NEWS
MOST DEF
High Definition Definitely Arrives at NAB 2005
by Patrick Gregston
 photo by Tomm Carroll |
The National Association of Broad-casters (NAB) 2005 trade show brought more than 120,000 visitors over a week of conferences and four days of exhibitions to the Las Vegas Convention Center this past April. This year’s overall theme could be the remarkable turning of high-definition (HD) acquisition and post-production into commodity products at near consumer prices before there even exists a broad professional marketplace for HD content.
With cameras dropping below $4,000, 24P cameras available for under $7,000 and many other tools making it possible to build an uncompressed HD edit tool kit for under $30,000, HD has become a full range of production tools from consumer to professional in less time than it took to establish “C” format videotape as the post standard just 20 years ago. It was also a show where a new high ground––4K–– showed a number of new products, including multiple projectors, storage and monitors, thus enabling a new exclusive territory for professionals.
The Vendors
You many not have noticed (since you’re busy shoveling the zeros and
ones that make digital post-production so efficient) but the influence of
the marketplace we work in has become one almost solely of marketing. Every
post-production vendor has a feature film poster indicating that its tools
or services played a part in the production, and several actually had testimonials
or representations of the people who had used those tools. But with few exceptions,
the development of tools is not being driven by the users, but rather by larger
market trends.
Apple
In a show about show business, the only company applying show techniques to its presentations was Apple, and this year’s NAB featured the first set of products built to take advantage of the 64-bit processing of the G5 platform. Tiger, the new operating system for Macintosh, adds 200 new features, including the new QuickTime 7, which sets up HD and other new media applications. QuickTime 7 supports H.264, the next generation MPEG open standard that scales video from cell phone-quality all the way up to HD.
Apple then rolled out a succession of products designed to make high-quality post work more integrated and further bring the Final Cut Pro (FCP) product up to professional status. Part of the new Final Cut Studio (see story, page 29), FCP 5 now supports many more formats in addition to DV, including uncompressed SD, IMX, native HDV and DVCPro HD, some of six real-time HD formats. Multiple-camera editing (up to 128 linked sources with 16 visible simultaneously) and 24 audio track input and output were the biggest elements added to the FCP bullet list.
Most interesting was the addition of a sound editing product, SoundTrack Pro, which promises the tightest integration between picture and sound editing yet. While the two functions can be totally separate, it is also possible to go from the picture editing application into the sound application, manipulate and layer a sound and return to the picture application with that manipulated sound as a single sound clip. Apple also had members of TV’s Scrubs editorial team in their presentation demonstrating the use of video chat as a conferencing tool.
As always, price announcements at Apple’s event brought cheers from the crowd as the full suite of desktop production tools will sell for under $1,600 with upgrade packages for existing customers even lower.
Avid
 photo by Tomm Carroll |
The erosion of the Hollywood influence on tools was nowhere more apparent than at the Avid event and booth, where one had to hunt for film and 24-frame capability. The big news at Avid was its acquisition of Pinnacle. This purchase brings a number of broadcast tools into Avid that fit well with the corporation’s principal business today: digital broadcast conversions of terrestrial broadcast stations. In addition, Pinnacle brings a number of consumer-level products into Avid. How Avid deals with these products remains to be seen. Pinnacle’s sale of Nuendo sound editing applications in advance of the Avid transaction indicates that Avid intends to keep these elements alive.
Digidesign showed larger dedicated mixing consoles, as the migration
from software-only sound manipulation evolves back toward the tools
that ProTools originally supplanted. For creative editing, Avid’s
main news was about bringing HD to the Nitris platform and 2.1 software
for its Media Composer Adrenaline HD system, which delivers support
for tapeless workflow with support for Sony’s XDCAM optical
disc recordings and Panasonic’s P2 storage. Other developments
included a news editing application, Avid News Instinct, designed
to make it possible for the reporter to integrate and edit video with
text. Apparently, Avid has progressed to the point where elimination
of the editor is now a feature of its applications.
Lightworks
 photo by Tomm Carroll |
This year’s show brought still another resurrection of the Lightworks picture editing tool. Bought just after last year’s NAB by the UK-based Gee Broad-cast, the current Touch editing tool is instantly familiar to any Lightworks user, while having totally up-to-date computing, storage and effects capabilities. While modest in its presentation, Lightworks demonstrated several unique capabilities, including instant conforms of HD files to offline edits.
4K
While Sony has many product lines including the Xpri editor––which
continues to mature but remains without an offline component––the
most interesting item with the famous four letter word on it was the SXRD
4K Digital Cinema Projector. The infrastructure required to support 4K exhibition
continues to be incomplete, as is the production pipeline. Deliveries of this
projector, combined with SGI’s Prism server, means a full 4K theatre
solution will be available later this year. Combined with Autodesk’s
Toxic asset management, Globalstor Data’s new Extreme-Stor 4K server
and Ecinema’s DCM23 reference monitor, 4K is showing signs of establishing
a new high-cost, high-tech high ground for professionals.
While currently expected to be limited to theatrical markets, this format sets new challenges to every post-production environment. Standard setting claims reached a new plateau with the DCM23. A TFT LCD-based monitor designed for HD and digital cinema color grading and on-set reference viewing, the DCM23 system suggests what could be a viewing monitor landmark: an implied guarantee that any two DCM23 systems will match, whatever their geographic location or application.
Storage
Where to put and how to access all these big files remains a primary cost
and logistics driver for file-based all-digital post-production. With 2K and
4K systems becoming part of the feature post workflow, geometric increases
in bandwidth and storage are just part of the story. How to find the right
file inside the closed black filing cabinet called a hard drive is as critical
an issue to the post facility of today. Open standards, multiple operating
systems, security and redundancy were part of every vendor’s pitch.
Medea, Rorke, Focus and EditShare were just some of the many vendors showing
alternatives to the Unity or XSAN solutions.
Summary
NAB 2005 was a big show, and as much as it stays the same, there is a great
deal of change. Products come and go, margins drop, and manufacturers still
do research and development and build stuff without asking who would buy this,
and how. Confidence, however, showed up this year. While the aisles weren’t
terribly overcrowded outside the Avid/Apple corridor, the arrival of high-definition
equipment at all price points meant people had the confidence to buy HD production
gear of some flavor. That made manufacturers generally content with their
investment in mounting the Vegas effort.
While there are still lots of reasons to go to NAB, the possibility of seeing Hollywood craft being served is retreating with the desert surrounding the city of Las Vegas.
Patrick Gregston is an assistant editor member of the Guild and serves on this magazine’s Editorial Policy Committee.
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