Generally speaking, this year’s product introductions at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) didn’t dazzle their audience. As a result, NAB 2002 was chalked up as a year for improving infrastructure and workflow. The catch phrase, "It was an evolutionary, not revolutionary, year," was uttered more than once. However, a faraway look lay in the eyes of attendees speculating on what the future holds, and many are hopeful. As the Internet pipeline gets fatter, processors get faster and memory gets cheaper, it can only mean one thing: new possibilities and, ultimately, more creative opportunities. It just wasn’t going to happen this year.
For postproduction, the ’02 NAB confab was marked by low-cost solutions reaching higher levels of productivity, and manufacturers of high-end solutions remaining cautious about new introductions. With the industry at the end of a difficult 18 months and with little more than unsubstantiated promises of a rebound, this was clearly not the year for purchasing untested products in the six-figure range.
If NAB—including all the hype that leads up to it and trails after it—is to serve as a benchmark for postproduction, the message this year was clear: Invest prudently in high definition, buy desktop solutions, keep holding onto your workstations, and connect to your clients via the Internet. Besides conveying that much, the confab served the same purpose it does every year: giving attendees the opportunity to keep current, gossip and recruit.
HD, despite rocky beginnings, finally seems to have a strong foothold in the market. Product introductions across all categories had to account for the inevitability of HD in their designs. "For the first time this year, we are seeing the high-definition, 2K work starting to bleed into commercials," says Jack Schaeffer, president of The Finish Line, Santa Monica. "Longform has seen it for a little longer, but we wanted to see what was happening for theatrical-release material and things of that sort." Schaeffer, along with his director of sales and marketing Brian Gaffney, were two of a six-man team from The Finish Line sent to NAB this year.
"I was impressed to see that there wasn’t a single booth or suite anywhere without HD plasma screen monitors," reports an excited Ken Ashe, partner at visual effects and editing facility Match Frame, which has offices in San Antonio and Austin, Texas. "It was replete. The whole show was just overflowing with it, and we were really glad to see that. Our company stands to be enhanced as we step into a better format. The advertising agencies are starting to think about shooting in HD. We have done a couple of projects that have originated on high definition. If there is a trend at this NAB, it is HD." Ashe also notes that Match Frame is located in a hot spot for independent feature film production, and expects that to be a strong growth area as HD cameras find their way into those communities.
"It was gratifying to see that digital TV is there, and high-definition TV is everywhere," observes Kirk Hokanson, executive producer at Voodoo Films, Minneapolis, and chairman of the New Technology Committee for the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP). "Finally, the broadcasters are seeing that as a given," he notes. "Even though there aren’t that many receivers in the world yet, I think that they are finally really on board with this transition. And it is great to see every time you to go NAB the improvement in the monitoring and in the projectors."
While the term "low cost" is certainly a relative one, many manufacturers at NAB were set on introducing lower-cost solutions, as well as solutions that can be purchased with one or two trips to the ATM machine. Quantel, Discreet and Avid all reacted to current market conditions by introducing low-cost options to their high-end systems. In recent years, the rise in post houses using low-end software packages for more time-consuming tasks like rotoscoping has been significant. Quantel and Discreet each offered software packages that run on desktops, in order to address that market and to provide one contiguous workflow for their customers moving projects from one platform to another. "It was interesting to see where the world is in terms of NT boxes, and I was particularly pleased about where Discreet Logic was going," relates Dean Winkler, chief technology officer at Crossroads Films, bicoastal and Chicago. "There really was something great about it. The current products are going to be integrated into new products. Part of their booth presentation was a little NT show-off, just to say that they could do this, too; and they showed five streams of real-time video moving through an NT box."
Avid lowered the barrier to entry in its own way by significantly dropping the cost of a basic system. "Avid came out with a limited HD product that doesn’t have the graphics package starting at $85,000 … it’s an Avid," exclaims David Binstock, CEO of Multi-Video Group, New York—parent company to Rhinoceros Post, Rhinoceros Editorial, Rhinoceros Visual Effects & Design, Wax Music and Sound Design, and audio post/music house Tonic. "The competition is getting so steep that when I bought [an Avid for HD production] last July, it had a ticket price of about $325,000. In October, I think they lowered the base price to about $210,000. At this show—less than a year since I purchased it—you can get one without all the bells and whistles for $85,000. Where is this business going? Tomorrow you put it on your Mac for one-hundred twenty-nine bucks."
Apple, with its acquisition of software developer Nothing Real just prior to the convention, will also be considered a force among low-cost solutions for the desktop. "There was still a lot of excitement about what Apple may do in the future on the desktop," says Gaffney. "There wasn’t any real surprise, but I was glad to see that there wasn’t any bad news at the show; and it was encouraging that the market was still moving forward."
Work Space
Workstations, at the heart of postproduction, were watched closely this year. Quantel, Avid, Discreet, 5D, and Sony each took its respective approach towards the open architecture/open resolution solution that many post facilities are demanding—but none of those companies tried to elicit the "oohs" and "ahhhs" associated with new special effects. "We were glad to see that Discreet and Quantel are still leading products," recounts Gaffney. "There were new technologies from Sony—like Socratto—as well as products from 5D like Cyborg and Colossus. We saw some very good first-generation products, although it is obvious that the maturity of the existing revenue-generating machines like Inferno and Henry is still strong. We did get the sense that cheaper, faster, stronger is on the horizon. We are encouraged by what we saw, but didn’t feel we had to move now, because none of the creatives are telling us we need a new box in order to win an account or get an effect done that we couldn’t do otherwise."
But Discreet’s announcement regarding its open architecture and new user interface (working titles Strata and Mezzo) left Red Car founder/CEO Larry Bridges nonplussed. "I think they were risking or undermining customer loyalty," he relays. "I left there asking, ‘What is important? Where is the emphasis? Is my continuing investment in Smokes and Flames and Infernos something that I am going to be rewarded by, or is it going to be undermined? And is there going to be a shift away from that to something different in terms of paradigm, or quite different in terms of price?’ These are the Clydesdales of the industry—what Discreet has—and suddenly they are telling us that it isn’t the most important thing to them. They are saving it for last, telling us they don’t know when it will be released, what it is going to cost or what it is really going to be called. But there they are, selling it."
On the flip side, Bridges was very interested in the approach that Discreet was taking. "The model itself was the product of some very interesting thinking—detaching software from devices and having essentially a very thin client served by many options of a given manufacturer," he says. Bridges feels that thin client applications—meaning computers that can function without particular software applications loaded on the hard drive (i.e., Web sites for accessing files and/or applications from any computer in the world, or computers with open architecture)—will play a big part in the future of postproduction. "I think I was seeing a thinned-out client or workstation so that the artist sits there and gets to use many devices, because there are many different formats in front of them and combinations of formats within the timeline. Therefore, you need this new layer outside the traditional layer where you walk into a room and you have a computer with a single application on it and it is used just for one thing. The ‘non-linearization’ of the software device itself is very interesting. A lot of people are doing that. Avid is doing that, and so is Quantel’s IQ, but to see Discreet do it is interesting."
"It was cool to see Socratto [from Sony] and Cyborg [from 5D] as alternative compositing systems," remarks Winkler. "I thought both of those had good things about them. But the fact that multiple manufacturers are pursuing that is great. Very healthy for the industry."
Online Connectivity
This year, the Internet was a more important tool for post facilities than ever before. Although concerned with security, post houses were keenly aware of the need for connecting with their clients by means of the Web and secure FTP sites. However, as Gaffney points out, many issues must be addressed, as post houses carry a large burden of responsibility going forward. "If [a client’s] elements are coming in and out via an FTP site," explains Gaffney, "there is the potential for that going somewhere and being used inadvertently. We go to great measures to track [the individual projects], but it would be nice if those tools were made available farther upstream in the digital pipeline. As we become a postproduction company that is really doing production work—from creating elements and capturing stuff—we might even have to start thinking about doing digital rights management work inside our facility and giving that as a service back to the agencies to protect their assets even before the final distribution."
"I went to the show with the intent of seeing the IQ,’ " adds Ashe of Match Frame. "I got a demo and was pretty impressed. They are offering quite a few benefits—anything in and anything out in real time is quite a benefit."
Gaffney appreciated the simplified solutions—especially 5D’s approach. "What I liked about the 5D booth is they were really showing total workflow," an enthusiastic Gaffney explains. "They even had the digital files going all out to the Web with this BEAM.TV application at the booth. They showed a total end-to-end [solution]. I liked the fact that the manufacturers understand that our workflow means an entirely digital pipeline. That was encouraging because connectivity is certainly key for us. Products like Telestream’s ClipMail Pro system and their Clip Factory, I thought, were the most exciting because I saw more maturity, lower prices, increased stability and greater industry acceptance in their client list. It was totally integrated into broadcast and our agency clients."
Some attendees take a creative approach to NAB by mixing and matching products to find the ultimate solution. Robin Shenfield, CEO at The Mill, London and New York, observes, "There are a lot of nuts and bolts technical things that can be achieved at NAB that aren’t in the headlines of what people like us do, because people talk about Spirits and Flames and CG, but our whole infrastructure relies on the support of twenty to thirty different vendors. Sometimes," he adds, "you can even end up putting different vendors together to solve your particular problems at NAB. From the unseen, infrastructure side of the business, the technical crew at The Mill gets great benefit from looking at some of the utilities that are just about making the business work more efficiently, work faster and improve quality.
"My strategy at NAB is basically chemical. I try to create a reaction I didn’t expect," Shenfield continues. "I try a combination of observations. Like, ‘Wouldn’t this machine be cool if you put it in the context of this workflow?’ It is speculating on products that might not even exist and workflows that might now be the planned strategic pathway of the given manufacturer."
Speculating on the future is often dangerous ground but, in the case of postproduction equipment, the future may already be here. "There is probably a lot of really groovy stuff in the lab that they are not bringing out because no one is going to buy it," muses Bridges of Red Car. Since technology did not slow down this past year with regard to processing speed and cheaper memory, the lack of new-product introductions probably says more about the economy and cautious businessmen reacting to it than anything else. Certainly the need for a competitive edge is also prevalent. The only thing missing is the money. "You are about to be shocked by something that is more disruptive than anything that has come before," says Bridges. "People will be doing the most dazzling and wonderful things detached from the facility. It will all be networked, it will all be extremely thin, and it will all be extremely fast. I think the level of execution is going to become much more astonishing. I think when the stagnation of the economy is over and people are starting to invest again, they will be given reasons to invest. I don’t think the game is over.
"[The future]," Bridges continues, "may be the equilibrium adjustment where technology, which used to be the buzz, will return to the background where it belongs and allow other things to come into the foreground—like relationships, convenience, service, being organized with metadata and all that, having the digital world serve everybody at every level with equal ease. But I don’t think it is going to change who does what; I think it is going to be the same number of agencies, artists and production companies, etc., and maybe even grow when we start advertising again. I don’t think anything is changing. I think it is on the same curve going lickety-split towards more dazzling work."
