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NAB Day One

The mood at NAB is definitely one if excitement this year.

Previous years, with the economic downturn and uncertainty about the future of broadcasting, attendance seemed to be down and the mood somber.

For me as well was the utter disappointment with the retooled Final Cut Pro X, which while some people saw it as the next great thing in editing, I was left cold and miffed at Apple’s total abandonment of professional editors. I still use FCP7 because for the projects we are currently working on it works well and we often are revising shows we have done previously on Final Cut. But I am looking to the future and to me that means 3 other companies that begin with A: Avid, Adobe and Autodesk.

The Adobe booth was particularly popular showing the new components of CS6, with great upgrades to After Effects and Premiere. Finally Premiere is something that I could use to cut the kind of projects I do. I have used Premiere 5.5 to edit a couple web shows and it was pretty good but the new improvements to in Premiere 6 make it a solid editor- it handles many formats natively, including R3D, P2 and ever Arri Alexa RAW. YAY no transcoding. And on my system with the NVIDIA Quadro 2000 and Tesla GPU, it plays back multiple streams with no rendering. One of he neat new features of Premiere is Continuous Playback which allows you to tweak and effect while the video continues to play. Adobe also recently acquired a color correcting solution they are calling Speed Grade which used to be IRIDAS, and the integration is impressive. Adobe is really putting a lot of effort into their products as I think they see a prime opportunity to grab a lot of the people like me who are moving away from Final Cut.

I spent most of Monday at Adobe and also checked out Autodesk, as they were showing the new Smoke 2013 which loks a lot more user friendly and accessible while retaining it powerful compositing ability. And lowering the price to under $4000 is pretty incredible too.

It was nice to meet up with Bryan Miller from Sensory Overload Music. He does really great music for s and is just a nice guy as well.

There was certainly a lot of people in the South Hall checking out the booths of Blackmagic, which unveiled their new Cinema Camera which could be a shot over the bow of Canon and Nikon and could really shake up the trend towards using DSLR cameras for video. It’s got a superwide dynamic range, a large high-resolution 2.5K sensor, and full compatibility with Canon EF and Zeiss ZF mount lenses. The 5-inch touch screen on back can be used for direct metadata entry as well as all settings such as frame rate, shutter angle, color temperature, dynamic range, and focus assist.

Blackmagic is another company that is really working hard to bring innovative products to the production industry. They also came out with some new boxes for using the new Thunderbolt technology.

After spending most of the day in the South Hall, I wandered through to the Central and North Halls but I had had enough and by 5:30 was ready to go get some food and rest up for another day of walking… Happened to see this as I was heading back to my hotel:

Coming up: Day 2, Meeting the nice folks from Dell and NVIDIA.