At this point it really feels like Wednesday and Thursday of NAB 09 were kind of a blur. I had good intentions and planned to attend an intense 3 hours Apple Color class on Wednesday morning but after rolling into bed about 3 AM that 9 AM class seemed to soon. But that meant more time on the show floor checking out some cool products.

From an ease-of-workflow-for-offline-editor standpoint, pluraleyes might be the killer app for mulitcam editing in Final Cut Pro. When you have a multicam shoot without jam synced timecode you could use pluraleyes to sync those cameras. The software uses the audio to sync your clips in a multi-video layer timeline. Once you have this sync-map then you could multiclip via auxiliary timecode and have the best of both worlds! I hope to test this software out in the future.

ProxyMill is another little app that could have great usage for some. It automatically creates “creates low resolution, preview quality QuickTime movies directly from digital HD media including P2, XDCam, AVCHD, and RED.” It can do this in an automated fashion via a “watch folder” and with support for Primera Bravo disc duplicators it can automatically burn stuff to disc. Imagine a very easy (nearly automated) process of generating low-rez BITCs for a client and burning them to disc for delivery after a multi-day shoot and you can see how handy ProxyMill might be.

I remember playing with CatDV at a facility years ago. It was handy to cataloging video files but I didn’t see much need for it other than it being cool. They newest version of CatDV that was showed at NAB is light years beyond what I remember. It’s cataloging on steroids with support for many formats (including stills), logging, media management and many options for general workflow integration. Check out the description page for all the info. I watched the demo as the operator took a QuickTime file, added several columns of metadata and imported the clip into Final Cut Pro from within CatDV interface with metadata intact. He also created a simple edit in CatDV and sent that to FCP as well. Apparently one popular application for CatDV is for reality tv where loggers must catalog hundreds of hours of media. 

Bella was showcasing the soon to ship HD Mouse. Calling it an “HD” mouse might be a bit more marketing than reality but with the extensive customization that can be saved on a per-application basis it might be one of the better mousing solutions out there. Bella plans to provide presets for a lot of our favorite creative apps as well.

Everyone was buzzing about SonicFire Pro 5 and it’s Final Cut Pro integration. Using a timeline, SonicFire gives the user the ability to retime music to picture without changing the pitch of the music. You can add markers in FCP that will translate back to SonicFire for specific beats and hits you want to emphasize in your video. It’s really music customization unlike anything else out there on the market. Short of hiring a composer for custom scoring I’m not sure how you could get any more custom music than this!