Archive of the New Products Category

Thursday is NAB‘s rump day. The show floor closes early, at 4 p.m. instead of the usual 6 p.m. And if you stay to the bitter end as I do inevitably each year, you get to hear a voice over the P.A. announcing NAB‘s end, a cheer going up from tired booth workers, then a Scottish bagpiper playing a live version of “Amazing Grace.” I‘ve never actually seen the bagpiper, just heard him.

What‘s truly special about Thursday is that most of the madding crowd has gone. Thursday is viewed as a slow day, and it‘s the day that folks abandon their own booths to go inspect firsthand what else NAB has to offer on display, including their competitor‘s products. Quite a few industry VIPs, for instance, were drawn as if by magnetic force to RED‘s booth today. As I idled my motor near the Phantom High-Speed Digital Cameras in Abel Cine Tech‘s booth a short while this afternoon, several employees of JVC and Panasonic dropped by. more

It was a busy NAB. Of course any show is busy, with hundreds of vendors and thousands of products to consider. But even compared to the usual convention (this is my 20th NAB. Yikes!), NAB 2007 had significant new products to consider, with cameras, storage arrays, and NLE gear just three examples of product areas with significant churn. One prime motivator behind all the new technology seems to be the commoditization of formally high-end–read expensive to manipulate–technology. Now, innovative entrepreneurs living just about anywhere have a chance to introduce potentially significant products, right up there with the established players. With so much to cover, I can just offer a final quick look- in no particular order- of some of the more intriguing products I came across, both new and significantly upgraded. (Be sure to check out NAB wrap-ups in upcoming issues of Digital Content Producer and Millimeter): more

Today‘s NAB blog is about individuals. Two very different sorts of individual who have impacted our industry. One is a phoenix, beginning his ascent into the sky. The other recently slipped over the horizon.

The first individual is Jim Jannard. No, this is not him. This is Stuart English, former VP of Marketing for Panasonic, who now works for Jim‘s company, RED Digital Cinema. Stuart is standing behind a RED ONE digital camera in the RED tent at NAB. He‘s obviously enjoying wearing his RED shirt. more

Digital asset management (DAM) is an amorphous concept to many in the production and post communities. Having heard that it‘s the coming thing, and further, that implementing it could make your business more efficient, saving money in an increasingly competitive environment, well, no matter: jumping in to such high concept stuff that isn‘t a part of your day-to-day world can still be scary. Where do you start?
That’s why latest version of Xytech System‘s Xytech Enterprise software might be just the thing to make you take the plunge–rather than starting out with all sorts of abstract database concepts, the company backs into DAM, building out from its familiar schedule sheet structure to, in Version 10, transition to a file-based system that integrates digital assets (media files) and physical ones (staff, rooms, hardware). more

Each NAB, much of the fun in wandering the aisles comes from stumbling upon new products from small companies you might not have heard from, or even companies that have a name in their industry but don‘t do much advertising.
Pennsauken, New Jersey-based Disc Makers, a DVD/CD duplicator and manufacturer, is one of the latter. Coming upon the unassuming Medley Automated DVD/CD Publisher isn‘t all that auspicious at first–its beige-body is a bulky piece of plastic molding ala an earlier generation dot matrix printer. more

As many shooters who have made the jump from DV to HDV are finding out, accurate focus is critical when you’re shooting video at higher resolutions. That of course requires a good monitor, and most standard camera viewfinders are just not up to snuff.

Good monitoring can be expensive, but Ikan is one company that tends to take an aggressive approach to pricing. Its big new product intro at NAB 2007 is the V8000HD, an 8in. LCD for on-camera monitoring. The V8000HD ($795) has a native resolution of 800×480 and has composite, S-Video inputs as well as HD component with pass-through. The monitor uses an L-Series Sony battery, and there’s an on-board charger so you can plug it in and power and charge the unit at the same time. more

A brief visit to Panasonic‘s booth today reminded me how far we‘ve come when it comes to codecs. Their AVC-Intra, based on H.264 a/k/a MPEG-4, is twice as efficient as DVCPRO HD. In a split-screen demo on the show floor, video compressed using AVC-Intra at 50 Mbps (1440/4:2:0/10 bits) matched identical video compressed using DVCPRO HD at 100 Mbps. Differences in resolution or artifacting were undetectable. In another split-screen, AVC-Intra at 100 Mbps (1920/4:2:2/10 bits) matched D-5 HD (north of 230 Mbps). Same impressive result.

Where this gets particularly interesting is in the case of Panasonic‘s new P2 flagship, the AJ-HPX3000. The shape and size of the chic black 3000 affirm its lineage to 3-CCD ENG camcorders, yet resemblance ends there. With 2.2 million-pixel CCDs (1920 x 1080) and 14-bit, 4:2:2 signal processing, the 3000 is a spirited thoroughbred more in league with Sony’s F900 than a Varicam. However at $48K list, it‘s half the cost of an F900. more

JVC Professional Products Company is introducing a high-efficiency Full HD microwave equipped camera system that, for the first time, brings affordable HD microwave capabilities to the ENG/EFP market. The ProHD Libre system provides native 60P HD capture, recording and transmission through a compact, onboard camera-back transmitter developed for JVC by Broadcast Microwave Services (BMS). A fully equipped system, complete with camera, lens, microwave transmitter and receiver can be configured for under $30,000. Previous systems with this capability began at more than $100,000. Read on at The Briefing Room: 2007 NAB Newslink

Waiting until your files are finished compressing beats watching paint dry, though just barely.
Kulabyte is offering a solution, and you won‘t have to buy into specialized hardware that ends up going out-of-date before you‘ve paid it off. The software-only product takes advantage of today‘s multicore processors to deliver a claimed more than 12 times improvement in compression speed over industry-standard codec times for the two initially offered codecs: H.264 and Flash. more

For 14 years I‘ve watched manufacturers sweat NAB product debuts. This year we‘re doing it too. www.reel-exchange.com. I hope you‘ll check it out and let us know what you think. You‘re seeing phase 1 based on our strong new media backend and database capabilities. With your input we‘ll continue to refine the user experience, features and service. We think we made a good start, and want to continue to build out in ways that you‘ll find useful in promoting yourselves, your work, and your collaborators as well as finding new collaborators and clients.