NEWS
NAB 07 Report:
Maintaining Relevance In the Face of Changing Technology
by Patrick Gregston photos by Pam Malouf
 Avid's booth. |
This year, over 108,000 attendees from 108 countries came to Las Vegas for the National Association of Broadcasters annual event to hear experts, cruise the aisles and get close to the latest in cameras, production and broadcast gear, as well as applications related to the creation and delivery of radio and motion pictures. As has been the trend for over a decade, broadcasting is merely the anchor for a trade show that draws a worldwide attendance for a set of sessions that cover far more territory than the million or so square feet of the vendor exhibits that most folks think of as the NAB.
This year’s edition brought both ideas and technology to bear on the disruptive combination of Internet distribution and what has been coyly termed “user-generated content.” As frankly asked in one of the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) conference descriptions, “What do professionals need to do to maintain their relevance?” Both articulating and demonstrating the problem, one member of a news director panel blogged just before the show, “Imagine an early 20th century convention of the whale oil industry. In the hall outside the meeting rooms sits the latest in blubber reduction technology, newfangled harpoonery, foul weather gear and drowning insurance salesmen. Who’s best suited to talk to the group about electricity–– someone from the Edison crowd or the research team representing the whale oil industry?”
While it is a stretch to think that broadcasting faces the same precipitous technology shift as the whale oil industry, broadcast ad revenue and viewership are flat, while online advertising revenue–– just a small fraction of broadcast’s––is a steep angle upward.
The question isn’t so much whether news and entertainment will remain relevant, as how do current businesses and practicing professionals adapt to the changing conditions? Business likes upward inclines and that brings us to the continuing efforts of our employers to secure the future audience.
 Apple's booth. |
For the Hollywood distributors, once again the Digital Cinema Summit (produced on the weekend preceding the exhibits) expressed the latest issues for the feature theatrical community and the increasingly powerful but complex digital nonlinear production and distribution pipeline. Compared to last year’s program, where James Cameron led a high-profile call to resurrect the theatrical experience on the basis of 3-D exhibition, this year’s sessions were far more down in the trenches and dealt with the devils in the details of just how the business is going to deliver to that market or other emerging markets. In virtually every session or panel, the message was that our digital tools and process nuts and bolts are more productized than ever––but nowhere near standardized. Whether originating on film––or any of the plethoras of camera platforms and formats (are you ready for 4K?)––the clear lesson is that our experience in the new tools and pipelines is still shallow.
Professional prudence means pre-production planning and testing anything that one hasn’t actually already done. One case study session dealt with the interesting parallel productions of the successful sword and sandals epic 300 as both a film and console game at the same time. While these were produced for a day-and-date release, none of the elements was shared. Also a significant insight was the enduring question of how to best archive a highly post-produced visual effects show. The panelists all concluded that it was better answered by someone else! In the words of one industry veteran, “Making a feature film 120 frames at a time is not scaling well.”
This year’s show also provided several examples of the challenges of digital exhibition, as the projection quality in the conference room itself was questioned by panelists. The ASC Technical Committee presented a detailed list of the areas of concern to all professionals responsible for the image in motion pictures. “It isn’t that these problems aren’t known, or that there aren’t efforts to address them, but that development lags implementation,” said Curtis Clark, ASC committee chair.
One could see the state of that development out on the exhibit floor. The impossibility of evaluating products in the context of the show was exacerbated by the perennial problem of technology companies failing to have any sense of how to put on a show. Credit the folks at Apple––who last year had so little to announce that they skipped their annual Sunday morning revival meeting––with having the best presentation. In announcing several new product updates, Apple was entertaining, tight and to the point (see accompanying sidebar).
 Adobe's booth. |
Other companies had the usual demonstrations showing how everything can be done faster simpler and with amazing sparkle––if only one learns that application and applies the nearly proprietary workflows of that vendor. Red, the ambitious effort of Oakley brand founder Jim Janard to build a 4K camera from scratch, had a remarkably well-produced short by Peter Jackson (shot just two weeks before NAB) to demonstrate the viability of its vision. Red is expected to deliver its first-ever products sometime later this year.
Probably the clearest challenge of technology to the question of professionals’ relevance in the changing landscape of creative advancements was the addition of the “Color” application to Apple’s Final Cut Suite. This powerful and professionally configured color correction tool is a major upgrade to color grading in the Apple toolkit, and is now included with no price increase.
Almost simultaneous with the announcement were lively threads on telecine, post and other mail lists arguing the issues presented by a “free” professional tool, and how this impacts the workplace, earning potential, etc. Like writers in the face of word processors––and editors when cheap desktop tools made it possible for producers to think that they can edit themselves on their dining room tables––when a manufacturer uses dramatic price-to-performance to distinguish its products, the high-end professional must redefine his/her value and position in skills rather than the cost of the tools.
Broadcasting has become a matter of having an encoder and roll-your-own server. You still can’t have enough memory, be it RAM or hard drives. Whether one is promoting a software, computer or appliance solution, the proliferation of ways to make and share video continues to be overwhelming, demanding and chaotic. Any element that becomes well established is almost instantly a commodity with competitive pricing and no standards for inter-operability. GRID computing, which offers one way to deal with the geometric increase in storage and computing required to step from HD to 2K and then again to 4K, had several vendors just learning the vocabulary of broadcast and post-production engineers.
While the question of maintaining relevance was posed in response to the explosion of citizen journalism posing a challenge to traditional news, the parallel issue was present for all production and distribution folks. After all, YouTube’s selling price of $1.5 billion isn’t based upon the availability of the motion pictures that Guild members produce, but the incredibly varied content posted by individuals and independent producers of all ages.
As this year’s NAB conferences and exhibition demonstrates, the challenges from technology––and the power it puts into the hands of many forces––are many. With the explosion of distribution channels and low-cost, high-quality tools for production, the questions of what establishes and maintains our value and will preserve it for the future is worthy of our consideration.
Patrick Gregston is a former Board member and occasional contributor to this magazine. He is currently producing a documentary on climate change.
Avid
The highlight of the Avid presentation was particularly poignant for any of
you who’d ever worked on the Ediflex. The ScriptSync feature has now
added a phonetic recognition unit that correlates the audio signal to the
script, automating the logging function that used to require real-time marking
on each take (see “Tech Tips,” page 50). The demonstration analyzed
and marked about 40 minutes of dailies for a sequence in less than 30 seconds!
Other significant additions included further codecs for options in portability of projects, and tighter integration between ProTools and Composer applications. Also presented were open-system initiatives with over 50 third parties for plug-ins and storage to further flexibility in how Avid systems are configured. More interesting was the clear demonstration by Avid leadership of the value of our market users to its ability to maintain a competitive advantage with professional users. The new head of Video, Graham Sharp, answered questions about the future by asking questions of this representative about how to be closer to our membership and what could be the next significant advance in editorial applications.
The acceptance of the Interplay application is demonstrated by over 150 installations in a variety of production environments. Avid expects to build on this application by further extensions integrating more aspects of production and post, leveraging its expertise in nonlinear editing into the nonlinear nature of digital production. Look for further opportunities to interact with Avid design and technical teams through Guild-related events and forums.
Apple
Apple returned this year to stage its Sunday morning-cum-press conference,
announcing Final Cut Suite 2. Adding codecs that support HD at SD data rates,
a powerful new color correction application (“Color”), improvements
to its Motion graphics package and refinements to Final Cut Pro 6 (inter-format
editing within the timeline), Apple continued to lead the drive to all-in-one
post applications packages at dramatically lower pricing.
The relevance of this to professional applications was illustrated by the members of the audience sitting on either side of me at the presentation. On my right was a manager of a German broadcast operation with 140 editorial desks. As he put it, the cost advantage of Apple products was secondary to the comfort level of his existing employees and the existing freelance labor supply on which his operations depend. Combined with his local Apple distributors support network (“If they can’t get Apple on the phone, where does that put me?”), the main value of the Apple offering was in leveraging down his Avid distributor. On my left was an industrial producer from Pittsburgh. His four-person production company will convert that single-seat all-in-one productivity into about $40,000 additional net by being able to do in-house completion tasks that previously required going to a post house.
Apple also introduced a new server and stated clearly its intent to move into broadcast news operations integration, using Los Angeles channel 9 as its initial test bed.
Adobe
Adobe continues to advance its all-in-one post applications, although this
year the most interesting announcement was the introduction of a new player
to enable Flash viewing without a browser. This development again emphasized
the escalating fight for the online motion picture viewing market. Given the
progress made in past years toward making Premiere a viable interoperable
tool choice, this year’s offering was a disappointment.
Sony
Of interest in the post applications market was Sony Creative Software, whose
growth in market share was celebrated with a rather simple traditional gathering
of the faithful. A small unit of 90 people based in the US, Sony Creative
Software’s user appreciation celebration was reminiscent of the meetings
of early Final Cut Pro or Premiere user groups.
Featured speaker Steve Oedekirk demonstrated a combination of geek capability and humor distinctively missing from the rest of the show, and showed several productions that he has on air using the Vegas application. He even made a relevant joke about the 8-gigabyte RAM available in the latest AMD 64-bit processors. Producing sophisticated products with sophisticated yet sophomoric humor, Oedekerk evidenced the realization of democratized capability promised by low-cost, high-powered digital tools. The overall sense of the event was that this small unit of Sony is successfully building a loyal and powerful constituency in comprehensive production software applications.
Significantly showing the disconnected corporate enterprise that Sony appears to be, the hardware partner was AMD, and the only Sony computer on view was the one used for PowerPoint presentations by the speakers.
[ return to top ]