NAB Snapshots (Part 1)

Just before packing his bags and jetting off to Las Vegas, George Jarrett had time to give us a second preview this year’s show...
NAB will be upon us before many people have finished scoffing their Easter Eggs. An essential annual pilgrimage for so many media professionals, it has become an event of incredible sophistication, offering multiple attractions to organised groups and individuals alike.
This year the Consumer Electronics Show will cast its biggest ever shadow over NAB, in the form of 4K, but in this second preview of the show there are many individual snap shots and nothing tied to a specific theme.
One area that merits serious attention will be SPROCKIT – a ‘next big thing’ initiative featuring 10 selected development companies on a collective hub in central hall, plus the keynote session Start-ups: Powering the Media Metamorphosis. Examples of what you can find are Tivi, which specialises in live streaming TV and TV Everywhere for college students, and Standard Media, which indexes, tracks and aggregates real-time media spend data for dollar-nervous content stakeholders.
In the area of collaborative standardisation work, The EBU and AMWA will showcase a number of advances to FIMS, starting with the extensions for repositories, and the work being done on quality control and quality analysis. Repositories concern anything that has to do with storage, be it local, remote, distributed or in the cloud. The FIMS business board requested QA/QC, and the development work will be done in collaboration with the EBU QC group. FIMS will define the service interface, and the EBU will define parameters and criteria.
Exhibitor product news
Sony’s Media Cloud Services Division launches at NAB, with president Naomi Climer saying: "The market is hotting up and there are suddenly really 'no brainer' cloud use cases emerging across the industry - so the timing is great.
"Our thinking is that the core needs of many companies dealing with rich media content have many similarities. We aim to deliver a really strong ‘common core’ that does the basics really well for a wide range of customers, and then we’ll deliver Sony and third party applications to meet the specific needs by industry or organisation," she added.
Quantel will split its exhibit into news and sports production – advanced workflows delivered by Enterprise sQ and QTube; the use of RevolutionQ to show how SOA can deliver fast, connected broadcast workflows from generic storage; and, the finishing of 4K projects with V2 of Pablo Rio. The aim is to establish Pablo Rio as the leading real-time, high-resolution colour and finishing platform. The app SynthIA, introduced at IBC, is a S3D interaxial adjustment system.
The CG and VFX software specialist Luxology, which recently merged with The Foundry, has improved the modeling, sculpting, animation, effects and rendering workflows of its MODO package. In addition to boosting the architecture of its rendering engine, it has added a new particle system. Notable improvements include the pre-set workflow at the end of the procedural particle engine, sound playback with channel modifier, and a new Python interpreter that reduces execution times.
End users will highlight the improvements in both preview and final rendering, and MODO is also available on Linux now. Meanwhile, The Foundry has introduced MARI 2.0. Its digital paint tool now boasts an artist-focused layer system in which the key tools are layer view – grouping, tagging and filtering, procedural layers for creating a look, and shared layers.
Anton/Bauer will major on the DIONIC HD battery, the AB Direct VU handheld receiver/monitor and a set of Gold Mount power options for the latest cameras on the market. Fellow Vitec group member Camera Corps, which specialises in tracking systems and special application cameras, will lead with its Q-Ball high-definition pan/tilt/zoom head. A third Vitec company, Integrated Microwave Technologies, will major on the Nucomm connect live COFDM and Multi-4G/LTE Live-Video HD transmitter, which it aims at the wireless camera systems used in live news. It is packaged with a five-inch, high-resolution touch-LCD monitor that mounts directly onto a range of small-format HD cameras. 
Appear TV, specialising in head ends for IP and broadcast, has a new
Multiscreen and OTT system for modular head end architecture. This enables users to streamline the encoding and transcoding process, and the easily integrated and expandable architecture puts it right in the fast growing business of streaming content for live applications such as sports broadcasts.
Clear-Com’s news for its voice communications user base will be V1.1 of its HelixNet party line intercom system. It has a system linking capability, which extends digital party line intercom communications in the field and in studios.
Solid State Logic will have new software for its C10 HD compact broadcast console and the C100 HDS digital broadcast console. Tagged respectively as V4 and V6, the new releases introduce performance improvements for the C10 and workflow enhancements to the C100.
DPA Microphones has launched the d: facto II vocal microphone. Aimed at live music broadcasting, this is said to produce a natural sound experience – which reaches the extreme sound level handling of 160 dB - with high separation and extreme SPL handling.
Sound Devices will offer upgrades for it PIX 240 and PIX 240i video recorders – most specifically Apple ProRes 4444 recording from video sources over 3G-SDI. This triggers superior colour precision for chroma keying, colour grading and editing.
Read George's article in the online edition of Regional Film & Video here.
(IT/CD)