Well, the exhibition started today and hordes of people came from all around to check out the booths. The first thing on my agenda was to check out the Adobe, Apple and Red booths before my courses started, I knew there would be enough time but you never know what you’re gonna see at these shows…
I made it to the Adobe stand where they were announcing the new features of the video production suite, and I have to say, some of these additions are pretty sexy. Some, just geeky! Apparently, Adobe includes a new program called Adobe Device Central, this program, in conjunction with the Adobe Media Encoder, emulates many devices to enable you to see what your videos will look like on said devices! It’s a bit overkill I think, but I guess some people would find use for it. It has a database of different mobile phones and portable players, and let’s you see how the video will play on their processors, and it will even show you what it will look like when the device is in standby or in sun light! It even has the device’s controls mapped out on a graphical representation of the device! I couldn’t believe it when I saw it! I think a few people started crying…
Don’t believe me? Check out the photos from the Adobe booth! Other cool things I saw:
- Photoshop now imports video files if you have the extended edition, great for rotoscoping.
- You can do clip acceleration now instead of having a clip at a certain speed in Premiere Pro.
- Premiere Pro now lets you export videos to more places such as YouTube, Google video, Blue ray…
- Adobe has a new online video player.
- Adobe Encore DVD lets you export your DVD menus as Flash files!
- Adobe Flash (Still have to get use to saying that) now supports closed captioning (Subtitles from text files) for video files (!).
- One of the Adobe guys (The bald one) has a StarTrek tribute band. Again, see the photos with Adobe’s Steven Seagall!
- There is too much to add here. Look it up on Adobe’s site, most of these software packages were made public betas today.
The other thing I was dying to see at NAB2007 was the RedOne Camera, many people have heard of this and a lot of them didn’t believe it existed. Fair enough, all people had to go on for the longest time were renders of what the camera looked like. I won’t go into specifics, but the details are at http://www.red.com. Anyway, I got to the booth and had to queue up for around an hour to see some of the footage that was shot with this camera, all we had to go on was a few hints from some of the Red staff, they walked along the line of people and kept telling them that the film they were showing was shot by a famous director in two days, two weeks ago. Fair enough. Finally, my turn came to watch the footage, and after being ushered into a sound proof mini cinema hall, a guy came in and announced that what we were about to see was in 4K and that it was shot by Peter Jackson! They also said that he used the alpha cameras they had been developing, Boris and Natasha, and that they only had shutter controls and a record button working at the time! For the next 15 minutes, we were treated to a gorgeously shot film that was based on what looked like World War I combat, it looked great! Everything was so fine and detailed and did not have any compression artefacts in it at all! I was surprised, as I was expecting at least a few problems! Then again, I don’t have the experience of some of the other cinematographers with me in the room, but they did not utter anything during or after the film either. The camera works by recording RAW files which can then be processed in many ways; you can create intermediate files that you can replace later on with high resolution versions (Up to 4K! No rendering on intermediates either!) or you can process them and edit them in native resolution. It’s very flexible and very powerful. Above all, non-destructive either! Check out the photos. I have no idea what that spider thing is though!
There were many booths out at NAB2007 obviously, but because my courses start at two o’clock, I don’t have time to check them out, I will on the last day though, so there should be more photos of them later. Another thing that was really cool was the Red Giant Software booth, makers of Magic Bullet, I spoke to a guy there who I had been emailing about problems I had with the software but had never met, he was a really cool guy, he told me about an offer on Magic Bullet 3 (Which is to be released tomorrow, in beta I think) for 199$ instead of 799$. Bargain! He knows I’ve been using the software for a while so I guess he was really good about the upgrade. Oh, I’m also getting InstantHD free with it too!
Here are some other random photos from the show, they include the new Cinealta camera from Sony and the Nucleo booth from Grid Iron, another great software package.
