Archive for April, 2006

Panasonic product announcements are aggregated in one location.

Click here for Panasonic’s NAB press releases regarding the P2, AK-HC1500G HD cam, BT-LH2600W HD monitor, AJ-HDP2000 VTR, and AJ-HD1400 compact VTR.

Avid has got student representation from various colleges and universities blogging about their NAB experiences. Read candid entries by future industry pros from across the country at the links below.

Columbia College, Chicago

Emerson College

Howard University

NYU

USC

University of Akron

At the HP booth, you can see what HP says will be the new screamer workstation based on the new dual core Pentium 5000 and 5100 chips coming out from Intel in a staged release next month and then in Q3.

Check out the xw8400 running an unoptimized version of Avid Media Composer, showing truly impressive performance increases—Avid’s Joe Bentivegna says the realtime streams more than doubled and they saw a 25-30 percent increase in render times. I stress “unoptimized” since Avid hasn’t yet put out the 2.5 release that takes advantage of the new architecture.

Also at the booth, the same workstation prototype is running Autodesk Maya.

You can also use the op to see the new dual-core mobile workstation.

Read a press release on HP’s Digital Media Solution at NAB here.

Here in Vegas it‘s $4 for a paper cup of coffee, $3 to use an ATM, $5 to ride the Las Vegas Monorail from casino to casino. Of course, New Yorkers are now paying $4 a gallon of gas, so why kvetch about airport prices at NAB? I suppose I‘m savoring the irony. Big iron telecines here used to fetch a half million, ENG camcorders and VTRs fifty thousand and up. Ah, the salad days.

At Sunday‘s Panasonic press conference, a newly announced AJ-HPS1500 hybrid DVCPRO/P2 recorder with five P2 slots plus Gig E, FireWire, and USB 2 connectivity seemed downright pricey at $19,950. Not so a new AJ-PCD20 P2 card reader for Mac and PC introduced at a tenth the price, $1,950. more

For a number of NABs, it‘s always been my part of my beat when covering storage and networking to stop by the booth of Studio Network Solutions, a small but savvy manufacturer of network attached storage devices out of St. Louis, MO. They always seem to come up with interesting, useful solutions that are priced right for modest to mid-sized post facilities, whether audio, video, or multimedia-oriented.

This year was no exception. For starters, the company has been doing SAN systems for Mac gear for many years, long before Apple‘s Xsan hit the market. Keep it simple is the key phrase. SNS‘s SANmp is the key here; the multi-platform volume sharing software works with both Macs and PCs straightaway.

The software is the basis of its globalSAN product line, or, as the company likes to describe it, a “SAN in a Box”. Users will feel like they‘ve saved themselves the cost of an IT guy when they pull it out of the box, plug it in, and edit away. more

I met with Dave Chaimson of Sony Media Software this morning. In a private room off the show floor, Sony Media Software (known best for Acid Pro audio and Vegas video editing software) had set up a demo suite for its brand new sountrack creation program, Cinescore. The idea of the software is to allow editors to create royalty-free music beds quickly and efficiently.

Cinescore ships with 20 “themes,” which are broken down into 20 variations each, and each variation includes several songs. Each song is broken down into structural elements such as verse, chorus, interlude, etc. These and other elements (like intensity and instrument arrangement) can be dialed up and down. So an interlude can be extended to match up to video (which is displayed on the Cinescore interface as a non-editable timeline), which then dials down the chorus and verse to fit the desired segment length. more

Here at the Prism booth with David Krall, President and CEO of Avid. Avid made a bold start with their press conference yesterday; some cool new tools—like software-only Media Composer—but more importantly Avid is ready to tackle the big picture of enterprise integration for media. And not just for Avid tools.

David Krall:

What I love about this year is that more than ever what we’re doing is tied back to our longstanding strategy. That’s partly because of where the world is in the evolution of technology now—we can finally tie together video and audio; now we’re finally got that layer—the glue that can connect it together not just for the edit suite but for the enterprise.

Let me back up. What I mean by overall strategy is this. We’ve always prioritized four things: making the best tools for the world’s content creators, delivering seamless interop among all the pieces, delivering open solutions that use open standards, and giving great customer service. This year we reaised the bar on all those fronts.

Let’s take one example. Something people have been asking for is here: a software-only Media Composer. Great tool right? But look at it in context. more

Hearing Jim Cameron and others speak during the Digital Cinema Summit, it’s interesting to ponder whether HD acquisition for feature films is having a bigger impact on how movies are made from a technology POV, or how they are financed, marketed, distributed and discussed from a business POV. Cameron and several others pointed to major breakthroughs in fiber technology and the Sony SRW VTR as major elements that have made this form of filmmaking more accessible to larger groups of filmmakers on various budgets. (Indeed, DP’s from several such shows spoke at the Digital Cinema Summit, and Millimeter and Digital Content Producer will be covering workflow from several such projects in coming issues.)

Still, on the post side, HD acquisition has changed workflow in many areas, but not always the basic principles of filmmaking, Cameron said, using editing as an example when asked if cutting 3D is any different than cutting 2D material. more

Sony’s press conference was unique in that it focused almost entirely on users including the Lakewood mega church in Houston (which is not yet using 3D technology but should call Vince Pace and Jim Cameron about getting some), McNeil-Lehrer’s commitment to going HD in 2007, an ambitious television station for a new Inglewood college (part of a huge neighborhood revitalization effort) and others, including a trip to Gilman’s Point atop Kilimanjaro with an HDV camcorder in tow.

Speaking of rugged trips, director/cameraman Mark Falstad was on hand to talk about his adventures with the XDCAM HD on Alaska’s Iditarod dog race. Falstad showed some remarkable no-light footage (captured with an XDCAM HD shutter feature); here’s Falstad’s exclusive account of his Iditarod shooting experience.

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Avid made a splash at its press conference at the Hard Rock yesterday with its introduction of Interplay, which it’s dubbing the first “nonlinear workflow engine.” Claiming that it’s “more than asset management,” Avid says that Interplay tracks the relationships of different parts of projects across a facility - it looks at projects as “a fabric of associations.” For that reason it’s meant to be everywhere in a project - on the journalist’s end, within an administrator’s workflow - transparent yet invisible. Avid says that Interplay tracks over 100 different file types: budget spreadsheets, PowerPoints, storyboards, scripts, and JPEGs of locations.

For instance, with Media Composer 2.5, Avid Interplay offers a “live window into a media asset library” - when updates come in, Media Composer is aware of the changes. Interplay takes care of tasks such as linking low-res edits back to high-res content behind the scenes. more