By Patrick Gregston

This year’s NAB convention, held April 17-22 in Las Vegas, was notable for a number of shifts in content and character. Taking place after a record first quarter in advertising revenues for broadcasting, the optimism of broadcasters was guardedly shared by the many manufacturers on the exhibit floor. Attendance of 97,544, was up from last year. Aisles were more crowded, especially around the Avid and Apple islands.

Oprah Winfrey receives NAB Distinguished Service Award

With new conferences focused on post production and something titled “worship technology” joining the usual meetings, there was also the third Digital Cinema Summit. With all the disruptions that technological change has wrought, the future seemed to be getting further away. This year, it can be said with some reservations that the industry is once again advancing.

Based on the opening event, in which Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina was the keynote speaker, and Oprah Winfrey, the recipient of the NAB Distinguished Service Award, the future is now more dependent on character than capability. Before a crowd that had more women than any previous NAB or industry event in this writer’s recollection, both Fiorina and Winfrey highlighted a theme that emphasized what we choose to do has more significance than what we can do.

“I think the capabilities of this age and this industry are quickly being defined,” Fiorina stated. “But the character of this age - the character that all of you are in a position of
deciding - has not been defined. That is the challenge before us today.”

Oprah Winfrey, in accepting her award, put it this way: “Martin Luther King said ‘not everybody can be famous, but everybody can be great and greatness is determined by service.’ My prayer, since I was a young girl who saw Sidney Portier getting an Academy Award and wondering if I could do that, has always been: ‘Lord use me.’ ”

While that may have been Oprah’s prayer, it was the sales pitch of the thousands of exhibitors on the floor of the world’s largest production-related event. This year, the themes on the exhibit floor were HD, as in High Definition, and data-based methods.

With HD now a part of every vendor’s offering, this new format for production and distribution is seeing dramatic cost reductions. This is occurring even before significant penetration into any distribution channels. A good example of this is Apple’s Final Cut Pro HD, being offered at $999.

Data-based methods were represented by major IT industry companies, such as HP, IBM and Cisco, bringing the methodologies applied to data to production and broadcast. “Create, Manage, Distribute” or slight variations, were the mantras of companies as diverse as Apple, Ascent Media and Grass Valley.

Significantly, for those in post, was how editing was presented in the “Create, Manage, Distribute” model. Indeed, this year’s NAB showed the tip of an emerging trend as all manner of products and services embrace editing as central to the overall process. Apple’s data model variation, which is “Make Manage Move,” opened the only press event
worthy of being called “a show” by stating, “It all starts with editing,” which surely surprised the writers and cinematographers present.

Other manufacturers bringing editing functionality to their applications, included color correction, compositing and data management.

While there was a lack of consensus on just how the production industry will utilize data models, there was total agreement among those present on the need for tremendous amounts of storage.

Many levels of manufacturers, integrators, developers and specialists were on the show floor. The scope and scale of these exhibitors went from Cisco to small veterans, such as CommandSoft (part of the TranSoft team) and miniscule newbies, such as EditShare. The latter grew out of a filmmaker’s own frustration with the cost and capability of Avid collaboration solutions. Just last October, producer Andy Lieberman started
building his own solution to produce his films, distributed by Discovery. Like
several other specialists, his alternative to Unity or LANshare drew many shoppers looking to find a lower cost solution.

Other significant trends on the floor were transparency and interoperability. These two terms for making it possible to use tools from different vendors easily have been kicked around on the floor and in marketing materials for several years.

This NAB marked a shift to having employees of one company show up at another company’s booth to make presentations. While the capability to actually have transparent interoperability may not have arrived, clearly the cooperation between toolmakers has reached a higher level.

At the end of three and half days, there were many tired feet and dry scratchy throats. The conclusion to be drawn from the show was stated most clearly at the opening. As Carly Fiorina stated, “The challenges are to character, not capability.” At least this year’s show gave evidence that in many areas, the character to address difficult issues is asserting itself.

Manufacturers Debut Innovative Products for Post Community

For the post production segment of the industry, this year’s NAB gave further
evidence that post is both the eye of the needle and the leverage point for the increasingly digital production and distribution elements.

As the first to be both digital and nonlinear, post production was either the starting point or the destination for many exhibitors. Always overwhelming, the exhibits of NAB also had a bewildering quality.

There were HD cameras, with the capability to hand crank (literally); a company calling itself, “Farmer’s Wife” (facility and production management); and, applications that combine script supervisor, DIT and editorial assistant into one.

Then, there was this year’s 3D viewing breakthrough; and the relentless efforts of some to have more blonde babes per square foot. Let me tell you, it wasn’t just the feet that were exhausted.

For our community, the news is mostly evolutionary, since more stuff can be done for less money on a desktop than last year. The addition of HD to almost every editing package means that nearly all editing applications now have a 24FPS capability, and that price performance choice exists in the 24-frame world.

Adobe’s Premier Pro and Leitch’s Velocity deliver both SD and HD
performance at remarkably low costs. BlackMagic, a small company in Australia, showed uncompressed SD video cards under $1,000 and equal value in the HD formats. Especially interesting was their card, which enables using an Apple Cinema display (or any DVI-D based LCD computer monitor) as a HD production monitor. Complete cost for this display solution saves roughly $20,000 compared to a HD CRT monitor.

Apple's Final Cut Pro HD Presentation

While all that was pretty interesting, the most dramatic product introduction was Apple’s Final Cut Pro HD, which adds a DVCPro HD capability to every Mac. This introduction, while cheered by those present, was fairly routine compared to Apple declaring its alliance with several established professional grade vendors.

Grass Valley will be integrating FCP into its news editing installations, while Discreet announced XML support, meaning that edits from FCP can now be read by the Smoke and Inferno systems. Also impressive at the Apple event was Panasonic’s introduction of a portable HD deck that handles multiple format decoding, can down convert to SD and has a firewire connection for direct-to-FCP transfers, all for $25K US. While this deck and the current implementation of HD by Apple are both YUV instead of the higher quality 4-4-4 version available elsewhere, the statement made by this release is clear. Pro is becoming a meaningful word in the name of Apple’s editing product.

Apple also announced Motion, a graphics creation and manipulation tool to be available in August for $299. The demo was the creation of a television news bumper, with a dozen elements, all moving, in about five minutes.

On the same day, Avid announced that it had further tightened its integration and workflow advantages in the professional post production market. In addition, Avid brought HD to its DNA line, as well as dedicated control surfaces for ProTools for small (Command 8) and medium (Icon) hands-on mixing. The many new details on the capabilities would fill the magazine, but this year’s offerings surpassed the usual incremental feature creep. Nothing changed the landscape of 24-frame editing. Pricing on some items was also lowered. FreeDV is still free.

Edirol introduced a novel feature, called “Direct Linear,” which permits the editor to edit a loop sequence in real time repeatedly, making and displaying changes instantly. Mackie showed a replacement for the ubiquitous 1604 VLZ with 1394 (Firewire) connectivity. Discreet added a color correction tool, Lustre. Sony promoted low-cost solutions, Vegas and Sound Forge, as well as the HD system XPRI. BBC Technology presented Colledia, a turnkey asset management system that integrates with post solutions, one of which is Final Cut Pro.

In the area of storage, several firms displayed cost effective alternatives to Unity. Rorke Data, Command Soft, and start-up EditShare, all professed capability to perform the functions at dramatically lower costs than the official Avid solution.

In general, storage, particularly all its variants - SAN, NAS, LAN and WAN among the acronyms (see sidebar Glossary) - was the dominant product segment, both in terms of numbers of vendors and floor space dedicated to it. It was probable that more than a petabyte was in use at the show, but it was impossible to keep count.

The broader outlook revealed that vendors in color correction and DVD authoring, as well as graphics, adding either editing capability or are working to have those functions available in the editing room.

Kodak appeared in a number of places to discuss the Look Management System, a package of applications to enable cinematographers to time the first transfer of their work, so that the first look shows the intended final concept.

This concept - that creative intent can be encoded and carried through a project - means that in the case of color correction, editors will now have information about how the image was intended to look available during editing.

Up to this point, metadata, or data about the data, had been limited to the kinds of information normally kept in Keyes files for motion control or script supervisor notations. While the new Advanced Authoring Format (AAF) was designed to carry far more information through post production than the EDL or cutlist, this trend portends a flood of metadata for which there is currently no plumbing available.

Kodak also announced a Display Manager for the calibration and profiling of monitors. Announced to be distributed through Discreet and Quantel, this product could become applicable in any environment where consistent image display is desired.

A product area targeting post production showed itself to be maturing this year, as there are now several companies offering extensive background and effects elements for purchase. Joining ArtBeats, which has expanded from stock footage and texture plug-ins, and the Digital Juice brand of royalty-free motion graphics, were 12 Inch Design and Post Holes. Sony was selling the Acid line. The quality and amount of turnkey-ready-to-apply elements for creative post work has gone far beyond generic industrial video backgrounds.

Arri D20HD Prototype Display

Elsewhere, among the more remarkable items were several new HD cameras. From the camcorders under $5,000 to unavailable prototypes, there is now a continuous price performance slope that producers can select from to acquire HD images. At the extreme was the Kinnetta, a camera based on film traditions, which permits changing the image sensor. Should one have a set of lenses that fit a 16mm film camera, these can be applied to an appropriately sized and back-focused HD sensor. It works the same for a 35mm camera, and so on. The Kinneta also has the ability to drive shutter speed with a hand crank. Recording to a drive array in a small suitcase, or in a clip-on, film-style magazine for cordless operation, this camera created quite a sensation when presented at the DC camera panel. There were several examples of the Arri D20 HD prototype on the floor, which is expected to be available for use later this year. Looking very similar to Arri’s film cameras, this product also has generated great interest.

NAB Meetings Offer Progress Reports

While the most amount of space at NAB and the attention of the public was
dedicated to the exhibit floor, a significant amount of time at NAB was devoted to an extensive number of conferences.

Long-standing subjects, such as Broadcast Engineering, or Radio and Television Management, were joined this year by Digital Cinema Summit, NAB Post/Production World and the Worship Technology Conference.

In its third year, the Digital Cinema Summit reached several landmarks. The April 17th sessions, presented in association with SMPTE, addressed a number of important issues, including the need to standardize measurements of black-and-white; the introduction of the DCI/ASC Stem test materials; and, a report from the SMPTE DC 28 committee on its progress toward a packaging standard for digital distribution.

The DCI/ASC Stem test materials included a set of silent images acquired through numerous cameras that are intended to provide a standard basis for evaluation of the many workflow and display propositions. From this day alone, real progress toward a digital distribution future was demonstrated.

The program on April 18th was presented in association with the Entertainment Technology Center at USC. Breakthroughs in participation took place in that creative content professionals not only spoke, but had full panels to advance their interests and concerns.

Three years after Steven Poster, past president of the American Society of Cinematographers and a director of photography, suggested to the audience that cinematographers shouldn’t be sharing the dais with camera manufacturers, such a panel was presented. It was entitled, “What Do Cinematographers Need?” The panelists’ consensus was for some form of standards for digital dailies, presence, pay-for-post, mastering, and a way to ensure that their creative work is protected in the final product.

Equally notable was the first seminar involving post production, entitled “The role of the Cutting Room in the New Digital Post Production Process.”

Lamentably, all three of the editors scheduled to appear had to work on the day of the event. However, USC professor and picture editor Norm Hollyn carried the editor’s point of view.

Of all the conferences and events, the calendar of the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) was the one most concerned with issues of content creation. In that shows and show business are at the root of NAB, content creation figures little in either concept or execution of the convention. Short of the most scripted presentations, notably by Apple, much of what was presented lacked production or drama. The BEA, comprised of a large number of college-level media programs, devoted a great deal of its three-day program to content creation, and one of its seminars was even titled, “Producing Producers.”

In addition, there were a number of events, such as the Congressional Breakfast, where members of Congress from the committees charged with technology and broadcasting regulation sparred before an audience that was finishing their scrambled eggs.

FCC's Powell chats with Sam Donaldson

This year’s fourth annual “Breakfast with the Chairman,” featured newsman Sam Donaldson interviewing FCC chairman Michael Powell. Over 1,000 people were in attendance, while Powell explained that the current attention on decency was nothing new.

“The rules that we are enforcing were established in 1926. The current attention is a reflection of the agency responding to the public concerns as evidenced by the mail we receive,” Powell stated. “In 2002, there were 25,000 complaints about this subject. In 2003, we received about 250,000 complaints. This year, we have already had over 500,000.”

Powell emphasized that it is better for broadcasters to control what’s on their airwaves than to have government step in with a mandate. “You do not want the government to write a ‘Red Book’ of what you can say and not say,” stressed the chairman.

Other speakers included Tom Ridge, director of Homeland Security, who lauded broadcasters for their participation in public safety; Senator John McCain (R-AZ); Roger King, head of KingWorld, the distribution company for many syndicated programs, most notably, “OPRAH;” and ABC “Nightline” host Ted Koppel.