Impressions of this year’s National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention, held last month in Las Vegas (4/22-26), ran the gamut from "lackluster" to "the most exciting NAB I’ve ever been to." With technology advancing at such a rapid rate, expectations of extraordinary developments may simply be running too high among postproduction and visual effects companies.
SHOOT revisited several of the industry players surveyed for its NAB preview (SHOOT, 3/30, p. 13, and 4/6, p. 10). The goal was to learn exactly what stood out for post and effects people among the 1,700 exhibitors displaying their wares at the confab.
Larry Bridges, founder/president of Red Car, which has offices in New York, Chicago, Santa Monica, San Francisco, Dallas and Toronto, made the "most exciting NAB" claim. Bridges says the general sentiment that NAB was somewhat lacking in the "wow factor" could be explained by attendees’ traditionally high expectations. "The industry has had a run of coming to NAB and seeing big breakthroughs in the obvious places…I think the reason for their disappointment this year is that they were looking in those places and the things weren’t there," he observes.
Bridges says he found developments in places that weren’t obvious, defining the two key words for NAB 2001 as "workflow" and "metadata." One of his key discoveries at the confab was San Francisco-based Rocket Network—which has teamed with Digidesign, a Palo Alto, Calif., division of Tewksbury, Mass.-headquartered Avid Technology, to develop DigiStudio. Available for shipping this summer, DigiStudio is a virtual workplace for online audio collaboration and production. Accessible via the Digidesign Production Network, the system builds on Pro Tools 5.1 software, and allows users to exchange stereo, and multi-channel surround tracks, as well as mono tracks over the Internet.
Bridges also praises two executives from Avid—Janette Bradley, director of AvidProNet, and Peter Scannell, chief architect—as "two of the smartest people on earth." He notes that Bradley and Scannell were instrumental in the development of Avid’s Review & Approval system (SHOOT, 4/13, p 9), which has been dubbed the first Internet browser-based application for frame-accurate review and approval of video content that can be integrated directly into an Avid workflow. "Avid’s Review & Approval system is a great thing, and I am very excited to see Avid extending its desktop advantage," says Bridges, who points out that the developments are all heading towards one thing: working without geographical barriers. During NAB, Red Car teamed with NeTune Communications, Culver City, Calif., to demonstrate workflow collaboration. "NeTune is our preferred supplier of the bandwidth to get material from the editing room to the agency or the client," says Bridges, who adds that the two are currently beta-testing a production model for the system.
Bridges’ favorite of the show was London-based Unique ID, which has developed an asset-management system known as CakeS (SHOOT, 4/6/01, p. 10). "Let’s face it, asset management is pretty bland, but Unique ID makes it sexy," he states.
Lackluster?
Chris Franklin, owner/editor of Big Sky, New York, and president of the East Coast chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors (AICE), identified finding solutions for breaking down geographical boundaries as one of the things he was looking forward to checking out at NAB. However, he found some solutions prior to the confab—Big Sky opted to build an FTP site and support it with ClipMailPro, which was developed by Telestream, Nevada City, Calif. "By the time I got to NAB, I was just looking around," he says. "It seemed [the vendors] were at the same place they were last year; nothing extraordinary seemed to be coming out of the show."
Kirk Hokanson, executive producer of Minneapolis-based Voodoo Films, chairman of the Association of Independent Commercial Producers’ (AICP) new technologies committee, and president of AICP/ Minnesota, was one of several executives who described this year’s NAB as lackluster. Still, he managed to find some points of interest, particularly in terms of HDTV sets. He spent a great deal of time looking at the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) display of these, and pricing guidelines in the Digital TV Store in the lobby of the Las Vegas Convention Center. "For the first time, there are really informed people who can talk about consumer sets and a consumer guideline," he comments. "One of the things I take from NAB is that digital TV—or, hopefully, HDTV—is really well entrenched within the broadcast community. Hopefully, the advertising people will start to pay attention. Digital has gone beyond the ‘wow factor,’ and is starting to be implemented, which is great." Hokanson cites the growth in high quality digital projectors and the fact that the image quality is rapidly improving for the consumer.
Fresh Edits
Hokanson also looked at the number of digital video editing systems now available, the most marketed being Apple’s Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Pro 2, the next generation of the company’s video editing, compositing, and special effects software. "I was so impressed with what you can now do on a laptop," he says. "I also saw Final Cut Pro in HD … here’s a product all the way from mini DVD to HD on your laptop—now, that’s pretty impressive."
Steve McCoy, president of FilmCore, Santa Monica and San Francisco, says that while he didn’t come away with any groundbreaking insights from NAB, Final Cut Pro is something he plans to keep an eye on. "This is not so much for where [the system] is today, but where it has come from in such a short amount of time," explains McCoy. "I feel that if Apple continues that rate of development, it will be intriguing to see where it goes." However, at this point in time, the biggest buzz about the product—the low price—didn’t interest him, as he has already invested heavily in Avid equipment.
Walt Louie, partner/senior editor at creative editorial/design house ARTiFACT, Santa Monica, identifies the strongest booth as Apple’s Final Cut Pro. The fact that Apple now allows third-party manufacturers to create hardware that supports a variety of professional editing features and formats, such as the RTMac card from Matrox, was good news, according to Louie. But what was currently on offer was so elementary that he could not see the real strength of spending the requisite $1,000 to purchase the boards. "Final Cut Pro is an example of ‘Why bother hopping around many different applications when we can have everything in one application?’ " he points out. "In a way that is impressive, but on the other hand, I’m not sure if that’s the best way to do things. If you are working totally independently and have to do everything yourself, that’s great. At the same time, I would rather have a graphic artist handling my graphics and a sound designer creating my sound."
Bill Thompson, VP of Crawford Communications, Atlanta, was most impressed with the iQ system showcased by Quantel. "The iQ is pretty exciting," he opines. "As far as we can tell, it is the only system in the world that lets you edit between standard definition and hi-def resolutions while doing all the conversions for you—it’s pretty incredible."
Thompson notes that Quantel has taken steps to develop a totally open architectural product, which allows the incorporation of third-party plug-ins. The other two nonlinear editing systems he was interested in were the Avid/DS HD and Sony’s XPRI. Crawford was a beta test site for the Sony system. "We already have the Avid/DS in standard definition, which we bought because we believed there was a proven pathway to hi-def. At Crawford, we will never buy another system that doesn’t have a proven path to hi-def. It doesn’t make sense anymore."
Tony Robins, executive creative director at Spontaneous Combustion, New York, said he would be keeping an eye on the product offerings by Venice, Calif.,-headquartered Nothing Real: namely, Tremor and Shake. Tremor will enhance workflow for digital compositing professionals working in HDTV, commercial, video and broadcast, and is fully compatible with Shake. Shake is a general purpose image manipulation toolset that provides users with a low-cost, high-performance compositing solution without the need for specialized hardware (SHOOT, 4/27, p. 1). "It’s a bit early to put in full production yet, but the products are definitely interesting," he says. Robins also liked the 5D Cyborg, the new integrated effects environment offered by 5D, London—but said these have a little way to go, too. He did make some purchases to upgrade Spontaneous Combustion’s Inferno.
ARTiFACT’s Louie says of NAB: "This annual forced showing of goods can sometimes be good for the industry, and other times it forces a false expectation that every year there could be something so significant that we go goo-goo over." He thinks that right now investing in new equipment is widely on hold because the industry is in a transition between the old world and the new, high-definition world, which has yet to be fully defined. "I think it would be foolish to spend a lot of money in this next fiscal year on hardware or software until some of the dust has settled and the path is a little clearer," he states.
Louie only had a day in Las Vegas, and he spent his time at the Sands Convention Center, where the desktop vendors showcased their wares. Louie’s choice is indicative of the shift from the more hardcore electronic suppliers to the desktop-oriented vendors supplying plug-ins.
As an Avid user, Louie spent some time at the Avid booth, and thinks the Xpress DV version 2.0, was a good package. The software-only package—which can be used on a laptop—is shipping for $1,699.
Another exhibitor that caught his eye was Veil Interactive Technologies, St. Louis, Mo., which was demonstrating, among other fare, an interactive promotion for Ericsson Mobile Phones that ran during ABC’s Who Wants To Be a Millionaire last October. Veil produces a technology called Video Encoded Invisible Light (VEIL) that allows digital information to be invisibly delivered by an ordinary television’s video image, allowing individuals to activate electronic game devices during encoded commercials.
Louie observes that, upon reflection, lackluster may be too harsh a description of this year’s NAB. "We are all so expectant that no matter how hard the R&D people work, we are totally still jaded and expect it to be better than ever," he notes. "No matter how fast Apple can make G4s, we are still bothered by the boot-up time being slow. Does that make us a bunch of cyber cynics?"r
