Archive by Cynthia Wisehart

At the Wacom booth, After Effects artist and Apple Engineer Ben Koning is spending his first 20 minutes of life as a Wacom user testing the new Intuos4 tablet. “In that time I’ve gone from completely flailing around, drawing things when I don’t want to, to being able to drive Photoshop and AE,” Koning says. “This is my first animation with keyframes and spline,” he says with mock pride, indicating a kindergarten-level construction of boxes on the monitor. Buy hey, he’s driving. “It’s responsive and easy to learn I’d have to say, almost like drawing with a real pencil or a real brush.” more

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. more

Ensemble Designs is here with 28 products, celebrating 20 years and good health, says Ensemble’s founder David Wood, (who is also a DSLR fan like so many on the show floor). For NAB, Ensemble brought five new 3G products in their BrightEye line and nine 3G products in their Avenue line, from an electrical to optical convertor to automatic gain control for audio and sync changeover. Avenue also gets new conversion, protection and TSG tools and two new ASI/310M convertors. more

Maya artist Bryan Thombs is walking the floor for his day job at Picture Mill. Specifically he’s looking for stereo 3D technology (he’s come to the right place). Hollywood-based Picture Mill is moving into stereo 3D title sequences, prologues and epilogues, and trailers to expand on their existing work in the same vein in 2D for clients including Paramount, Disney, Universal, Spyglass, Red Wagon, Nickelodeon and the BBC.

Bryan also made the titles for the Reel Impressions showcases that have been running all week in the Central Hall Content Theater. These showcases feature the Cinematography, Graphics, and Visual Effects work from millimeter’s Reel-Exchange members and NAB attendees.

See the Picture Mill reel here.

Here’s a must-see device and not just because you can control it with your iPhone: AJA’s ambitious little portable digital disk recorder—Ki Pro—attaches to virtually any camera (via SDI or HDMI) and records virtually any video (or audio) source directly (and losslessly) to 10-bit full raster Apple ProRes 422. Unplug it from the camera, plug it into Final Cut Studio via FireWire 800, and media is instantly available to edit. Or record to 35mm ExpressCard Flash. Ships in June starting at $4K with 260GB HDD storage module and an AC adapter.

You can see it on the JVC booth coordinating nicely with the brand new HM700 HD camcorder. Apple’s Richard Townhill and AJA’s Nick Rashby have the whole total world domination thing pictured for this device; if you’re hooked on ProRes workflow you’ll track their vision of a continuous ProRes stream from production to post. No one will miss digitizing. more

MTI Film CEO Larry Chernoff is standing at the booth reminding Leon Silverman (now of Disney) that he’s been syncing dailies since he was 18 years old, and in fact he’s still syncing dailies. They’re both in a cheery mood.

MTI is here—and on the Panasonic booth—with the newly released Control Dailies DA (for Digital Acquisition) bringing dailies workflow to P2, Red, Viper, Genesis, and the Arri D-21, as well as DPX media. This faster-than-real-time module can stand alone or work within the Control Dailies system in combination with Control Color and Convey. The DA Head module does ingest and decoding, Control Color handles ASC CDL-compliant grading and/or LUT application. With the new Convey modules, while the system synchonizes audio and lays off up to three HD or SD output streams, it can simlultaneously output DNxHD and DPX (with metadata and MXF wrapper) for editorial and DVD or Blu-ray for dailies review. Modules for ProRes and QuickTime are on deck for later this year. more

Globalstor CTO Scott Leif is two years into his Red workflow experience. Technology partner Assimilate worked closely with Red in the development process of the camera—Assimilate can deal natively with Red files. Now Globalstor debuts the next generation of its ExtremeStor-DI REDe video storage workstation. This is the first workstation to deliver native uncompressed 4K resolution, Leif says. Raw, DPX, and Cineon files are handled in real time at 24fps (it can also do stereo 2K). It’s built on the Intel Nehalem architecture, which Leif calls “nothing short of spectacular.” The system also incorporates Nvidia’s Quadro Plex 2200 D2. Core software is Assimilate’s Scratch.

Will be available in rack and tower versions at capacities from 1.4-9 terabytes.

It’s the solar charger that sucks people into the Anton Bauer booth—imagine a kind of picnic blanket embedded with solar cells with an adapter that plugs into the battery. It’s a just a technology demonstration at the moment, but since the collector part of it is real, Anton Bauer has a reasonably manageable task to deliver a camping-friendly batter charger that will run on sunlight.

Meanwhile the company has delivered a hot new 4-gang charger. VP of Marketing and Business Development Shinichi Minowa says the TM4 charges batteries up to two times faster than the Anton/Bauer TWQ charger. It doubles as four discreet AC power supplies; it can power various equipment with a 70W supply via a 4-pin XLR. The power supply can be used simultaneously with the charger, allowing three batteries to be charged while operating from AC mains.

Also new, the Dionic HC high current battery, capable of up to 10 amps, with 91 watt-hr capacity; a built-in LCD real-time fuel gauge tracks up to nine hours of run time.

In the Central Hall Content Theater, Animal Planet’s Dave Salmoni and I are watching him fight off angry delinquent lions with a wooden cane. He’s “backing off” from a crabby looking female—brandishing that old man’s cane, an F900 in his hand where the taser should be.

He’s making sure his picture and audio look good on the 24-foot screen in the Content Theater; I’m waiting to screen my own footage for the Reel Impressions showcase (in which there was little for anything but exhaustion). He will be bringing a live lion to his presentation (tomorrow at 3:30). I will not be. more

Flew up from LA seated between Jim Compton, CTO of the DVS Intelestream group, which includes Burbank post house CCI, and DP Brian J. Reynolds. Reynolds—late of The Closer, shot the first five years of NYPD Blue, the Emmy-nominated American Family, and is just finished with David Semel’s new pilot Limelight—a three-camera Genesis shoot that also gave Reynolds the chance to experiment with the Canon 5D DLSR.

Compton’s testing 2 perf (Kodak Primetime) for Jim Chressanthis on Ghost Whisperers; Reynolds is pretty dazzled by the 5D. The two men trade stories and opinions about life and images in post-35mm television. One talks about “grain,” the other “noise” but their observations overlap around questions of sensor size and resolution, budgets, and archiving. more