Digital Video - April 2008 - (Page 8) DV UPDATE NAB PREVIEW screening tent would this year feature footage from Red enthusiasts Steven Soderbergh and Timur Bekmambetov. “To be honest, we’ve been focused on shipping cameras, but we will have something.” Schilowitz notes that as last year ushered the beginning of the tapeless acquisition transition, this year “we’ll see it as becoming much more the norm than the exception, between Red and others pushing tapeless workflow.” Perhaps the most unexpected NAB surprises for ’08 were unveiled some months ago, when Avid and then Apple announced that they would not be attending the show, saving each company an estimated $3-5 million in exhibition expenses. Both cited strategic shifts in their respective marketing approaches, which would include attending fewer trade shows (though Avid confirmed that representatives would be somewhere near the Las Vegas Convention Center April 11-17) and increased reliance on the Web and direct outreach to their user groups. In regard to Apple, one has to also assume that the company has reached a certain saturation point in terms of public awareness given the relentless media blitz surrounding their releases of the iPhone and Air laptop. As a result, two of the biggest players in the hotly contested NLE space have sidelined themselves, leaving the playing field open to Adobe (Premiere), Sony (Vegas) and Grass Valley (Edius), I HATE THE TERM “FUTURE-PROOFING,” BUT WORKING IN HD IS PLANNING FOR TOMORROW. —ROBERT L. OTT, SONY ELECTRONICS among others. For Adobe, exhibiting at NAB — where they are showcasing their new Media Player content distribution and management Web software — was a no-brainer. “I feel incredibly strong about the importance of NAB to our customer base and about the amount of potential growth out there, even if there’s the threat of a recession,” says Simon Hayhurst, Senior Director of Product Management, Dynamic Media at Adobe. “When I look across our customer base, going tapeless has gone from something people were talking about to something people are doing or about to do because they know they’re late. That’s most true in broadcast, at the high end, because they have the budgets, but the change has almost hit the bottom as well, as companies like Panasonic have introduced a $1,000 tapeless HD camera that can take a 16-gig card. That’s affordable. So the middle of the market is what’s being squeezed. And that’s driving growth. I feel better about the next two years in terms of potential industry growth than I did about the last two. Rebel chef Anthony Bourdain hosts No Reservations. COMING IN DV May NO RESERVATIONS: We hit the road with the globe-trotting Travel Channel foodie series. IN REVIEW: Editing solutions; 35mm lens adapter systems AUDIO: Optimizing your workstation; portable mixer survey FEATURES: Stock footage report; high-speed work with the Panasonic HPX500; PMW-EX1/CineAlta tests; specialty HD cameras COLUMNS: Storage Media, DV101, Production Diary And this year’s NAB is a seminal opportunity for us to reach 100,000 or more people on the cusp of that growth.” So far as Adobe’s “big NAB announcement” is concerned, “the Media Player is a main focus right now — and we just had other announcements with the Flash Server — but we will have something, I’m sure.” He points to such strategic industry issues as the searchability of massive content archives and the need to seamlessly deliver media simultaneously across all possible platforms — including broadcast, Internet, cell phone and PDAs — as areas that Adobe is working on. “I’m also essentially living through my second HD revolution,” observes Hayhurst, who has been attending NAB since 1995 — essentially the edge of the current generation of many digital video tools in use today. “The first came during my 10 years at SGI in the 1990s, before I came to Adobe, when we were doing simultaneous HD streams and then multiple 4K streams, but that was being done for people with budgets on steroids. This time, it’s for everybody. And even if you’re looking to do higher-end work, you can base your system on a standardized tool set, like Adobe Premiere or Final Cut Pro. You don’t need anything exotic. The shift is more and more toward commoditizing and the democratizing the process, even at the highest end.” As evidence, Hayhurst points to the correlation between the ever-evolving size of pixels and Moore’s Law: “In 1990, my screen was 640x480 and today it’s HD. Plot that on a graph against Moore’s Law and it’s really clear as to what’s happening. Look at networking trends and the evolution of file www.dv.com 8 dv april 2008 http://www.dv.com
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