NAB Day 1

So after a long run of dry months, with few releases of new hardware and software, NAB has brought all sorts of new toys to the table.  While I am spending most of my time as a demo artist at the Cineform booth, I did manage to take a look around at what a few other companies were showing nearby.

First off, Cineform is demonstrating their new Neo3D workflow.  While I have always been interested in stereoscopic video production, I have not worked on a 3D project in 4 years.  The tools have definitely advanced a lot since then.  Once development is complete, Neo3D will give editors and other content creation artists a simple way of working with stereoscopic assets.  Once the technical task of syncing and muxing the two streams into a single Cineform3D file is completed, the software seamlessly manages the separate streams in the background, presenting Left, Right, or some stitched variation to the requesting program.   It can create SideBySide, Stacked, Interleaved, or Anaglyphic versions on the fly, depending on what type of image the display requires.  It can also compensate for vertical alignment and rotational variation and tonal differences between the streams, rendered on the fly, as well as change the point of optical convergence, all based on user editable Active Metadata.  It works in FCP, so I am to seeing the same functionality on the PC in the near future.  Now I just have to find a 3D project to use it on.

Blackmagic Design has a lot of new products available, many utilizing SDI over fibre optic cable.  It is a pretty straightforward idea, but since fibre is even more expensive than BNC cables, I personally will have little use for it in the near future.  Their new UltraScope product is very exciting, and if it works as well as advertised, fills a big hole in the market.  Most other HD-SDI scope products are in the five figure range, so a $700 solution will be a very welcome option.  They also have two new variations to their Videohub line, the Enterprise version with 144/288 I/O channels, and the more reasonable Studio version with 16/32 channels.  I have filled our old 12/24 channel original model Videohub at Bandito Brothers to capacity with about 8 edit stations and the supporting equipment.  But between having 33% more connections, and 3Gb SDI support to avoid wasting two channels at a time, the new version would probably support facilities twice as large.

Thats all for now, as I have to prepare for another big day, but I will be checking in with my friends at AJA, Matrox, Sony, and maybe even Avid over the course of the week here.

Tags: Blackmagic, Cineform, Compression, Stereoscopic 3D