DV Info Net - Pics and comments from my visit to NAB today..

*MODS.. feel free to move this wherever is most appropriate*

**I will update this thread with more video, pics, etc throughout the week**

I dont know if anyone cares.. but for those of you who dont have the chance to attend nab, i thought i'd post some pics and talk about some of what i see this week. I didn't have a chance to take very many pics today, as I have a laundry list of stuff my company needs to buy, and today was the day where i find every booth on the list, make contact with those companies, and see if their products are better or worse than the competition.

The first booth i wanted to find, was ZGC's. I've heard nothing but good things about ZGC on here, and I have been drooling over the mini35 since i first saw video online of them. I found ZGC pretty quickly in the C-hall.. they had an HD cam, an XL1, and another cam all outfitted with Cooke and Optex lenses, and pro/mini 35 units. All three cams are aimed at a miniature set (maybe 3'x3') with model grass ,fireplace log, a stuffed squirrel/ferret, bottle of soda, sand, and some other stuff. My first disappointment came when i stood in front of the ZGC booth (maybe 2-3 feet from the XL1) for at least 10 minutes waiting for someone to talk to me, or approach me. I tried to have the "i'm ready to buy at least 1-2 mini35's but would like to try them out first" look on my face.. but apparantly it didn't work (which sucks, since I actually AM ready to pickup 2 units, i just need to justify them to my boss.. who was with me, and not happy that no one seemed to want to talk to me). All of their salespeople were busy with other customers, finished with them, and then went to help other people standing near me. I toyed with the XL1 for 5-10 minutes, still no one talked to me, and i figured 20+ minutes at one booth was long enough.

I did snap one shot of the XL1.. fitted with a 27mm Cooke S4

http://www.adamgeek.com/nab1.jpg

I'm sad to say I came back to the ZGC booth twice more throughout the day, and never could manage to speak with anyone from ZGC. I did have a 15 minute conversation with one of the optex guys though, who let me play on one of the HDcams outfitted with a 5.5mm optex wideangle periscope pens.. absolutely cool, at least for use ont he miniature set.. gave very shallow DOF from 5-10" away from the objects, and due to the length of the lens, when you pan the camera on the tripod, it doesn't seem like a tripod rotating on a single axis, but rather a crane sweep.. since the lens is soooo long. He explained to me how it uses in in-lens relay system to provide 35mm view angle and dof to the 2/3" chip camera.. but i wasn't quite clear how it did this, since he claimed it was all done optically (without the aid of GG)

Anyway, like i said earlier, i didn't have much picture taking chance today, but tomorrow, when i return to the ZGC booth i'll take some more pics there. I looked for P+S Teknic GMBH's booth, but i couldnt find it where it was supposed to be.. i'll try to look some more tomorrow.

I spoke to a guy named Walter Klassen, who makes carbon fiber vests for MK-V steadycams.. who had some really cool body mounts. His vests were absolute works of art, and I hope to demo one of the arri-rigged units tomorrow.. I watched a couple of their experienced operators for about 10-15 mins today doing various moves.. and it was absolutely artful to watch them dolly around people, and make snap movements panning the camera.

Maxell had a booth where their plasma screen demo was prohjecting 10GB disc media, 23GB, 50GB, 200GB.. and even 400GB per disc optical media.. they were saying 2006-2007 for the 400GB stuff.. holy cow@!!

Arri had a bunch of film scanners, but there were so many people crowded i didn't get a chance to look closely.

Really looking forward to playing on a smoke machine tomorrow as well. I watched a presentation on a "quantel" "eq" today.. a DI system for color grading up to (and beyond??) 4k scans, and the workt he colorist was doing (live, on a projection screen) was very impressive.. i only caught the last 2/3 or so of the demo, but I plan to watch the entire thing tomorrow. I suspect that most of the people watching the demo didnt know what color grading is, since a lot seemed to walk up, and walk off, but from what i saw today, their system seems to be about as robust as all the video i've seen of people using Lustre / collosus5d systems. He had the ability to load preset templates he had made (much like in magicbullet), and then tweak them manually, mask out certain areas to adjust luminance, saturation, etc and motion track those same areas with the masks. I didn't see what (if any) kind of keyframing it has integrated, which i'd like to talk to them about tomorrow, since it would be nice to be able to keyframe in adjustments, shifting gamma or saturation along the timeline.. as well as find out if it's built for a closed architecture, and what he total pricetag is. Actually, they had at least 2-3 other booths open doing presentations in.. and if they have other editing suites that are as effective adn tehir color grading suite seems to be, they might be a good contendor in place of a smoke or avid system for editing.

Anyway, sorry to ramble.. i don't know if anyone is even interested in what I am going to take pics of, or my impressions of various stuff.. so i guess speak up and let me know what you want to see.. i will take a bunch of pics tomorrow, but if you want to see particular stuff, I can swing by booths if i have time.. and my boss is taking thursday off, so I intend to use thursday as a chance to run around with an XL1 shooting a bunch of video of various products, so I can post some of that if anyone is interested.

Again, sorry to ramble, thanks for reading this far.. if you did haha.