My taxi from McCarran Airport makes a beeline down Paradise Road–a corridor of clutter and billboards hawking spent acts like Bill Bixby, Jamie Farr, and “comedian of the year” Rita Rudner–to the Las Vegas Convention Center and NAB 2008. It’s good to be back.

At LVCC I encounter the weekend calm before the storm. The show floor is being readied for the thick, swarming crowds that will arrive on cue Monday. True to form, incongruities are in place too. At the LVCC’s entrance sits parked a cube truck dressed as a giant tube TV with eight-foot rabbit ears. Ohhh-kay…

What catches my eye is the message displayed on the big mock screen. “What is the digital television (DTV) transition?”, it asks the unassuming passerby.

Now, if this ersatz PSA were displayed at Best Buy or Costco, I’d hardly give it a second thought. But at the front step of the ATSC’s Holy Temple–the National Association of Broadcasters convention–on the eve of the great analog shutoff?

Seems a little late in the day. Is there a single broadcast engineer or attendee at NAB not aware of the impending switchover to digital? Better not to take any chances, I suppose.

There are several good reasons to view this NAB as a special one, beyond the fact that it’s the final NAB of the analog TV era. It’ll be the first NAB in years without a huge Apple or Avid booth, with all the show presence and floor congestion they generate. It will be, for all intents and purposes, the first all-HD NAB, in that there’s no longer much wind in the sails of standard definition, at least not here in the U.S. Consequently you’ll see a big push here for broadcasting news in HD (although the switchover to ATSC doesn’t strictly require HD). It’s also the first NAB to enjoy a single HD optical disc format, although it’s too early to tell if this will be much of a factor on the show floor.

The real reason to attend NAB early on this somnolent Saturday is the Digital Cinema Summit underway over in the South Hall. When DCS began as an NAB Saturday/Sunday side event six or seven years ago, the emphasis was on Digital Cinema production: cameras, formats, and Digital Intermediate techniques. The technology was edgy, the dais untamed and often argumentative as speakers laid claim to new trails they’d blazed. That version of DCS had a wonderful and unpredictable Wild West energy.

Today’s DCS is mainstream, co-sponsored by SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) and consumed almost entirely by issues of Digital Cinema exhibition, particularly progress in implementing the Digital Cinema Initiative’s (read: Hollywood Studios’) latest specs for 2K/4K color space and brightness, file networking and distribution, and anti-piracy.

Still there are surprises and unexpected insights at DCS. Among this year’s gleanings:

– ASC cinematographer and VFX expert Dave Stump announcing a new proposed standard, co-developed by the ASC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, called “Common File Format for Look-up Tables,” meant to bring universal interchange of color-correction and look-management data to the set of digital cinema productions. This is a very, very big deal to today’s digital feature cinematographers.

– The term “stereographer,” dropped by Buzz Hays of Sony Pictures Imageworks, referring to cinematographers and postproduction mavens who specialize in 3D.

– 18 films are being released in 3D over the coming year. However the number of digital 3D cameras in all of Hollywood is not enough to support more than two ongoing productions at once…

– In 3D, it’s the little things that’ll kill you. Like adding subtitles to 3D. Should they be “dimensionalized?” Should they exist in one plane, and should that plane be in front of the screen? Should 3D subtitles become overtitles, go above the picture to soften eye strain? These issues actually arose during the international release of Beowulf, and test results were shown to the DCS audience. All tests were problematic. Who knew?

As you’ve gleaned from the above gleanings, there were lots of presentations about 3D at DCS. Hollywood has flirted with 3D in the past: an initial bubble of interest in the early ’50s–60 films were made!—another in the late ’70s, maybe a microbubble in the ’80s, and each time they’ve burst with a loud insistent pop. What’s different this time are the myriad advantages intrinsic to digital cameras, with their high resolution and small sizes, and digital projectors, with their power and versatility, exemplified by the single-projector Real D system used so impressively for the recent release of the U2 3D film.

No wonder this year’s DCS became a virtual 3D pep rally. So it was doubly fascinating to learn about advances in laser light sources for digital projection. Two companies, Arasor Corp. and Laser Light Engines, gave presentations on the extraordinary advantages–and what they claim is the inevitability–of laser diode technology for RGB illumination they say will soon replace xenon lamphouses in digital projection.

According the presenters, conventional xenon lamp efficiency in lumens/watt is only 15%. LED does better at 30%, but laser provides a whopping 90% efficiency. Reproducible color space compared to what the human eye can see is 40-45% for LCD and plasma, 50-55% for xenon and LEDs, and over 90% for diode lasers. Solid-state lasers also last 7-10 years compared to costly and dangerous high-pressure xenon lamps which must be replaced several times a year. Other laser advantages include no UV and heat, for estimable savings in air-conditioning of projection rooms.

And then there’s the raw punch of laser. Several DCS speakers noted that a laser source’s more powerful output could prove the perfect tonic for single-projector 3D exhibition, which compared to conventional projection appears dim under the best of circumstances. (Those funny glasses–you’re wearing shades in the dark–don’t help matters.)

Seems too good to be true, which is what many in the audience felt. But the presenters claim that low-powered lasers are ubiquitous in our daily lives–at the heart of every CD and DVD player—and that the advantages of higher powered micro lasers will place them in consumer products like cell phones and TVs as early as later this year. And that as familiarity and consumer acceptance grows, manufacturing will ramp up, costs will tumble, and digital cinema projectors powered by lasers will match conventional xenon projectors in price tag. Not having to replace lamps, of course, will tilt the long term cost advantage towards laser projectors.

Now that’s the sort of peek-over-the-horizon I came to NAB for. More than makes up for that idiot cube truck, still parked out front of NAB.