NAB is too big a show in too short a time to see more than a fraction of it. I’ve covered a few things in some depth (as have other PVC folks), but there’s plenty more that slips by without proper coverage. Here, I have a few photos of interesting things that I saw in passing, with pointers for more info should anything catch your fancy.

RED’s “Leader of the Rebellion” Ted Schilowitz held a press conference at NAB on Monday, describing the projects and products RED is working on. Rather than paraphrase him, I’ve got him on card (well, it’s not “on tape” and it’s not “on film”; what are we supposed to say these days?) so he can tell you himself. I also have a collection of images shot around the RED booth, for your viewing pleasure.

At NAB I found support vendors at the affordable end of the spectrum I hadn’t seen before, comfy Aaton-style handgrips, F65 tweaks by Carlos Acosta, and a “drive-by demo” of a handy zoom/focusing lever.

In the first two days of NAB, I saw five different folks walking through the halls carrying multi-rotor camera copters. In previous years? None. UAVs of all sort were all over the show; here are pix of a few of them.

In the past few years the industry has been moving away from rack-mounted tape decks in favor of small, on-camera or near-camera, portable recorders using CF cards, SSDs, and hard disks. At NAB 2012, we saw a partial reversal of that trend: the recorders are moving back into the racks.

Just when you thought you need only decide between Zacuto and Cineroid for add-on EVFs, NAB gave us two new choices. Also, Band Pro showed their own high-end EVF, and it’s a weird one.

I’ve already covered the basics of what Sony and Panasonic announced, as well as looking at Canon’s C500 and the BMD Cine Camera, but JVC also had interesting camera announcements worth looking at. And of course that’s not all there was to see…

Canon held a press dinner Monday night at NAB, where Larry Thorpe held forth on the Canon C300’s use of a quad-HD sensor (2x HD resolution in both H and V dimensions) and how Canon’s “super green” sampling boosts MTF and suppresses aliasing in the camera’s 1080p images.

The Blackmagic Design Cinema Camera was the surprise of the show. In this second report on the BMDCC, I gather together facts (such as they are at this early stage of the game), informed commentary, crazed guesswork, and pointers to more info. [updated 2012-04-29: CinemaDNG data rate corrected; 2012-05-07: better video embedding.]

A few pictures of the $3000 BMD Cine Cam and some infonuggets. [update: added EOSHD’s sensor size comparison.]

Canon held a meeting in the Brenden Theater at the Palms, showing off two 4K short films (one shot by Shane Hurlbut with the 1D C, the other by Jeff Cronenweth, using the C500) and turning Larry Thorpe loose with a wealth of technical details.

When big companies hold press conferences, they’re a mix of marketing / sales encomiums from happy customers, and some actual useful information about technologies and products. I’ll mostly focus on the tech stuff that Panasonic and Sony announced today (and adding my own snarky commentary in [square brackets]).

The day after my fun with matches, Art Adams came by. We played with fire a bit more, then turned to water and ice.

I took the FS700 into work and shot under various lighting conditions to see what would happen. I also swapped out my cheap Nikon lens adapter and support kit for an updated Hot Rod Cameras Tuner Kit (sliding baseplate, PL mount, and 15mm rod adapters).

Last week, Sony announced the NEX-FS700, a super-slo-mo follow on to the NEX-FS100. On Saturday, a pre-production FS700 arrived on my doorstep. On Sunday, I went to the coast to try it out; I offer a small sampler of the results for your delectation.

OLED—Organic LED—is said to be the display technology of the future… and it’s here today. The PVM-740 is the smallest of Sony’s trio of professional-series OLED displays, and Sony lent me one for a while when I was testing the NEX-FS100.

It’s nice. I mean, it’s really nice. Perfect? Well, not quite, but darned close; let’s just say I’ve reset my expectations when it comes to reference displays.

Sony sent me an NEX-FS100 to review , and included seven additional lenses: three A-mount zooms, three A-mount primes, and the E-mount 16mm pancake. They also sent two A-to-E-mount adapters, the $200 LA-AE1 and the $400 LA-EA2. Here’s a quick look at these lenses and adapters, and how they work for video on the NEX-FS100.

Sony’s follow-on to the consumer-oriented, 1080/60i NEX-VG10 is the more professional NEX-FS100, an E-Mount AVCHD camcorder listing for US$5850, or $6550 with an 18-200mm lens. It shares the same sensor as the considerably more expensive PMW-F3, but nothing else—including its design. The FS100 abandons the problematic “overweight Handycam” form factor in favor of a compact, lightweight box-camera layout that works nicely on a tripod and readily enables cine-style customization and flexible lens choices. It’s a bold departure from the status quo and one that, with only a couple of quibbles, pays off handsomely.

The Sony NEX-FS100 has no internal neutral density filters, and its telescoping 18-200mm lens doesn’t work well with matte boxes. Lens-mounted variable NDs are said to be the ideal solution: a single filter capable of 2 to 8 stops of brightness attenuation, thus replacing several conventional NDs.

Sony sent two variable NDs along with the FS100, and by sheer coincidence I had just ordered one myself, so I had a chance to try all three side by side. I’ve also explored one of them further on a PMW-EX1 and a DMC-GH2 EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens) camera. Variable NDs are indeed useful, and are arguably the most important filter in your toolkit when shooting with electronically-controlled still-camera lenses—as long as you understand their peculiarities.

The protean design of the NEX-FS100 cries out for customization, and the market responds… Whether you want a more comfortable and stylish top handle, a simple lens adapter, or a full-on, ruggedized wrap-around support system capable of mounting the heftiest cine zoom, somebody makes it. Let’s take a look at some of the options available.

Last week, San Francisco rental house extraordinaire Videofax took delivery of Sony F65 #15, and on Thursday BandPro’s Jeff Cree came up to show off the camera to local DPs, ACs, and DITs. I was able to shoot some photos and take some notes, which I have pulled together and annotated, in a somewhat scattershot manner, for your viewing pleasure.  [Update 2012.01.29: typo & terminology fixes]

While all the attention is focused on large-single-sensor cine-style camcorders, Panasonic has come out with a line of high-quality 1/3” 3-MOS handhelds that leave little to be desired. The HPX250 is a handheld version of the shoulder-mount HPX370, while the AC160 and its simplified sibling, the AC130, bring the same fundamentals to the AVCCAM (AVCHD) world. [Updates 2012.01.30: SDI out is 10-bit only on 250, not 160; 2012.02.24: typo page 2, should be “or any of the other misfortunes possible with location audio.”]

If you’re in the market to rent or buy “affordable” PL-mount primes (e.g., under $10,000/lens), you won’t want to pass up this test.

Sony has three E-Mount primes coming out right about now, and I had a chance to play with prototypes of them attached to an NEX-FS100 LSS camcorder. Here are my impressions, and a short test.

[Update 9 Dec: ASG Large Raster Workflow seminar Tuesday in San Francisco.]

1) Media Solutions and Sony present Sony PMW-F3/NEX-FS100u Demo and Workflow Solutions this Monday, 12 December, at Meets The Eye Studios, San Carlos CA (Northern California, between San Francisco and San Jose).

Last Thursday, Canon announced the EOS C300 (EF mount) and C300 PL (PL mount) “Cinema EOS” camcorders in a much-heralded rollout at Paramount Studios in Hollywood. Saturday, I had a chance to visit Paramount and see it for myself. [Update 2011-12-16: fixed malformed movie embed code.]

Next week I’ll be involved in two public events, one in Burbank (a panel on production technology) and the other in San Carlos CA (our shooting stages open house). Come by to visit, to ask questions, to complain, or to throw things. Also: what’s in the pipeline after that.

You can tell a camera has struck a chord when its users start turning out aftermarket accessories that are themselves objects of desire.

Cine Gear Expo, “the film, video, and digital expo with focus”, offered the usual kid-in-a-candy-store experience, and introduced new light-emitting plasma (LEP) instruments, new cameras, and a revolutionary new electronic shuttering device that gives digital cameras better motion portrayal capabilities than even the best mechanically-shuttered film or digital camera. [Updated 2011-06-11: removed erroneous “12 Hz” shutter rate reference.]