Las Vegas is home to illusions. While roaming the strip, you are confronted with not just one Mirage a la the hotel, but with another visual phenomenon: Even though you can see the hotel where you’re headed, it takes illogically long to walk there. Your brain says its short. Your feet begin to argue.

Mapping mirages happen within the Las Vegas Convention Halls too. When crafting an NAB schedule, sometimes you forget where your classes are. Or more specifically, how far away they are. 

“Where is C8201?” I ask Chris. 

“That doesn’t sound familiar to me,” Chris responds.

I roll my eyes. I realize I need to make a decision about how to use my time. So I ask Chris:  “What’s the most important session at NAB?”

“Check out what we’ve got planned for 2024 Show!”

“What is the most important release?” I pester.

“That’s not on my radar,” Chris responds. 

My partner Chris is not terribly helpful. He is, after all, an AI chatbot created specifically for NAB Show. His older and more sophisticated humanoid sibling (cousin?), Ameca, graced the NAB Show main stage. And while robots and chat bots might be expected at one of the most technologically focused trade shows of the year, the human conversations and humanity are truly the highlight.

At a trade show where the production and actions make our creative lives more robust, NAB highlights conversations and community that drive products and change. Conversations lead to action and conversations lead to product. And where else can you have a conversation with almost every creative player in the industry, and also gamble, but NAB?

And we do mean every creative player. For some companies, like Blackmagic Design, NAB is the trade show where the most staff attend. 

“I think what happens, and the reason why we bring so many of our engineers to the show, is to watch reactions to what we announce, get ideas for future things, and a lot of times, and this has happened more than once, there’ll be a product that was not announced but is coming later, and people will give feedback about, ‘you know what you should do?’,and you start going, hmm, well, we are in the right direction,” shared Director of Sales Operations, North America at Blackmagic Design, Bob Caniglia.

Blackmagic usually decks the halls with decks, literally. Photos of their gear have graced the pillars, the ceiling, and the windows of the Las Vegas Convention Halls and the neighboring Marriott for years. This time, the new URSA Cine 12K graced the hotel awning at least 24 hours before the announcement of the camera. Users still flocked to the booth, eager for the first glance of the new camera or see the Pyxis in action (or perhaps sink their feet into the best carpet). 

The larger the booth, the larger the presence. Just down the way from Blackmagic, Adobe’s bold colors and massive real estate offer creative consultations and demonstrations.

“We’ve got pretty much everybody that’s working on the product that can actually bring it to life and make it happen,” shared Paul Saccone, Sr. Director, Adobe Pro Video Marketing. “We have literally hundreds, thousands of customers that we’re talking to this week at the trade show, but it just doesn’t happen at trade shows. We have really, really doubled down in the last 18 months at Adobe about making sure that we are deeply engaged with the community.”

Community for Adobe now extends deep into the creative sphere beyond the boards (though those are helpful too). With meet  ups and conversations, collaborations with creatives, and more, Adobe has been strategic about leveraging from and learning alongside those who use their products the most. They’ve included members in early releases, especially with AI incorporation, and hosted frank conversations about how best to improve their products.

“There’s a million things we can do with generative AI, but we’re trying to think of things that are going to be meaningful and have an impact for editors,” Saccone continued “When we did the sneak for the community members on Sunday night [before NAB], there was applause. I want to continue this engagement with the community and really focus on trying to do the things that matter.” 

Speaking of engagement, NAB Show creates a one of a kind opportunity to meet the people behind the products. So I had a conversation about conversations with the CEO of Frame.io Emery Wells himself, in-between demonstrations of the new Frame.io V4 which includes a build out for a casting call.

“We hope that people share what they’re discovering and the workflows that they can create,” Wells noted about how creatives  are using Frame.io. “We probably would not have sought out to build a purpose-built casting tool, because that’s a relatively niche kind of requirement. But what we found is across all these different requests of workflows that people are trying to accommodate, we distilled it down into a common model, which is this idea of custom metadata fields.”

Wells proceeds to walk me through the custom metadata fields and shares the functionality of Frame.io V4.

“Whether you’re doing VFX shot tracking, casting, location scouting, commercial photography workflows, standard post-production workflows, anything in between, they all share a common sort of workflow approach, which is input some data, and then build views off of that data for the specific workflows you’re trying to accommodate,” Emery shared about the potential buildouts of metadata workflows. 

Keeping the end user in mind drives every company, including NAB itself, from design to talent to new features to supporting the community. And it’s driven in part by feedback.

“We make meaningful changes, and we’re not building these products for us.  We’re doing it for you and the customers and what you would want and what our customers would want,” enthused Brett Halladay Product Education Manager at DJI. We chatted while riding the subway at the DJI booth. Major pluses: it didn’t smell and was relatively quiet! Magical!

Vertical shooting, now on the RS4 and RS4 Pro, was incorporated based on feedback and adaption of 2023’s RS3. “On the RS3 Mini, when that launched last year, we built in vertical shooting…and it turns out that a lot of our customers actually love this, and they started buying RS3 Mini as a second gimbal so they could use it with social content,” Halladay explains. “So we incorporated their feedback and the desire for this level of workflow into our main line of product. You can go from landscape recording or photos into portrait and then right back.”

I ride all the way to FUJIFILM (well, by foot, not by subway) to see if a certain new camera that broke the internet is out and about.

“Oh you mean this one?” asked Michael Bulbenko of FUJIFILM as he slings a X100VI around his shoulder and onto a counter. Yes, that one. This camera, with new video emulations, is the latest to inspire FUJIFILM’s “loyal community.” And they, in turn, inspire the equipment. “The whole point of making anything that we do is for the end users,” Bulbenko shares. “We have this philosophy of something called Kaizen, it’s a Japanese word, it basically means like always improving. We embrace that.”
Across the way, Canon beckons me in both by a surf rock band and by my name, a testament to their relationship building as part of their community (Author note: seriously, I crashed a Canon winter gathering years ago and somewhere between sips of wassail and demonstrations of the R, I made years-long friendships). It’s like Lisa Gualtieri Alford, Vertical Sales Manager at Canon, shares: we feel like VIPs.

“I think that we build community through NAB through a lot of one-on-one time. I pre-plan a lot of meetings with customers so that I can take them on booth tours and do product demos and build those relationships ,working with customers on that one-to-one level,” Gualtieri Alford shares. And some of those customers have actually suggested elements that, through a process of feedback and design implementation, were incorporated into products. “A lot of educators wanted to see aperture rings on the outside of lenses the way that we used to do it in our older lenses,” Gualtieri Alford explains. “So when we came out with the RF lenses one of the things that they added to it was the control ring…and then also with the new RF 24-105, that has a dedicated aperture ring on the outside of the lens. So that’s one example of bringing feedback from higher education and professors that need things like that as a teaching tool that now we see in the new and current iterations of products.”

This educator is pleased.

Relationships are also key when it comes to Sony’s work with creators and users. As shard by Senior Product Manager El-Deane Naude in an email after NAB Show, “Sony’s core mission over the last few years has been getting closer to creators.  Practically speaking, this means sourcing feedback from power users, customers, and influencers. This insight and information has helped us design and roll-out purpose-driven products and implement helpful updates to enhance the power of – and your investment in – our existing products.  Sony benefits from the knowledge and relationships within our industry, which help us create more effective solutions.  In turn, our creators have their perspectives taken into account and have an open forum and a direct line to Sony to have their feedback considered, pain points addressed, and better technologies to assist them.”

During my tour of the Sony Booth at NAB, questions and notes were drowned out by a video about Virtual Production. “Gone are the days of the green screen,” the video beckoned. Conversations, and community, around virtual production actually started before the floor even opened at NAB at Vu’s Virtually Everything Summit. Everything is big and bright in Vegas, but Vu’s LED  screen (and breakfast spread) defined the words. 

Fueled by a proper breakfast and held at Vu’s facility close to the Vegas airport, the Summit aimed to be a hub of conversation and learning from each other, talking about the “miracles” that are virtual production, as presenter Chris Hayman shared on stage. 

“We’ve just found over the years, there’s been a lot of advertising about how amazing virtual production is, but not enough people talking about the reality,” Tim Moore, CEO of Vu Technologies, shared before his keynote. It’s just a really good time to have a lot of great minds in here that are open and willing to tell what they’ve been through and how to avoid that in the future.”

Vu’s Summit provided breakout sessions on everything from diversity to Unreal Engine, and plenty of space, real and figurative, for conversations. As we were reminded by Edd-Dawson Taylor during their session (attributed), “Art is communication coming from people.”

So is communicating with yourself art, too?

Throughout NAB, I for one, talked my way through it. From wondering if I was making the right choice with a class to asking questions about gear, it’s a continuous conversation. And through it, I noticed that the element of change, of serendipity, of risk happened over and over. A gamble. 

We are in Vegas after all.