NAB - 17th to 22nd April 2004

Saturday 17th:

The plan is to update this page with pictures and stories throughout the week at NAB in Las Vegas. We arrive midday on the 18th, which should land us in the thick of the news!

Sunday 18th:

Sunday was mostly spent in Toronto airport, where we waited for 12 hours for our flight to Las Vegas.... 2 of those hours were us stuck in the airplane from Ottawa, on the tarmac of Toronto while we waited for the lightning to subside. We Just made it to Las Vegas late Sunday Night, so not much news to report yet, other than looking at Apple's web site, there will be some great stuff to see and do!

Monday 19th

Spent some time at the Lumiere HD booth which is part of the massive JVC booth. Frederic, the producer of LumiereHD demonstrated the product with some video he shot for his movie "Hotel", and it looked and worked great. It was nice to see the product in action. If you want to edit HDV in FCP, then this is the product for you. The FCP integration module for the LumiereHD program was written by me, and there is G Chroma Noise Reducer (a cut down G Video Noise Reduction from Set 1) included with the package.

If you've never been to NAB, it's enormous!

View of some of the convention centre from our hotel room at the Las Vegas Hilton

More

More LumiereHD, and the product in action with the little JVC HDV deck.

JVC were showing a high end HDV camera. Click for bigger picture.

Black Magic Design were showing their fantastic HDLink product, which turns your Cinema Display into a very high quality HD monitor. The moving images on it were stunning to look at, and although, perhaps, not quite as good as a very high end CRT for monitoring, to me, under the show conditions, looked wonderful!

Apple were demonstrating their new Motion application - they showed a lot of real time working, and quite nice particle systems and an innovative user interface. As to whether the application will prove useful in practice though... And the Panasonic demonstration of editing with the DVCProHD codec was most impressive - very high quality and a lot of real time, and firewire to a DVCProHD deck that costs $21,000. I don't know why they can't remove the high end outputs on the deck, because you don't need them if you go the Black Magic Design approach, and produce a DVCProHD deck that just has a firewire port, and sell it for $1000 - now that would be killer!

Panavision were showing a most impressive 300x zoom lens. It was over a metre long and looked the business - and the picture looked very impressive considering the amount of zoom.

The Panavision tent was outside in the area between the main halls. They were demonstrating a very nice crane by flying it over your head!


The new Panavision 300x zoom was on demo

It was good to see the high end Glidecam products and how they compare to the V-8 we use. They had some arms which looked anodized blue in colour, and looked a lot nicer than the "functional" V-8, which although can produce excellent results, I think of as a bit of a DIY solution.

New Glidecam Arms

SiliconColor were demonstrating their FinalTouch system running on a Dual G5 2ghz machine, showing live 2k resolution processing, utilizing OpenGL shaders on the GPU to do a lot of the work and the ability to use a render farm for the final quality rendering. It's an expensive solution, but it shows what can now be done on a modest "home" computer.

Tuesday 20th

I managed to grab a few pictures of some of the things we saw yesterday, but first real stop today was back at Panasonic to see the Varicam and the new editing on FCP with the DVCProHD codec. Presented on a very nice projection display, the results were stunning, and filmmaker Noah Kadner was demonstrating some very good real time colour corrections, and capturing HD over firewire with the new AJ-HD1200 deck.

Noah Demonstrating, and the AJ-HD1200 firewire DVCProHD deck.

We were able to get a little nearer the Apple exhibit today, where we met with Tom Wolsky, who was working in the training area.

The Artbeats booth was demonstrating how to use their excellent stock footage library in a variety of ways, and Jerry Hoffman was there to tell us how to use their HD stock with the new DVCProHD codec in FCP HD.

Jerry is a very interesting and entertaining FCP guru!

We always spot new things while wandering around NAB from booth to booth. This morning we saw some very nice LCD monitors from IMP Electronics - "Hummingbird" - that worked great in the Las Vegas sunshine, which was very surprising. Their trick was to concentrate on getting a very good black through a very good optical glass coating, rather than just pumping up the brightness level through backlighting - indeed, they ran cool to the touch. They were also being used with the MK-V camera stabilizer, which their creator, Howard J. Smith was demonstrating. He tried to take the rig outside so that we could see how good the monitor was, but was stopped by some over enthusiastic security who thought he was stealing his own rig!

Finally, we arrived at Sony, and found their exhibit very hard to navigate around, and totally full of people! But we did catch a glimpse of their new HDV products in prototype form.

Sony prototype HDV camera and deck. The deck was just a block of wood with no connectors on the back.

Sony HDCAM camera and deck

Sony XDCAM disk and deck, and portable HDCAM-SR deck and tape.

Tuesday evening ended with the 9th Annual Promax Digital Cafe, which was a well attended event (>500 attendees) hosted by the well known VAR Promax at the Stardust hotel. Charles McConathy, the president of Promax started the event off, which was MC'd by Michael Horton of the LAFCPUG. The speakers included:

Adobe - showed Premiere Pro, After Effects, Encore, Photoshop integration.
Apple - A great demonstration of the new Motion application
Alias - A great demonstration of making a Blimp in Maya using polygon modeling techniques, then a quick run through of the possibilities of the new hair dynamics system, and how it can be applied to more than just hair!
AJA - great presentation showing the new IO's and the new Kona2 card and K-Box, which seem like a great solution to HD and SD video.
Sony - Sony talked about what we could see on their booth if we have the energy to get near enough to it, and then demonstrated Vegas, which looks to be a very powerful video editing solution, and most interesting in the extensive nature of it's capabilities.
Pinnacle - Demonstrated Cinewave 4.6, although assumed that the audience knew way too much about their product, so we didn't get any real insight into it.
Avid - tried to demonstrate their new Studio suite, but some crashes and instability got in the way of us seeing how all their new applications talk to each other to create an integrated environment.
HUGE - gave some great technical insight into the nature of hard disc storage for video, including SCSI v ATA, SCSI v Fibre Channel, RAID 3 v RAID 5, and for SANs, ethernet v Fibre Channel - very interesting - these guys know what they're talking about!
ProMax - tried to demonstrate the superiority of capturing DV via SDI to uncompressed, and managed to get a lot of technical points wrong, like DV isn't "broadcast safe" - whatever that means (it means they don't understand setup and IRE NTSC issues for digital video) and that DV over SDI gives DV 4:2:2 colour sampling, which it does by interpolating the chroma, just like the DV player does out to analogue, and does as it outputs SDI, or it does using blur filters on the timeline. There's no extra information this way, just a different way of presenting the same information that looks more visually appealing. Of course, you can do better than this and make the 4:1:1 of DV look like 4:4:4 by using my G Nicer filter!

The raffle went well, giving away some great prizes with Promax showing an enormous amount of tact, generosity and integrity when one of the prizes got mixed up!

There were some great people attending the event:

Kevin Monahan, Graeme Nattress and Joe Maller, and Michael Horton and Charles McConathy.

Wednesday 21st

The big event today was the LAFCPUG - WWFCPUG event at the Stardust. A complete set of our Nattress filters was given away in the raffle, and, of course, the Telly's FX were promoted as part of Kevin's excellent book. I found out that one of my filter users used Film Effects to make a video project for heavy metal band Anthrax "Music of Mass Destruction", along with some other of my filters - I can't wait to see the finished product after watching a preview!

Wendy won a door prize in the LAFCPUG raffle - a 120GB Firewire hard drive from Wiebetech!

I managed to get into see the Sony HDV demo - and I was not impressed. Supposedly the camera that had locked away in the box, connected to the screen with what looked like a firewire cable, was a working sample, as the little sticker on it indicated, but they just pressed play on the tape so we could see some pre-recorded 1080i, but it was not shown full screen so there was no way to judge quality, and even still it didn't look too good. It was reported to me that the footage wasn't even shot with an HDV prototype camera... Sounds like Sony needed something to show, even if it wasn't indicative of an end product. Everyone was asking for 24p though...

Perhaps the most interesting product we saw today, and perhaps the most interesting of the show was the hydrogen fuel cell camera batteries from Jadoo, which looks to be the beginning of a fantastic trend! I think we've all heard of power cells and that they are the way of the future, but this is the first time I've seen one in a shipping product. One nice feature was that the cells are hot swapable, leaving enough hydrogen in the system for about 30 seconds operation before the new cell needs to be inserted. There was a small vent on the back of the camera box that emitted slightly warm, very very slightly water vapour containing air. Very neat indeed!

Jadoo NAB-II fuel cell charger

Thursday 22nd

It seems that Avid were increasing the volume of their presentations all week, which made it pretty hard to hear the final Apple presentations. We finally had some time to sit through Apple's FCP HD and Motion demos. They were also giving away some DVCproHD footage on DVD, which will be excellent to see what the format looks like under close inspection. The demo of Motion showed it to be a great application, with a lot of depth behind the scenes! We can't wait to play with the finished version. From my personal experience behavioural or procedural animation can be very useful, and when supplied with a gui that allows quick and easy adjustments, like we see in Motion, it can be a powerful ally in the rapid production of complex effects. It would appear that almost any kind of animation can be done with their flexible particle system! Another nice feature was the control menus that floated semi-transparent over the large work area - no longer will we have to engage in the age old After Effects window dance! The timeline looked comprehensive, and was not needed to be on screen all the time because of the clip dependant "mini-timeline".

Apple's RAID storage on display! I wonder how many terabytes are in there?

AJA were demonstrating their excellent Kona2 card, and Kevin Monahan was also promoting his book!

The Sony booth was also less crowded, so we got in to see their HD demo, which was spoiled by containing some badly uprezzed SD footage, and some of the HD shots had a bit of a scaling problem, which might be down to the projector, but most of the shots looked fine - strange... They were really pushing XDCAM, but for how long is optical disc going to be an acquisition format when recording to memory chips gives you instant access? Optical disc technology would seem to be a good replacement for tape for long term storage, but I think we all want to get away from mechanical issues while shooting. Panasonic were pushing their P2 memory storage which is currently too expensive, but I'm sure it will only get cheaper!

One of the many fun display devices we saw.