NAB 2010, the National Association of Broadcasters convention at the Las Vegas convention center has come and gone, seeing a sizeable increase in numbers with tech enthusiasts, content creators, television and radio broadcasters and manufacturers and retailers attending to the tune of 88,000, with over 1500 members of the news media also in attendance.
It would be impossible to give a comprehensive overview of all the new ideas, ambitions, technologies and concepts presented, but part of the magic in the world’s largest tech and media conference comes from interfacing with others who were there and hearing from them what discoveries they made.
HOT PRODUCTS FROM NAB 2010
Some of our own highlights included the many seminars, tutorials and breakdowns around the new Adobe CS5 Production Premium Suite that becomes available before summer 2010. From a complete 64-bit rewrite of Adobe Premiere, that showed RAW footage from a RED cam alongside Panasonic P2 footage and Quicktime H.264 files rom Canon’s DSLR playing from the same timeline (without transcoding) to the mind-boggling technologies introduced in the latest iteration of Adobe Photoshop (like smartfill, or dry brushes that show an animated three dimensional paint brush that animates as you paint) to the rotoscoping brush in After Effects – the new software promises to be a complete game-changer. Adobe has acknowledged some of it slightly disappointing attempts in earlier versions, but seem to have nailed it this time around.
Harris showed a very interesting new vertical technology called Fanscape (working title?) that simplifies the generation of discounts, contests and call-to-action incentives that uses Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media for on-fly conversion strategies while handling all of the behind-the-scenes logistics including point of sale management.
Canon unveiled its latest camcorders – the new XF305 series featuring 4:2:2 colorspace, 3 CMOS sensors, SMPTE generation and a lot more. The camera’s MSRP is presently $8K.
TVLogic showed off what may be one of the first 3D OLED monitors. The TDM-150W is a 15″ 1366×768 15′ (16:9) OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) with 3D Shutter Glass, a 100,000:1 Contrast Ratio, built-in waveform and vectorscopes and SDI/HDMI 10-bit support. Just, wow.
Litepanels – the runaway star of the mini LED lighting world, demonstrated an amazing hyrid LED that doubles as a flash strobe with a burst rate up to eight frames per second (8fps). In case this doesn’t amaze in text form, check out this demonstration video from the NAB show floor:
NAB 2010 BUZZWORDS
If you follow us on Twitter, you may have caught some tweets about this year’s buzzwords: last year they were 3D, DTV and social networking, and these were replaced, or updated in 2010 to “broader-casting” (a term trademarked by NAB to include the new broadband broadcasting revolution), “transmedia,” “metadata,” “broadband spectrum,” “mobile,” “colorspace,” “time-shifting” and “multi-platform.”
Add to which, we were treated to talks from Michael J. Fox, Raymond Kurzweil, Stan Lee and many other industry leaders and an amazing preview of Discovery Channel’s upcoming 4-hour series based on the ideas of Stephen Hawking -Into the Universe at the SONY 4K Digital Content Theater.
We will be discussing all of these buzzwords and expanding significantly on this year’s highlights at our very own podcast available on iTunes, or via the main site at http://keramcast.com in the coming weeks.
As usual, it was a breathtakingly huge show that proved very informative and fruitful – a sentiment echoed by anyone with whom we spoke. Kudos to all the event organizers and the NAB for pulling it off.
You must be logged in to post a comment.