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NAB 2015 Wrap-up. Winners, Losers, Drones and Escalators

Scott Simmons

With another NAB in the books it’s time to take a look back on what we saw, where we were and what we might remember from the show. Overall it didn’t feel like a big revolution-in-the-making for any one company, product or format. There weren’t any huge surprises but rather more of the expected. The thing that shocked more NAB 2015 attendees than anything else? It got cold.

With another NAB in the books it’s time to take a look back on what we saw, where we were and what we might remember from the show. Overall it didn’t feel like a big revolution-in-the-making for any one company, product or format. There weren’t any huge surprises but rather more of the expected. The thing that shocked more NAB 2015 attendees than anything else? It got cold.

The Monorail was there, as always, shuttling tired and weary bodies back and forth. Back and forth.

The bigger issues

Drones and their place in the industry

 Drones were everywhere. The South Hall had the first ever and very successful Aerial Robotics and Drone Pavilion that featured a presentation area where the audience could sit and watch drones fly in a large, netted cage. Next to that were a lot of exhibitors with drone-focused products which helped revitalize the rear of South Upper-hall from a no-mans-land of Chinese widget makers and overpriced lunch options into a destination for one of the hottest product categories in video production. There are plans to expand the drone pavilion next year.

Central Hall was where drone makers both new and old set up shop to show their wares and fly them in their own netted cages (thought they didn’t seem to be flying that often). I never knew there were that many drones one could buy beyond the high-end multi-rotor machines costing five figures and the little ones from DJI.

In addition to the Drove Pavilion’s big drone net a lot of the small booths had their own nets. Oddly they never were flying them the many times I walked by. There were people in the net but they weren’t flying the darn things.

North hall was where classes were taught about drones, reporters were reporting on drones and panels were talking about drones. The FAA and some Washington bureaucrats even showed up to bravely take on those who are making a living in this new product category. I don’t think they provided any real new information.

Forget drones as there was a REAL helicopter taking off and landing from the LVCC parking lot demoing (I can only guess) some cool camera technology.

Women’s issues (though they are really issues for all of us in the industry)

Kudos to NAB for putting tougher a panel on women’s issues with the Working Together to Close the Gender Gap in Post Production panel that happened on Monday in the north hall. I wasn’t able to make it but I hear it was well attended, generated great discussion, stimulated good though and was appreciated all around for trying to bring to light some of the issues women face in this predominately male-dominated industry.

Meanwhile over in South Hall RED may have knocked women’s issues back a few notches with the scene it chose to set up so show-goers could test out its cameras. You know these scenes, intricately crafted full-sized live-action dioramas with real (usually living) human actors (presumably so you could see skin tone on the camera gear) going about their business in little vignettes populated with things like beach-gear, kitchens or any number of brightly colored, multi-textured items for the cameras to shoot.

This camera booth had nice colors, lots of little knick-knacks and well lit people to test all of those cameras out.

Leave it to RED to turn this time honored tradition on its ear with a darkly lit and dankly colored serial killer lair complete with skeletons on the wall and formaldehyde jars filled with dismembered faces. These camera demo scenes have to have a human component so every now and then a creepy old dude would emerge and piddle around the room before he began removing internal organs of a female corpse laid out on a slab. It wasn’t as bloody as it sounds but it was … interesting.

Of course this is generated controversy (why concentrate on RED’s Weapon announcement and the fact that hell must have frozen over since RED is going to offer on-board ProRes capture) and depending your point of view it was either a ballsy way for RED to thumb their nose at the stodgy old camera makers in the Central Hall or sickening display of misogyny that topped RED’s bikini runway models from last year. Or maybe you just ignored it altogether.

RED did have faces that you could shoot at their booth to test out the cameras only they weren’t attached to living bodies.

Other than that the RED booth was big and busy.

4K > 1080 ≠ HDR

I don’t know if there were any new 1080-only cameras released at NAB this year or not but if there was you wouldn’t really know it from the discussions around NAB. It was all 4K (and even 8K in more places than ever but that still wasn’t too many) all the time whether you were talking acquisition, post-production or delivery. The last two NAB shows have been teasing 4K to an ever growing degree and this year 4K was no tease. Even if you’re not going to post or deliver in 4K you might as well shoot in 4K since most every acquisition device out there is going to shoot it and/or record it.

 

High Dynamic Range has been touted as something that makes more sense for the viewing public than forcing 4K upon them as HDR images are much more brighter and vibrant than anything we’ve ever seen onscreen and will, conceivably, get the consumer more excited about buying a new television long before 4K will. The Dolby booth was showing Dolby Vision which was a great example of HDR production at its best and it was beautiful to watch. But then Sony had a side-by-side HDR demo playing with the exact same footage.

I have to disagree with that above tweet as results were just … meh. If I could have HDR vs non-HDR for everything I watch? Sure. Would I pay a lot more for it? Not from that demo. I think the verdict is out on HDR.

The non-camera camera makers

AJA

AJA is in an interesting position. After a big surprise introduction of the CION last year this camera has been met with mixed reviews and it didn’t get a huge update this year (not that it was in line to) other than some new firmware.

 

But AJA has decided to get the thing into the hands of users in a very unique way. The are lending 100 CION cameras to dps, operators and camera nerds in the USA with the [#TryCION program](https://www.aja.com/en/support/trycion/signup). Apply to get a loaner and you too may be able to take one for a spin. It’s a very clever way to counter some of the negative press the camera has received. There are so many potential users out there who won’t ever see or do the deep pixel peeping that many camera nerds do. All they need to do so get their hands on one.

As for the other AJA news?

Blackmagic Design

What can you say about BMD other than: products. Product after product after product was rolled out at the Monday press conference. The company seemed to admit many things: Yes we know the Pocket Cinema Camera is a pain to mount everywhere you people are mounting it, here’s the Micro Cinema Camera. Yes we know the URSA weighs as much as an anvil, here’s the URSA Mini. Yes we know you can’t be a real NLE without audio and multi-cam, here’s Resolve 12.

This is how NAB always begins, huge crowds everywhere. Especially around the Blackmagic booth.

And this is how NAB ends. The crowds have all gone home on Thursday, even at the Blackmagic booth. Hint: Thursday is the best day to walk the show floor.

All that stuff had the press event’s audience in a tailspin as they (we) processed the dizzying array of stuff and tried to report on it. The big winner here is July, when BMD said they’ll ship most of this stuff. It is unclear whether that is July 2015 or July 2016.

The NLEs and other software

Final Cut Pro X

FCPX had an interesting week. Apple gave us all an NAB surprise as Monday morning 9:01 AM Las Vegas time saw a brand new version of all the Apple Pro Video apps. I can’t remember the last time Apple had a non-Tuesday release. But more significant than Monday was that this was an unofficial NAB release that put Final Cut Pro X at the front of the Monday-of-NAB news cycle. Apple also chose to visit with their customers live and in person via presentations at the FCPWORKS suite (thought that came at the expense of some of the planned panel discussions, Apple apparently nixed those). While this wasn’t a booth on the show floor it was just a short walk from the convention center at the Renaissance hotel. In fact the whole week of FCPWORKS presentations was quite a showcase for many different implementations, workflows and success stories for FCPX. I dropped by on Wednesday to a packed house for one of Apple’s demos. Talking to the folks over there it sounds like they had good crowds all week.

While this update brought new icons and a jump in version numbers many users felt underwhelmed by the new features as not everyone needs 3D text, though many more probably do need masking. But early reports on FCPX 10.2 sounds like Apple wasn’t touting the update’s best feature: better overall performance. A search around the internet for those who weren’t at NAB and got to actually cut on FCPX 10.2 for the week were reporting noticeable performance increases. That is nice to see. What wasn’t really seen very much was FCPX itself, as in FCPX running on the show floor. I was only able to really look around the South Hall but after seeing a tweet about just that I looked around and didn’t see it much either. There was FCPX in the plug-in pavilion and I did see EIZO had it running in their booth but other than that there was quite a bit more Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro CC. I did see FCPX being used in both the press room and in the back of the big Teradek booth where they were broadcasting live shows (I saw it after one of our PVC hours were over). I’m sure there were more instances of FCPX running and some booths were probably mixing the NLEs up but overall I was surprised how little of it I saw given how much better the NLE has gotten over the years.

Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Adobe took some of the steam out of a forthcoming update to Premiere Pro by announcing it the week before NAB but this isn’t unusual. That did create buzz around this update coming into the week and there were a lot of people crowding around the PPro pod at Adobe’s booth every time I walked by. The on-stage presentations were quite full as well.

The big winner for Premiere Pro is color. Intrinsic color controls built into all clips in the upcoming PPro release is a big workflow change to those in the Adobe universe. The loser here might be Resolve, Colorista and Adobe’s own Speedgrade.

Avid Media Composer

Avid’s Saturday press conference and the 2015 Avid Connect event meant we knew what to expect out of Avid when the show opened on Monday. While most of the Media Composer focus was on the upcoming free Media Composer | First there was also a mention of an upcoming Media Composer 8.4 as well. I didn’t get to see a demo of 8.4, in fact I can’t find much coverage out of NAB about 8.4 other than this German video below. Details are scarce right now as this Avid community thread mentions. But it looks like we might actually get true resolution independence with custom frame sizes.

Does Media Composer | First classify as a winner or a loser? I think that totally depends who you talk to. One view says that it is a desperate attempt by Avid to get Media Composer into the hands of a new generation of filmmakers brought up on FCPX. Those are folks that won’t pony up the dough for expensive software or a monthly subscription and really wouldn’t ever download a 30 day trial. A free version will let those Avid-curious get their hands on Media Composer. The other view sees MC | First as a full winner as it brings new eyeballs into the Media Composer universe, lets editors who aspire to feature films and network television learn the tool the pros use and gives them just enough features (but not too many) to whet their appetite for more. Whether MC | First translates into brand new Avid users and more revenue remains to be seen. It has to ship first.

Avid also had a big announcement of new I/O hardware in the form of the Avid Artist | DNxIO. I think some of the initial excitement of new hardware beyond the aging Mojo (which will be discontinued) and Nitris boxes waned a bit when people realized that the DNxIO is essentially a rebadged Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K. This probably makes financial sense for Avid as it saves a lot of development and manufacturing costs. But the question I have is what exactly is there inside that makes it worth the cost above the BMD hardware. We know there is some DNxHR acceleration.

Media Composer has been notorious for not having as good of performance on third party hardware as it did its own Avid hardware ever since MC began supporting third parties for IO. One would hope there is some dedicated hardware inside that Media Composer can take advantage of to makes things like trimming as smooth and robust on this BMD-partnered hardware as it is on current Avid hardware. The same can’t be said for current third party devices. It’s really to early to speculate on this thing as you’re not going to buy it before it ships anyway.

Red Giant Software

This was the first year I can remember that Red Giant didn’t have a booth in the plug-in pavilion. Does that make them an NAB loser? No, even though a couple of folks I talked to there in the plug-in pavilion said they were asked numerous times were Red Giant was. One of them even said they were asked if Red Giant had gone out of business. I can tell you they aren’t out of business but they are alive and well. This year they’ve released Magic Bullet Suite 12, updated it and others, had an NAB panel, opened voting for a new Universe tool, had a sale and made a film. They are fine.

I asked Red Giant’s Aharon Rabinowitz about their absence from the plug-in pavilion and he said this year was a bit of experimentation with NAB. They actually were all around Vegas having meetings in the south hall, participating and putting together panels as well as sponsoring events like the Media Motion Ball and Supermeet. And if prizes were given away during an NAB event you can bet there were some Red Giant prizes in there. Personally I missed them not being in the plug-in pavilion as I always got to chat with some of the Red Giant folks face-to-face that I usually only interact with via email. But an NAB can be an expensive proposition so it’s understandable why some companies spend their NAB money elsewhere. Hopefully I’ll see more of them next year.

Sony Catalyst Production Suite

Sony has been quietly building their Catalyst name with several tools into Catalyst line. NAB gave us the new Catalyst Production Suite (or at least gave us the announcement of). Catalyst Browse and Prepare have been around for awhile but it’s the new Catalyst Edit that caught my eye. Word from the Sony demo booth was that it’s simple editorial and nothing too in-depth to compete with an FCPX/AMC/PPro but just looking at the interface and seeing some of the features it looks like it has a lot packed in.

Simple it may be but it has two of the hot editing features that any new NLE must have. Hover scrub / skimming (Sony even calls it Hover Scrub, can Adobe sue?) as well as a ripple / magnetic timeline. While there’s no pricing on the Sony website I think Catalyst Edit will be one to watch.

Overall a quiet NAB

2015 was one of those transitional NABs. There are some great new products for the camera nerds out there but as far at post-production goes it was somewhat quiet. I didn’t hear of anything that knocked the socks off of most attendees in the South Hall.

Escalators were a big loser at NAB 2015, they seemed to be broken all over Vegas. And that poor little car didn’t fare too well against the Hummer limo.

4K really was a norm this year and while many companies touted their 4K workflow I’d say it wasn’t near as big a deal as this year as it has been the last two years. The big headlines were the few companies showing 8K workflows but I think those were way more of a curiosity than anything. There always has to be someone to show something first. It makes me wonder exactly what might be the big thing at NAB 2016.

 

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