NAB99: Video The Look of Things to Come by Patrick Gregston The 1999 edition of the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas once again expanded in attendance, square footage and exhibitors. Beyond the expected fare of cameras, broadcast antennae, monitors and editing systems were products for video on the Internet, and a large representation of products aimed at the industrial, or prosumer, market. But at a show where once-visionary Ted Turner stated, "I am afraid of the future," there were no revolutionary new technologies or products. That's not too surprising. With the current plethora of formats in broadcasting (the FCC table of digital formats includes 18 choices for broadcasters), most manufacturers are unsure of what path to the digital future their customers will follow. Nonetheless, NAB built it and people came. It was not clear what was being bought. Nonlinear Editing Several products did stand out, however, often more for what that system meant than what it might do. A case in point was the Avid Film Composer. At a convention with over 300 nonlinear editing tools on display, the Film Composer is probably the one with which Local 700 members are most familiar. So it was more than just noteworthy that the only Film Composer in the Avid booth was running on Windows NT. Film Composer on NT is very much like Version 7 for the Mac. Basic operation is identical. In the NAB demonstration, the system was very responsive and ran all the latest features without a single crash. The interface design is cleaner. The outlines of the buttons in the Composer window are gone, but icons and functions are unchanged. Much has been made of Avid's move to the NT platform (see the article on page 1, as well as the Guild web site for a lively discussion), but based upon the demo I saw at NAB, users will see little difference. Avid also introduced a new shared storage solution, Avid Unity, which promises larger and faster storage configurations that can be shared in more flexible and user-definable packages than with Avid MediaShare F/C. Unity is currently Ultra SCSI based, but Avid stated that it would be a fibre-channel product in the future. The most remarkable products at the show were at the low and linear end of the spectrum. Play, Inc., producers of the Snappy and the Trinity all-in-one production systems, showed an innovative item called the Pocket Producer. A hardware attachment and application for Palm Pilot PDAs, the Pocket Producer allows the logging of material from any LAN-C or RS-422 controlled deck. With the Pocket Studio version, which fits onto an airline seatback tabletop, a DV player and DV camera can be used as a cuts-only editing system. Pocket Producer sells for $399, with the Studio variant just $499. No more breaks from editing just because you are traveling back from location! DraCo's Casablanca editing system Another eye-catching product was the Casablanca, from a company called DraCo Systems. A black box, turnkey editing system, Casablanca hooks up easily to a television and a VCR. That's all you need to start cutting. A very simple mouse-driven menu on the TV leads to all functions, including rendered effects and titles. Casablanca systems were set out in the DraCo booth for anyone to try. Selling for $5,000, the model I looked at was very easy to operate. I was able to digitize, edit and make a title over my own picture in about five minutes. This was before anyone from the company even spoke to me. Targeted to low-end corporate and educational applications, the picture quality was very good, and the price-performance ratio was the best at the show. With the explosion of formats (Best quote of the show: "All formats are temporary."), a lot of effort has been expended by manufacturers on the DV format, in both high-end consumer and professional formats. One result is that DV editing is now available at very low prices. For instance, at the Apple booth was Final Cut Pro, featuring integration of the same DV channel now found in all higher level Macs. At under $1,000, this system has most of the features of the Avid application many of you are using today. Unfortunately, there is no 24-frame support. However, full-featured nonlinear, real-time, multiple video-stream editing systems with audio, graphics and animation packages are available under $10,000. For instance, the Canopus company makes a card/software post-production package for PCs. You can purchase this product with a Canon camera and a new 400 MHz PC for under $10k. Add to that lighting, grip, scriptwriting and accounting software, and you've got a complete production and post company for about $20,000! Digital Video Transmission One area with a lot of interesting new products was video transmission over the Internet. Wham!Net, a company formed to promote the use of the Internet for moving video images around, had the show's best party favor: a pair of purple sneakers with the company logo (an exclamation point) on the side. Pretty cool when you realize that the company's agenda is the elimination of the widely used and still hard to beat "sneaker net" still favored by most production companies. One of the products in the Wham!Net initiative was Virage. A technology integrated by a number of vendors, Virage is a component of automatic logging and databasing applications for video. Feed video to the program, and a text- or picture-based database is created. For the increasingly complicated task of tracking and cataloging all the elements of a production, Virage promises to make losing that tape or picture element a thing of the past. Telestream's new ClipMail Pro digital media delivery system Two other companies showed tools that were very promising. Telestream, a year-old firm based in Nevada City, California, showed ClipMail Pro, a video/Internet version of the fax machine. With a ClipMail Pro at two locations, video and audio can be easily sent over conventional Internet connections, starting with 56k modems, at qualities up to uncompressed broadcast. The company's claim that "If you can e-mail, you never have to ship a cassette again," appears to be true. The system features a touchscreen menu and includes the hardware to convert a video signal to MPEG-2 files. A handy slide-rule-type calculator was handed out to show the relationship between quality of picture, type of connection and transfer time. Sending a 30-second commercial over an ISDN line at D1 quality, for instance, takes only eight minutes. At $15,000 per station, you'd have to be Fed-Exing a lot of cassettes to begin seeing dollar savings, but if saving time is important, ClipMail Pro may be the way to go. An interesting variation of this same idea comes from another new company, SightPath, which presented the Studio and Appliance systems. Studio is a server, while Appliance supports up to 20 PCs with video from the server across a WAN, including PCs linked via the Internet. A user can view full-screen, full-motion video on their desktop computer. For large companies with internal cassette distribution or video training and communications departments, the Studio-Appliance solution offers immediate cost-effective replacement of duplication and viewing, to say nothing of easier scheduling. What does this mean for companies in the entertainment business? That turnkey tools allowing on-demand viewing of dailies from location, or down the hall, is at hand. Overall, the standout products of this NAB emphasized the lower end of the production spectrum, with the most impressive products being those that offer high performance at a reasonable price. But, like much in the new information economy, items which are given away altogether are sometimes the most valuable. Personally, I thought the most useful products at NAB99 were the freebies handed out at various booths. I picked up a wall chart of every videotape format since 1955 and a glossary of MPEG-2 terms, items I have since added to my reference shelf, alongside the Editors Guild directory and ASC manual.   Patrick Gregston can be reached via e-mail   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 20, No. 3 - May/June1999   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700