the BROADer issue

Shining Tech CitiDISK R258 & the Twitter effect

Just in the last few hours, I have seen several Twitterers write approvingly about this new tapeless DV/HDV video recorder from Shining Tech, which made its debut at NAB 2009.

RED Ted effervesces at NAB 2009

I really enjoyed this video interview from NAB with the irrepressible Ted Schilowitz, Leader Of The Rebellion at RED (pictured, at another event). It was shot by Guy Cochran using the Canon 5D Mk II hybrid 21.1 Megapixel DSLR / 1080 HD video camera, incidentally.

The interview covers the demand for high-res stills and moving images from the luxury goods sector, particularly for internet use, the latest technology from AJA that's helping drive the digital cinematography market, especially the Ki-Pro ProRes box. Ted also explains what's happening with the forthcoming set of RED prime lenses, and the tech demos RED did at NAB alongside some well-known (but unnamed) "major motion picture lenses".

I had a similar experience to this when I interviewed Ted on the 'phone earlier this year for an article on Stereo3D production on pages 24 & 25 the March edition TVB Europe magazine.

NAB 2009 closes: to sleep, perhaps to dream

Day 4 of NAB 2009 seemed, from the tweets I saw, really very quiet. Lots of talk of heading for the airport (and it being a relatively painless affair), and of having spent time with some great people, and of product highlights.

For @calisurf, the Ki-Pro from AJA was the pick of this year's show. For many others it was definitely the I-Movix Sprintcam Extreme SloMo camera. @nathangwilliam writes "My favorite part of the NAB show was getting a demo of Kaltura open source video sharing platform. See http://Kaltura.com."

@underpk and @stu both post updates about seeing a new Adobe rotoscoping tool called Magic Matte, and Nathan posts a couple of images from the presentation he saw. Can anybody shed any light on that new product?

There are a load more tweets to go through... I'll get to them in the morning.

Revised NAB visitor figures

Perhaps I read it wrong first time, but I've just seen figures for 2009 on the TVB magazine site of just under 84,000, rather than the 90,000 I posted a day or so ago.

That's about 23% down on last year's 105,000.

However, on a positive note, one friend told me on the phone from the NAB show floor yesterday evening London time (as the doors opened for Day 3) that the people he'd been meeting and speaking to had a serious reason to be at the show this year. Tyre-kicking was at a premium and everybody seemed pretty upbeat.

NAB 2009 Day 3: It's hot ... but quieter than last year

The temperatures in Las Vegas have been soaring into the Nineties, but attendance has dipped from just over 105,000 in 2008 to just under 90,000 this year.

There's a bit of 'Spinal Tap'-like optimism in some of the tweets I've seen about the quality time with visitors and fewer time-wasters compensating for a lack of numbers, but the mood amongst NAB 2009 Twitterers is generally pretty upbeat.

Some more news from the show floor.

Actually, this first story happened well away from the show floor, at the AJA party to be precise, from where @Krazpr posted this fantastic pic of the vivacious Kiki Stockhammer, ahem, "rockin' the pole"! If, like me, you've not been at this year's NAB ... gawd, what have we been missing?!

Following up on the update from earlier today, could the iPhone ProPrompter be the fab teleprompter product referred to?

I really like this review of NAB 2009 by Bobby Owsinski - @2bobby - on his blog in which he talks of "an air of quiet evolution in the new products" at the show, a lack of "swag" to take home, precious few parties to attend, and almost no free magazines bins at the entrance - 6 or 8 where there used to be 50 or 60. On the product front, his favourite was "ioDrive by Fusion iO, a solid state drive that connects directly to your system buss, bypassing the bottleneck of the normal PCI I/O architecture. As a demonstration of how fast it was, 16 servers were accessing a single drive, which output 64 MPEG-2 files of DVDs to 16 screens all at the same time. That's 1024 DVD streams ALL AT ONCE! Wow!!".

There's a lot of mumbling and grumbling in the Twittersphere about Apple's no-show at the Supermeet and the absence of Final Cut Studio 3 from the show.

Lastly, for this update, one of the hot little items at this year's NAB is Syncsy, an inexpensive file transfer service to replace slow and sometime shaky FTP. Syncsy launched at the show and is described on the front page of the website as:

"the next step in file transfer services for businesses needing a higher degree of security, speed and manageability. Syncsy.com allows you to fully automate the process of sending large files and folders. It is a perfect replacement for FTP and Web Uploads/Downloads for situations that demand a higher degree of automation. For example, consider the following business file transfer scenarios:

Sending approvals with repeated updates to customers Enabling your clients to send you files for processing Distributing clips and dailies Connecting remote offices for regular updates

In each of the above scenarios, files are transferred on a frequent basis with numerous updates. Rather than having to perform manual transfers, Syncsy.com can seamlessly monitor for changes and syncs new content without any manual steps."

News from NAB 2009 Day 2: Hot weather & sore feet

Sifting through tweets from Day 2, I've read a couple that indicate attendance is down, with one pessimist saying he's been told it's by as much as 50%.

Looking at news from the show floor, Randi Altman from Post magazine seems to have found or been shown some interesting stuff. Here's a sample of Randi's tweets:"Snell's Kahuna HD switcher for 3D stereo targets live to cinema projects", "Matrox CompressHD uses MAX technology to accelerate creation of H.264 files for mobile, web and blu-ray", and "Sony shows new XDCAM camera ... PDW F 800. Native 24p,multiformat recording, variable frame rate for slomo, quick motion".

Randi's also reported on Flare, Autodesk's new low-cost, software-only companion to Flame, and the new 64GB P2 cards (less than $1,000 for an hour of 1920 x 1080 HD). As I said, Randi's been very busy. Still, she did get to go to dinner with Oscar-winning 'Slumdog Millionaire' editor Chris Dickens yesterday evening, which should have been a cracking way to end a long NAB day. To read more from Randi, follow @post_magazine.

FreshDV has put together a nice set of video reports from the show floor, including quick visits to the Cinevate (who get lots of mentions elsewhere on Twitter) and Panasonic booths, and a look at the new JVC 4K prototype camera mentioned in yesterday's post.

@dekekincaid attended an "interesting adobe presentation essentially about using fcp to do base edit and then to premiere & ps & ae encore to conform/finish".

@Andrewlock found a portable teleprompter based on an iPhone. As he says, what a great idea? Which company is marketing that product?

I've seen mixed reports on the Stereo3D HDTV exhibits, with some raving about the display technology and others finding it so-so. Generally good feedback on the Stero3D production technology, though.

I'll leave it to @metjohn to sum up Day 2 at NAB @009 with a tweet on his day in the South Hall; "Whew... did the South Hall at the NAB today. Imagine 20 Target stores under one roof. Then make that two stories tall. 1.3 million sq ft!".

Indeed!

News from NAB 2009 Day 1: Las Vegas Twitters

I've been following a few dedicated NAB attendees via Twitter as they plot their way around the vast expanses of the Las Vegas Convention Centre. Here are some highlights so far.

Will Strauss (@willstrauss), Technology Editor at 'Broadcast' seems quite impressed with the Sony Location Porter, which allows users in the field to convert content from a camcorder or a live feed into an H.264 stream and broadcast it via 3G. Will points out that it's not exactly new, and there are alternatives out there, but it still looks very appealing. Another spot from Will is JVC's new 4K camera with a live signal output. As he puts it, "That's potentially one in the eye for Red. Not that they'll care too much".

Object Matrix (@om_nick) and Squarebox have announced a tie-up that sees the former's MatrixStore technology for tiering and clustering inexpensive storage hardware integrating closely with the latters CatDV DAM system. For the full story, click here.

The jury appears to be out on the new Avid corporate identity, which is a bit retro for some tastes, but which others feel shows the company getting back in touch with its NLE roots.

I spotted this on the CalDigit Twitter feed, if it's any use to somebody who's reading this while at NAB: "We're giving away 5 CalDigit VR minis at NAB. But you have to visit us at booth SL13610 to get your raffle ticket."

Engadget has this interesting post about the new 1,000 fps I-Movix SprintCam v3 HD camera on show at NAB for the first time. In fact, I've just read through a number of other Twitter updates, and lots of people seem to be raving about the SprintCam

Two people I follow posted this somewhat random tweet at exactly the same time: "Adobe Story is an app for creating, editing & optimizing scripts for films, broadcast & rich media, public beta in late 2009.".

Autodesk is streaming demos live from the NAB booth on its AREA website, according to @somenice.

@JasonRaneses points to this announcement from Western Digital of its new 2TB Enterprise-class HDD.

The Pro Video Coaltion (@provideo) were on their toes on Day 1. They've already posted this update, which includes a picture of the AVID booth, showing that logo. There's also a quick look at some very advanced 3D holographic technology.

I'll post some more stuff from Day 2 as I spot it...

Tapeless Procam makes Easter move to new premises

Last weekend, as we tucked into our roast lamb and chocolate eggs, staff at London camera hire and crewing company Procam dodged the Easter rain showers to move the company lock, stock and barrel to new premises about 500 yards from their previous home.

Once they'd settled in, I popped down to South London to visit the company's Andrew Black and get a guided tour. I used the opportunity to record this podcast, in which I find out more about Procam's investment in tapeless cameras and belief in the future of file-based workflows.Download Procam Guided Tour April 2009

Content like this makes science more accessible

I got the link to this fantastic little film about "the secret lives of invisible magnetic fields" off a friend last night (thanks John!).


Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

The film, funded by Channel 4 and The Arts Council England, shows magnetic fields developing in laboratory conditions at the NASA Space Sciences Laboratory at The University of California, Berkeley, and features spooky ultra-low frequency recordings of the electrons fizzing and crackling as the fields develop.

I hope science teachers are picking up on films like this and showing them to our kids. What a great way to stimulate a bunch of teenagers into exploring the subject a bit further.

Media storage people rock & that's official!

Just got an email in from James Richings of Editshare, who, unbeknown to most of us, plays in the band Sleeping With Giants. I am guessing he's 'Jay', and he plays the drums, though I could be wrong.

They've been selected by Radio 1 to play at The Vic in Swindon on Tuesday 5 May as part of the Radio 1 Big Weekend Fringe 4-nighter.

If you live close or you're in the area, it's a free gig (don't those words look good when put together?), so pop down and lend him and his band mates you're support.

Stereo3D feature 'The Dark Country' shows its face

The first stills taken from Thomas Jane's directorial debut, 'The Dark Country', have been published online. You can view them here.

'The Dark Country', Jane's big directing break, is a Stereo3D release.

The film's cinematographer, Geoff Boyle, was one of the people I interviewed for an article in the latest (March) issue of TVB Europe magazine about the prospects for Stereo3D production.

You can view the online edition here. My article appears on pages 24 & 25.

Sony 4K projectors for AMC cinemas in $315m deal

The rivalry between Sony and Texas Instruments in the cinema projector market is set to hot up. Sony has just announced a massive deal with US cinema chain AMC Entertainment, reports The New York Times.

TI has just under 5,500 digital projectors installed in the US. This new deal will see Sony's installed base leap to 5,000.

A senior AMC VP said of the decision to make the investment, “digital cinema gives us a huge opportunity to do 3-D, live broadcasts and playback of live events.”

4K image resolution is four times greater than 2K, and more than four times greater than HD. Sony says it is accelerating development of 4K production technology, and Sony Pictures says future cinema releases will now be in 4K.

The installation process at AMC will begin in the second quarter of 2009, and continue through until 2012. The process is part of the initiative led by the DCIP (Digital Cinema Implementation Partners) group, of which AMC is a founder member.

Stereo3D Keane gig to be shown live online

Tomorrow (April 2), fans of British band Keane will be able to watch them live online as they perform a short set at London's legendary Abbey Road Studios. Nothing too earth-shattering there you might think.

What marks this out as a groundbreaking event is that the images will be stereoscopic, and viewers will all be wearing red and blue anaglyph glasses.

For more information on how to watch and where to tune your radio for the audio, take a look at this page on the Keane website.