Well, another NAB is in the books and I believe I have just about recovered from the AJA party last Tuesday. But the less said about that the better.

I’m sure everyone has heard the big news of the show which came from Red, Panasonic, Sony, Imagineer and Avid. Before speaking about two gems I saw from the show a few words about these. To me, Red’s Scarlet 3K camera for $3,000 should be even more revolutionary than the Red One, and I am a little confused about the need for 5K since we are years away from realistically being able to do a true 4K workflow. It seems to me that a lot of the folks that were interested in the Red One still had little use for something that powerful and even at the low price was a little beyond their means. The Scarlet should adress that nicely. Also, you have to think that other camera manufacturers are going to at least give some thought to lowering their prices. Now the question is, when will Scarlet be delivered on time. Inquiring minds await.

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Avid seems to have focused and defined its message and product line as well as added suport for P2 and XDCAM. After years of virtually ignoring the existence of Apple, it seems to be reaching out to say, “yes we cost more, but if you want a pro workflow, you’re better off paying a little more for the Avid. If not go with Final Cut, or better yet Pinnacle.” Lots of folks have been scratching their heads as Avid has been slow to adopt new formats in th e past few years, especially compared to Apple. But ingesting material is only part of the equation. Howard Brock of Runway, which rents out editing systems, noted in the AlphaDogs’ Editors Lounge last month, “anything you can get in the Avid you can get out. Apple has the opposite problem: you can get anything into Final Cut but getting it out can be a real problem.”
I guess the debate will continue endlessly but Avid appears to be finally taking on the debate and making the case for its systems.

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At Panasonic it is “One ring to rule them all,” an that ring is P2. It’s no surprise this was coming but it will be interesting if there is resitance from those that still don’t want to go tapeless. And of course you can’t mention Panasonic without mentioning Sony. While Sony released it’s second generation of solid state recording camcorders with the EX3, it also showed a new solid state recorder which fits on the back of a studio XDCAM optical disc camcorder. It was said that this accessory was for a “studio camera” but one would think Sony would soon have them for the field XDCAM optical disc camcorders. This seems like the best of both worlds: record to both, bring the SxS card into your editing system to work with while your footage rests safely on a disc on a shelf.

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Autodesk and Quantel seem so ingrained in the VFX/finishing world it seems difficult to imagine a new kid on the block carving into that market. But hats off to Imagineer for trying and the VFX guys I spoke with at the the show were genuinely excited about the mogul architecture. At the last hour of the last day of NAB Imagineer was demonstrating mogul to Autodesk and Quantel representatives. The sheer amount of questions from them makes me think that Imagineer may just well be onto something here.

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But my two favorites are less well know. One is aiming for the sky and the other is firmly rooted. The latter is a locking HDMI cable from Ottovonmo Productions. It does exactly what is says, you plug it in and it locks. The rep that I met plugged the locking HDMI cable into a Canon XL H1 and held it up by just the cable. This is a small thing but should provide some peace of mind on set and likely prevent some production disasters.

www.lockinghdmi.com

The second product that struck me came from a new company Cinnafilm could be revolutionary (and I hate to even use that word). Cinnafilm was started by former aerospace engineer Lance Maurer and has as its technical advisor Brad Carvey, who won a technical Emmy as part of the team that developed the Video Toaster. The Cinnafilm HD1 is a black box that provides realtime film look to video. Since more and more people are shooting on video and not going out to film, providing a film look in realtime at a fractuion of the cost should be extremely appealing. Users will be able to selct from a menu of common film stocks or can start from scratch and create an entirely unique “stock” from a plethora of controls.

The system will be leased for $10,000 a month (there will be more on the pricing to be relased soon so that the cost goes down over time). Seeing is believing as starting in May Cinnafilm will accept 30-second video clips which they will apply a look to and send if back to you as proof of what they can add to your film. Cinnafilm has its own studio in Albuquerque New Mexico for film finishing.

But that alone, while impresive, is not the revolutionary part. Soon after the June release of HD1 Cinnafilm will be adding the InfiniFrame and InfiniPlane mudules to the system. Infiniframe allows you to create an infinite number of frames bewten regual 24-frame footage, the the new slow-mo footage plays back absolutely smooth with no artifacting. They’d told me about this over the phone before NAB but seeing is believing. And infinite, means infinite. During the demo they played back a 6-second clip that took 20 minutes to play back. InfiniPlane will allow users to create depth-of-field: going into a shot where a lot of the image is in focus, selecting the point to remain in focus and then throwing everything else out of focus in a natural gradual manner. Again not a bad tool to have for HD production and it is all realtime.

Combining these modules Cinnafilm will be developing a third module which will allow for simple 2D to 3D creation. They are working with Los Alamos National Laboratories, which worked on a little thing called the Manhattan Project way back when, and also to accurately access their color replication and processor response.

www.cinnafilm.com