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Filed under: Audio •Cameras •Hardware •Lighting •NAB 09 •

NAB 2009 - Wilt’s Wrap-Up

Other Cool Things and Interesting Sights

Support kits for DSLRs like the Canon 5D are appearing, so that you can take something designed as a still camera and make it fit a cine workflow…

Zacuto DSLR rig with Canon 5D camera.

Zacuto DSLR rig with Canon 5D camera.

Zacuto has their mix ‘n’ match bag o’ parts from which this and other support kits may be fabricated. Note the gunstock for bracing as well as the shoulder pad for support.

Caution: a fully loaded rig may cost as much as the camera that sits on it!

Redrock Micro DSLR rig.

Redrock Micro DSLR rig.

Red Rock Micro has their own bags o’ parts.

Both the Zacuto and Red Rock kits feel pretty good on the shoulder, and the eye-level LCD adapters work well. However, what they really reveal is that the Canon’s LCD isn’t crisp enough to use as a focusing viewfinder! To me, these kits will be a lot more interesting when the much-anticipated Panasonic GH-1 comes out.

Marshall Electronics daylight-viewable LCDs reflecting a direct spotlight.

Marshall showed these displays last year but they’re just as impressive this year. They largely eliminate the need to set up a tent every time you use a monitor outdoors in direct sunlight.

Everything has a display: this one is on a Canon zoom mounted on BandPro’s PDW-800.

Even ENG lenses have built-in displays these days. Now, when can I control it and monitor it on my iPhone, over WiFi? (Of course, then I’d have to get an iPhone, wouldn’t I?)

Ross Video’s Synergy switcher (vision mixer) control panel.

Nothing says “big iron” like a switcher panel, even if most of the big iron has been replaced with compact CPUs. Ah, for the Good Old Days…

JL Cooper Eclipse CX control surface.

Man, colorists get all the cool toys… I worked with this one a bit; they had it driving Apple Color. It solves ALL my annoyances with Color’s UI modality; the trackballs and transport controls and the pots always work no matter WHERE the mouse pointer is.

I so want one.

GV‘s 2/3” 3-CMOS Infinity camcorder, now with a free seat of Edius and optional 24p.

Let’s not forget the Infinity, which offers the option to shoot in DV, MPEG-2, or JPEG 2000, and records on Iomega Rev drives or CF cards. The camcorder even has Gigabit Ethernet built in.

NewTek’s TriCaster SD/HD switcher / production system demo.

Long-time NAB attendees will recognize this booth… the products keep evolving but NewTek‘s demos follow a time-honored and successful strategy: have Kiki give the demo!

Arri PAX LED lighting and controller: pick a color and call it up.

Arri now has LED lights, complete with a control panel to tune their brightness and color. Gels are so 20th Century…

Matthews RED dolly (no relation to the camera).

Matthews showed the Red Dolly, which works for low-mode handheld work as well as bungee-stabilized or bazooka-mounted cameras.

Looking straight up into an Airstar reflector balloon.

One of my favorite items at the show: Airstar‘s reflective balloon. Instead of using a crane to hang light above your location, you can have Airstar float this internally silvered flat balloon with a transparent underside, then bounce ground-based lights from it. Hey presto: instant soft downlight with no nasty cranes!

Cable samples in Belden’s booth.

Belden makes excellent bulk cable and tends to be an industry-standard supplier. And I’m not just saying that just because they gave me (and anyone else who asked) a nice Belden HDMI cable just for stopping by, grin.

Camera Corps Q-Ball HD remote PTZ cameras.

Remote pan-tilt-zoom HD cameras in your choice of designer finishes. Now, if there only a way to put those multicolored Element Technica breakout boxes on them…

Lectrosonics “Super Miniature” wireless mic transmitters in the North Hall.

Ah, audio… there’s more to television and movies than pictures, remember?  Lectrosonics is the wireless mic supplier the others are compared against. Most of their systems use 9V batteries but these supermini packs use AAs.

Aaton Cantar-X audio mixer / recorder with optional fader panel.

Sound Devices 788T 8-input, 12-track recorder with CL-8 control surface.

Nagra LB two-channel recorder with built-in clip editing.

Three of my favorite recorders:

http://www.aaton.com/products/sound/cantar/

http://sounddevices.com/

http://www.nagraaudio.com/pro/pages/products_nagra_lb.php

Angenieux builds big lenses, too, not just Optimo DPs!

Lightcraft’s Eliot Mack demos the Previzion freeform handheld keying/compositing system.

We have one of these on order, so I’ll be able to report on it in detail later in the year. But basically, it’s astonishing.

There was a Mini Clubman uplink “truck” last year, but this time it has its own pop-up canopy.

Hey, Jannard, think you’re tough? Think you’re hard? These guys brought a freakin’ tank!

Operation Interdependence helps civilians send care packages to troops overseas. Their booth display had a way of dominating the outdoor exhibits.

Crate City: How the Panasonic booth travels.

One thing the casual attendee may not realize is just how much effort it is to have a big booth at a major trade show. A small supplier with a 10x10 may not suffer too badly, but if you have a big, hardware-heavy booth like Panasonic does, you may literally have several semitrailers of stuff—cabinets, counters, carpets, lighting grids, display cases, banners, digital signage systems, custom construction, projectors, electrical panels, cable harnesses, networking equipment, water coolers, cappuccino bars, fans, office furniture, literature kits, swag, etc., not to mention crate after crate of just-barely-working, brand-new product prototypes.

It can take over a week to erect and stage a big booth, and that’s after weeks of off-site prep and pre-staging. And then, once the show closes, you may have only a day or two to strike.

This forest of crates between the South and Central halls says a couple of things: Panasonic has lots of stuff (all these crates are Panasonic’s), and Panasonic has probably made special arrangements to have their crates stored nearby, so that they get their crates soon after the show closes so they won’t have to stand around and wait before they can strike.

It’s a heck of a lot of work. Big companies often have staging crews to do a lot of the heavy lifting, but the folks you see on the floor giving demos often help out as well (and on the smaller stands, the demo dogs usually are the staging crew).

Having worked about 20 NABs as both a crew rat and a demo dog, at companies ranging from 4 to 200+ people, all I can say is that the show goes by a lot quicker and a lot less painfully if you’re an attendee than if you’re an exhibitor!

A locust lurking on the escalator at 1:15am Wednesday 22 April.

After my Day of the Locusts post, I took the monorail back to my hotel (note: at 1am on a weekday, you can often have the northernmost car of a southbound monorail to yourself). There were still a few locusts hanging out around the MGM Grand station, and a some squished bodies at the base of the escalator, but the Biblical swarms reported earlier in the day had largely dissipated.

Flight of Luminous Insects: MGM Grand station, 1:26am Wednesday 22 April, 1/6 second exposure.

Those bugs that weren’t resting otiose on the handrails or pavements were flying around the bright lights of the stations. By the next night, most had departed.

WWII Cunningham Combat Camera at the ASC booth.

Another relic from the past. How soon will all the shiny new toys from this year seem as weird and dated as this gun-like camera?

“I’ll hush up my mug if you’ll fill up my jug with that good ol’ monorail pure mountain spring water?”

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Thanks for the great wrap up.  I love seeing the Akeley Audio Camera and “combat” cameras.

Heard you saw the Lunix GH1 and footage.  How does it look, if you can say at this point?

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  04/29  at  07:52 PM

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The vintage cams were pretty cool. I haven’t been able to date the Akeley; I think it was the 1920s or thereabouts (there was probably an informative placard on the ASC booth, but that doesn’t help me now!). Any idea when it was made?

As to the GH-1, it looks very interesting in the writeups I’ve seen, and there are supposed to be clips from it on the web (if you can get past all the Guitar Hero 1 clips, grin), but until I get my eager, trembling hands on one and do a proper eval, there’s not much I can say. B&H says, “Approx. Arrival June”, but it’s already shipping in Japan. I think I need to drop by Yodobashi Camera one of these days… how much is a round-trip ticket to Narita?

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  04/29  at  10:42 PM

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Panasonic’s Jan Crittenden, on seeing my “crate city” photo, said, “those are only the booth crates, there were another 15 8’X6’X6’ cages full of equipment and another 6-8 pallets of plasmas.” Ouch!

Philip Bloom has posted a GH-1 video: http://philipbloom.co.uk/2009/04/30/panasonic-lumix-gh1-first-impressions-and-first-footage/ Man, look at all those Canon Super8s, and even a Scoopic. Oh, laddie, it takes you back…

Posted by Adam Wilt  on  04/30  at  02:27 PM

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It would be real mice if the HMC40 was indeed a descendant of the DVC30, and kept the 16x optical zoom that went digital to 20x and was super (pro lens) smooth with an external lanc controller. As it is, it’s limited to 12x, which, in this age of true 20x optical on pro, and even more on consumer, you have to wonder how a camera that _evolved_ from the DVC30 would lose 4x of zoom.

Posted by IEBA  on  05/01  at  12:37 PM

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“Panasonic showed this rather intimidating mockup, clearly the result of an ill-considered assignation between an HPX170 and a pair of binoculars following a night of drunken debauchery.”

Great line!

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  05/01  at  12:41 PM

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Too Bad Ikegami didn’t show an HD version of their 3D Zoom camera that shipped back in 1991:
http://3dstereomedia.com/content/lk-33-stereoscopic-480i-video-camera
That would have taken away Panasonics thunder, and been very easy to do.

Posted by Steven Bradford  on  05/04  at  12:45 AM

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