Archive by David Leitner

I call Thursday NAB’s “rump” day, a short, casual afternoon of thin crowds, when tired booth personnel slip away to visit competitors and otherwise view the show floor for themselves. It’s my favorite day.

For instance, I swung by RED’s tent and found no lines. I stepped immediately inside and like those before me, ogled the aluminum prototypes of the upcoming 5K Epic (the small boxy one) and 3K Scarlet (“3K for $3K”) rotating behind glass. more

Serendipity on the show floor makes for impromptu sessions. Tuesday I ran into cinematographer Bill Bennett in front of the Sony F35 parked on a dolly in front of Brand Pro’s booth. Not much to say about the F35–35 means its newly developed single CCD is the size of a Super 35mm film frame–except that it’s as impressively thought out as last year’s F23 on which it’s based, and like its double first cousin, Panavision’s Genesis, did once, it sets a new highwater mark in 4:4:4 RGB high-end digital cinematography cameras.

Well, for $250,000 without lens, it ought to. A lot to pay in weak dollars for tighter depth-of-field and better dynamic range than the F23, plus 1-50 fps variable speed in 4:4:4 (compared to F23’s 1-30). But you do get every pixel you pay for. This is a full-on 1920×1080 RGB image—no Bayer interpolation of phantom R and B pixels here, no sir. Leave that to lowly CMOS cameras like the REDs, Silicon Imaging 2Ks and Minis, and Arri D21s (at NAB upgraded from D20 with new 2K RAW data output mode). more

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. more

In yesterday’s blog I didn’t get a chance to describe Sony’s press conference, so let’s catch up.

Sony is the largest exhibitor at NAB and their Sunday press conferences are large, slick affairs. I’ve genuinely enjoyed them through the years, though Sony as well as Panasonic could learn a thing or two from Apple, whose stage personalities memorize their presentations. Robotic readings, unnatural eyelines from footlight teleprompters, jokes fed from prepared text—it’s not pretty. Neither are taped testimonials from smiley-faced Christian evangelicals representing megachurches delighted with their Sony HD systems.

I’ve nothing personally against this market segment, but I squirmed at the mention of Jesus Christ to a mixed, international audience. What this sort of thing is doing at a Sony press conference full of trade journalists—for the second year in a row–is anyone’s guess. A Jewish journalist friend of mine from Moscow sitting in the next row looked uncomfortable, if not quietly flabbergasted. more

The Digital Cinema Summit continues this morning with sleep-inducing updates like “Thwarting In-Theater Piracy” and “Report from NATO,” but the morning’s first exchange, “The Exhibition Perspective: Truth and Consequences in the D-Cinema Rollout” was chock full of provocative insights.

Turns out the U.S. has taken a long lead in Digital Cinema, with nearly 5000 digital cinema screens in commercial service, exceeding the entire rest of the world by a factor of 10. For instance, since Nov. 2005, over 300 Hollywood movies have been released digitally. Wendy Aylsworth, VP of Technology at Warners, said further that while all Hollywood films today undergo a D.I. in post, the primary purpose of the D.I. is the DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative standard) projection master, and that the color-corrected files crafted for film output are created secondarily. If true, that’s a genuine “see” change. more

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. more

Thursday is NAB‘s rump day. The show floor closes early, at 4 p.m. instead of the usual 6 p.m. And if you stay to the bitter end as I do inevitably each year, you get to hear a voice over the P.A. announcing NAB‘s end, a cheer going up from tired booth workers, then a Scottish bagpiper playing a live version of “Amazing Grace.” I‘ve never actually seen the bagpiper, just heard him.

What‘s truly special about Thursday is that most of the madding crowd has gone. Thursday is viewed as a slow day, and it‘s the day that folks abandon their own booths to go inspect firsthand what else NAB has to offer on display, including their competitor‘s products. Quite a few industry VIPs, for instance, were drawn as if by magnetic force to RED‘s booth today. As I idled my motor near the Phantom High-Speed Digital Cameras in Abel Cine Tech‘s booth a short while this afternoon, several employees of JVC and Panasonic dropped by. more

Today‘s NAB blog is about individuals. Two very different sorts of individual who have impacted our industry. One is a phoenix, beginning his ascent into the sky. The other recently slipped over the horizon.

The first individual is Jim Jannard. No, this is not him. This is Stuart English, former VP of Marketing for Panasonic, who now works for Jim‘s company, RED Digital Cinema. Stuart is standing behind a RED ONE digital camera in the RED tent at NAB. He‘s obviously enjoying wearing his RED shirt. more

A brief visit to Panasonic‘s booth today reminded me how far we‘ve come when it comes to codecs. Their AVC-Intra, based on H.264 a/k/a MPEG-4, is twice as efficient as DVCPRO HD. In a split-screen demo on the show floor, video compressed using AVC-Intra at 50 Mbps (1440/4:2:0/10 bits) matched identical video compressed using DVCPRO HD at 100 Mbps. Differences in resolution or artifacting were undetectable. In another split-screen, AVC-Intra at 100 Mbps (1920/4:2:2/10 bits) matched D-5 HD (north of 230 Mbps). Same impressive result.

Where this gets particularly interesting is in the case of Panasonic‘s new P2 flagship, the AJ-HPX3000. The shape and size of the chic black 3000 affirm its lineage to 3-CCD ENG camcorders, yet resemblance ends there. With 2.2 million-pixel CCDs (1920 x 1080) and 14-bit, 4:2:2 signal processing, the 3000 is a spirited thoroughbred more in league with Sony’s F900 than a Varicam. However at $48K list, it‘s half the cost of an F900. more

I still have Sunday on my mind. So much innovation to absorb. From Samsung, Apple, Panasonic, Sony… for instance Sony‘s sensational F23 digital cinema camera, or XDCAM EX flash memory Handycam (at right, promised this fall), or the replacement to their outstanding BVM-A series of HD CRT monitors, the sure-to-be-award-winning 22.5-inch, 1920 x 1080, LED-backlit LCD BVM-L230 — 1080/60p and digital cinema 2K (plus every lesser format) with waveform and audio level displays!

(When it comes to flash memory recording and professional LCD monitors with waveforms, it‘s only fair to credit Panasonic with starting these balls rolling at previous NABs.)

It was only yesterday that HD itself was precious and exotic. But Sony‘s NAB mantra this year is “HD for All.” Apple, in turn, boasts of its ongoing effort to “democratize” professional video and HD. (Popularization and professionalization are wildly clashing ideals Apple seems to enjoy juggling like a watermelon and an egg.) Both echo JVC‘s proletarian 2003 NAB motto, “HD for the Masses.” This got me to thinking about the roles of language and marketing at NAB. more