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Now, here are the reports I filed while at the show -- if you've already seen them, you might want to re-read them all in one place:
The first stop of the traditional Sunday NAB press caravan was at the Sony annual dog-and-pony show, which opened with a tape of Jay Leno ribbing the mass-market appeal of HDTV to roars of laughter from the usually-jaded press corps. Looking ahead to the bright future of HDTV, Leno quipped, "This HDTV thing is going to be really big. In fact, by the year 3000, seventy-five people could have HDTV." But things got serious quickly when Tonight Show producer Gary Considine described NBC's pioneering experiences with HDTV (see photo at right). According to Considine, "We've been working in HDTV for three years -- we were the first to go HD -- and we're thrilled. The picture is stunning." He talked about the various changes the company made to accommodate the new format, including a complete set re-design.
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Next came the Grand Poobah of Sony, President and CEO Kunitake Ando, who announced a deal where NBC has agreed to buy almost all its HDTV gear from the Japanese giant, until 2009 or doomsday, whichever comes first. Big win for Sony. Then after proclaiming 2002 the Year of Cinematography (hey, aren't Presidents and Mayors the only ones who can issue proclamations?) Ando laid his big prediction on the crowd, intoning in his surprisingly good English, "And now, I'm going to make a bold statement. I'm anticipating that by [the] year 2005, more than half of all movies will be shot digitally." I know a few cinematographers who would heartily disagree with that, but hey, if you're selling these digital film cameras, might as well predict they'll be wildly successful.
Perhaps the biggest news announced by Sony at the meeting was of its agreement with Avid, Quantel and Cisco to support the new MXF format, an interoperability protocol that lets cameras, editors, and any other device talk to any other over extremely high speed networks, either wireless or fiber-based. It's like that idea where refrigerators are hooked up to the Internet, and then it could tell you when you need to get another quart of milk. But with a pro camcorder, for example, it could tell an edit suite what footage it has and begin downloading EDL info before the production van even got back to the TV station. This could be really neat! Sony is certainly doing its part, with Chairman Ando announcing that from now on, every Sony product will be assigned its own IP address. No kidding. But nobody was really sure where or when these high speed wireless networks would appear. I thought wireless networks were the turkey investment of 2001...? Well, they'll work out those pesky details later -- let's talk about the "blue sky" possibilities, because, hey, after all, it's NAB!
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| Discreet General Manager Paul Lypaczewski goes underground for an NAB press conference |
The other half of this "holistic" environment, called "mezzo," will move the files around, and it's also loaded for bear. Discreet claims the thing will be able to move three streams of HDTV to multiple applications, or, get this, 15 streams of real time uncompressed standard definition video. And, while it's doing this, it's going to give you crash recovery, backing up your every move as you go along so that you won't lose any data, no matter what happens. I found this idea to be intriguing: Easy-to-use 3D (never seen that before, really), timeline editing, fast response, software-based. Wow. If they can pull this off by next year, they may just be competing with no one but themselves. I couldn't get them to tell me about pricing -- let's just hope they don't want to charge us $100,000 for it.
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| The Hard Rock Hotel is one cool place, where even the chandeliers are musical |
One big item also stuck out in my mind -- Avid, reacting to extreme price pressure from nearly all its competitors, is now selling a slightly stripped-down version of DS HD for $85 grand. That's quite a price cut, and places that product a bit closer to its competition, price-wise. I would expect further price cuts in the future from the towering Tewksbury edit-giant. But overall, the company presented an impressive parade of testimonials from its legion of top-flight users, who amount to, well, just about everybody in this industry, or so it seemed. Almost every major motion picture is edited on Avid, every news organization is touched somehow by Avid, and so I guess Avid is the undisputed big dog. But there are lots of yippy little Chihuahuas nipping at its heels, so this should be fun to watch in the next year or two.
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