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MillimeterNAB 2005 Pick Hit Awards
Jun 1, 2005 12:00 PM
Hot Lighting, Camcorder Deluge, and Software Giants
Picking a final 15 “best of” from NAB 2005 was tough. Here's a show that saw everything from three significant camcorder introductions to the first 4K projector to hit the market to a brilliant innovation from Kodak, the film industry's founding partner. Our judges had to make some difficult decisions to come up with our NAB 2005 Pick Hit finalists, but you'll benefit from their take on one of the more exciting shows in years.
- Apple Final Cut Studio
All-in-one bundles are not unique to Apple, but the collective advances embodied by Final Cut Pro 5's multi-camera editing, Motion 2's accelerated 32-bit floating point rendering, DVD Studio Pro 4's ability to burn HD DVDs, and Apple's new audio editing program, Soundtrack Pro, make an overwhelming argument for this $1,300 cornucopia, says Pick Hits judge D.W. Leitner.
- Arri X Ceramic 250 lighting
“The first lighting instruments to utilize Philips' new tungsten-balanced 250W Ceramic ST 250 HR discharge lamp, the open-face Arri X and fresnel Arri Studio Ceramic 250 match the warm correlated color temperature of tungsten at a quarter of the power,” says D.W. Leitner. Arri's housings are nearly cool to the touch. Ballasts are built-in, and the single-ended lamps are rated at 4,000 hours.
- Autodesk Toxik
Toxik recasts Autodesk's Inferno and Flame tools into a workgroup environment for motion picture projects with the ability to work with massive compositions in realtime and includes many (though not all) of the best tools in Inferno. “Toxik future-proofs Discreet's long-running product line as it integrates system advantages that are hard to emulate in lower-price editing and compositing environments,” says S.D. Katz.
- Avid iNews Instinct
Today, as newscasts pump out more and more video, able-bodied reporters and producers better be able to turn stories around fast. Avid delivers a fresh approach to doing just that. “By presenting such a simple, intuitive interface that matches video to the scripts,” says Dave Sirak, “Instinct solves a lot of our [training] problems, yet it's still as expandable as you need.”
- Exavio ExaMax 9000
Exavio's ExaMax 9000 I/O Accelerator uses up to 2TB of dynamic cache and delivers a high-bandwidth storage system with a sustained I/O throughput, peaking out at more than 5GBps. “The industry is moving toward 4K,” says Derek Zavada. “The combination of its hardware design and caching algorithm makes its product very interesting for those sorts of projects.”
- Grass Valley Venom FlashPak
The emerging digital cinematography community asked for an onboard solution to digital storage, and Thomson responded with its compact Grass Valley-branded Venom FlashPak. Shaped to resemble a small 35mm film magazine, Venom mounts atop or behind, Steadicam-style, Grass Valley's Viper and, soon, Arri's single-sensor CMOS D-20.
- Inlet Technologies Fathom
Inlet Technologies Fathom 2.0 VC-1 (Windows Media) encoder offers realtime single-pass and accelerated multi-pass encoding for 2K-, HD-, and SD-res content, all at a price point that's about a third of its competition. “I would put [dailies] onto DVDs,” says Al Hart, “and then, using the new pro DVD players that can play 1080i movies, just give that to your customer on set, and away you go.”
- JVC GY-HD100U 24p camcorder
Whether ProHD is a new HDV format or flavor, JVC's bold crossbreed of HDV and 720/24p stirred excitement at NAB. “The star attraction was JVC's shoulder-mounted ProHD/DV camcorder, the GY-HD100U, with its $6,295 price tag,” says D.W. Leitner. “The HD100's 1/3in. CCDs boast true 1280×720 square pixels. JVC pulled out the stops on this one.”
- Kodak Vision2 HD
What if Kodak took its ever-growing list of tungsten- and daylight-balanced camera negatives and combined them into one product that could, upon developing and transfer, digitally mimic any current Kodak filmstock? Kodak's Vision2 HD “hybrid” system, unveiled at NAB, is a step in that direction: a new low-contrast, “scan-only” negative, 7299 (Super-16 only) rated either 320 or 500, plus a Vision2 HD Digital Processor, used at post houses to emulate the other Kodak looks. This is a controversial — even radical — initiative, and it's nice to see Kodak once more stirring things up.
- Microsoft Connected Services Framework
Microsoft's Connected Services Framework (MCSF) offers a new approach to organizing your business by harnessing the power of web services along with a service-oriented architecture (SOA). “The MCSF provides a framework that allows Sony Pictures Entertainment to use multiple networking transfer technologies under a single service wrapper and abstract the client interface to something that is very generic and runs on any platform,” says Jerry Ledbetter, vice president of Digital Media Initiatives for Sony Pictures Entertainment.
- Miranda HD-Bridge
DEC With sales of Sony Z-1 HDV camcorders brisk and rising, Miranda's HD-Bridge DEC has supplied an essential key to pro HDV use: affordable HDV to HD-SDI conversion. According to Michael Bravin, “The Miranda HD-Bridge Dec is the missing link in integrating HDV equipment and their images into the high-end postproduction workflow that depends on the HD-SDI data stream.”
- NEC LCD2180WG-LED Monitor
While CRTs are starting to look like yesterday's technology, is there anything else that can offer comparable color reference for production and post? NEC Display Solutions' LCD2180WG-LED does it by changing out the LCD's fluorescent tube backlighting to a new generation of super-white, super-bright LEDs. The result? Radically improved color rendition, reproducing a remarkable 109 percent NTSC color gamut, resulting in a rich, stunning image.
- Panasonic AG-HVX200 camcorder
Imagine a VariCam shrunk to handycam size and form factor, and you have a fair idea of Panasonic's AG-HVX200, a DVCPRO HD P2 handheld 1080i/720p/480i multi-format “dream machine,” according to D.W. Leitner. “Yes, full DVCPRO at 100Mbps, 24p, variable frame rates, and four 48KHz/16-bit audio channels.”
Panasonic displayed under glass at NAB a mock-up of what an AG-HVX200 might look like when finally introduced at the end of the year. “What we can say for sure is that Panasonic has put its considerable prestige behind the introduction of this $6,000 product, so we can expect something to appear by year's end,” says Leitner.
- Sony SRX-R110 Projector
Sony's SRX-R110 is the first digital projector sold that delivers on the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) 4K tech spec via its LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) technology that puts a bright, 4096×2160 pixel resolution image onto the screen. That was enough to attract Landmark Theatres, which jumped at the chance to be the first group in the United States to install the projector.
- Sony HVR-Z1U camcorder
At NAB Sony announced that more than 37,000 of its HDV camcorders and decks had been sold since October, making HDV perhaps the most successful new format introduction ever. Much has already been written about the superb design and functionality of Sony's HVR-Z1U camcorder, but what became apparent at NAB was that Sony wins the first round.
Millimeter's Pick Hit Judges
- Michael Bravin, CTO, Band Pro Film & Digital
- Mark Cuban, 2929 Entertainment/Landmark Theatres
- John Dames, creative director, Coreaudiovisual
- Al Hart, executive vice president, engineering, Modern Video Film
- S.D. Katz, director/writer/producer, senior contributing editor, Millimeter
- Jerry Ledbetter, vice president of Digital Media Initiatives for Sony Pictures Entertainment
- D.W. Leitner, director/DP, senior contributing editor, Millimeter
- Dave Sirak, News Operation Manager, WFTV-Orlando
- Derek Zavada, Director of Information Technologies, Threshold Digital
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.