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.

NAB Observations
I got back from the annual pilgrimage to NAB and wanted to throw out some observations and see what other people thought. For me, it was the shortest trip yet, flying in Monday morning and leaving 24 hours later! Still, I came in looking for very specific new technologies and came away very pleased.

Apple vs Avid

This is definitely Apple’s year @ NAB with the announcements of Final Cut Studio 2, Final Cut Server and Color. Last year, Avid had the bigger buzz while Apple was focusing on the important but difficult transition to Intel Chips. I did miss seeing Apple and Avid squaring off right next to each other, but Apple definitely needed a larger booth and made a good decision to move into the center of the South Hall. Monday morning’s crowd at Apple’s main presentation screen was the biggest I’ve ever seen - seating for hundreds with walls of people standing in the back.

As far as buzz is concerned, people seemed the most impressed with Color, the bundled color correction software that is now part of FCS 2. This is as disruptive as Final Cut and DVD Studio Pro - bringing down the cost of color correction by tens of thousands of dollars. Although Color does not impact us directly, it will deepen the Final Cut ecosystem dramatically. The rumors on the floor were that there were 50,000 Avid installations in the market place and over 800,000 registered copies of Final Cut (and many more pirated ones!) Apparently, the Final Cut user base increased by 300,000 since last year alone!

The big deal for us was the announcement of Final Cut Server, which is server software that provides digital asset management users of any Final Cut Studio application. As Apple says, “Final Cut Server takes the headache out of managing large collections of media files, then extends to tracking job status, managing reviews and approvals, and automating complex sequences of tasks.” This is Apple’s answer to Avid’s Interplay system - but at literally 1/100 the cost! Final Cut Server will help the Vault immediately - it will be easier to find, manage, and export video than ever before. Instead of having multiple resolutions of a video file (i.e DV source, Quickime version, MPEG1 vesion, etc), FCS introduces the idea of a single “Clip” that represents them all. We think that FCS will streamline our client’s high res video files the way iTunes improved on the CD collection. What we are really excited about is the ability to ultimately integrate Wiredrive with FCS, making a complete digital workflow that reaches all the way out to client presentations! Final Cut Server should be out by the end of summer.

Online Digital Video / Compression

As Apple keeps marching forward with great digital production technology, Adobe and Microsoft are stepping up their commitments to the world of online video consumption. Microsoft seems to have woken up to the fact that Apple’s set the standard for online music and Adobe has suddenly taken over user generated content with Flash video (Youtube, Google Video, Revver, etc). Microsoft’s Silverlight (http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/) plugin looks like a direct competitor to Flash, combining website design elements with video playback. It will probably take several years for Silverlight to become a mainstream plugin but Microsoft is really good at taking the long view of development. Considering it will be preinstalled on millions of computers over the next year, they may have something here… Or maybe they will just be an online Zune, who knows.

Adobe’s presentation of Media Player was a bit spotty - i.e. long canned buildup with technical difficulties. That being said, it’s a good branding move as Adobe would prefer people to talk about Adobe instead of Flash. Adobe is moving into the desktop web application realm here and trying to compete with iTunes as a localized viewing experience. The Media Player is a skinnable Flash application that will allow people to build their own “Channels” of video content to come down to your computer. It uses RSS and even offers DRM capabilities, so content providers can charge for and protect their content delivery.

Apple’s obviously not sitting idle in this space, having delivered a new DRM-less audio codec (changing the music industry once again) and AppleTV that brings a new video consumer experience to the marketplace. Apple’s Compressor 3 application provides some new filters and workflow on top of pretty much the same compression engine (i.e. not many speed improvements unless you have an Octo-core Mac).

Cameras

There was a 45 minute line to enter the Red booth. They had working cameras and possibly the coolest “sculpture” at NAB - a spider-like creature with blades for feet and a camera iris for an eye. The booth combined Apple’s announcement of an integrated solution with Red and Final Cut definitely helped push Red from crazy vaporgear status to “OMG, Panavision needs to be worried” status. I’d be curious if Apple’s not heavily behind this product on other fronts, because it seems to share a similar disruptive approach - incredible design, a fraction of the cost and cutting edge technology. Not a bad combination.

Regards,

Bill Sewell

[update] - I just got a call from a nice lady from Avid who found this blog and called in to clear up any misconceptions I might of had while attending NAB. First off - it’s very cool to see that level of followup, so hat’s off. In the end though, my observations still stand. A few Wiredrive customers may benefit from ScriptSync or other new Avid announcements, but the vast majority will see significant improvement from Final Cut Server. Assuming it launches soon

Looks like the Supercomputer propellerheads in San Diego had fun last month reviewing compressed 4k footage delivered from Japan IN REAL TIME over an ultrahigh speed fiber network (250-400 Mbps). 4k footage, btw, is 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution. So far, only 1 movie, Spiderman 2 has been worked on in 4k resolution (by our friends at EFILM), so this stuff is very new. Apparently, Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC, a consortium of the seven major Hollywood studios is pushing the 4k standard, although it’s a ways off.

My favorite quote - “This experiment emulated a multi-site production digital dailies session scenario, where the cinematographer is on one continent, the colorist on another and the director on his laptop in a screening room in his East Hampton summer house, or in a DI suite in Hollywood.” Yeah - my “state-of-the-art” PowerBook can barely play back 720p without choking and I’m eagerly awaiting a 400 Mbps connection So, think that director is going to sip back a few more Long Island Ice-T’s before THAT scenario pans out…

Johnathan Schartz, a bigwig over at Sun, has written an interesting blog about how software and file distribution is changing big - and will change yet again this week with their new announcement of a web-based version of Office.

So, lots of people are seeing the connection between websites, desktop applications, and interconnected data. Currently, this interconnectedness is best shown with iTunes - largely because the application is already installed on Macs (PC’s have to work harder), it runs locally and uses the Net, and it just feels right. Sun and others are trying to connect up word processing and document sharing, so we all will be bombarded with this new way of working. Just because it is happening doesn’t mean it will be smooth - there is plenty of hand holding along the way, including developing interfaces that non-techies love to use.

So as Volume increases (photos, video, documents meeting with networks, hybrid desktop and web applications), their intrinsic value will increase - BUT only if done right. Lots of projects in the open source world stall out and don’t get adopted - purely because not enough thought or effort went into them in the first place.

As we prepare for this congregation of EVERYTHING, common sense and balance needs to prevail (doesn’t it always). Finding good examples of this still is not too common.