Archive of the Hardware Category

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

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

When a company with a product line as big and deep as Autodesk makes its NAB presentation, you’ll forgive them for thinking like an auto company and describing the updated apps as their 2009 product lineup.

Trevor Boyer has already posted notes about Autodesk’s Sunday press conference. While each of the major products announced have plenty of notable and usable improvements, I’ll vote for lower price points and ability to work with compressed media as the most significant moves that herald future trends. Smoke 2009’s $64,000 tab for a turnkey hardware/software finishing machine–storage included–is a great breakthrough. For the first time, (fiscal) hope is offered to those many mid-level shops which blanch when faced with six-figure offerings from Autodesk, Quantel, et.al. (At present, this was described as an introductory price available through July 21, 2008. It’s a little unclear what happens after that; maybe if enough new buyers are attracted, the price will hold.) more

Sonnet Technologies announced a price reduction for the company’s award-winning Fusion line of high-performance SATA storage solutions for professional content creation and editing. Price reductions of up to $1,200 give users in the broadcast and post-production industries the opportunity to invest in the speed and capacity they require without compromising quality or performance. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

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

There was something of a Yogi Berra moment at the Hard Rock Cafe on Sunday when Avid’s new executive VP and then the new CEO took the stage to pledge that this time we’re going to get it right.

Oh no, I thought, not another set of promises about working well with others and thinking outside the box. Well, we got those promises again. And yes there were some snickers around the floor of Hard Rock’s music venue (Avid’s traditional space over their years at NAB) at inappropriate times from the hundreds in the audience of users along with a smattering of press.

After all, neither CEO Gary Greenfield nor Kirk Arnold, executive vp and gm of Avid Video, have any video industry experience. (Give Avid’s board credit though–both of these very recent hires have solid reps for turning around high tech companies.) more

Storage is a consistent problem for video producers, and I just learned about a new, high performance, relatively low cost solution. Plus saw the Red camera in action, got a refresher course on RAID numerology and met with filmmaker Thor Wixom in the same meeting.

First the storage technology, which is called xSATA, and available on a product from AMCC called 3ware Sidecar, which includes a PCI Express card and enclosure that can house up to four disks drives (around $595). Configure the unit with four, 1TB drives, and you can get up to 4T of storage for about $2,000, which isn’t that much more on a per gigabyte basis than a simple eSATA system.

Where eSATA uses one connection to service all drives in an external enclosure, xSATA devotes one connection to each drive. AMCC claims that this increases throughput from an actual bandwidth of about 40 MB/second for eSATA to about 350MB for xSATA. more

Broadcast Pix is growing - financially, yes, but also physically. The manufacturers of all-in-one video production systems recently moved into new, bigger office space in Billerica, Mass.

That follows the company’s growing presence in church control rooms, universities, corporate video departments, as well as traditional over-the-air stations. When I visited the Broadcast Pix booth on Monday, company president Ken Swanton had just met with reps from a major sports broadcaster (can’t say who, of course) who have decided to buy several systems. Swanton says that his integrated production systems have been so popular because his competitors in the space can’t match the low latency of the Broadcast Pix systems’ hardware switching, crucial for live broadcast and even IMAG situations. more

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