best of Show Awards - SmallHD Sidefinder EVF (Electronic Viewfinder)
SmallHD has been a long running client, providing amazing technical challenges for us and an amazing team to work with. We’re immensely proud to have been part of that journey with them, and are very excited for what the future holds.
“One of the things I love about Spore Lab is the clearly high level of integrity in which they operate. I never have to worry about auditing hours spent or quality of work. At Spore Lab, everything is done the right way.
Spore Lab have been instrumental in developing our next-gen technology platforms, from which we have generated millions of dollars in revenue.
I fully recommend the team at Spore Lab for any size engineering job.”
If you'd like to know about working together on a project, please get in touch.