Monday’s dharma at NAB was about bigness and smallness, and I’m still thinking about it.

Yesterday Tim Robbins gave the keynote speech. Ever since FCC Chairman Newton Minow gave his famous “vast wasteland” speech at NAB in 1961, it seems NAB has played it safe. Past keynotes I’ve attended have featured Ronald Reagan (attacked on stage by an ice sculpture-wielding assailant, yards from where I was sitting), Barry Diller, Richard Parsons of Time-Warner, James Cameron and the like. Safe Republican choices, not likely to get former NAB CEO and good ol’ boy Eddie Fritts in any Washington hot water.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Convention Center this year.

How Tim Robbins got invited to give the keynote is anyone’s guess. But there he was, on stage, facing a large morning audience of radio and TV broadcasters, cable owners and mixed-media types.

Moments earlier, as NAB officials backstage had glimpsed his prepared remarks, brakes were slammed, gears reversed, tires shredded. So Robbins puckishly told the audience that he would not be giving his speech after all: “I guess you’ll be able to read it at some later date in another technology.”

NAB floor agents ordered journalists to turn off all cameras. But then, to the audience’s delight, Robbins threw caution to the wind and began his speech anyway, entitled “The Power and Responsibility of Our Nation’s Broadcasters.”

What proceeded was a selective history of American broadcasting, from Edward R. Murrow to “Amos and Andy” to the Lewinsky sex scandal and beyond, a seriocomic screed pitched somewhere between The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Barack Obama’s penetrating speech on race in America.

The cheekiness of it all drew repeated bursts of applause (unlike the dead silence Minow received in 1961), nor did anyone object to Robbins’ frequent use of humorous expletives, no doubt a valentine to the Supreme Court and FCC.

Because, ultimately, Robbins was deadly serious: “We are at an abyss as a country and as an industry. … And you, the broadcasters of this great nation have a tremendous power… to turn this country away from cynicism … away from the hatred and the divisive dialogue that has rendered such a corrosive affect on our body politic.” Newton Minow, wherever he is, must have grinned.

Entering the lion’s den of entertainment broadcasting yesterday, tossing a spiky gauntlet at the spectators while reminding them of the formal responsibilities underpinning their use of the public’s airwaves to make a buck; highlighting, as well, social responsibilities that extend to the businesses of satellite, cable, and Internet–this took supersized cojones. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent this story propagates across the commercial media it’s aimed at. Although TV cameras were ordered off, many small audio recorders captured the entire event. Perhaps you’ve heard of it already?

Gently switching gears (no smoking skid marks here): the smallness I encountered yesterday came in the form of diminutive inventions you could bury in the small of your palm.

Imagine a USB 2.0 device the size of a flash drive that captures analog standard definition video and converts it in real time to MPEG-4 H.264 for capture to a laptop. H.264 files that are easily imported into iTunes, an iPod, iPhone, YouTube, or a Web site. Think of all those dusty VHS cassettes you’ve been dreaming of saving to disk someday… Blackmagic Design’s innovative Blackmagic Video Recorder looks like a flash drive that’s sprouted a bouquet of cables: analog component, composite (NTSC, PAL), and S-Video. There’s also a small Mac OSX program for setting levels and frame sizes, but that’s it. It’s pure plug-and-capture. For an unprecedented $119, available July.

I found another USB device embedded in the side of Aaton’s new 2-perf/3-perf handheld 35mm camera, the Penelope. In this case it really is a USB flash drive, but when was the last time you saw a USB connector on a 35mm film camera? Flickering away in deep blue, Penelope’s flash drive was silently capturing camera scene information such as magazine number, frame rate, timecode start-stop, etc. You have to look hard at the Penelope to spot it, because it’s nestled behind and between her twin batteries. (If you can read the adjacent photo, where the lettering spells “Penelope” upside down, that’s the little flash drive.) To walk away with PDF “image reports” in your pocket–JPEG stills with metadata–how cool is that?

Speaking of connectors, ever tried to plug in an audio XLR cable only to discover you have the wrong sex? Not you, silly… the XLR plug? More irritating is when you don’t happen to have that necessary male-male or female-female adapter on hand. Grrrrrr… Well, Neutrik has ended XLR gender confusion forever with its new “ConvertCon” connector, essentially an hermaphroditic XLR plug. Slide the gray shaft back, it’s male. Slide the gray shaft forward, it’s female. Neutrik’s tiny booth was unprepared for deluge of interest it received as people heard about this innovation and came to see for themselves. The Convertacon was so new, they hadn’t even given it a part number yet. In fact, I suspect they invented the name on the spot. No matter. This proves there are still better mouse traps to be built.

Here’s one more small miracle in the form of a rumor that you can bet on here in Las Vegas. Iconix has shown their tiny 3-CCD HD cube camera–ice-cube sized, actually—at NAB for the past several years. It uses a C-mount, and a chronic problem for Iconix has been lack of C-mount lenses that are HD-worthy. Existing video C-mount lenses are made for standard definition and are not high-end designs to begin with. What’s needed is a C-mount Zeiss DigiPrime at a fraction the cost. Well, hard rumor has it that Schneider at the urging of Band Pro has agreed to create first-rate HD C-mount lenses for the Iconix, and that Fujinon has agreed to do so as well. Which, given the recent spike of interest in digital 3D, makes Iconix the perfect candidate for low-cost 3D rigs. Not to mention Iconix’s own NAB announcement: a next-generation Studio2K Iconix camera. Dual-link 4:4:4 output, same golf ball dimensions.

Above is an NAB snapshot of an Iconix with a C-mount lens. The three knobs at bottom are the tripod, the knob at top is the camera!

And, wouldn’t you know it, to the right is a low-cost 3D rig made from two Iconix cameras, mounted on a small Sachtler tripod head.

Good things in small packages.