Archive of the Display/Presentation Category

Back from the show. I like taking a day or so after my last postings to look through everything I’ve collected, selecting some last items to include in a final wrapup. While that’s not a lot of time for deep reflection, I am at least far enough away from the hype of the moment to enable a bit of perspective.

At the NAB press office earlier this week I overheard an NAB official talk to the editor of one of the leading trade mags. He was asked about what he thought would be among the most exciting developments of the show. Instead, he begged off answering, stating that as far as he was concerned it was all just a rehash. He could find nothing new or interesting worth commenting on. more

Media Excel was the last company that I saw at NAB, but last was certainly not least in this instance. The company’s real time encoders for mobile, web and IP TV, recently anointed by MTV and MobiTV, looked very, very impressive.

The company targets broadcasters and other very high volume streaming producers and builds their Hera real time encoding boxes using Texas Instruments DaVinci DSP (digital signal processor). The chip is programmable, so it will support later codec updates, and reportedly scary fast. more

As streaming becomes more technologically advanced and complicated, it’s easy to forget that the most basic streaming video-related need for many organizations is to synchronize a video of a speaker with his or her PowerPoint slides. Though Accordent does many more things than this, they offer two of the best products I’ve seen for streaming PowerPoint with video.

The Accordent Capture Station is a computer/appliance you can take with you on site to stream the presentation live, and/or capture it for later streaming. You connect the presenter’s computer to the appliance via a VGA connector to capture the PowerPoint slides, and plug the video feed into an Osprey card. The Accordent software captures and synchronizes the stream, captures it to disk, and can push it out to a remote streaming server. more

Video over cell phones is one of the hottest topics facing video producers, but most organizations lack the technical expertise and/or capital to make it happen. If you’d like to dip your toe in the water, check out the Mobile Video Managed Service from Vidiator.

Operationally, you upload your videos to the Vidiator site, who transcodes them and sends you a link to post on your web site. Or, you can create your own mobile-phone accessible web-site using Vidiator tools. In the booth, the company captured video from a web-cam, uploaded it to their service, and then transmitted it to a cell phone in the booth where it played with minimal latency and good quality.

I saw the Vidiator folks in a 10×10 booth in the Central Hall, which initially raised my eyebrows, but learned that they’re owned by Hutchison Whampoa Ltd, a $40 billion Hong Kong company. Hutchison developed the cellular streaming technology for in-house use, and is now taking it out of house via Vidiator. Both the service and technology felt mature and well thought out, and at $99/month for 10,000 minutes of cellular viewing, it’s certainly affordable.

HP announced it is the first company to release Microsoft’s Media Center Extender capability to an Internet-connected TV.

With the capability, people using HP MediaSmart TVs not only get access to rich content from the Internet but they also can enjoy their own digital treasures from their home PCs on a big screen high-definition TV (HDTV). Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

My first post-lunch meeting yesterday was with NewTek, where I saw a demonstration of TriCaster, the company’s portable live production system. I was in that post-lunch lull, but the capabilities of the system (and booming, piercing voice of the demonstrator) perked me right up.

Let me say up front that I’m continually amazed at the functionality NewTek builds into their little boxes. Seems like I’m not the only one, as the NewTek rep rolled off customer after customer, like NBA, Fox Sports and the NHL.

Here are some rough impressions. The new slow motion control is a real winner for sports and other live shows. It’s a separate piece of hardware that costs $995, and during live playback, you mark the in point then the outpoint, then send the clip to the DVR where you can play it back at will at any speed. Very nice. more

Adobe Systems Incorporated announced that it plans to lead an initiative to define an industry-wide open file format for digital cinema files to streamline workflows and help ensure easy archiving and exchange. Adobe intends to leverage its successful Digital Negative Specification (DNG) file format as a foundation, and Adobe plans to work with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers, including Panavision, Silicon Imaging, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI—along with software vendors, including Iridas and The Foundry, and codec provider CineForm—to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented file format that it plans to call CinemaDNG. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

In the vein of small things mattering: Marshall Electronics is at the show with their new SunBright LCD Monitors, designed to be viewable no matter what the sun is doing (or not doing). The breakthrough is about a proprietary opitcal surface that passes backlight but minimizes surface reflection. Here at the show you can see two camera-mount configurations (features are all the usual stuff). The booth display does a decent job of mocking up sunlight conditions.

As annoying logistical challenges go, this was a big one says Marshall engineer Greg Foster. Addressing it is part of Marshall’s effort to not only keep working on resolution improvements for their products but to tap into some of the longstanding issues of efficiency and workflow.

In this same vein, they are debuting the industry’s first full lineup of LCD panels with in-monitor display. (They’re branding it IMD). Foster says they were designed to integrate easily with existing Tally systems and controllers–check out the wall display on the booth (they also work as standalone displays with HDSDI loop-through).

At the Adobe dinner last night Mark Randall described NAB 2008 as the “year of plumbing.” Without a lot of blockbuster product releases (especially for the desktop), there’s a lot of truth to that statement. So what we’re seeing is a lot of infrastructure gear that’s not incredibly “sexy” (sorry, I can’t believe I just typed that) but is, or will be, incredibly useful.

Take 3Gbps HD-SDI transmission technology. This year (and somewhat last year) we’ve seen a wealth of products that can input and output 3Gbps worth of data i.e. video — it’s all over the show floor. Why is this number significant? Traditional single-link HD-SDI works out to 1.5Gbps. Dual-link HD-SDI and the newer 3G-SDI (which operates over a single coaxial cable) can handle 3Gbps. Standard HD-SDI can handle the transmission of 1080i video; dual-link HD-SDI and 3G-SDI open up the possibility of transmitting 1080p, 4:4:4 RGB, 2K “film” data, and stereoscopic 1080i. more

National TeleConsultants (NTC), the world leader in strategic technology consulting and engineering design services for the broadcast and media industry, presented an exclusive “State of the Industry 2008″ briefing at the 2008 NAB Conference on a series of critical topics facing today’s media professionals. Presented by NTC Chief Technology Officer Eric Pohl, and NTC Consultants Michael Sterling and Joey Faust, the “State of the Industry 2008″ briefing examined seven specific areas, including: the transition to digital cinema, the challenge of metadata collection and usage, the importance of social networking, professional open source media software, the rise of mobile television in the United States, the explosion of digital content distribution formats and methods, and recent advances in high-resolution consumer display technologies. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room