I am aware everyone new of Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and pretty much all of the broadcast and new media industry were going to see some big things launched at NAB this year. Was that the case? Oh, YES! I am happy to had been there to see all these new applications, tools and hardware.
Many people do not agree with the upgrades or new offerings of many new products, but I must disagree with them, for the following products have many, many tricks under their sleeves, and I was really impressed for what I saw:
1. Final Cut Studio 2: I could go in detail about many of the new upgrades to FCP but in reality, I am amazed at two things with this upgrade, Motion 3 and Color. To see Motion move into the 3D space in all of its parameters, filters, particles and even with replicator is just impressive. And, the nice addition to the FCP suite is Color, an application that is so advance for all color calibrating and finishing and it is all up to 4:4:4 32bit float processing.
2. Adobe Creative Suite 3 Production Premium: From this collection three of the applications that had many upgrade were:
Adobe Photoshop CS Extended with streamline 2d/3D compositing. You can place, manipulate, change lighting/rendering options, and edit the textures of 3D models. Supports 32-bit HDR. New tools in Camera Raw 4. And vanishing point is just amazing at creating perspective 3D output from a 2D image and then exporting it to After Effects CS3 Professional where you just select the areas and can create a fly-around animation, really nice. And, Flash CS3 UI was incorporated and it looks more integrated to CS3 suite, so its tools and palettes are more ‘Adobe’ like Photoshop/AfterEffects. You can now import a Photoshop file and all of its layers will be sent to Flash layers with its respective names, and if you have layers grouped in a folder in Photoshop, you can import them as MC (MovieClips) inside Flash. ActionScript turns 3.0 and now video-encoding and playback is more advanced and has options as deinterlacing.
And we had a sneak peak at Adobe’s new Media Player. YES, a new player to the market, and while many of you may think, What are they talking about, Willis? I would respond, Microsoft Media Player, be affraid, very affraid. Because as most of us know, which format is the most used one in video playback on the web? No Quicktime, No WMV, but FLASH Video! Maybe that’s the reason Microsoft launched Silverlight, would this be as succesful as Zune? BTW, What’s is Zune?
3. A new Photoshop/FCP Plugin or Stand Alone Application that I saw was DFX by Tiffen Filters. If you’re a professional in the film and photography arenas, you know that some of the best polarizer and such other filters is Tiffen, they are expensive, but they are great. They launched an applucation named DFX, and when you see what this application can do to images, I would say it is amazing. Certainly it is an addition to Lightroom, Photoshop and Aperture, and a great addition.
4. One of the most talked about products and companies at the NAB was definitely Red Digital Cinema Camera’s product RED ONE, an amazing Digital 4K camera that is affordable and highly configurable. They also have their own codec: RED CODE that works great in FCP. The Camera’s package prices start at $ 17,500.00 This is a really affordable high end camera. People that wanted to see it were willing to wait in line throught the show for even up to an hour and a half ( I used my time to eat and read a lot of spec. sheets)
There were plenty of things to see, but really there is no way to walk through out 4 Million square feet of booths and displays. And to sift through more than 120,000 people is just so overwhelming in anly four days, but in any case I just wanted to mention a lighting company, that I hope many pople got a chance to view at the show, It is Element Labs, and they have a great product: Kelvin. I had been looking for a set of Flashes in the past six months, I do not want to spend a lot of money, and I want it to be portable and affordable. I had been looking at fluorescent tubes and banks, since they are cool and also are great for soft looks, and then I see this little brick that is only 6×1.7×2.3 in. that contains INTELLIGENT WHITE LIGHT SOURCE. Yes, indeed, it is a brick with an array of 5×17 ‘pixels’ or sources of light, but it is not only white light, it is an intelligent LEDthat provide unlimited variable color temperature settings and maintain a color rendering index(CRI) of 95 between 3200K and 6500K, resulting in extremely high-quality light. And unlike traditional light products, color temp remeins consistent throughout the full range of intensity variation. This brick provides 40 foot candles @ 3.3 feet. You can control it using a remote control or via software. And the price is only USD650.00
If you have any questions about NAB2007, send them to me, I did the best to visit most talked about companies and products, but I also visited many new comers.
