Archive for April 23rd, 2006

For those of you who missed the Digital Cinema Summit this morning, you missed an unusually animated director James Cameron aggressively preaching the gospel of 3D HD for the big screen. Cameron was in a particularly jocular mood, both in his keynote address, and on panels discussing specifics of making 3D stereoscopic imagery and putting it on the big screen, and discussing the future of digital cinema with NATO president John Fithian.

In fact, Cameron was positively Lucasesque in his digital fervor—not suprising, considering he and Lucas are, in his words, “in violent agreement about all this. In fact, George has the curse of being prematurely right most of the time.”

Cameron has obviously taken up the cause this NAB, big-time. Following are some of his more definitive musings:

*”Anaglyphs are bad. Very bad. Let’s stamp out this unholy practice,” he said, promoting the stereoscopic HD camera approach to big-screen HD that he has been pioneering with camera rig guru, Vince Pace. (Look for Vince shortly coming to our podcast section of this NAB blog …)

*”It should be a rule that all CG movies should be released in 3D.” more

The 8 a.m. Sunday Chyron press breakfast traditionally starts off the week of NAB press conferences. Now British-owned, the company originated in Melville, Long Island, decades ago. The name became a standard term in the broadcast industry—something like Band-Aid or Kleenex—to define a character generator, as the company built some of the very first commercially available ones.

For the first time, Chyron announced that its entire line of character generators, graphics play-out systems, and channel branding gear would be SD/HD switchable. That’s good news for those starting out with the new entry-level HX200 CG; users can begin at a lower tab, then add the HD boardset when the need arises.

The new Channel Box, a “channel branding solution in a box,” reflects the dynamics and increasingly tight economic factors now in play in the broadcast industry. While an artist or talented CG type can create the original graphical layouts, the device sports a newly designed, simple, clean, drag-and-drop GUI. Now, regardless of staff change-over, any operator—even that pimply kid intern, can run the system—changing the graphics via the simple-to-use Windows-style drag-and-drop interface. There’s more: The same GUI will show a neat mini-version of how the image will appear married to the final broadcast video, and even allows control over the final play-out to air. more

The National Association of Broadcasters, organizer of NAB 2006, will also be producing downloadable podcasts from the Las Vegas Convention Center. Show partner Future Media Concepts (the training group behind Post Production World) will produce five-minute video recaps of daily events in conjunction with the trade organization. Read the full press release here.

The video programs will be available through a free subscription to Future Media Concept’s podcast RSS feed that is featured on iTunes, through a clickable link that will be sent via a daily email or on the NAB2006 website: www.nabshow.com.

I attended a few more Post Production World sessions that I didn’t get a chance to mention yesterday. Ben Waggoner’s “Compression for DVD” session was especially interesting, and appealed to me as a guy who finds comfort in the certainty (more or less) of numbers. He didn’t get too deep into the hottest emerging issue for DVD authors—that would be HD-DVD and Blu-ray authoring—but I certainly learned a bunch of great tips for packing the most bits onto a 4.7GB disc while maintaining the highest possible level of quality.

The first basic, elemental issue that Waggoner covered is one that hits home for many do-it-all author/shooter/editor types—encoding DV25-originated content to MPEG-2. It’s simply a bad idea to go straight from one to the other, because of the incompatibility of their respective 4:1:1 and 4:2:0 color sampling schemes. (4×1 horizontal blocks and 2×2 square blocks don’t mesh that well, who knew?) The answer, pretty obvious: Use an intermediate codec of some sort; just don’t render back out to DV25 before moving onto authoring. more

This is my 19th NAB. I don’t know if that’s something to be proud of, or if I should have figured this thing out well enough to know better by now.

Whatever the case, April finds me back in the familiar haunts of the Las Vegas Convention Center, eager to see what the major players will bring to the table in these fast developing digital days, while hoping that I’ll come across some unique, inventive souls that are turning out technology that will rock our world, whether that innovation is coming from Australia, China, or Santa Cruz, Calif.

Actually that last stop along the way is a reference to CustomFlix, the innovative on-demand DVD publishing company that’s come up with a sharp method for film and video makers to sell their work via the Web. (CustomFlix clients keep their data files on the company’s servers; DVDs are printed out as orders come in, so there’s no need to sink cash into upfront stock.) more