Post Editorial Advisor Fred Ruckel of effects house Stitch in New York City is at NAB and has checked out a number of manufacturer booths. Here's a look at his take on new releases from Discreet, Sony and Adobe.
- Discreet Flint on Linux was really amazing. It was honestly as fast as Flame and on some things, faster. Price-wise, it is significantly less than the Flame/Inferno line with almost all of the same effects.
- Sony HDCAM SR is a great format 12 channels of audio, image quality was clean and very little artifacts. Compression-wise they use 2.7:1 for SD 4:2:2 and 4:1 on a 4:4:4 signal. This means that while it is a great format visually, it still will be problematic for use in chroma keying.
- Adobe After Effects V.6.5 The new tracker is more advanced. Vector paint is trackable and you can track a paint stroke over time very cool feature. Text advancements that include expressions and easy recall of built effects. A plug-in by Digital Anarchy was great, named 3D Layer I bought it. It allows 3D manipulation of layers in a composite inside After Effects.
NAB attendance close to six figures
The NAB public relations staff has released an attendance figure of 97,544 for the 2004 show, which includes 22,320 international attendees. The total is up from 88,020 in 2003. Final figures will be released after the convention.