Post NAB Catchup

Despite ambitious plans to blog everyday about NAB its now a week after my return from Vegas. So here’s a quick wrap….

I spent way too much time in meetings at NAB. To do justice to show like NAB you really need at least four people, allowing each to attend the meetings relevant to them and allowing each to have time to free range the floor. It was only on the last day that I managed to get a limited walk of the floor. Even then it was highly directed as I paced the halls looking up the stands others had recommended to me.

The world of broadcast management applications isn’t booming. Its a small and increasingly smaller market so that’s no surprise. I was surprised to also see a lack of movement and excitement around media asset management (MAM). Obviously Proximity reborn as Final Cut Server provided some noise but otherwise it seemed very much business as usual with the existing players and no interesting new entrants.

The exception to this was the MXF Mastering Format demo given by the Advanced Media Workflow Association. Unfortunately I can’t link to anything substantial on it as the materials are available to members only. But it represents a new approach to the way in which media is managed, a more distributed method, and a concrete example of how MXF can be used to solve broadcasters media management problems. It is result of two years work by Omneon, EMC, Marquis Broadcast, Metaglue, OpenCube, Pro-Bel, Quantum, Snell & Wilcox, Softel and TMD , who focused their efforts on the multilingual audio and captioning requirements of Turner Broadcasting in London.

On the new distribution front Microsoft and Adobe battled it out with their respective announcements on Silverlight and Apollo. In terms of impact Silverlight is available as a cross platform, cross browser plug in capable of playing DRM wrapped media. In theory this means that DRM video services should now be able to be made available to Macintosh users. Practically and pragmatically this is of course not guaranteed. This week at Microsoft’s MIX further announcements on Silverlight have been made around programming. Silverlight contains a new dynamically focused version (DLR) of the .NET runtime (CLR) to provide an environment in which dynamic languages such as Javascript, Python and Ruby can better be run within. The creator of the .NET/CLR version of Python, Jim Hugunin, who now works for Microsoft provides some more details on the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). Whilst the full presentation by Ray Ozzie is available as a Windows video stream. I’ve already tried some of the Python samples running within Firefox on a Mac (PPC) and they’re taking down Firefox every time. Will update if I can get these working.

[Back at NAB] One night I excused myself from the industry cocktail circuit and paid cash money to attend a massive FCP Users Group meeting. Walter Murch gave a great talk on the production process of the new film, Youth Without Youth from Francis Ford Coppola. Murch is the editor on YWY and described how he approached the edit in FCP. Similar stuff to his book In the Blink of an Eye. The film was shot on the digital Sony CineAlta F900 cameras, 2 used statically, and when they needed a third an Arri film camera was employed. It was slightly unclear but they seemed to record vi HDSDI onto an external deck and record onto internal cassettes as well. The material was digitised as DV for the offline editing, effects done in Shake and then conformed against the HD material. Sound was handled in Pro Tools.

Apple’s announcements on FCP 6, Color and Final Cut Server made the largest noise at NAB. I asked everyone I met at NAB what were the big things for them and just about everyone polled listed Apple’s products in their top three. I was posed the question what will the impact of Apple’s “bang for buck” announcements be for mainstream media. Apple have aggressively priced FCP and the introduction of Color - effectively bundled for free and FCP Server continue this. So for traditional broadcasters and decent sized production houses they can look to continue to see cost savings, either by switching to FCP or to some extent by waiting for Avid to react and continue their ongoing price cutting.

More importantly it continues to drop the barrier of entry to video production. Be it for traditional programmes or the new net based forms of video delivery. For a great source of ongoing discussion on this topic I recommend checking out Twit.tv and the Pixel Corps - who are closely related, as is Video Grunt, who has a great series of videocasts on aspect ratio which a few people should try watching…

For me FCP/MXF and possibly FCP Server will be the focus of some ongoing exploration in the coming months. In particular around integration, using FCP’s XML project format, which I hope I’ll have some time to comment about. Be