NAB pre-amble

I recently attended the National Assocation of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in Las Vegas, Nevada as well as the concurrently running Digital Cinema Summit. An awesome local post-production facility, Mission Control sponsored a good portion of my trip down, and I was on the lookout for a lot gear and things for several different people/agendas (including my own).

Prior to the show there had been a lot of hype surrounding an "unknown" announcement from Apple regarding their product line which everone assumed would include something about Final Cut Pro and perhaps DVD Studio Pro (version 4). They had announced their dual-quad processor machines (yes that's EIGHT CPUs in one box) just a few weeks earlier, so the speculation was that they would have some really kick-ass software that needed that spectacular horsepower.

Highest on my own priority was to check out the current state of digital cinema cameras such as the super-hyped "Red" camera from Oakley (the sunglasses) founder Jim Jannard and the underdog SI-2K from Silicon Imaging which incorporates the Cineform digital codec. Amongst the concerns for any new camera system is to asses the stability and level of maturity of the tools and workflow developed for the camera.

35mm film has been around for a LONG time, and is fairly well understood by most of the folks working with. Digital cameras on the otherhand are so new that even the pros are often confronted with vexxing questions about how they're going to proceed with the acquisition through post-process.

I wanted to find on-set monitoring solutions that included the ability to incorporate what are known as Lookup Tables (LUTs) so that quick color-grading "looks" can be applied while shooting on location. These would need to be non-destructive - meaning they would only effect our set monitoring and not the actual footage recorded to digital disk/ram. This is a fairly new market and so the list of companies providing solutions for this is very small.

Finally, I was interesting in seeing what options might be available from any and all companies for a digital grading or DI process for our movie as well. Currently in the Portland market, the only real "Color/Film Transfer room" is at Downstream which has a Spirit Datacine capable of a maximum of high-def resolution with an older DaVinci color correction system. I'm really looking for a product that can do a total digital data pipeline so that our footage can be shot in a raw digital format, transcoded to another codec for editing and then conformed using a high-end color room for final assembly and mastering. Ideally this would be done at 2K or 4K instead of just high-definition (which I'll elaborate on further when I recap the D-Cinema Summit).

This was my fourth or fifth time attending NAB, and probably my 20-something trip to Las Vegas. I've been to many conventions there over the years (including CES and the now defunct Comdex), so I guess you could say I'm a bit of a veteran there.

In the coming days, I'll be posting my observations about several of the products and companies that caught my eye and also recapping some of the more interesting tidbits from the 2007 Digital Cinema Summit.