Best swag of the show: Automatic Duck‘s key fob/beer opener. Photo by Wes Plate. Watch them get made. Really, you should watch it.

It’s Automatic Duck’s 8th NAB—lots of us remember their debut. It seemed impossible that there could be a business plan in fighting the War on Tedium. But that’s what Wes and his dad Harry did, and they’ve delivered one plug in after another to tackle the yucky conversion tasks and minor but soul-draining shortcomings of mainstream editing products. For this year’s NAB, they reached back to their early days (2001) to resurrect the spirit of Media Copy 1.0 that worked with OMF files and “languished and died because it didn’t support all the file formats,” Wes recalls. Now Media Copy 2.0 provides an elegant $95 alternative to the overkill of similar features in AE and Final Cut. Media Copy 2.0 is a super simple application (“brain dead” he says) that merely allows you to find source media that may be strewn about your system, package it up and send it to another location. Mac only—it reads an Avid AAF or OMF 2.0 file or a Final Cut Pro XML file, figures out which media files are used by a given sequence then copies the media to a location you specify.

Automatic Duck’s at-the-show news also included the technology preview of a partnership with EditShare to convert Avid to FCP, FCP to Avid—Automatic Duck’s Pro Export and Pro Import will include the fruits of this partnership in the future.