Second Day Impression at NAB

Posted By Mike Romey on April 13, 2011 09:29 am | Permalink

Stumbling across the finish line here at NAB to see everything.   Found a bunch of great gear in the North hall.  

If you are not familiar with stereo rigs but interested you should check out Element Technica’s booth. They have some amazing hardware and software that they have developed.  One of the products they are showing is a rig called the Atom.   It has most of the cabling for follow focus and ocular correction built into the carcass of the unit.   This makes setup and configuration faster and easier.    The metadata field recorder they are developing particularly intrigued me.   This device records all the camera follow focus and inner ocular convergences to a memory card or streams the data live to any possible listening devices such as a Virtual set.  Hoping they can lace an SDI signal in the future with this metadata.   They also have a hand unit for these rigs that allows the stereographer to control lens and ocular positions of cameras. Was really impressed with their equipment and spent a bunch of time looking at the units in detail.

Another great find worth checking out on the lower cost spectrum is the GoPro sport camera.  They introduced stereo support for their sport camera line.   The cameras can shot in 1080p and can be synched together for stereo support now.   They also introduced a new waterproof case to support stereo production.

Was also captivated by Teradek’s wireless video encoder.  It’s a little device that can be mounted on a camera and send wireless video with embedded audio to any wifi device.   So on set you can use this device to review live footage from your iPhone or iPad.   Was surprised at how well the footage held up especially with everyone on the show floor flooding the facility with wifi pollution.

Seems like NAB 2011 was the year of field recorders.  All the vendors seem to get that people want to go direct to edit and the field recorder is the way to do it.   A company named Gemini introduced a 4:4:4 field recorders with built in monitor that can record dual signals two 2 ssd drives.   This unit packed the most features I saw in the smallest form factor.   Including DPX file format support in future firmware revisions.   DPX acquisition is a key component at our facility and has been a standard for visual effects.   Receiving the footage in the proper format allows us to control the time it takes to prep footage for production.

Lastly what would a blog on NAB be without mentioning RED.  These guys are always rocking it and NAB was no exception.   Live tattooing on NAB floor, WHAT!   I know everyone is excited to see the HDRX footage and the Epic but the device that really got me amped up was the Red Ray Pro and Consumer devices.   Red has done it again buy introducing a new red ray file format called “.RED”   that is specifically geared to playback.   Think projection room playback device.   The device is capable of playing back HD, 2K, and 4K.   The catch is this, the size of the encoded files are tiny so the hardware requirements to playback 4k are nominal.   This in turn should make the cost affordable.   If you are looking for a device to playback 4k without purchasing truckloads of storage you need to see this device.   If you have a projection room and are trying to determine how to playback footage this thing is for you.   They also plan on making a version that can run at home.   In theory you could outfit a director with one of these at home smaller devices, encode the footage to red ray so that only the directors device can playback and ftp transfer the footage to your director quickly for 4k playback and review.   Really astonishing stuff and hoping to talk to RED about outfitting Zoic with these units for Dailies and review sessions.