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Some NAB 2022 thoughts, videos, pictures, interviews and more

Scott Simmons

If you haven’t heard, NAB happened again this year. After a two-year hiatus due to the … you know … it was back in person and definitely a different NAB than all the others I’ve attended over the last decade or so. Official attendance numbers from NAB were this:

TOTAL REGISTERED ATTENDEES: 52,468

INTERNATIONAL ATTENDEES: 11,542

COUNTRIES REPRESENTED: 155

I’ve seen comments that some think it was significantly less than that. I doubt NAB would lie about the numbers but maybe that many registered but way less showed up. I do know that in the short time I was on the show floor booth humans tried to scan my badge 52,468 times.

I don’t know whether those numbers above should be considered good or not as I don’t know about event attendance projections and break-evens but from an attendee standpoint walking the show floor, it was great. It felt really nice not to stand shoulder to shoulder almost every minute of the show and have to fight to get into a booth every time you wanted to see something or talk to someone. I’m sure NAB hopes those numbers get back up to where they used to be pre-pandemic and I bet the exhibitors do too.

All seemed well with the world as the Blackmagic booth was large and in charge but this time at the entrance of the North Hall.

There was no South Hall this year as the new and far away West Wall shifted everything by one hall and put stuff further from the Las Vegas Convention Center monorail stop. Many of those in my post-production purview didn’t get to the West Hall. I ventured there for a couple of talks at the Remote Production Corner of the Connect Experiential Zone.

This is someone else doing a talk at the Remote Production Corner, not me. I thought FMC took a picture of my during my session but I can’t find. At least you can see what these “Experiential Zones” were like. Some cool spaces.

I wasn’t sure what to expect in the West Hall as I walked in and saw a booth full of FM transmitter antennas but there I was. The best part of going to the West Hall was it gave me an excuse to ride back to the Central Hall in the new LVCC Loop which is a giant tunnel bored underneath the LVCC that runs a bunch of Tesla Model Ys driven by human drivers on a continuous loop through tubes barely bigger than the Model Y themselves.

I don’t see any fire suppression systems and escape hatches out that front window but honestly, I don’t know what to look for other than little sprinkler propellers and neon Exit signs.

The driver assured my group that in the event of a mid-tunnel accident and fire all would be fine because “all safety measures are in place” despite the appearance there was no fire suppression system or emergency exits in the tunnel. I’m sure it wouldn’t have passed codes without something safety-related despite Elon Musk’s influence. He owns (controls?) both Tesla and The Boring Company that made the loop. I have to assume the Tesla drivers get really bored after a couple of hundred drives through the loop.

And yea that’s kind of a cool underground launching port outside of the Central Hall where you launch your Tesla. I mean the driver launches the Tesla.

It sure beat walking between the halls yet again though.

Overall it was a short, fast, and easy NAB. This is despite the Thursday, April 28th, 3:30 AM scare that I might miss my 5:10 AM flight as I came down from the hotel to catch a cab and was told there were no cabs, Ubers, Lyfts, busses, shuttles, or rickshaws for blocks since the whole area had already been shut down for the 2022 NFL draft that, coincidentally, was in Vegas the day after NAB ended. So I wandered through empty Vegas streets with my bag until I got to a hotel that wasn’t under NFL draft quarantine and paid an Uber driver $25 in cash to add me to another ride going to the airport. It wasn’t all bad as we listened to and talked Metallica all the way to the airport much to the dismay of the sleepy passengers in the back seat.

What kind of stuff did I see on the show floor?

Not a lot as I didn’t have a lot of time on the show floor due to the short trip and some help with the Post|Production World conference.

But I did want to take a few minutes to catch up with a few companies that I have championed over the years that I hadn’t seen or talked to in quite a while. I grabbed the small PVC video crew for a few quick interviews as well.

Filmtools and ProVideo Coalition

It was fun to see PVC’s parent company Filmtools have a booth at NAB this year. They brought in a batch of camera, grip, and camera support gear and had a great time talking to customers outside of their Burbank location.

Our family at Filmtools got a lot of good traffic at their NAB booth. A bonus was restrooms were very close. And there was a hot dog stand on the other side.

Since our parent company also owns Moviola and there is a Moviola documentary in the works I encouraged them to bring a Moviola along for some old-school film editing but come to find out the physical Moviolas are very big and very heavy and no one really knows how to use them anymore. Maybe NAB 2023? 🤔

But I did learn you can buy tiny C-Stands for your desk. They are very cool and functional just like a regular C-Stand.

At $129 they aren’t super cheap but they are very much like the real thing and sometimes hard to get. I want one.

There’s also tiny little Filmtools Apple boxes.

They are a lot cheaper at $16. While these items aren’t post-production related they can sit on your edit desk so maybe they are!

Hedge

I first caught up with the gang from Hedge as many of them made the trip over from Amsterdam. They didn’t have any big, new product announcements but rather a continued evolution of their current product line.

It was the first NAB for Hedge since the acquisition of Divergent Media. That brought EditReady and ScopeBox under the Hedge umbrella. I talked with Hedge founder and CEO Paul Matthijs as well as Divergent Media’s Founder Mike Woodworth for an update.

What was most fun to hear was that Hedge has grown from just a few folks in the early days to nearly 45 people. I had hoped to catch up with the gang from ColorLab.ai as there were spending time at the Hedge booth but I missed them, Next time.

LucidLink

I continue to be amazed at what LucidLink is doing, even a year + after my review. While LucidLink has customers in many different businesses and disciplines they have a firm commitment to media production as evidenced by their booth and how busy it was every time I wandered by. I caught up with LucidLink co-founder and CEO Peter Thompson to get an update on LucidLink and probably ask him some of the same questions I’ve asked before but I’m still trying to figure out exactly how it works besides voodoo.

Perhaps the most memorable LucidLink thing (other than streaming media from the cloud directly to my NLE) was they were giving away Lego kits! Both at their booth and the Media Motion Ball on Monday night!

That was different and awesome but I didn’t tell my kids about it as they would have somehow wanted me to be sure I brought one home. Instead, they got Las Vegas novelty socks.

Axledit

Yes, the cloud was everywhere at NAB 2022. And yes many companies claim editing in the cloud. One interesting one that I talked to was Axle about their new Axledit. Axle Video is a long and well-regarded media asset management system and Axle.ai takes that MAMing to the cloud for even more functionality. A lot of that happens in the cloud with their AxelAI product.

Axledit is a browser-based NLE that can use your media already up in the Axle cloud or you can upload new media. It is a simple NLE but will be familiar to anyone who has ever spent more than an hour on any NLE other than Final Cut Pro. Edits can be performed and cuts downloaded and/or sent to YouTube (and presumably other online services) or exported as an XML or EDL to bring back to your desktop NLE.

There’s a free trial to test it out. Axledit might prove to be increasingly useful for the story editor needing to dig into a new shoot or a client to string together the talking heads assuming you can get them to do it.

Loupedeck

The gang from Loupedeck made the trek over from Finland to what I think was their first real NAB with a full-on booth. Despite my early skepticism of adapting a photography console to the video editing world (folks are trying) the Loupedeck CT really blew me away as a control surface for video editing and I love it. How much so? Here’s Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of my Loupedeck CT review.

It was great to meet them in person after years of emailing. While they didn’t have any new products they did have some show specials going and the sold one while was there talking.

No, they didn’t bring this booth from Finland. There are companies that can manufacture and store booths like this in Vegas.

Like Hedge, Loupedeck has grown from just a few folks to a much larger company though they are still quite small when compared to someone like Elgato or Logitech. While they do have some investments from some larger companies they remain what I consider a small company. While I assumed a lot of those new hires were working on hardware I was corrected in that it’s the software that takes a lot more of the engineering resources. That makes sense considering the new version of the Loupedeck software as well as the other things like the marketplace that is now part of the Loupedeck world.

I still took the time to pitch the CEO of Loupedeck on my new dream of a Loupedeck keyboard that is a ….

Seriously, now how cool would this be? Imagine a nice extended keyboard with the assorted Loupedeck controls built into the top of the keyboard, sort of angled up for easier reach. That would be amazing.

Keyboard with Loupedeck dials and screens integrated into an angled panel right above the keyboard. NAB is about dreams too.

Blackmagic and Resolve

It’s not NAB without something new and maybe crazy from Blackmagic. This year was all about Resolve the cloud and collaboration. Both Resolve projects in the cloud but also using and distributing media through/with the new Resolve Cloud hardware. While I don’t think most of us will be using the build-to-order cost quote only Resolve Cloud Store we might indeed by using the Resolve Cloud Store Mini or Resolve Cloud Pod. I’m still figuring these things out so I had questions for Bob Caniglia from BMD.

While I’m not exactly sure he cleared up my specific question of how the media on a Resolve Cloud device gets from Editor A with the Cloud Mini/Pod in Boise to Editor B in Jupiter Scranton but it seems that might be by Dropbox. Then I wonder why not just put the media on Dropbox to begin with since that is the current service that the new Resolve Cloud products support (more will be added). Seems that’d be one less step. But maybe the Resolve Cloud products just do this for you and save some labor. I’ll need to get one of these to try it out.

What I do know is that our media creation and post-production world is a better place with BMD in it. They have the ability to juke, dodge and pivot on a dime and you never know what they are going to do next. You can talk to the Resolve developers right on the show floor and they are genuinely interested in your use of their products. When it comes to the old adage of skate to where the puck is going BMD seems to be doing it better than anyone.

I was chatting with the folks from Nashville’s own High End TV, checking out their live-tv production truck, (they had been the truck used on several recent shows that I cut) and they showed me the new BMD HyperDecks they had installed. The production of a live show can buy the approved and relatively cheap SSDs, plug them into the HyperDecks and then take all those SSDs when them when the shoot is over. There’s your camera originals on a nice backup and the editor gets fast transfer to their RAID. A bonus bit of safety is the new HyperDecks have a buffer that they keep recording if an SSD gets accidentally pulled while recording. Don’t try that with your old KiPros.

Adobe and Frame.io

This was the first NAB since Adobe’s acquisition of Frame.io. Both Adobe and Frame had already announced their new products and It was great to see Frame.io friends who are now Adobe/Frame.io friends. Interestingly they had entirely separate booths in different parts of the show floor.

This was because Frame was located not in the post-production areas but near cameras due to their focus on the ever-evolving Camera To Cloud.

Seeing those demos live from a convention center was cool.

Wrap-Up

Overall it was a fast and fun and much more relaxed NAB. You can

I had planned to get by the Signiant booth and ask them when/if they are going to let Lesspain Software work on an update to Kyno but I didn’t so I took to asking on Twitter as it was hoped that NAB might get us some kind of Kyno update.

But, alas, we got nothing.

Lotus of Siam wasn’t as crowded but was just as tasty.

The cripsy rice is to die for.

The same can’t be said for In N Out Burger.

And finally … the MSG Sphere is coming along.

This thing is going to be a hot spot for NAB-bound media creators once it is complete. Will it be done next year? They say 2023 but will it be done by April 16-19 of 2023? We shall see.

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