Archive of the Workflow Category

At NAB, Focus Enhancements was showing its FS5 direct-to-edit recorder as well as an archiving solution for solid-state shops.

Prior to day one at NAB, there was a ton of preshow buzz about AJA’s new Ki Pro unit, a unique solid-state hard disk capture device that also serves as an I/O box for camcorders of all flavors and formats. The online community was also buzzing about the Io Express, the younger sibling of the Io HD ProRes device that AJA came out with some time ago. So we got the low-down on both products at the AJA booth, check it out.

Ensemble Designs is here with 28 products, celebrating 20 years and good health, says Ensemble’s founder David Wood, (who is also a DSLR fan like so many on the show floor). For NAB, Ensemble brought five new 3G products in their BrightEye line and nine 3G products in their Avenue line, from an electrical to optical convertor to automatic gain control for audio and sync changeover. Avenue also gets new conversion, protection and TSG tools and two new ASI/310M convertors. more

Press Release

At the 2009 NAB Show, Echolab took the wraps off Atem, a paradigm-busting 1 M/E 3Gbps 1080p/60 production switcher that sets new standards of flexibility, functionality, and utility for government, educational, corporate, live entertainment, and house of worship customers. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2009 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

Grab Networks’ (nee Anystream) Agility 2G (for second generation) can pretty much grab video from anywhere, process and encode it, and deliver it in the necessary format for an expansive range of broadcast and streaming formats. I looked at Agility last year; since then, it’s been completely redesigned from a standalone application to a web based interface that’s obviously more accessible to multiple users from different stations on the network. For example, here’s a screen of the new web-based encoding preview screen.

I spent 30 minutes late in the day looking at a demo of the new system, and it was impressive. I’ll share my major takeaways.

First, the system is very flexible regarding licensing. If you buy a five license system, you can float the licenses over ten or twenty systems as they become available on the LAN, you can just run five instances simultaneously. This makes the system very easy to deploy. more

Next time you watch a newsfeed of a reporter out at a really remote location (like really remote), you may notice that the picture quality is better than you previously remembered. If so, it may be because Inmarsat just boosted the bitrate of their BGAN (broadband global area nework) X-Stream service from 256 kbps to a minimum of 384 kbps, with the potential for streaming up to 450 kbps. At these rates, according to Frank August, Inmarsat’s Director of Business Development for the Americas, quality is sufficient for wide shots and real action, not just jerky postage stamp talking heads.

Don’t know much about satellite delivery? I didn’t either; here’s the Cliff Notes version I got from August. Inmarsat is the world’s leading provider of global mobile satellite communications. When I say mobile, I mean a dish that’s smaller than a 17” notebook. Obviously, if you can get a satellite truck involved, with a huge dish, you get much higher speeds, but such dishes tend to be tough to check on a plane, or for roving reporters to carry. more

Press Release

Calibrated Software, an innovator of applications and plug-ins for video, asset management and mobile platforms, announced an enhanced family of cross-platform tools to streamline and speed the process of viewing and using high-definition camera and other video files within popular post-production systems and editing packages. The products are being demonstrated at NAB booths #C5108 (Ikegami) and #SL8307 (Square Box Systems). Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2009 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

While we’ve handed the buzzword crown this year to “3D,” let’s not forget about old friend “workflow.” Solutions and improvements abounded this year at NAB, and the Vision Research people are no exception. They are addressing the issue as it relates to their popular high-speed digital camera technology.

The guys at Vision Research showed me their new 10gigabit Ethernet Phantom CineStation—a docking station for its hot swappable CineMag memory magazines designed to speed up the transfer of data from the magazine to the people who need it—both the transfer and the download of the data. When you consider, according to Vision Research, that the Phantom HD system gobbles up about four megabytes of memory for each frame shot, just a few seconds of material can suck up internal camera memory quickly. more

Press Release

The functionality of Broadcast Pix is going portable. Magic Wave Productions, a systems integrator and event video production company based in Pleasanton, Calif., has created the Magic Wave Magma, a portable unit powered by the Broadcast Pix Slate integrated production system. Magma is being demonstrated at the Broadcast Pix booth during the 2009 NAB Show at the Las Vegas Convention Center (Booth SU2617). Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2009 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

Kulabyte caught my attention as a brash startup several years ago, with an oversized NAB booth and bold claims of the fastest VP6 encoder available. Though I frequently asked for review copies, the software never materialized, and the company seemingly went into stealth mode.

I just met with the president, Peter Forman, in a considerably smaller booth on the show floor. Over the last two years, Kulabyte focused on the live event streaming market, with some impressive results, including contracts with the US government for gear deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition, Kulabyte was MySpace’s technology partner for the 2008 “Operation MySpace” live concert webcast from Kuwait, which was streamed at 720p at less than 1.5 megabits per second. more