Comments

DavidMcKnight wrote on 4/20/2007, 9:11 PM
I asked Glenn Chan 4 times to breakdance, all to no avail. :)

Got to finally meet Victor Milt, and picked up his new dvd too, btw. Always an inspiration, and very gracious. "David, I'm so glad to finally meet you, you're much younger than I imagined"
Such a charmer. But genuinely interesting, and interested.

Saw John Cline in the registration line but got distracted. Also Farss, who came with a big sign on his badge.

The event was, in my opinion, huge. I think there were close to 1000 people there. If there weren't, it looked like it because it was SRO. The VASST brass did a great job of organizing people, places, and things.

Although 85% of NAB does not currently apply to anything I do, I hope to go back next year and delve deeper into the Post Production Workshops.

<edit> spelling & clarity
GlennChan wrote on 4/21/2007, 12:06 AM
Ack David, sorry to disappoint you. I don't remember you asking me 4 times... but next year I promise you I will show some moves for you. I did a little dancing but that was after nearly everyone left.

It was great meeting all the other people on these forums and others. The food was great... I was all over those salmon appetizer thingamabobbers.

Spot's daughter Amanda was taking some pictures... hopefully they will start surfacing.
vicmilt wrote on 4/21/2007, 12:26 PM
The party was totally "bitchen" (old west coast slang for most excellent)
Spot and Mannie gave their usual intro speeches and they were just the right length, articulate and informative.
There was this super writer/director Steve Oedekerk who pulled himself from the bottom to the tippy top of the industry and still uses Vegas!! Very funny dude.
Then they screened a ten minute collage of HiDef footage from various venues: Incredible stuff from Spot - skydiving footage supreme ( you gotta see this stuff ) over the Grand Canyon, a couple 'o feature clips and some high def stuff from the new documentary I'm currently shooting.
The food was quite good, the bar was FREE (to a large selected group), there were dozens of major "high flyers" and yes...
Glenn Chan DID spin and twirl like a street-wise dervish. I personally witnessed it happening.

Re: my new movie, "Director/Cameraman" - I'm proud to admit that it was not only the best selling DVD at NAB2007 - it was the best-selling DVD in NAB history. We sold out completely with people fighing over the last few available.

I think many of you will greatly enjoy it - I certainly hope so.

In all, I had a great time - show wise, party wise, product wise and, well - everything.

BTW - David Knight is MUCH younger and better looking than his posts here would lead you to believe - good looking and smart - what a combo.

In fact, I would venture to say that ALL the Vegas fans were particularly attractive, intelligent and fun to boogy with - must be something in the stress-free environment of Vegas vs. "the rest" that makes the difference. If I missed you there, I'm sorry - I tried.

v
farss wrote on 4/21/2007, 4:35 PM
The party was awesome, great to finally meet Victor in the flesh.
I'd add the VASST team and Glenn in particular although we were kind of sorry Glenn didn't do his "dance". Always next year I guess :).

Can't add much else to what Victor has already said.

As for the rest of NAB, first time I think we were there everyday from opening to closing and made some usefull contacts and got good hands on demoes of lots of kit and software that we're interested in.

Great to see Vegas had it's own stand, just wish it was bigger.

Most noticeable comment from one presentation at the party was about the line between video and film production being blurred. Noticed the same thing on the show floor. Many vendors promoting 2K / 4K workflow solutions.


Wish someone had warned us about how COLD Vegas can be, awesome really as on Sunday night it snowed on the mountains around Vegas. Watched a fair bit of PBS in our hotel at night, those guys do a great job, get behind them.

Sorry if this post is a bit jumbled, just got home after very long, very full flight and no sleep.

Bob.

randy-stewart wrote on 4/21/2007, 5:14 PM
Bob, et. al.,

Great to see you again. Yes the party was very huge, about 3 times the size of last year and much more going on with announcements, big give-aways (including a $5,000 work station), entertainment (music, slight of hand, magicians), and the best video clips I've seen. Highlights were Spot's clips of the champion aerial sky-dive team over and in the Grand Canyon in HD, Victor Milt's Florida Cowboy's new footage, and the comedy of Steve Odekerk's clips. Everyone seemed to have a good time and most everyone stayed through the whole program. It was definitely up-scale from last year. About the only down side was everyone having to wait a little longer to get in due to the amount of room configuration that had to be done after the last training sessions. Many thanks to the army of helpers who volunteered to stuff the Artbeat grab-bags and set up about 600-700 chairs.

As for the rest of the NAB show, it was huge as usual. Highlights for me were the VASST booth and the Sony Creative Software display. The VASST booth was manned by Dave, Glenn, Amanda, Tony, Matt and occasionally Spot and Mannie. I didn't have much time to explore the floor as keeping the VASST products in the two NAB stores was a real challenge. Couldn't get the product stocked fast enough. As Victor mentioned in another post, Light It Right and Director Camerman were very hot as were all of the VASST titles and it was fun to watch people grab and go. Needless to say, I had a great time. I'll post some pictures later.

Many thanks to Spot, Mannie and the VASST team for allowing me to help out. Working with these Pro's was certainly a highlight for me. Hope to get the opportunity to do it again next year.

Randy
John_Cline wrote on 4/21/2007, 8:41 PM
I have a slightly different take on the Vegas party... Overall, I thought it was well produced and I enjoyed myself for the most part. Steve Odekerk was amusing, as were his clips, I'm not sure why Studio Monthly Magazine Editor-in-Chief, Beth Marchant was there. She talked about herself and her magazine, but it really didn't have anything to do with Vegas or any of the other SCS software. Perhaps her message, whatever it was, was lost on me. The videos were good, particularly Vic Milt's Florida Cowboys footage. I liked Fred Tepper's (FWTEP here on the forum) stuff, too. The technology preview of the 64-bit Vegas was pretty exciting in its implications for Vegas' future.

Yes, there were a lot of people there, about 10-15% of whom were obviously just there for the drinks and food and had no real interest in Vegas. They stood by the bar in back throughout the entire presentation and had themselves a loud, racous party. My brother and I were sitting about 2/3 of the way back in the room and their continuous racket made it difficult for us to enjoy the show, much less hear it. They only shut up when they started handing out the raffle prizes. It appeared that one of these party animals won the PlayStation 3.

Unfortunately, I didn't end up meeting nearly all the members of this forum that were there. Maybe next year we should figure out somewhere to meet each other outside of the Vegas party, sort of a brief Vegas forum specific get-together.

John
fwtep wrote on 4/21/2007, 10:35 PM
It was a pretty fun evening. The highlight was the speech by Beth Merchant from Studio Magazine. I wish that could have gone on forever. Oh wait, it did. :-) (It's actually a good magazine though.)

The big announcement, 64bit Vegas was nice, but I wish some mention would have been made of other changes, such as bit depth. Any comments about new stuff would have been welcome. Yes, I know it's not even close to beta yet, but it would have been nice if there was some indication of what they were reaching for besides 64bit. Hopefully the speed and headroom that 64bit affords will let Vegas finally break through to higher bit depth video.

It's funny that over the years Vegas has stayed away from any kind of hardware requirement (such as not working with GPUs) and now, while it's not exactly a hardware thing, they're making the one requirement that I'm least likely to be willing to commit to. Upgrade my graphics card or CPU or RAM, or something? No problem, I'd do it. But change to a 64 bit OS? Not too likely until more of the software (and drivers) I use run natively on it. It's just too much effort to go through for one piece of software. On the other hand, if I do another film and put together a system just for editing maybe it would be worth it. Hmmm... much to think about.

The biggest bummer of the evening for me was that I didn't have any time at the end to chat. I got to talk to Spot for a few minutes, and I'd met and spoken to John Cline in line, but that was all I met. I got in from Los Angeles at 5:30pm and went straight to the party, and since the party started late, I had to rush out only a few minutes after it ended and literally run for a cab to get to the airport for a 10pm flight. What really sucked was that the flight was delayed for 45 minutes, so I COULD have stayed and met more people. Oh well, there's always next year. It was at least nice finally meeting John and Spot. I didn't even get a chance to talk to Steve O. whom I've worked with a few times over the past several years.

Fred

PS: Thanks to the folks at VASST and Sony and AMD and Artbeats, etc. for putting on a good show!