| Summary of last week's show, with daily reports compiled |
| Page 1 of 7 |
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| Winner for best-looking "booth" -- definitely Discreet! |
There was something here for almost everybody who wants to be involved with video production. For the high-end players, the big talk was, as it was last year, workflow. If you have a production house full of high-end gear like Avid Symphony editing systems or Discreet Flame compositors, you want to be able to exchange files between these behemoths. And AAF (Advanced Authoring Format) looks like the file exchange format to bet on at this point. Finally, the promise of being able to exchange metadata like ins and outs, dissolve and transition information, and even vector-based text overlays is much closer to reality than ever. But then lots of users have their doubts about any standard talking hold, and some called out for a group like the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) to oversee standards. Even though a clear victor in the file exchange war looks like it may be coming to the fore, the idea of cooperative standards in a hotly competitive market like today's video technology battlefield sounds to me like an impossibility. We can only hope.
Another interesting development that may be a foreshadowing of the future was Panasonic's announcement of the first consumer-level 24p camcorder. But there was one bone-headed omission in the new $3000 unit -- it captures video in a 4:3 aspect ratio. What was Panasonic thinking? Obviously a 24p camcorder would be used by budding digital filmmakers, who would want to shoot in at least 16:9 wide-screen format, right? Am I missing something here? But anyway, it was a step in the right direction, which Sony or Canon will probably pick up on and run like there's no tomorrow. I expect to see Sony and/or Canon soon release a 24p consumer-cam that gets it just right, and maybe even undercuts Panasonic by a few bucks. I talked with super-wise guys on the show floor, including Ajay Chopra, Chairman of Pinnacle, who sees a new world emerging of 24p distribution, where foot-dragging TV stations could be left snoozing on their hoards of cash while blue-laser HD-DVDs burn edited 24p copies of all the video these young turks can shoot with their new sub-$2K, 24p, 16:9 camcorders. It could happen!
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Then there were the accelerators. All I can say is, wow. Media 100 announced its 844/X a few weeks ago, and at NAB vowed to ship it by the end of April, while DPS showed the most promising hardware/software combination of all, its Velocity Q. With these new cards, we saw four, five, six, or even eight layers of video and graphics layered and played back in real time, making compositing much more user-friendly. The big story with DPS was that its Velocity Q is so comparatively low-priced, at around $20K for a turnkey system. That beats 844/X by a country mile, and adds lots of effects that 844/X can't match. But none of these systems are shipping as I type this, so we can't declare anything superior to anything else yet.
Rumbling underneath all this are software developers who cling to Moore's Law like a tick to a dog's leg. Wherever that dog goes, so goes that tick. And Moore's Law says computer power will continue to bulk up while the biggest computer price war in history rages on. This is going to be a big victory for us, the users. Pretty soon, the reality will be that if you can't do it in real time, it may be too complicated for eyes and brains to comprehend.
Then there was Apple. Its Final Cut Pro demos were always packed with artsy humans every time I walked by their booth, and vendors and users everywhere in Las Vegas were declaring the Cupertino company as the one with the target on its back. New and cheap ways to accelerate Final Cut Pro (Voodoo, AJA cards), along with Apple's own plug-in to make it more friendly to the film community, made FCP even harder to catch. And then there's that coolness factor, which is impossible to beat right away, so competing companies will just have to wait for that to fade -- if it ever will. Many wags say Apple has an unfair advantage, where they control the hardware platform, and thus can make the software run perfectly on that one platform. Most importantly, they will do whatever it takes to sell that hardware, even if that means giving away the software. But I think one thing's for sure -- the software and hardware are both of very high quality, and that is something that lasts longer than any "coolness" factor ever will. And under the surface, more rumors persist of much more powerful Macs on the way, while OS X shows its stuff, too, going stronger than ever. Apple is going to be hard to beat.
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| Click for enlargement -- Here's Discreet's application that's now under development, code-named Strata. |
Stepping back a bit, I noticed how different this NAB was from the one held two years ago. In those days, which now seem like so long ago, everybody was hitching a ride on the streaming, Internet bandwagon, and this year, there wasn't a peep about that. This time around, I heard talk of DVD-this and DVD-that. DVD is the new killer distribution app. DVD is in a huge percentage of TV households, and its quality is near-perfect, for standard-definition video, that is. And this is just a rehearsal for the HDTV DVD-Rs that will probably be showing at next year's NAB. Nobody was assuming there will be huge pipes of voluminous bandwidth any more, at least not in the near future. But lots of people are looking under their noses, at DVDs, and thinking maybe this'll hold 'em for a while. I agree.
Underneath all this, though, was FCC Chairman Powell's urging, just a few days before the convention started, that TV stations adopt HDTV soon. That might have fallen on deaf ears. I just didn't see the urgency of years past for HDTV. Maybe the station fat-cats saw how easy it was to shirk the FCC order for HDTV. While they're relaxing, heaving that big sigh of relief, there might be some other path that viewers take toward HD that slips right underneath them. Could happen.
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