I just got back from NAB and, after a day of rest, I'd like to share my thoughts on the whole show.

The show itself was huge. Obviously with 1500 exhibitors, you're going to have near chaos but it was manageable. Most of the video-related goods were in the central and south halls of the LV Convention Center. The only hall I didn't get a chance to go to was the North hall with the radio equipment, which is no surprise considering that covering an entire hall floor level in a day makes everything from the waist down hurt like hell. I only went for three of the four days of exhibits, but I found what I thought I needed to find.

The number of technologies on display on the floor were phenomenal. Being focused on the lower end of video editing workflow integration, some of the goods there were totally out of reach for anyone not in a large company. Some of these included SGI-based Discreet boxes, 2k editors like Da Vinci, high-end SAN storage goods, and the semiconductor products that underlie these products. There were companies showing off switchers, lighting, camera goods, cameras, (tons of) SDI switches/distamps, and innumerable NLEs of various shapes, sizes and forms. Basically, you had everything at this show you needed to create your own tv network, tv station, or production company.

There were a few recurring themes at the show that weren't necessarily apparent. They were as follows:

Media Management -

For as much as people complain about it here, it's still a significant issue even in the professional and broadcast space. There were several companies attempting to deal with this, but I have yet to see end-to-end media management for both production footage and stock footage. I kept telling folks that my clients would like a solution where their individual media is fully cataloged and indexed not only on content, but also on the licensing terms attached to it. Yes, there were some very slight incremental improvements like Premiere Pro's source media collation feature, but nothing on the scope that I was hoping for.

In fact, I raised some eyebrows at a couple of booths when I mentioned what I thought would be a great system for dealing with media licensing. Although their focus was on broadcast and network production media licensing and tracking, they were interested in talking to me about media management for independent content producers like many of the folks on this forum are. The overview I gave them was that a project should be initially defined by the target distribution audience, have fully indexed and cataloged media that can be included that's tagged with its license terms, and then based on the target distribution audience that the license scheme and costs be collated into a "super cue sheet." This is where all of the media in the project is either already covered by licensing or requires additional information of the copyright holder.

On the professional side they are moving towards this model, but on the lower-end NLE side it's still a bit lacking. Between licensing and cataloging, I was a bit disappointed yet hopeful that solutions will be developed in the next year. In fact, one of the most fascinating products on the floor was from Harris, where their broadcast equipment could actually do image and voice recognition of on-air material and tie that into a copyright database for license management. Extremely fascinating technology but, unfortunately, nothing that we'll see any time soon.

Media Archival -

Another one of my perpetual pet peeves is the lack of true archival media. Large tv stations have the luxury of tape robots that can be programmed to rotate and duplicate stock periodically, but many of the folks here have no such luxury. Whether it's miniDV tapes or DVDs, there was no significant presence by the media companies to address this very issue.

To their credit, both Maxell and TDK were on the show floor, but I was disappointed to see that nobody else was (or maybe I was just too tired to notice). I discussed the issues of optical and tape media longevity and the need for specific marketing of technologies, and the representatives from both companies agreed. I was even almost invited to negotiate on their behalf, though I merely recommended that their distributors be educated and actively promote high-quality high-longevity media. On that note, TDK now manufactures an "armored" DVD with UV-resistance that you can scratch with steel wool on the writing surface and basically have no issues. For media used daily, this will be a great product.

Media Online Storage -

There were a lot of companies showing their new hardware and software solutions for online media storage. The majority of these choices are for television stations and very large media houses. For independent content producers and smaller operations, there aren't as many choices. What's out there, however, is pretty interesting.

HUGE Systems has some new products that deliver multiple streams of DV or uncompressed over either Fiber Channel or Gigabit Ethernet. Medea also has similar products, and was across the aisle from HUGE. All of their solutions are in the $5k and up range depending on what amount of online storage you need. To take advantage of these storage solutions, you'll probably need a good workstation-class motherboard with PCI-X to handle the bandwidth needs of a Fiber Channel or Gigabit Ethernet adapter and still have enough left over for system I/O. They are available today depending on what you need.

In general, there is a trend to separate and treat the storage remotely from the editing box. Depending on the size of the producer and the content being created, this is only a good thing. With redundancy, hot swapping and special media management features, some of the new technologies will proliferate down to the lower end of the market within a couple of years. I personally can't wait to see what's out next year.

Compressed High Definition Formats/CODECs -

Lots of companies had some flavor of HD CODEC and DI format on display. The two major HD formats on display were HDV (a long-GOP IBP-frame MPEG-2-based compression at the same data rate as standard definition DV), and DVCPRO HD (an I-frame only compression scheme virtually identical to existing DV but roughly 4x the datarate).

There wree more editing solutions on the HDV side but, frankly, I'm nervous about the whole long-GOP MPEG-2 editing idea. Part of the advantage of DV was that each frame in the video was individually compressed which naturally lead to very minimal generational loss. One fellow I talked to at the Omneon booth who also writes for DV magazine is in agreement with me in saying that DVCPRO HD is probably going to be the superior CODEC. I also ended up in a somewhat-friendly argument with the Pinnacle folks about just this issue, and they were mostly clueless to this issue. Yes, it's easy to display multiple HDV streams, but what about light compositing of video sources, titles, and other effects?

Probably the most interesting technology in dealing with HD formats that I witnessed is the Cineform Prospect HD solution. The lower-end NLEs will finally have a hardware (HD-SDI) and software (digital intermediate HD CODEC) based solution. Yes, this does also include Vegas, though the HD-SDI card is being very quietly licensed from Mac-centric AJA. Apparently, in talking to the Aurora folks they're also willing to take on a developer who'll do the driver development and support of existing Aurora cards on the PC side. I also talked to the Bluefish 444 folks about Vegas HD support, and I'm not sure if they actually did get a chance to talk to Sony.

Ultimately, the difference is what will manifest itself in terms of mass-market uptake. Given the support of HDV on the show floor, I have to say that HDV will probably come out the winner in this regard because of its backwards compatibility with miniDV/DV hardware and overall support. For most editors, however, this is going to create some quality issues. I think a lot of this is going to have to be mitigated by clever management of source footage, because I don't see too many producers being able to deal with the generational loss effectively. I'd really like to see some options in terms of cameras and NLEs supporting the DVCPRO HD CODEC natively, because the data rates are still very manageable in terms of most producers' workflows. And yes, I hope Vegas also includes support for DVCPRO HD in the future.

On a final note, there were no cameras from Sony or Matsushita on display that were working with either HDV or DVCPRO HD on the low end of the scale, and the typical entry point for these cameras was around $4000. Lots of Varicam, HDCAM, XDCAM, and other high-end variants. I'm guessing it'll be at least a year before we really see these cameras proliferating into the hands of the smaller independent content producers in any reasonable quantity. While JVC has these cameras now, their feature set and quality leave a lot to be desired in my opinion.

NLEs -

We come to the part of the program that you've all been waiting for. There were lots of new NLE apps out there. Premiere Pro 1.5, Pinnacle Liquid HD, Final Cut Pro 4.1, Vegas 5, Edius 2 and a number of others were out there. They all had the familiar setup that most NLEs have, centered around the timeline. From that perspective, there were subtle but important interface enhancements as well as new capabilities. Most of the NLEs out on the floor were being demonstrated with some sort of HD technology, with or without DI. Lots of exhibitors had classrooms for feature overviews, including Sony, Apple and Discreet. None had the charm of the flashing blue Vegas 5 tags that were being given away, however.

The one thing that I will say about promotion at the show is that Apple had everyone on the show floor beat in terms of its presence. The overall impression I got was that they were the ubiquitous NLE on display. It was also hard to miss the 100 ft. tall banner on the south side of the Las Vegas Conference Center that said "Final Cut Pro HD." The irony is that there were many NLEs that did HD including Vegas 5, but none were as well promoted as FCP was or were in as many booths. I wish there was a bit of a perceptual change, because going to NAB you'd think that FCP HD was the proverbial second coming in NLEs (the first being, of course, Newtek's Video Toaster). It's unfortunate and will probably only reinforce the pseudo-omnipresent snobbishness of the FCP fanatics, but for those willing to look there were non-Apple solutions on the floor. I'd love to see a Vegas 6 banner up at NAB next year touting HD in the same way that Apple did, as well as working with companies demoing supporting technologies with Vegas. That would've generated considerable interest in my opinion and created a bit more balance at the show.

Despite all that was new, I don't think there was anything that spectacularly groundbreaking in NLE technologies. Avid Mojo DNA has been out since last year, so that wasn't particularly new though it was interesting to actually see it in action. I talked to Gennum about their new 2D image processors that handle everything in the HD space, and they apparently do realtime hardware-accelerated 2D scaling, color correction, deinterlacing and a number of other functions. I also talked to Nvidia about their new 3D processor line (GeForce FX6800), and they had a monster showing with their new HD-SDI card with genlock output. I know Canopus and Matrox had their new accelerated HD technologies, but it wasn't anything significantly different than the other folks were showing on any number of different software and hardware platforms. I did, however, mention to the Nvidia folks that they should be looking into integrating 2D and 3D acceleration along with utilizing the 3D GPU for acceleration of rendering. If some of these companies get their heads together, they could provide some spectacular hardware acceleration for HD and SD video effects. Sadly, nobody had realtime Gaussian blur a la Media 100 844/X but I was told it's being worked on by some of these companies. As I also mentioned above, media management is still a bit further off from what it could be in the NLE space. As a small side note, I did see almost all the NLEs using large plasma and LCD screens with DVI, and this may become another aspect of workflow enhancement to consider.

Specifically with regards to Vegas 5 and DVD Architect 2, I was impressed by the new capabilities and features of the software. The Mackie control surface demo was interesting, and all of the software there had a great showing. I was fortunate enough to go to the Monday night social where they offered a hosted bar and all-you-can-eat rack of lamb - something that made my relatives drool profusely upon being told of it. I met lots of folks from the forum including Spot and his wife, riredale, beerandchips, the original SoFo team, and quite a few others that my head can't wrap itself around because of my fatigue at the time. Suffice it to say that there was a proud showing for the Sony side and that things will get better. In fact, riredale and I even suggested some enhancements to this forum to Sony VP David Chaimson, so we'll see if they get implemented. I also went to the VASST breakfast on Wednesday morning as well as a few other events not related to this forum, and it was invariably a good time and very informative at all of the events.

After three or four solid days of walking and talking, kissing babies and shaking hands, giving and receiving business cards, it was time to call it a conference. If there's one thing I learned, only the diligent will pass muster and discover the real gems at the show. Passing underneath all of the hoopla and penetrating through it, one gets a real sense of how big this industry is and how the traditional lines of production technology are slowly being blurred. Paradigms are slowly but surely shifting. Perhaps in a decade or two we'll be talking about 2k and 4k editing, and that film may even go the way of the dodo if the imaging technologies fall into place. I highly recommend that you go if you get the opportunity if you didn't do so this year. The way people connected at that show was phenomenal, and the exchange of information and business opportunities was second to none if you're involved in any sort of video or audio content creation. The only problem now is waiting another year to see what will really crop up.