Archive for April 26th, 2006

Yesterday I blogged that my eyes had seen the glory of the coming of 4K (hum that to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, you won’t get it out of your head) at Filmlight’s demonstration of 4K color grading of 4K Dalsa Origin clips over a Sony 4K SXRD projector. But that was yesterday. Today my eyes have a new hero: NHK’s Ultra High Definition Video, which delivers sixteen times the definition of HD. And seeing is believing. more

NAB, the “National Association of Boys.” I heard that at a ProMax Systems gathering, where the guy on stage was tossing ProMax T-shirts to eager audience members, preferably those blonde and female he announced with self-irony. Of course only a few in the audience fit this description. Perhaps that‘s why he asked if Adam Wilt were in the audience. He was, duly received and donned his free T-shirt, and curtsied. Boys will be boys. Adam will be Adam.

A far cry from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s when companies (particularly European) at NAB or the SMPTE Equipment Exhibition featured at their video camera demonstrations tableau vivants of lissome “Indian” babes in buckskin posed in front of a teepee. It‘s gratifying how NAB has evolved away from dimwitted chauvinism and towards inclusiveness. more

Yesterday I met with Marshall Electronics, manufacturer of production monitors. The company was showing off its 23in. V-R231P-AFHD, a 1920×1080 native LCD that sells for only $5,999. Thom Belford, VP of marketing and engineering (when was the last time you saw that combination?), told me that the monitor was able to produce 98 percent of the SMPTE chart, making it close to a reference monitor in quality. Belford said that Marshall was looking at LED backlighting as a way to cover even more of the chart, but at this point hasn’t yet developed the necessary servo system that would respond to saturation feedback and modulate the LEDs. This is a challenge that’s specific to moving pictures, he said—still images already can be displayed just fine in a LED backlighting situation.

Over at the Panasonic booth today, Steve Golub showed off the BT-LH2600W, a 26in. widescreen LCD production monitor with a 1366×768 resolution and a relatively low price tag under $5,000. It’s got a ton of features to make the guys in OB trucks and post facilities happy. Audio level meters can be superimposed across the top of the screen. The BT-LH2600W has two auto-switching SDI/HD-SDI inputs. Its waveform monitor graphically displays luminance levels from -5 to 108 IRE in any of the monitor‘s four corners. There’s a split screen/freeze frame function for scene comparison and critical color matching. A safe-area frame marker is selectable in both 16:9 and 4:3 modes. Check out the press release for more info.

And I couldn’t resist taking a look at Panasonic’s 103in. plasma monitor (pictured), which it’s claiming to be the world’s biggest. It will get its official debut at InfoComm in June. MSRP: If you have to ask.

Sun Microsystems is promoting a variety of video management, data management, and content distribution tools at NAB, as well as several partner initiatives, such is designing a powerful render farm solution for an indie CG film called Barnyard and a storage solution for several HBO shows. But the over-riding theme behind all this, according to Rob Glidden, the company’s marketing manager for broadband and digital media, is the notion that standardized IP/IT infrastructure solutions, built on a Java backbone, can work at a foundational level for a wide range of entertainment industry content creation, management, and distribution requirements in the strange, growing world of “new media.”

Glidden suggests that content creators should be concentrating on building a single, robust IT-based infrastructure to whip out content ranging from high-end feature films to cell-phone video, and everything in between. more

Visited the Inlet Technology booth the other day and talked to Neal Page, Inlet CEO.

Lots of developments at Inlet, which makes hardware cards and systems to encode to VC-1/WMV, and has become recognized as among the leading companies working in this fast growing market. (VC-1 is the SMPTE spec that‘s a variation of Microsoft‘s Windows Media Video.)

The Raleigh, N.C. company has announced that it will now crunch down video to include AVC (H.264 / MPEG-4), the other major spec for DVDs, the ‘net, etc. Demos presented AVC encoding within both the Fathom compression card and Semaphore, a quality control app. Production release follows later this year. more

I checked out Aussie microphone company Ricsonix, a tiny company located in the depths of the NAB Radio hall. (See more at www.gracedistribution.com.)

I was on a hunt. The previous evening I ran into an old friend who always seems to be up on the latest audio gear. He raved about Ricsonix Blue Wireless, a very impressive Bluetooth mic they’ll be delivering later this year.

Blue delivers CD-quality audio with zero compression. It‘s about a third the weight, size, and cost of conventional radio mics, according to the company. The system is said to use the latest frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, making transmitters and receivers need less power consumption for near field operation. more

The bitmobile pulled up to the convention hall curb and I got my first limo meeting at NAB. Luxology showed me the new version of Modo, due out in a few weeks, and it was a convincing demo. I usually withhold judgement on products until I take them for a test drive or use them in production. But having seen the product over the past year and going on gut I believe Modo will become a very important 3D product. This is the Stuart Ferguson, Allen Hastings, and Brad Peebler follow up to their other product Lightwave, and a good case can be made for software developers that have the opportunity in their careers to create the same category of product twice.

Adobe Premiere honcho Randy Ubillos got to do this with Final Cut Pro, and Modo may be a similar situation. OK, Modo. It‘s was first a polygonal modeler and the latest version adds texture painting, mapping and rendering. It runs on Windows and natively on the Mac. The render, shown to me on the latest Mac laptop is very, very fast. Yes, I did not hammer it, but I asked the right questions and it looks very promising. No animation yet, which is a too bad, but this time next year we may be seeing the app that professionals begin to include in the fraternity of high end 3D apps. more

Press Release:

Integrated production suite upgraded with SDI switching and HD editing more

Press Release:

da Vinci Names Master Colorists at NAB2006 Presentation Ceremony

At da Vinci’s Master Colorist Awards ceremony on April 25 at NAB2006, da Vinci announced winning entries in the four categories of its annual competition. This year’s winners are: more