Focus Enhancements sells an assortment of products in multiple markets, so it’s always a fun visit at NAB. The coolest item this year was an upgrade of the company’s popular FS-5 DTE recorder, which includes the ability to create MPEG-4 proxy files after recording for preview on the FS-5’s color LCD. MPEG-4 is a good choice, since you can obviously play the clips on a computer, upload them to a video sharing site or display them on most mobile devices.

Also new is the ability to wirelessly log clip metadata using any WiFi capable device like an iPod. You can even link multiple FS-5 units together and add the same metadata to all units simultaneously. FS-5 version 2.0 should ship in May and will be free to all customers who purchased the FS-5 between February 2009 and June 30, 2009. Otherwise, the upgrade will cost $39.

Otherwise, Focus announced the ProxSys Media Archive server, which automatically archives video content to either hard disk or optical media. For later searching, the unit creates a Flash preview during ingest which users can preview along with native and custom metadata on the ProxSys MA system.

Focus will sell two versions of the archive server, both based on a Windows XP Pro desktop server with the ProxSys MA application on a Linux virtual machine with 1TB of mirrored RAID internal storage. The standard ProxSys MA-10 ($5,995) has an internal 8x Blu-ray burner, while the ProxSys MA-50 ($11,495) has a robotic 8x Blu-ray burner with customizable disc label printing. Both units should ship by early summer, 2009.