NAB preview or review?
 

I haven't seem much preview or news from NAB - any ideas? Anything cool? Any good url for this or podcasts?

http://www.studiodaily.com/main/

The video demos of Final Cut Studio are good. Some informative PR info for other products there as well.

more at fresh dv.com in the blog section, a good set of video clips from the floor.

Hello,

I just returned from NAB, can give a few of my own observations.. Attended monday and tuesday.. Crowd was big on monday, a bit less on tuesday.. The first things which knocked our socks off, was the new camcorder from Sony(not available until the end of this year)I think it was the XDCAM EX9do not quote me on this) which uses PC Express flash cards, a 16 gb card gives you one hour of footage..the camera has 2 PC Express card slots.. It can take 3rd party cards provided they are fast enough..Also the camera has 1/2 inch snsors..(Sony did not say wheteher they were CCD or CMOS, and yes we did ask, they declined to specify) There were several of these cameras around the booth, never saw one working, but they did demonstrate accesing the Express card on a laptop..Camera looked slightly larger than the current V1 model, but with a fatter rear end..

Another thing we saw out of curiosity, was the RED camera.. I am not a film guy, but wanted to see what all the hype was about.. We waited in a line 1 hour to get into the booth(people behind us had a 2 hour wait.. Once in , we were hustled into a samll theater, which had a 4k projector setup..They showed an 11 minute movie.. We were stunned by the movie quality and production.. The camera was taken to New Zealand just a few weeks ago and given to famed director Peter jackson to evaluate and use..We were expecting just some raw footage and some beautiful scenics shots of NewZealand.. but to my surprise we got a full mini movie based on some WW1 trench fighting soldiers..The movie was excellent, and the footage looked fantastic.. It easily looked as good as any 35mm film I have ever seen in any theater..clearly this camera is going to cause a revolution..

The third thing which I was extremely impressed with, (I am a Mac user) was Final Cut 2.. The new applicaton in Studio called Color, looks great..Extremely powerful in doing color correction, and also in processing you footage to give it lots of new looks including some film presets(bleach bypass etc..) The demo we saw took some raw footage of a Ducati commercial, and then using color they made lots of color corrections and enhancements to change a drab sky, increase saturation of the motorcycle etc..they were able to really enhance the spot, and take it to a whole new level.. Also Motion 3 was demoed, with its new 3D capabilities, and vector paint..This looks like a huge jump in power for Motion.. They also showed a new codec(cannot remember what it was called) but they did a split screen showing some uncompressed HD, split with thei new Apple codec, and I could not see any difference..
Anyway i need to get some work done, this was jsut a little taste from my viewpoint..

Mike M.

I got to play with the Sony cam a bit... very nice!
I was told by one of the Sony guys that it will have CCDs. But he didn't speak English very well, so maybe he didn't quite know what he was saying...

Hello,

The guy we asked about the camera sensors, was very coy and said Sony did not release that info...
Did you get to see the Red Camera short film??

Mike m.

Hi David,

See discussion and photos of the XDCAM EX here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=91612
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=91594

Final Cut Studio 2 is here:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=91577

Generally speaking, NAB coverage is found in our Digital Video Industry News forum (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/forumdisplay.php?f=38) so you might want to browse through it a bit. Also plenty of product discussion in our other camera, gear and software fora.

Like Mike, I was also fascinated by the XDCAM EX and the presentation was drawing big crowds. But we will need to wait a little longer to get more specifics on this camera.

I was also very impressed with FCS 2. Apple's demonstration of Color really blew me away. I will definitely be upgrading to this when it's available this summer.

Didn't make it to the RED booth. Looks like they have a real winner, but I will wait until it starts shipping and things settle down before I dive into that.

There were a lot of other cool things to see there, most of which are WAY beyond my means...But if money were no object, I'd want a FlyingCam :-)

I was also really impressed by the high speed cameras from Vision Research (http://www.visionresearch.com/). They were showing some spectacular footage from these expensive goodies.

There was a programmable articulated crane zooming around through a giant chessboard which was also very cool (don't remember the name).

And there were a couple companies demonstating ultra-high resolution video which was amazing. The line was too long at the theatre, but NHK has big plasma screens running at 3840x2160 with jaw-dropping images. They had the same size 1920x1080 screens next to them showing the same footage, and the difference was like comparing SD to HD. Quite remarkable.

Another company also had a demo like this (sorry, didn't jot down the name). See the attached photo, which is only 2500 pixels wide but gives you an idea of how much detail this format is capable of.

As a lighting designer, I was also fascinated by what must be the world's largest moving light from ARRI. It's intended for use on cranes and other locations which would be too inaccessible or hazardous for a human operator (see attached).

Getting back to reality, the MovieTube Jr. (see attached) looked very interesting, on display from our sponsor AbelCineTech. I believe the cost is about $4,500 and due to ship in September. Unfortunately they didn't have it connected to a monitor but it looked good on the Z1 LCD panel.

There was a lot of other stuff, but these were some of my highlights. And it was also great just to see other things like lights, camera support and monitors in person. Definitely worth the trip, but also a little overwhelming!