Like many attendees at NAB this year that have a slightly technical leaning I thought I would try and post an NAB follow up that represented my views and take on the show. This is a bit of a retrospective really, just to put the show and the surrounding events into context, and to understand how the various announcements are going to play over the coming months.
NAB is vast. Spread across four multi football pitch sized halls and spilling over into adjoining venues, suites and hotels. This is not a show you wander around trying to discover things. If you did, there is no doubt that you would not finish covering the ground four days later when the show ended.
Some general observations are that there is a little more buoyancy in the marketplace in general – Vendors and clients are a lot more positive. The show had about 85,000 visitors this year. Although there was an area of the upper south hall cordoned off with empty space behind it (that was occupied by stands last year) the consensus is that things are definitely healthier than last year, even though the show was statistically bigger in 2009.
First on my list of Companies to visit was DVS. As a declaration of interest,
We rep their products and we have a great respect for the quality of DVS engineering. They showed hardware refreshed versions of the Clipster and Pronto which are their core DI products, as well as Fuze which is a cost effective DCP delivery tool...
The bigger news from them was the launch of the Venice video server, and the unveiling of the Atomix range of video cards. The Atomix card is cutting edge as it supports uncompressed 4K playback on the Mac or windows platforms – DVS’s marketing blurb describe it’s capability thus:
“supporting every resolution from SD to 4K in real-time. Moreover, Atomix handles 2K stereoscopic material as well. With the diversity and flexibility of its feature range, the powerful DVS hardware complements any software solution. Atomix enables the play-out of uncompressed 4K in real-time with an up- and downscaler for format changes and uses 3D LUT to suit high-end film post production and presentations. Furthermore, key features include capture and play-out via dual-link 3.0 Gbps SDI, real-time 1D LUT, 16 embedded audio channels along with 16 AES/EBU channels.”
With the Atomix supporting 4K there is also an AtomixLT version of the card which supports up to 2K only, at a lower price point.
These devices are clearly aimed at the market range currently occupied by cards from the likes of AJA and Bluefish and puts the renowned DVS video quality within the reach of the professional user - Apple and Adobe will need to help deliver the drivers using the available DVS SDK, but as the only option for a true 4K card (Other than DVS’s own Centaurus hardware) it is going to be seen around a lot more as a video IO for software such as Final Cut and Premier for users that care about delivering quality.
Speaking of cards, stack em high and sell em cheap video IO card specialist Black Magic Design (on one of the physically largest area stands at the show) showed some new USB 3.0 ingest devices with a unique design, some new IO card tweaks, and following their acquisition of DaVinci last year announced the expected (but vigorously denied) sub $1000 DaVinci grading software environment on the Mac.
Old school DaVinci colourists must be crying into their collective cornflakes at this turn of events, decrying the loss of the once “reassuringly expensive” brand leader.
But BMD have carefully and cannily segmented out the grading offerings – the sub $1K option does not support the DaVinci hardware grading panel or multi node and GPU offerings on Linux that the other suites do, With the top end Multi GPU/Node pricing coming out at about $49K, there is still a price premium on quality and capability.
Then on to Adobe. They launched CS5 with great fanfare at the show. The 64 bit Photoshop and After effects using common architecture, the Mercury playback engine, all pointed to great strides. Premier probably handles more Codecs natively and with more speed and responsiveness than any other NLE on the market today.
However, in terms of editing capability many mid to advanced bread and butter editing functions are still limited on Premier CS5. However depending on the kind of work that you do, this may be irrelevant given the advantages of real time and interoperability using Dynamic Link. But at the same time as they launched CS5, there was a nasty little battle raging between Apple and Adobe over the capability of The Flash suite to cross compile apps for the Iphone and IPad using the 4.x SDK.
I have debated long and hard with various industry professionals and developers about what this might actually mean. At first glance, limiting who can create for your platform seems insane. Some construed it as part of the wider movement on Flash bashing that has emerged with the html5 web standard being pushed by the likes of Apple and Google et al.
The consensus is that this is about control. It is about locking in the developer community to only use C++ or Object C for wring these apps and about ensuring that things are only done Steve’s way on this platform. That the platform is a compelling one was evidenced by the claim that Apple sold over half a million Ipad devices after its launch. There were many IPads in evidence at the show.
This brings us on to Apple. There was no Apple stand presence at the show although there were plenty of their staff there. Everyone in the Apple camp was pretty positive about how things are going. The new Mac hardware is Awesome, and the Apple platform is seeing increased adoption- the latest vendor being Autodesk with their Smoke on Mac offering, but more on this later…
But I tend to judge what is happening with a technology product based on the rate of change it is undergoing. A high rate of change indicates interest, commitment, and a response to what the end users are asking for. A low rate of change indicates the opposite, or at least a problem or issue of some kind.
Sadly the rate of change for the Pro Apps products is low. Again I need to declare an interest here. Our company is a Apple ASE and we have a huge amount of time, energy expertise and love tied up in this platform and suite of applications. It doesn’t appear from where I am standing right now, that Apple corporate is very much interested in what is going on in this space. Why should they? Since the Final Cut Studio/Server revolution of a few years ago the company has transformed itself into a consumer device and entertainment company. The Pro Apps sit rather uneasily next to the App store and Iphone / Ipad.
The FCS round tripping capability within the suite is downright clunky compared to the offerings from Adobe and dare I say Avid for example. So much has changed in two years, but very little has in FC Studio land.
Who knows what the future will hold? Apple have decoupled their software releases from events and tradeshows. Their code of silence is absolute. The same does not hold for the hardware and OS side of the business as we mentioned earlier where Apple are still innovating and bringing users and companies aboard to embrace the platform -(but more of this in part 2.)
I would love to see the software grow and develop, to see some of that rate of change we talked about. .
The consensus on the FCS3 release was mostly an Avid catch up in my humble opinion and Avid sure are not standing still.
Talking about Avid, (Again a declaration of interest – We are an Avid premier partner and this is my personal view on all of this)
They announced Media Composer version 5 at the show-(which incidentally won the best of show award in it’s category I believe)
There were also a slew of other announcements, including acquisition of control surface specialist Euphonix.
The new AMA capabilities of v5 are well documented by many before me, and I won’t bore you with them here. However AMA is really opening doors on some cool workflows and Avid really gets this. One under sung feature I really liked is that you can point your AMA disk mount at an Avid media files folder on the network for example and ‘mount’ that folder in an AMA bin without having to read out the mediafile database in the old school way. This capability alone is already worth the upgrade. There were no new storage announcements, and it was hinted that we might see them later in the year. Avid announced further changes and improvements to the Interplay environment with demos on the integration of asset managment from Blue Order that they aquired in January.
What Avid have done fits into the scheme and makes sense. Interplay for Production asset management, and the Blue order component is positioned as the Interplay Media Asset Management environment. This allows them to offer a fully fledged MAM backend on the Interplay production front end. It is very difficult to judge how well these things really work without really using them in anger. However, Interplay is going from strength to strength and for several of our clients provides them with the only effective and efficient way of delivering to budget and deadline based on their production volume. The MAM addition should allow long term content management and archive monetization – a crucial addition to the environment.
Speaking of rate of change, sadly there was very little in evidence relating to Avid |DS. Many DS users were in open revolt, and this is an issue which Avid really needs to address very soon.
Finally Avid were doing technology demo’s of Server side based editing. This flows from their acquisition of Maximum Throughput (specifically the MAXedit product) last summer.
The neat thing is that Avid have the ability to incorporate this technology into the rest of their post production ecosystem. Think of editing as a service. Think of logging in to a server, browsing and editing your material from where ever you are. The server holds a copy of the high res material. All the proxy streams are created on the fly. Always.
How do you get your high res material into the editing silo? Simple, you position your edit server close to it. The server components are pretty lightweight.
I would be very sceptical had I not seen it working very well, and this was over the laggy interweb, not a local LAN connection.
The web browser based editing uses a flash based video stream and basic edit interface (frame accurate and responsive) or the more richly featured java based editor uses a lightweight frame accurate codec, and was tied in with some functional and report driven review and approval tools. Again, review and approval could happen from anywhere, and there was an mobile option demo’d to underline that point.
The quality and responsiveness was jaw dropping. Avid were also demoing this on the main stage as a tech preview, and it is without doubt a game changer. Don't just think of remote editing like offerings from Forscene by comparison. This is much more compelling and profound. A quick example: Park on a frame to set up a title, automatically you get the full 1080 raster to do your titling element to. Finish, step out, play, in real time you are back on the lightweight stream. Seamlessly and transparently.
This dare I say, for some, will be the future of editing. I can’t say much more on this as I am disclosure constrained, but watch this development from Avid very carefully. It is a game changer.
In part two we will visit Autodesk, Xen, the great Codec Explosion and resultant file format war, Mystika, 3D and much more…
Thanks for reading this far.
Currently my blog is not accepting comments, but you can mailme at graham(at)root6(dot)com
Part 2 to follow shortly…
All change please – this blog terminates here soon!
I know I have been guilty of infrequent posting here at times, a frustration often driven by some technical issues amongst others – however soon I will have no excuse.
Podrush is moving soon promising a whole lot more in the way if interaction and usability…(if there is such a word)
please bear with me while we push through these changes
thanks
Graham
If you aren't in conversation with your customers or clients you are going to lose them.
Why?
This is not about nineties marketing yip on the back of the cluetrain manifesto. It is about a reality that unless you are providing something that your clients need, or are somehow enhancing a service that is out there, your clients are going to simply work around you.
Many entities deliberately interpose themselves into stream between a manufacturer and the end user. I should know I work with one. However that intervention needs to be necessary and it needs to add value. Putting yourself in the way where you are not needed, and where you add nothing to the process is downright stupid.
But it is amazing how many companies there are that still do that. they take something, resell it from a vendor or distributor and mark it up in the process.
But they add nothing of real value.
Want to call them for support on a device? – well yes you can, but your question had better be simple otherwise it will be deferred to the manufacturer. Want to replace a faulty part through them, well yes you can, but it takes longer because they don’t have the staff to run the RMA process attentively.
How on earth do such companies continue to succeed? Well mainly inertia on the basis of manufacturers and their current (but unsustainable) ability to put themselves into the middle of a process without adding value.
As of today, we are making a point of routing around these people. Where we don’t get value we will make every effort to get them out the way.
We are also continuing to be our own fiercest critics. We have to be, because if we are not adding something valuable – like knowledge, expertise or experience I fully expect our clients to route around us.