NAB2006: My picks from the show

Here are the products that stood out for me (not in any particular order) at NAB2006.

1. The Zylight Z50 is a tiny LED lighting instument that can instantly changes from 5600K to 3200K light with the push of a button and can be programmed to to produce any color you want and you can save you favorites with presets. The devices can be put together and controlled wirelessly. This is a very clever idea whose time has come. Based on technology licensed from Color Kinetics and built around a HD-led (High-Density light-emitting diode) module that packs over 230 high-power elements into a single square inch, making the Z50 the brightest portable LED light available.
2. The most excitement created this year was without a doubt the excitement around the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company booth. Red is a digital cinema camera in development that promises to break the price/performance barrier for high end digital imaging. If they meet their agressive engineering targets, next year we’ll see working cameras on the show floor and what I expect will be some amazing demo footage.
3. One of the most useful tools I saw in Panasonic’s booth for P2 users working with a Macintosh was HDLog from Imagine Products. It can be used for viewing P2 video clips (stored in the MXF format) on the Mac and it will help streamline your P2 workflow from acquisition to editing. HD Log automatically creates log files from the P2 media that include thumbnails, metadata, and links to the video clips. You can use the application edit and add additional metadata, log and select clips, and convert the MXF clips to QuickTime files ready for editing. If you’re working with large amounts of media, the program can work with Imagine Product’s Mac Digital Clip Library, a library solution you can set up on an intranet or the web for IntraNet or Web to share of logs, thumbnails, and video clips.
4. Avid’s Interplay is a media production workflow and content management tool that provides centralized administration of creative, production, and business processes for postproduction and broadcast environments of all sizes. While this space has been fragmented with many vendors, a player like Avid putting a stake in the ground will change the playing field and could have a serious impact on how broadcasters and large postproduction facilities manage their creative workflows. There’s some confusion as to what the entry-level $16,000. system actually buys you, but we’ll find out as time goes by and Avid actually starts delivering solutions.
5. The KONA 3 is AJA’s new top-of-the-line 4-lane PCI Express video capture card for Apple’s Power Mac G5. It supports both SD and HD uncompressed capture and Dual Link 4:4:4:4 HD. It can play back uncompressed 10-bit and 8-bit digital video and 24-bit 48kHz digital audio. The card also supports hardware-based up-and-down-conversion to and from HD and has a live hardware keyer for compositing. There’s an optional rack-mountable 1U panel for the many connections the card supports.
6. Quietly hidden behind a laptop at the Apple booth, yet prominently displayed in the Matrox booth, was the MXO, an amazing little box that takes the DVI output from your Macintosh and converts it to broadcast-quality video. You can use it for frame accurate print to tape or to monitor HD or SD with a component or SDI display, an excellent idea that adds significant new capability to many Macintoshes that can play back compressed HD in real-time, yet don’t have the right PCI bus to support a Blackmagic or AJA video I/O card.
7. Grass Valley’s Infinity Digital Media Camcorder combines the best elements of camera design with IT recording and connectivity technologies. This 2/3″ camera has all of the bells and whistles you’d expect from a professional HD ENG camcorder and instead of using tape or a proprietary tapeless solution, it records to Compact Flash cards or Iomega REVPro disks (a professional version of Iomega’s inexpensive high-capacity REV disks commonly used to back-up personal computers. The camera will be competitively priced around $25,000.
8. Amongst the noisy demos, the shiny PowerMac G5s, and the new 17″ MacBook Pro, in the Apple booth one vendor was quietly showning something critically important as we generate more and more digital assets. Artbox Workgroup from Proximity is an asset management and workflow solution designed specifically for small broadcast and post production companies. The system helps you manage you media assets with a single media catalog that can be shared among multiple users. The system supports workflow management, search, and transcoding between a wide range of formats. They touted project level integration with Final Cut Pro. Now that the industry is almost done with the digital and high definition transitions, I think lots of attention will placed on asset management. For large organizations, there’s Artbox Enterprise that supports many additional features like access to the media catalog from within iNews or ENPS and sharing media beyond a single workgroup.
9. I had already seen this projector, but the images projected with Sony’s 10,000 lumen SRX-R110 4K (4096 x 2160 at 1.85:1) projector designed for large venues were stunning. Unlike a DLP projector, there was absolutely no perception of a grid or pixels, even while close to the screen. The projector offers great contrast (1800:1), plenty of detail in the shadows, clean highlights, and nice color. Is there a digital projector that can exceed the standards of 35mm projection? This comes close. These are the projectors Landmark has been putting into their theaters.
10. Sony’s PDW-F350 HD camcorder is an impressive contender that records onto XDCAM disks and comes in a very attractive price-point at $25,000 sans lens. Sony opted to go with three 1/2″ CCD imagers rather than 2/3″ chips. Users with existing 2/3″ glass can mount their lenses on this camera using the LO32BMT lens mount adapter. In addition to recording in 1080/59.94i, 50i, 29.97P, 25P, and 23.98P, the camera is capable of over- and under-cranking with frame rates ranging from 4 to 60 frames per second. This is the first time Sony has provided variable frame rates in a camera. XDCAM is a strong contender against Panasonic’s P2 cards.
11. Panasonic had many AG-HVX200 camcorders in the booth and although introduced last year, this camcorder was generating a lot of interest, this year they expanded their line of HD camcorders with the AJ-HDX900 2/3″ HD camcorder and the AJ-HPC2000 P2 HD Camcorder. The AJ-HDX900 is pretty much an HD upgrade to the popular AJ-SDX900. As we would expect, the AJ-HDX900 offers cine-like gamma with three film-like modes and shoots in 11 formats and, surprise, it records to tape, not P2 cards (I guess tape is still something customers want, for now). The AJ-HPC2000 is a workhorse HD P2 broadcast camera, and introduces the AVC-Intra (H.264 Compliant) as an alternative to DVCPRO HD in order to double the capacity of the P2 cards. I was disappointed to find out that neither the AJ-HDX900 nor the AJ-HPC2000 offers variable frame rates like the AG-HVX200 little brother or AJ-HDC27H big brother.
12. VFinity was demonstrating their elegant web-based solution for content management, production, and publishing that supports non-linear video editing and multimedia publishing workflows with an end-to-end digital solution that enables creative collaboration and media transcoding, digitizing, and easy reuse of any form of media. Since they have built the system from the ground up using web services and the latest open standards, they don’t carry legacy baggage like some of their established competitors. They showed me a cool demo: Searching for a Final Cut Pro project using their media asset search engine, picking it out from a set of Google-like search results, and then opening the project. Then they showed me the same thing on a different workstation connected to the network. VFinity works with any kind of media and is accessble via a web browser. Looks like an interesting solution for creative media professionals working in corporate, broadcast, and large post facility environments. I know several people involved with the company, so I may exhibit some bias.