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MillimeterTouring the First NAB Post+ Production show
Nov 21, 2005 6:29 PM, Trevor Boyer
The NAB Post+ Production show, held at the Javits Center in New York last week, was the first of what's expected to be an annual event. Co-produced by the NAB and Future Media Concepts, which runs postproduction training seminars around the country, the show brings top level technology, training, and some celeb editors like Thelma Schoonmaker to the East coast.
As of this writing, final attendance numbers have not yet come in from NAB, but prior to the show the organizers were expecting a turnout of about 4,000 attendees. About 90 companies exhibited on the showfloor, while Future Media Concepts conducted over 120 training sessions on subjects including Apple Final Cut Pro 5 Certification Training and Avid DNA Editing.
While floor traffic couldn't be described as heavy, exhibitors generally expressed contentment with the quality of attendees visiting their booths at the New York show. Mike Nann, marketing manager for professional post production at Leitch Technology, told me that he'd met with several representatives from TV network and call-letter stations.
And for a show devoted to postproduction, the roster of exhibitors was pretty complete, with most of the heavy hitters represented (Apple and Avid, yes, but no Adobe, for instance). There was a surprising amount of new product announcements, as well as recently released products on display. For instance, Avid was demo'ing the shipping version of its Symphony Nitris (introduced at NAB), while AJA debuted the XENA LS and XENA LH video and audio I/O cards for Windows XP. The new XENA lineup marks AJA’s foray into integrated video capture and playback solutions for the Windows XP platform.
Boris FX announced the release of Boris Final Effects Complete AVX. Final Effects Complete AVX is a collection of native filters and transitions aimed at simplifying the workflow for Avid editors. How's that? The plug-in enables some 100 effects to animate directly in the Avid Effect Editor window. The simplicity of the filters is hard to fumble, says the company, since most of them feature less than a dozen parameters.
In October Boris FX acquired the operating assets and assumed tech support responsibilities of Media 100, which had been previously owned by Optibase. Media 100 will operate as an independent division within Boris FX.
Autodesk launched a Linux version of Discreet Flame, and was also demonstrating Toxik, its enterprise-based collaborative compositing program.
One interesting new company exhibiting at Post+ was Montreal-based Lanterna Magica, which had made a showing at the New York SMPTE show a couple weeks ago. Its Reality turnkey solution is designed as a way for reality TV producers to streamline their productions. The idea is fairly simple - while cameras run and action transpires, someone on the set sits at the Reality station and logs the related metadata, whether it's the wardrobe of the participants, the emotional tone, or the salient details of the conversation.
Meanwhile, Reality is capturing timecode and video from a camera feed, creating low-res WMV-based reference videos to correspond to the logged metadata. If you generate hundreds of hours of video for a documentary, for example, this is an ideal way to cut down all that painful hunting for the right shot. Lanterna Magica Reality turnkey units are available for rental.
There were a few traditional production equipment companies among the postproduction types. I was impressed by Ikegami's Editcam 3 (there was no Editcam HD in the booth, unfortunately) - mainly from a media perspective. The company's "yes, both" approach to solid-state vs. hard-disk capture technology is smart as a solution for today and for the future, as solid-state media costs continue to drop.
I also stopped by the Maxell booth, where they were showing an actual holographic recording disc that holds 300GB of data. (The disc was clear, though, instead of amber. The disc within the cartridge turns clear when it's exposed to light, rendering it unusable.) The first-generation 300GB media, along with associated drives, will be available next year.
Maxell was also showcasing its DVD-R BQ 8X media - the "BQ" is for broadcast quality. It's about four times as expensive as a typical DVD-R at bulk rates (so about $2 per as opposed to $.50 or so), but Maxell is claiming that the DVD-R BQ is 40X more scratch-resistant and 20X more dust-resistant than its own standard DVD-R media, making it appropriate for long-term archival use.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.