My NAB 2004 experience

[Laslo Panaflex]

I just got back from attending my first NAB confernce, and I was really impressed with it. I attended the post production world conference, which held classes on various techniques on many post production tools, and one day one the Expo floor (which was not enough time to see even 10% of the exibits.)

Some highlights from the post production conference:
I attended a class where Academy award winning inventor of the stedicam, Garret Brown, talked about effective camera movement. He diffinately has changed my ideas about camera positioning and movement. Another highlight was the keynote speach of "Dogtown and Z Boys" editor Paul R. Crowder talked about the stylistic approach to Z boys, and how they created the gritty unfinished Z boys look. For those that has seen z boys you know what I am talking about, for those that haven't seen the film, go and rent it, it phenomoninal. Paul also showed clips from, Riding Giants, his next film about big wave surfers. In riding giants there are amazing 3d effects on 2d photos that I am sure will be talked about when the film is released, needless to say it looks amazing as well.

Some hightlights from the show floor:
Of course being an apple buff I went straight to the Apple booth where they had a huge presense. Their booth had a giant 25 foot wide HD projector where they were demoing Shake 3.5, FCPHD. DVDSP3 and of course MOTION. Motion was by far the coolest software technology at the show. They had 4 demo stations where an apple rep demoed it for you, and needless to say I was amazed. For a 1.0 release this App was feature rich with many filters and "behaviors" that in my opinion will change the way I look at key framing and motion in a 2D space. Motion is pretty much a 2d version of shake, and from what I can tell, I will not be using livetype any more for titling. Motion is more robust when it comes to "motion" and is going to save time and energy in key framing because it is all in real time. This app is WAY well worth the 299 price tag.

That's it for now, I have to attend a meeting, I will post more details later and answer any questions within my realm of competence.

 

[wdlove]

I look forward to hearing more about your NAB experience. Was the Apple booth drawing a lot of attention? What was the feeling about Apple from other attendees?

 

[stoid]

Motion does sound pretty cool. I know it doesn't have all the features of After Effects, but I don't really need those. Any idea what the education price on Motion might be? Even AE is $270 for college students. Since I already spent $300 on Final Cut Pro 3, I'll just use that unless Motion is $100 (maybe $150).

 

[Laslo Panaflex]

For those wondering about the power of Motion, let me put it this way, it is pretty Photoshop, for video, and it ALL in real time. It uses layers to manage filters, is very robust and very fast. It does not have all the atributes of AE like chroma key camera movement, but that's not what this is for. It has the ability to produce powerful motion titles, layer vidoes, and other photoshop like filters to video. Like I said, it's pretty much photoshop for video, since video has motion, so the motion app enhances the motion, as photosop enhances photos.

To answer wdloves question, yes the Apple booth was very busy and everyone was very excited with their annoucements. Their was always no room to sit for the presentations and crowds viewing the presentations spilled into the walkway causing huge traffic problems. I must say the only booth that rivaled the Apple booth was the Sony booth.

Sony amazing HD products on display, mostly for broadcast, but they did have a protype of a HD camcorder that records to DV tape that they called the HDV. Of course the prototype was not working but rather a clay sculpture spinning around in a glass box . . . so we will see if it really sees the light of Day.

Sony was also promoting their XDCAM products. XDCAM is basically a tapeless alternative for SD production. The footage is recorded to their "Professional Optical Disks" that hold 24gigs of data. These disks look a lot like blueray disks, meaning they are standard DVD size disks that are in a special caddy like case that make them look like an oversized floppy.

The really cool thing about the XDCAM equipment is that since there is no tape or tape head, the camera can work in exteme conditions. For a demo they had the camera in a freezer that was at -10 celcius recording throught the glass door. They did then took the camera out into room temperture and is was still recording just fine. The lens did fog up with condensation, but the integrity of the camera and media was not compromised. I felt the camera and it was extemely cold to the touch.

Of course, since the XDCAM records all digital, you can take the disks to a computer with a XDCAM VTR deck and edit right away and not worry about capturing. The XDCAM cameras themselves actually have some basic editing funtions built in. If you switch the camera to VTR mode you get thumbnails of video segments split up by timecode breaks, you can then move clips around, trim, and make a rough edit of the footage while you are in the field. All of this is of course non-distructive. Camera men in the field can then take the disk to the station editor and they can add graphics or whatever. Of course, if the field crew were feeling abitious they could transmit their edits from the truck live.

All of XDCAM equipment is meant for broadcast, and is very expensive, burt who knows, in the near future their might be consumer models. I for one can't wait to get rid of capturing footage.

Phew, I am going to take a break here, let me know if you all are interested to know more, if not, I will probably stop writing these semi epic sized posts.

 

[wdlove]

Was there anything at NAB of interest to the average home Apple User? Any indication of future products?