This year’s theme is:

“All you ever wanted to know about file-based workflow – but were afraid to ask”

And the event takes place at:

GIRAFFE, 11 Frith Street, Soho. 10am – 5pm
Wednesday May 30^th & Thursday May 31^st

As ever, entry is FREE but space is limited and pre-registration is ESSENTIAL

The seminar programme will cover:

• Capture
  How best to manage legacy and live video within a file-based workflow? We examine high-performance capture and transcoding solutions with speakers from root6, DVS and Gallery.
• PAM & MAM
  Managing your assets efficiently is paramount but what are the differences and which approach is right for you? We explain and invite leading players to present their respective offerings. Speakers from root6, CatDV and Front Porch Digital.
• Managing Files in an Edit Environment
  Avid’s Senior Application Specialist discusses the management of file based media through Avid’s professional Editing range including its Emmy winning AMA software.
• Broadcast File-Based Delivery
  We examine the newly-defined AMWA AS 11 broadcast delivery standard as defined by the DPP. Addressing creation, metadata, automated QC and accelerated delivery with speakers from root6 and Aspera
• Archive
  Is it safe? One of the biggest dilemmas in today’s file based workflow is deciding how best to archive our footage.  We look at the various platforms for archiving and examine the risks involved with speakers from root6, StorageDNA and Object Matrix.

Full timetable and list of speakers available here

Plus! Experience the hot new technologies from NAB in the FREE exhibition, featuring:

The Black Magic Stand seems to expand by a several square meters every year. This year their ‘surprise’ was their 2.5K cinema camera priced at just under $3000. The device shoots Cinema DNG RAW, DNX-HD and Pro Res, supports EF mounts, and has built in monitoring. With the market in so called ‘lower end stills’ (sub 5K dollars) cameras used for pro video production still growing at a spectacular rate, BMD saw opportunity in the market, and they may well be onto something; Given their experience in this field you can expect workflow advantages over other similarly priced devices possibly-
Further BMD have bundled DaVinci Resolve and Ultrascope as software packages to complete the offering.

Also new, were image processing devices shown on the stand as a result of the recent  BMD purchase of Teranex.

The Teranex up/down/cross converter boxes are pretty well respected in their price range and again plugged a gap that existed in BMD’s quest to democratise all aspects of video production.

Moving on down the hall, it was impossible to miss all the light and heat being created on the Adobe stand with their CS6 preview. Given the shock that FCP-X issued to the pro video community last summer, several vendors have sensed an opportunity to move into the space once comfortably straddled by FCP. Adobe, particularly the Premier team, are pushing this very hard. As a rule I try and keep off the big stands on the first day as they are typically overcrowded, overhyped and overdriven. Thus we will be bringing you some in depth looks on CS6 and the other hot news item at the show Smoke 2013 from Autodesk in a day or so when things have just calmed down a little. At first glance though, both look very very interesting.

The topic of 4K here at NAB this year is on every ones mind. Many modestly priced cameras are punting 4K acquisition and there is again a lot of talk about it. This is fraught with issues on may fronts. At the outset, the 4K standard itself remains somewhat undefined. Further, a simple reality is that very very few people shooting 4K (in whatever form) will ever see that image in a pixel for pixel representation on a 4K capable display. Finally most of this material (but for a small niche portion of this acquired content) is compressed.
So why are people excited by it?
Well an alignment of different technology factors has allowed users to acquire in 4K resolution at a very affordable price, but scale down to 2K or HD for final delivery. The efficiency of modern RAW codecs means that data rates are modest, quality is high and the smaller, scaled down image result is of superior quality. We will go and have a more in depth look at the cameras later today and offer some feedback on this for you.

As a wrap up item the standout of the show for me today was the autostereoscopic (glasses free) monitor and tablets and mobile showing on the Dolby stand.

The monitor and tablet display technology is a product of collaboration between Dolby and Phillips, and the results are stunning. Glasses free 3D is the way of the future, and this is the first time I have seen a offering that has great quality (and surprisingly) a very wide viewing angle relative to the display.
In brief, they have developed a lenticular film technology for the display and this is coupled with a proprietary Dolby processing technology which delivers depth accurate 3D video and also includes real time conversion for 2D to 3D in some applications.The results on the tablet and mobile devices was equally good also- We will do our best to get an interview and do a dedicated article on this…

Any feedback or questions, hit us up with comments on the blog.

Check out their pre-show blog post to see what to expect from them:

ROOT6 Technology at NAB

Filmed as part of root6′s March 2012 Tech Breakfast

In case you missed it, or want to re-harvest it for information,our podcast recording is now online.

However, in my hovering from seminar to stand to seminar (back and forth from Avid’s supply of Jelly Bean’s), I happened to catch the last 15 mins of the Adobe presentation on CS5.

The problem: audio feedback throughout a video clip

Being from an audio background I was drawn to a new feature in CS5 which I can see coming in very useful in video – especially in live 1st take critical/audio embedded.
A 15 second Video clip with embedded audio was played with a high frequency feedback tone throughout the clip (caused by bad monitor mixing when originally capured).
If I were to make this listenable and indeed usable, I would have grabbed a graphic equaliser and spent 10 minutes trying to find the evil frequency and subtract it throughout the duration of the clip.
I’d imagine most people would use a feedback-destroying plugin (which in my opinion often affects all of the frequencies of the audio, resulting in it sounding like an over-compressed ‘underwater’ MP3)

The solution: selecting offending frequencies from the velocity level and deleting them

In CS5’s audio editing GUI there are the familiar waveform monitor and a spectral monitor (nothing to do with ghosts!), which shows Velocity as light from purple (low velocity) to yellow (high velocity).
Adobe’s demonstrator opened the spectral monitor for the clip and quickly identified a yellow, horizontal and quite mechanical looking wave form throughout the clip, between 4k and 6k.
Stating that this was obviously the feedback wave, being visually unusual and constant, and bright yellow signifying its audible prominence, he grabbed a lasso tool, highlighted the guilty frequencies from the top left to bottom right, hit delete and hey presto, the feedback was dealt with in seconds.
Obviously if done a little more carefully there would be no needless loss of frequencies.

Just one of many great innovations in Adobe CS5 .

Cheers for reading.

For more information about Arri’s DNxHD support, download the pdf here.

On the Matrox front, they are aware of the problems being faced by editors using Media Composer 6 and the MX02, and are working with Avid to fix these issues. However, Ricardo Marques was keen to re-iterate that workstations intended for use with Media Composer should preferably not be used for anything else. Third party software that is running in the background while editors are working can drastically affect performance.

101_Digital_Media_Files_2012.pdf

Thank you.