Monday, April 21, 2008

Best NAB find

Terence Curren | 04/21- 09:57 PM

I’ve seen the future of monitors

With Avid and Apple missing from the convention floor, I was hoping this would be a good year to hunt through the little booths and find something new. While I did stumble upon several cool new products, one impressed me more than anything else on the floor. This was a new monitor from a company I had never heard of.

If you have been following the “Death of the CRT” and “What are going to replace it with” threads over the last few years, you are aware of the problem we face. If not, here is a quick summary. LCDs suck for critical monitoring of video! Plasmas are a close call but don’t come in any size smaller than about 40”. So that leaves us with a poor substitute. One company, eCinema has created a monitor that actually solves the lack of blacks in an LCD. But it costs a LOT!

So imagine my surprise when I walked into a little draped off room and spotted three nice looking monitors in a row. The catch was, only the one in the center was a CRT. The other two were examples of a coming technology called Field Emission Technology, or FED for short. This is a variation of the SED technology that we have been waiting for since at least 2004.

The blacks were so black that I couldn’t discern where the letterboxing ended and the black frame began. Looking off-axis, the picture held up all the way to the edge of the screen. That’s 90 degrees off axis! The depth of the monitor was a little more than a standard LCD. And it wasn’t generating any significant heat. Wow!!

Of course trying to get pricing and release date information from the poor guy who seemed to know 25 words of English was an exercise in futility. But I was able to learn from later research that this company is a spin off from Sony who started the work with this technology. I don’t know if this is Sony’s way of trying to avoid getting caught up in the huge lawsuit surrounding the SED technology. And I don’t care. What’s important is that I’ve seen the technology in action and it works!

You can check out the sparse website at Fe-tech-co.

I’ve seen the future, and I finally have hope for monitoring in my world.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Snapshots - NAB 2008 Day 4

Adam Wilt | 04/19- 07:51 PM

Stuff I saw on the final day of NAB 2008

Softron’s OnTheAir Video: playlist automation for OS X

Softron Media Systems demoed their suite of fully Mac-native broadcast automation apps, with OS X compliant user interfaces. Their capture and playout apps use AJA or BlackMagic cards, standard codecs, and are AppleScriptable. Never heard of Softron? They’ve been in TV Stations in Europe and Asia for several years; in Russia this past year; they’re just now coming into North America. If you’re interested in Mac-flavored broadcasting, dowload demo software or the user manuals and see for yourself.

Of course, there are other Macintosh broadcast apps—BUG.tv is also Mac-centric, and Building4Media‘s front ends are cross-platform—but I thought Softron deserved a look since they’re new to our market.

Saturday, April 19, 2008

Recovering From Failure

Chris Meyer | 04/19- 11:42 AM

How a Mac OS kernel panic almost stopped us at NAB - and how it was fixed.

(Note: Names have been concealed to protect the helpful from becoming inundated with support calls.)

This past Saturday, while setting up for our first presentation at Post|Production World at NAB, we were having trouble getting our MacBook Pro to recognize the projector. We put it asleep and woke it back up again, and got a kernel panic: that nasty darkened screen with the “must reboot” message. From that point on, no Adobe CS3 application would run on our computer - including the installer/uninstaller, which meant we couldn’t replace the apps we needed in order to do our demos. Oddly enough, Apple’s Safari wouldn’t run either. Repairing permissions, safe reboots, and creating new users didn’t help. Fortunately, we were able to copy our files off to another computer (with special thanks to Jeff Foster of Lynda.com for the timely loan of a very large memory dongle) so that the show could go on. But if you’ve had a similar catastrophic crash involving a Mac and Adobe CS3 applications, you might want to read on to see how at least this particular problem was resolved.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Snapshots - NAB 2008 Day 3

Adam Wilt | 04/16- 11:46 PM

More pix from the show floor

Panasonic AG-HPX170

The Panasonic HPX170 is a P2-only update to the HVX200 (The HVX has been updated to the 200A and remains in the lineup). The HMC150, which records to AVCHD and lacks many of the 170’s advanced features, looks much the same.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Snapshots - NAB 2008 Day 2

Adam Wilt | 04/15- 11:44 PM

Codex Digital, SpeedGrade, Tangent, SI2K, and Nila

Codex Digital Portable and disk pack

Highlights of my walking around the show floor on Tuesday…

Codex Digital showed working versions of their Portable digital cine recorder. $44K gets you the lunchbox plus a three-hour drive pack, and the superb Codex user interface.

Monday, April 14, 2008

Killer Camera Support From Sachtler

Scott Gentry | 04/14- 06:11 PM

I spent some time today at the Sachlter booth checking out the Artemis vest and support – ACT 2.  I enclosed a press release after the jump, but here’s what caught my attention:

• Build quality seems top quality
• Carbon Fiber, Carbon Fiber, Carbon Fiber!
• This sucker was built on a vibration table to optimize its ability for quick motion and no flex
• New internal electronics to handle the higher wattage camera systems such as RED
• Revised vest ads to breathability and flexibility

While I don’t have a need for one of these slick items, I still want one…

Press release after the jump:

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