Archive of the Broadcast Category

Let‘s face it; there are a lot of multiple processor, multiple core computers out there. To a degree, they‘re reasonably generic, using the same processors, motherboard chipsets and memory. When I sat down with Boxx Technologies Director of Marketing Francois Wolf, my basic question was “how do you tell them apart?”

By way of background, Boxx Technologies sells high performance workstations into the digital content production market, and was showing their latest product, the 3DBOXX RTX, designed for high definition editors and animators, at the show. Here are the questions he recommended potential buyers consider. more

As Ikegami’s 60th anniversary approached in 2007, things didn’t look all that good for the one-time leading light of video camera technology. Once the maker of coveted high-end cameras that featured electronic circuitry delivering what many felt were the best video images going, by the late 1990s the company lost the lead, as Panasonic and Sony prevailed. Unlike Ikegami, those two industrial giants could also deliver the integrated tape mechanisms necessary to get a rig out of the studio.

Ikegami fought back with its innovative Editcam, launched in 1995. Designed in part with input from Avid, Editcam was the first mainstream camcorder to use ruggedized hard drives to replace tape in the field. more

Sunday morning started with a magic bus ride. Rolling down city streets, through underpasses, along Interstate 15 at 70 mph, and finally pulling into an underground casino parking lot, a handful of journalists including yours truly got a preview from Samsung of a proposed enhancement to ATSC that enables perfect mobile reception of digital TV, particularly to handheld devices.

What‘s the big deal? In a word, YouTube. Even the most benighted of computer illiterati grew acquainted with the pleasures of Flash files over the past year. (Thanks in large part to Paris Hilton, but that‘s another story.) The idea that it‘s fun to watch videos in a small window a few inches from your nose instead of from across the living room floor has now entered the public‘s consciousness. Apple‘s video iPod is another manifestation of this shift in TV viewing habits, as will be the larger, sharper iPhone when it debuts in June. more

If you work on color correcting in post, or have to match cameras in the field, it‘s easy to rue the passing of CRT technology. While that analog technology had its limits, moving to LCD monitors meant losing track of colors such as emerald green and dark red, since backlighting the screen with fluorescent tubes greatly limits color fidelity.
At their Sunday press conference, Sony provided a solution with its BVM-L230 LCD video reference monitor; the 22.5-inch HD monitor employs a newly developed LED backlight system and display engine capable of producing 1,024 levels of gray scale. (The ability to render a greater number of luminance values directly influences color reproduction fidelity.)
Sony claims the new LCD panel is the industry’s first with to offer a 10-bit driver, replacing 8-bit technology, which is capable of only 256 levels of gray scale. more

Teamworking in post is all the rage. You can‘t read far though the slew of pre-show press releases to learn that playing well with others will be a big part of the news at NAB 07

Quantel does its part with the launch of Genetic Engineering at their Sunday press conference. No need to worry about stem cells piling up on your NLE though: the Brit company is talking about overturning the traditional way of looking at SANs (storage area networks), allowing Q users to hook together any of its products–whether eQ, iQ, or Pablo–and getting access to the same clips at the same time without copying, reformatting, or moving the media. more

Chyron is touting its all HD booth at this year’s NAB show, a first for the company. At the press conference, SD and HD weren‘t even a topic of discussion for the 41-year-old company: that‘s so yesterday.

The Melville, New York, company traditionally holds the show‘s first press conference, an 8am Sunday breakfast slot that doesn‘t automatically make it beloved of reporters, though Chyron can always be relied upon to offer a good spread and non-stop product introductions.

But we weren‘t here just for another CG rollout. But rather the company played up its sharpened market sensibility and product mix: profit margins moved from 62% to 67% over the past year, it‘s now debt free, and over the past two years the product line has been completely revamped and rationalized–that is, products fit together, work together into some greater whole. more