NAB Day 2 Mark Heitke

Posted By Mark Heitke on April 18, 2012 12:13 am | Permalink
The show rages on.  

Today was a day to check out everything cameras and production, which meant I lived in Central hall.  
I spent most of time visiting with camera vendors since as a Post Producer I deal with new cameras and workflows daily.  
Looking through all the choices, I still love the Alexa but am really impressed with Canon's C500 as well.  These two cameras have the best look and feel for me and workflow wise are manageable, well as much as any digital workflow can be.  

After spending a few hours looking through lenses and framing random models doing completely odd, mundane tasks I headed outside for some sun and 3D.  I grabbed some lunch and checked out the 3ality booth.  They were showing off some Hip Hop dancing in 3D.  I am impressed at how every year they stand out as one of the few groups who show 3D as a creative tool rather than just a funny new tech.  

Refreshed and reenergized I swung back into Central hall to spend some time with GoPro.  The little monster of a camera has a giant following and rightfully so. GoPro released a new color tool this year, for free, that allows users to work with their footage and should help make extreme sports videos look better an better. The tool itself is fairly nice to use but it is no Lustre.  I also demoed their WiFi pack that allows you to use your iPhone to control multiple cameras from a distance. This was awesome!  A have a friend who is working on a shoot in Alaska.  After seeing the demo today, he will be utilizing the cameras to shoot multiple angles of a helicopter and control all the cameras form inside.  A really fun prospect and it proves that GoPro is certainly growing as a viable option for DPs.  

Having finished  successful day, I headed off to the CPUG (Creative Professionals User Group) meetup at the Tropicana.  While this event has been great in the past, this year was a mess.  The presentation was stopped cold by bad mics and flickering projectors.  The audio feedback was so bad that I had to leave after about 30 minutes there.  Too bad because the schedule they had planned was certainly shaping up to be really fun.  

Oh well, the one thing that helped with was giving me a window to sleep.  The crazy part of NAB is the endurance challenge it becomes.  Long days, long nights and early mornings makes for a bleary eyed Mark.  I really appreciate everyone who has been following my posts and responding on Twitter.  Please check out my Twitter and Instagram feed for more bits as I continue  to wonder the show.  


Mark
@mheitke