NAB 2008 Thoughts from the floor

I just flew back from NAB 2008 in Las Vegas and boy do my arms, I mean feet, hurt. I estimate we logged 5 to 6 miles and were on our feet for upwards to 10 hours each day.

This was the first year for me where Avid AND Apple were absent from the show floor. Both companies were very much present though, taking up meeting rooms near by at the Renaissance Hotel and throughout the Vegas hotels. In a weird way, the techno-spiritual center of the South Hall had been hollowed out and replaced by Thompson and Matrox… not exactly the intriguing rivalry of years past.

Red Camera alone stood out as the booth with crazy wild products that just might work and change the industry. I just hope they make their camera mounted remote controlled helicopter into an available product I got to what Jim Jinnard, the owner of Oakley and Red, pitch his new product line. Clearly he knows his stuff and is having a great time disrupting the industry! As he mentioned, a lot has changed in 2 years… from people thinking Red was a scam to now having over 2000 4K cameras in the field.

A big take away was that digital workflow really is here now. The last few years everyone was talking about “convergence”. Now everyone is actually doing it and fortunately not using that word anymore. Adobe’s broadcasting technology preview was really cool, starting from interactive video authoring to realtime mobile conversion to Flash streaming with advanced bandwidth management. Its OnLocation app lets a person capture, organize and tag video in the field with a neat trick - the ability skip around video by clicking on speech-to-text translations of the interview. Unfortunately, those kinds of demos are usually smoke & mirrors - the most advanced recognition software out there (Dragon’s Naturally Speaking) requires ideal environments, closely placed microphones and significant training in order to achieve usable results. Capturing an interview of your friend outside will still result in a transcript worthy of a Dilbert comic strip.

Apple and AICE got together again this year to wine and dine a handful of editing companies at the Hard Rock Foundation Room at the Mandalay Bay. We were able to talk with the Apple Pro Apps team and really drill down into Final Cut Server capabilities, which to me is the most intriguing development of the last few months (more posts to come on that!). The FCS guys definitely seemed a lot more relaxed than last year, now that the product is shipping.

So what was new and futuristic? 3D stereoscopic video seems like next year’s new thing available almost today. I saw someone walking around with stereoscopic handheld video camera shooting the NAB floor, which looked like a pair of binoculars with a digital screen sticking out. And yes, the playback systems require those awesome polarized 3D glasses. Isilon had a great 3D demo room with clips from Nascar and U2’s concert streaming out in two uncompressed HD stereo streams running through a single 10 GB/s accelerator box and a bunch of storage. For me, I really did feel closer to the action but I started to get a slight headache just after a few minutes

Random thought - this was the first trip that my wireless card really worked well, connecting at 3G. My only complaint is that it takes almost a minute from sliding in the card to being connected on the web.

We are a week out from NAB 2008, the first one without either Apple OR Avid battling it out with mega booths in the South Hall. Should be interesting, for sure. Nick and I will be there from Monday morning to Wednesday evening (actually Nick will be out earlier), so if any of you are reading this, give us a shout.

It’s great to see that Apple is finally shipping Final Cut Server, even if it was a tad late. FCS will finally give creative production facilities a cost effective way of ingesting, managing, tagging and searching their high resolution assets (video, images, audio, etc) - think of it as iPhoto + iTunes for professionals. Add a little transcoding and delivery services and you have quite a valuable organizational tool. We’ve been looking for a realistic smart vault solution like this for years, so it’s great to finally see what they have to offer. Version 1.0 will come with a few bumps, like always, but over time it will be the new core foundation for any company serious about storing media (for under $4,000).

Rambling on… I’m now several weeks into the Wiki experience and still loving it. It’s like a well organized sticky note system, where I can ask a bunch of questions and provide an ever growing resource of answers that are all interlinked. This feels totally different than storing thoughts in standard documents and folder trees, because communicating the “flow” of information is almost strangled by the limited length of folder names. I’ve also found that hooking up Wiredrive presentations to blog entries makes the best of both worlds - a great way to manage text entries and a great way to handle images and videos, either on their own or as a group.

I’ve finally added Facebook to my list of technologies that I love, for one simple reason. People have photographs of themselves AND of their friends. What an amazing part of the business networking process… something that LinkedIn still hasn’t figured out yet. Seeing what people are into feels so much more natural than lists of references and job experiences.

So, yeah… I’m joining in on what all the cool kids have known for years a touch late. But better late than never.

Regards,

Bill