NAB 2012

I attended NAB 2012 in Las Vegas. It's a massive conference with lots to see. This was a chance to talk face to face with vendors and technical support staff as well as a great opportunity to meet with other folks that work in the entertainment industry. I spent a total of two days at the conference. The first day was spent in meetings with vendors  The second day I spent walking the show floor asking questions and learning about new products.  This posting is highlights from the second day.

Day 1: Meetings

Day 1 at NAB was spent mostly in meetings with vendors and colleagues. I met with Adobe, Avid, Apple, Telestream and many other folks from ABC and Disney.

Avid CEO Meeting.  Tuesday 4/17 10AM

I got a chance to sit with the CEO, CIO, and other senior management at Avid.  This was a small group with about 15 people total in attendance.

Meeting Notes

• There was an initial overview of many of the new features in Media Composer 6.  Specifically called out was the move to 64 bit and the increased stability that came with it.
• JPEG 2000 is now supported natively in Avid.
• The avid can create Pro Res media on Mac, or in Window Server.  Can not be created on Windows desktop.
• Pro Tools and Avid are being brought closer together.  Avid uses the same audio engine as Pro Tools.
• They have more Open API's.  They need to make them available and then make sure they are used internally for development.
• Interplay is expected to become more effective in post workflows.
• There are many new cameras coming out.  Vendors have the ability to add AVID support through AMA plugins. They supply the AMA toolkit to the camera vendors.
• Future:
  • Interplay Sphere is coming in Q3.
  • MC 6.5 is coming in the second half of the year. 
  • Not willing to discuss MC7 right now
  • They are supporting AS02 workflows.
  • Avid sees future media experiences to be an integrated media experience. TV's have Internet. People want their hand held device to talk to the TV as more than just a remote.  There is a tend towards Multi-Screen.
  • Viewers on hand held devices want to see high quality content.
  • They are working on Frame Rate independence, color management, and  LUT support.

Telestream Meeting.  Tuesday 4/17 1PM

This meeting focused on telestream's media conversion and transcoding products such as Vantage, and Flip Factory.

• General philosophy behind Vantage is to take the linear workflow that flip factory had and open it up to better process design tools, non linear decision making witout loosing focus on transcoding.  - Take all the knowledge they have form flip factory and use it for media processing.
• They want all their transcoding products and  workflow products to "feel and quack" the same way.
• They have analysis tools,  decision making frameworks,. etc. It's good for when you have a mixed bag of media and need to convert it.  All the decisions that need to be made can be worked in.
• Flip factory is still selling like crazy, but folks are starting to move to Vantage.
• They have introduced x264 as a commercial license in vantage.
• With vantage you drop 100 files in a hot folder and it figures out what to do with them
• They are different code bases than flip factory so here are a few features that doen't exist in Vantage. If you are doing long form episodics, Vantage is still a good choice.
• Lots of discussion on audio compliance and SMPTE 2052 files.
• They are releasing a lightspeed which can do H.264 conversion quickly.  If doing 720P or 1080p you get much faster acceleration.  You put Vantage on a windows server and it has the license for the lightspeed server.  This can replace a Flip Factory Server.  I can be a 5X speed increase. You can make an array of transcoding farms that is CPU aware (better than round robin)
• Talked a little about Rosette which is now called "Pro Media Carbon".  It does delivery and media processing work flows. They've gotten a lot of requests for an API to drive it.

Adobe Meeting.  Tuesday 4/17 3PM

• Presenting:
• Bill Roberts - Adobe CS6 Product Manager. 
• Zach Fisher - Adobe Major Account Manager

• Announcments for NAB:
  • CS 6 - Incremented every product in the suite and added two products to the suite.
  • Story - Script writing application is a good source of metadata and cloud based.  Over 100K folks are now using story.
• Front end of production pipeline is an area they wanted to focus.  - Prelude. You can transcode, tag metadata,..
• They have an app for folks who work on metadata systems. it coms out of the box and just works. It's working with CNN's and BBS's metadata system.
• They developed an API that can be used to make logging more interesting.  Demo of ipad app where he is clicking on the screen and using that to do logging.
• They have the biggest release of technology that they had in a decade.
• Adobe has a "Creative Cloud" and a "Marketing Cloud".  The vision they set down 5 years ago is now there. They are proud of the vision. Creative Cloud - $50 a month gives you all products and cloud storage.
• Things are moving back towards remote architecture. You may have an on site server or one in the cloud but premiere is running remotely.  Adaptive media streaming allows scaling of media based on bandwidth.
• Premeire  - They have been focusing on making it technical grade.  They have a completely revamped UI and work flow. Because of Apple FC issues a lot fo people have tried their product.
• Premiere looks gorgeous -they believe they have the fastest editor in the world right now.
• After FX - They broke up the team. One team is on 3D environment the other handled the rest. They spent a lot of work focusing on Performance.  They now have a powerful 3D tracker in After FX.
• After FX has always been, at best, 2.5D. They now fully embrace the Z axis. They have a true hierarchal radiosity engine casting photons.
• No one is talking about resolution on cameras any more because they gotten big enough but folks are looking at high dynamic range.
• Adobe Media Encoder - Software architecture for encoding to any device. you don't have to worry about file size or cadence.  Compositionally aware encoder, it knows by the kind of data what it has to do.
• Audition - Their audio solution.  It is the fastest audio editor and can sit next to pro tools. They have a fast ADR tool.  They are doing ADR so they can handle dual system sound - i.e two cameras.
• Audition is fast and launches works in 4 seconds. You can run it on a 5 year old macbook pro.  It does a great job with Audio cleanup.
• They are working on making all their products open platforms and using open standards.
• Adobe is very focused on standards and using XMP which is based on XML.
• They acquired Automatic Duck. There will be integration in CS7. Support for XMP and AAF.
• Broadcast Engineering - A group internally of 13 engineers. They pick up projects that customers need and integrate them into the products. These guys work on getting these features into the product. They don't do it as a service, they do it to win business.  The work flows into the main product.
• Lots of Premiere users.. half million folks run after EFX.
• Adobe Premiere was used to edit  on Social network and girl with the dragon tattoo.
• They now support 3D lookup tables. They are then going to standardize Rec709 for all of their tools.  They will use .look for the LUTs.

Apple Final Cut Pro Meeting.  Tuesday 4/17 5PM

Presenting:

• Luke Tystrom : Product Manager for Final Cut, Compressor.

• One of the strengths of FC Pro 7 was third party integration. They've kept that.  Final Cut Pro 10 XML has greatly increased integration.
• Autodesk announced a new smoke for Mac. Both this version and current version support FC import.
• Marquis has a tool that imports from FCut into Pro Tools.
• The new smoke has gone from 10K to 3.5K and has a much more Mac look
• There is no private API, all the XML is on the web site.
• FC 10 - 10.0
  • First version was ground up new app.
  • 64 bit,. Magnetic time line, Content auto analysis
• 10.1
  • XML, XSAN, Audio Stems.
  • Audio Stems - files can be marked with metdata.
• 10..3 Multi Cam
  • Chroma Keying - Advanced chroma keying controls.
  • Broadcast Monitoring.
• 10.4
  • Performance optimization
• They used to release every 18 mos, now they can release much more rapidly.
• They are committed to building FC Pro as a video editing system for professionals.
• Advanced Chroma Keying controls.
  • When you apply the chroma key, it does an automatic evaluation of the image.
  • You can manually adjust the range of chroma that is being keyed out.
• Multi-Cam
  • Folks in the room are doing between 2 and 6 cameras.
  • You can have 16 angles in one view and up to 4 banks of 16 angles.
  • With QT7 you had to make sure they were all the same frame rate, codec, and resolution before you synchronize the media, now you no longer need to conform.
  • There is an angle editor
  • If using Arri Alexa or Canon C300 you can sync with time code, but Go Camera and 5D don't.
  • You can also sync using audio in FC pro. It analyzes the waveforms.
  • Also can sync using time/date.
• New Broadcast and post NLE purchase ; Adobe 19%, Avid 19%, Apple 52%, Other 10%.
• Later This Year - Coming
  • Multi Channel Editing Tools
  • Dual Viewers - Folks liked the FC7 Source/Record windows
  • MXF Plugin Support for Import/Export
  • Direct Support for Red Cameras.
• They've been working with Sony to update their full plugin range.
• They are also talking to ARRI.
• Cannon already has a plugin to import their C300 MXF.
• They are looking closely at what they do with the XML and developer API's
• There is no built in 3D support. There are dashwood fliters through MX factory which applies a Left and right filter and edit them side by side.  In the near term it's likely 3rd party support.
• Hobbit and avatar are 48 frames.  They are not talking about 48 frames right now.  FC does not particular bother about that, but the codecs would be the issue.
• Is there support for Ases - IDT, ODT, This is the Academy standard format.
• There is a lot of effort going into developer API's.  They could then have a $300 editing project and some of these things might be in 3rd party.
• Question about Motion being moved into the application.  He won't answer.

Day 2: Notable Show Floor Exhibits

Blackmagic Design

The Blackmagic Design booth was large and prominently placed at the entrance to the lower South Hall.  It constantly drew a large crowd.

 

They had their new Cinema Camera on display.  It was constantly surrounded by folks taking pictures of it and talking about it.  I heard several folks say they planned to purchase one.

The camera was getting a lot of attention.  The had a great area to try it out. Cameras were set up in front of a fake movie set.

Adobe

Adobe had a large booth with large video screen. Their focus was on their movie editing and post production tools such as Adobe Premiere.  They had a technical person posted there to answer questions. I asked some questions about Adobe Photoshop but he said he was only there to talk about video products. I then was able to talk to him for a while about work flows in Adobe After Effects.

AVID

I spend a lot of time building software that is wrapped around Avid Products so the Avid booth was particularly interesting to me.  Avid had a very nice booth situated right at the opening of the upper south hall.  You could not miss it.  The booth had a large video screen giving demos of most of their products.

 The booth was consistently this busy.  I wanted to stop and talk with a few folks but the booth was so busy, I gave up. Fortunately, I got a great overview of what Avid is doing in the meetings I had on Tuesday so all was well.

Planar Systems

I was drawn to the Planar booth by these interesting mosaic tiles.  At SCVi, we've been talking about putting together a "Donor Wall" to recognize folks who have donated to the organization. It would be very neat to incorporate this product.

I found a few links describing them in more detail.

• Interesting example with some pictures on Ubergizmodo
• You Tube Link showing a demo at DSE 2012
• Planar Web Site Explanation

They also had some interesting large display screens.

Sennheiser

Sennheiser had a nice booth with lots of microphones on display.

 

You could speak into the Mic and hear how it sounded on the headphones.  Very cool way to demo them. 

 These would look very nice in my Ham Shack!

Sony

Sony's booth was amazing and absolutely enormous.  They had a hub with lit stages surrounded by all kinds of equipment. You could go up to a piece of equipment and try it out in a real studio setting.

Cool And Interesting Booths

I thought these were interesting booths to look at so I snapped some photos.

 Dazzling displays from InfiniLED

The Canon booth was also quite enormous.

The Foundry, makers of Nuke, a popular compositing software used heavily in the entertainment industry.

In the back of one hall, they had a 200 inch stereo display that could be watched without glasses. I was impressed with it.  Though, I didn't get a picture.

These folks were selling "Whisper Rooms" meant for audio recording.  They are sealed rooms you can use to either contain noisy things or to go when you need silence.  I bet there's a few preschool teachers that wouldn't mind having one of these. Hehehe.