NAB in a day - Post Script - producst on display at post production industry trade show

Post, May, 2003 by Marc Loftus

NAB represents the biggest show of the year for both Post and the post production industry. There are tons of new products on display and getting to see all of them is a challenge. While there were many interesting announcements at this year's show, two of the cooler ones, I thought, came from Sony and Panasonic.

Panasonic is working on blue laser technology that will provide 50GB of storage on a duallayer disc. It also showed a prototype of a solid state memory-based camcorder that will record directly to SD memory cards. A IGB SD card will appear this year, and a 4GB card could exist by 2005, making SD-based acquisition and editing products more practical.

Sony is working on a blue laser-based product line that will initially include two camcorders and three decks. The company can store 23GB on a single-layer optical disc, which would have an archive life of 30 years and I million plays. The discs will cost under $30 and the new cameras will support both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, as well as the IMX and DVCAM formats.

Terry Dale of Toronto's DKP Effects spent just one day at the show, but saw enough to generate his own opinions. "It's nice to see that software venders are addressing issues of production pipeline as opposed to, 'Here's a tool. Look at what it does. Buy it!"'

DKP has four Jaleo NLEs and a Discreet Flame. The studio is always looking at new tools, especially for projects coming down the road. Here are some of Dale's NAB observations:

Apple Final Cut Pro 4: "Neat stuff, especially with the AJA 10 box, which lets you bring uncompressed video in and out."

Apple Shake: "They've done some good things, but pissed off some people because they've migrated to their own platform. All of our current Shake systems are on Windows platforms!"

Avid: "I was a little concerned with the price of the high-end Avid boxes compared to the performance coming out of them."

Adobe's Encore DVD:"A DVD authoring program with integration with After Effects and Photoshop? That's huge!"

Jaleo: "The new version, Mistika, will do two streams of HD realtime color correction. [It also] allows for background Linux cluster rendering."

Dale admits that he was "pretty rushed" at the show and that there were "a couple of places" that he wished he could have spent more time.

Me too!