Archive of the Camera Accessories Category

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

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

New Manfrotto tripods at the Bogen booth: the MPRO 535 (6lbs. holds 44) and 536 (8lbs. holds 55). Both are 100% woven carbon fiber, which Manfrotto says provides incredible torsion rigidity (no mid level spreader required). They’re very light and very fast to set up, ideal for ENG. “A lot of people take carbon fiber for granted,” says Bogen’s Kyle Kappmeier. “But not all carbon is created equal.” $550 and $725.

Mobile Studios is on the Panasonic booth with an elegant flypack system for live production. The set up includes a Panasonic AV-HS400 switcher, BT-LH2600W monitor, and an AJ-HPM110 P2 recorder. It can be configured with Mobile Studios own MS-CG100HD character generator (available separately at $9995). Fourteen available rack spaces for optional intercom, wireless sound audio mixer, direct-to-edit capture, and battery backup/UPS. $30K to $75K.

In addition to the flypack on display here, the company also does one with a MOTU V3HD option for direct-to-edit capture on laptops with FCP or Premiere CS3. www.mobilestudios.com for more.

While portable HDDs are turning up on HDV camcorders around the show floor, the promise of portable 4K field production came a bit closer with the pending release of Codex Portable from Codex Digital. Now on display in the Band Pro booth, the Portable (scheduled to deliver this June) is shown capturing 1080p, 4:4:4 data from a Sony F23 camera. The lightweight disk recorder– a pricier solid-state version will also be available at some point this year– is about the size of the toaster and records HD, 2K, and 4K from Sony, ARRI, Panavision, Panasonic, Thomson, and Dalsa cameras. more

In a place of honor at the Vinten booth, a slowly turning display holds one of Sachtler’s original tripods. Tripods are workaday devices that rarely get much attention. Here, it might be worthwhile to pause for a moment, just to consider what we’ve gained.

After all it was only in 1958 in Munich, Germany that cameraman Wendelin Sachtler–who also had turns as an inventor and actor–devised a dampened gyro system that helped add a professional gloss to location production. Up to this date there were few alternatives for camera head stabilization in the field. The heavy film cameras of the day employed massive geared heads requiring complex geared assemblies that need to mesh just so in order to work correctly. (Careful! Don’t strip the gears!) Meanwhile, lighter 16mm and 35mm cameras used freely moving heads or ones employing friction elements that offered a regular amount of resistance. That bit of resistance or drag made it easier to pull off a smooth pan or tilt, as it gave motion in any particular direction a countering force to move against. more

One of the coolest products I saw at the show came to me by chance as I was hurrying across the North Hall, that almost always deserted-as-a-ghost-town hall. Maybe it’s not something a journalist would, or should, admit to, but when walking across such halls I sometimes feel sorry for the companies that have booths there. The booth employees make longing glances at your press badge as you hurry by. I usually find myself mumbling something like “Oh boy, really late again…” as I shuffle past looking for the exit.

(Hey, it just struck me–it might be helpful to someone who has never been to the show that one way to get a sense of it is to begin by thinking of a really huge amount of enclosed space. Okay? Divide that up into three big spaces/buildings, but not evenly: have each one gaining on the next. Good. Now think of these as having personalities. Maybe something from Goldilocks and the three bears could work. For example, North Hall seems a little too quiet at times, but it really is the smallest of the three in floor space, so that fits. Next, move on to Central Hall–yes, it’s laid out right in the middle of the three halls. Central Hall usually seems just about right; whether it’s crowd size, said crowds attendant caffeine levels, or amount of shouting needed to make yourself heard in the hallways, everything comes out about average. But now walk into the last of the three, the very oversubscribed South Hall. Here, just think of those over-crowded, sweaty fairgrounds you’ve encountered, or maybe a dangerously over-packed subway platform, something you might not want to navigate on a regular basis, but with everyone running. Yes, even in Las Vegas too much, it turns out, is really sometimes too much.) more

Building on the innovations of the widely successful original Stasis body support, Anton/Bauer’s new Stasis Flex redirects the geometry of a handheld camera by redistributing its weight into the operator’s torso and over the shoulder. Introduced at the NAB Convention in Las Vegas in April 2008, the innovative design of Stasis Flex enables a cameraman to shoot in virtually any position, taking the weight off the operator’s hand, relieving fatigue and stabilizing shooting. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

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

Thomson Grass Valley Infinity finally shipped around IBC time last year. That camera was announced a few NABs ago, and the delay was due partially to Thomson’s late-in-the-game adoption of CMOS technology (three Xensium 1920×1080 2/3in. sensors) that Thomson believes offers better image quality than CCD technology. The bright side of the delay: as IT industry catches up to the needs of video production, the hard-drive-recording Infinity grows in power.

The Infinity records to Iomega’s Rev Pro media as well as CompactFlash cards, which are available immanently at the 16GB level. A new version of the camcorder, announced at the show and expected to ship in June, makes use of new Rev Pro recording media to expand its capacity. (Current Rev Pro media stores 35GB.) The forthcoming Infinity DMC 1000/20 is enabled to use higher-capacity Rev Pro XP and ER hard-disk media. ER means extended recording; the small 65GB hard drive packs can store 90 minutes of HD content at 75Mbps, or more than four hours of standard-def video. XP, meanwhile, means extra performance (extended didn’t work here I guess): the 40GB XP carts support a higher transport rate; these store 50 minutes of HD content at 75Mbps and can offload data at higher speeds than the Rev Pro XP.