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HD Expo Chicago was lame
I got in for free, and I felt like I wanted a refund.
The “2-hour intensive training” about how to wrangle data from HD cameras into a Final Cut Pro environment, which would have cost you over a hundred to attend if you registered day-of-show, turned out to instead be a one-hour lame sales pitch for a particular archival and storage product. And they didn’t even seem to have the product at the show. The stuff I came expecting to hear about, they teased that they would tell at a 3-day paid training. In LA. To me that’s a bait-and-switch.
I came expecting tips on how to wrangle P2 cards without wasting lots of time how to organize, tag, and enter metadata, how to make sure the shots are saved and not lost, how to share them on set and with clients at a distance. Instead it was like sitting thru a condo time-share sales pitch.
I took a day off from work and drove 400 miles, eight hours, round-trip for that. I’m not a happy guy, and as far as that product and that vendor, they are dead to me now.
The show was also very tiny, made the old Swiderski or DV expo look like NAB Vegas in the heyday, by comparison. The brochures on the vendor tables were mostly generic stuff, I could have done better surfing company web sites or the COW. It is stuff like this that’s killing trade shows.
Go ahead and gloat, Boomer, you called this trend quite some time ago. I still think there’s a place for physical get-togethers like trade shows though, but this expo was a bad experience for me. I think smaller local gatherings run and vetted by user groups would be more productive than what I experienced.
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17 Replies
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[Mark Suszko] “The “2-hour intensive training” about how to wrangle data from HD cameras into a Final Cut Pro environment, which would have cost you over a hundred to attend if you registered day-of-show, turned out to instead be a one-hour lame sales pitch for a particular archival and storage product”
That’s just bad business plain and simple. Sorry you had to experience that.
400 miles round trip for nothing. That’s very lame.
[Mark Suszko] “I still think there’s a place for physical get-togethers like trade shows though, “
I definitely agree with that. As long as they provide what is advertised, then it’s good for all parties.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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At the HD Expo here in L.A. last September, I pulled into the entrance to the Burbank Marriot only to be greeted by a fellow handing out maps to an offsite parking area ten blocks away. He said parking at the Marriot was full, but that shuttles were running continuously from the alternate lot. Right!!!
Needless to say, it was 95-degrees that day, and when I finally found the alternate lot, there was a line of other unfortunate people, who like myself, were now stranded, baking in the blistering afternoon sun of the San Fernando Valley.
I waited 45-minutes until a bus finally came — the others had been in line before me for God knows how long. In any case, when the bus finally arrived, as my turn came to board, the driver looked back and noticed the seats were all full, at which point he refused to let me and the one other unlucky person behind me onboard, citing a Marriot company policy forbidding the carrying of unseated passengers.
After quickly attempting to get the lot manager to fix the problem, I realized that it was all up to me. I jumped in front of the moving bus and forced the driver to stop. Then, I forced open the door of the bus and pulled the other guy onboard as well. I then put my face only inches in front of the driver, and I told him in no uncertain terms that he had best get the bus moving immediately, and that my friend and I were going along for the ride whether he liked it or not. There was no argument this time…
Later, at the end of the day, I had another 45-minute wait to get a bus back to the alternate lot. Trust me, I called the organizers the next day and let them have it with both barrels, and I will never go to HD Expo ever again…
David
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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I could forgive a screw-up between the show organizers and the hotel over parking and shuttle bus service. If there actually was a SHOW to go to.
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[Mark Suszko] “I could forgive a screw-up between the show organizers and the hotel over parking and shuttle bus service. If there actually was a SHOW to go to.”
I realized after I wrote the post that I left out the part about the show, which was indeed far less educational and/or entertaining than 30-minutes spent on the Cow.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los AngelesPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.
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This makes me think of the AVID Roadshow event I went to in the Boston area circa 1993. The event kicked off with a blank screen, as the PowerMac would not boot. Once it got going, the tech spent about half an hour showing all the cool backgrounds he could put on the Mac desktop. Eventually they got to the AVID software itself, but I don’t recall any specifics, since the dog and pony show for the Mac itself permanently scarred my frontal lobe.
I did get a free t-shirt.A few weeks later I went to the SGI Roadshow, and had a similar experience. An audience watching someone type UNIX commands on a projection screen – exciting! No t-shirt – bah!
A similar experience with the Radius Telecaster and the IMIX VideoCube also went down soon after.
All of these events had one thing in common – showing something that was probably not quite ready for the public, just to get it into the public.
Despite the non-starter nature of these events, they all came into play early in my career as we went about the following activities:
– Researched replacements for the aging 1″ edit bays
– Toured the country with our SGI computers displaying cutting edge Virtual Reality simulations
– Demonstrated not-yet-ready-for-primetime technology and presentation methodologies in front of large audiences
– Developed a large collection of customized Anvil casesMike Cohen
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Mark,
I’m sorry to hear of the experience but I’m really not surprised at all. I had the day off, I’d registered and gosh darn it, I’d found far more important things to do in my house, like watching some freshly applied paint dry.
I live in Chicago, I know the small venue they had the booked and I wasn’t up for a constant sales pitch. I work in live television, last thing I care about is a sales pitch for the latest and greatest heavily compressed, pixel-shifted 15k resolution ultra-hd yet proprietary prosumer piece of gear that is the new miracle tool for the next great American documentary.
I am sorry of hear of your experience and now I’m really glad I didn’t waste my time on the train to go. NAB was great this year. Lots of people believed the hype of the demise of the trade show and I could talk to any product manager I needed to talk to, no waiting. I’m hoping the hype continues on to next year.
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[Craig Sommerer] “Lots of people believed the hype of the demise of the [NAB] trade show and I could talk to any product manager I needed to talk to, no waiting. I’m hoping the hype continues on to next year.”
Er, um, excuse me. As someone who actually pays to have booths at tradeshows, I don’t think I would call that a raging success from the exhibitor’s point of view.
Placid relaxed grazing may be nice for cows and end users at a tradeshow, but it is not as advantageous for *many* of the companies on the show floor of NAB. Some benefit from it — usually those with higher mark-ups and tougher products to pitch, ones requiring more hand-holding to introduce — but most exhibitors would prefer a larger rather than a smaller audience. (Well, as long as it was an audience that really was targeted to their product. I remember when we went to the New York DV Show back in 2002 and we found out the promoters had people walking the rainy streets of NYC giving out passes to visitors who wanted out of the rain and came in to ask questions like: “So what is DV?” After about the 10th time of being asked that, I started pointing those people to the promoters information desk and told them that they would be quite happy to explain the focus of the show to them.)
Concentrated is nice but you need numbers too. Especially for the kinds of exorbitant fees that trade shows charge vendors.
Oh, and the demise of tradeshows is no hype. Like magazines, they are struggling hard to survive in today’s world where the internet is at everyone’s fingertips. The need for them is just not as great as it was before the internet came along.
The ones that survive will be the ones that have a real connection to their audience. Shows like DV Expo have dropped to the point where they are 1/50th or less, (from what I can assess from memory), of what they were in their halcyon days. Why? There was no genuine connection to the audience.
NAB has a connection. Cinegear has a connection. But from what I can see, many others are struggling to find a connection. Some, like DV Expo, have completely lost that connection and few companies even bother attending anymore.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
Creativity is a type of learning process where the teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry -
Howdy, Mark. Pity about that – I used to live in Chicago and while a trip there for me would still be worth it (family there) I feel ya, man, they stung a lot of people is what it sounds like.
I wonder if we’re not going to be looking at “virtual” trade shows at some point soon.
Why do I say this, you ask?
A client of mine is developing a virtual conference center. They are one among several. A live presentation can be made by one or several people, show varying content ranging from simple PPT slide decks to multi-camera product demos, and archived to view at any time for those unable to attend in person. The need for physical space interaction can be reduced significantly this way – and while it’s no substitute for all of life, it’s a good part of the winnowing process for decision-making such as what you’re in the middle of at the moment.
It could let you reduce your range of possibilities from 15 down to three or so. And custom content can be made at the presenter’s end easily enough, given the right motivation.
I know it doesn’t help with this one, though it may be a real option for things in the future.
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I guess I wasn’t clear. I was not an exhibitor at this year’s NAB, I was an attendee and quite honestly, my experience this year was one of the best I’ve had in many years due to the decreased attendance.
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Hey Guys – I am the HD EXPO organizer – actually the HD EXPO founder – Kristin Petrovich.
So sorry that your experience in Chicago was less than expected and that you considered your time and efforts a waste of time. I take all of your comments to heart and will address how we can insure that we not repeat them and prove ourselves better to you, our community and attendees. Hearing this sort of feedback, while never pleasant, is how we improve.
Honestly, the Midwest is the hardest region for us to gain traction, with both content creators and technology companies. It is also a more restrictive situation for trade-shows than other parts of the country, due to union rules. We are the only technology tradeshow to keep at it in Chicago, and this was our 6th year. Some of our competitors have only stuck to it for 2 years, then departed out of frustration or giving up on a rewarding bottom line. We have persevered, maybe with some flaws, but with commitment. This year presented its own struggles – the economy, political issues in the community, and other pressures, BUT our onsite attendance grew at its most significant rate — 67%. While our Chicago event is still much smaller than our LA or NYC expos, it’s been a very important part of our community and we have tried hard to make it a responsive and valuable event for the Midwest.
David – yes we had huge parking issues two years ago at the LA HD EXPO – but rectified it with the hotel and delivered a much smoother show last October. Can I make it up to you this year? The next expo is set for November 4th & 5th @ Burbank Marriott – I would love to buy you a drink if you are willing to give us a try again. We will once again have 3D Day on the 5th in addition to the HD EXPO.
We pride ourselves on presenting technologies and speakers/panels that are valuable, informative, career advancing and FREE for all attendees. Speakers like Wally Pfister, ASC, Patrick Lussier, Eric Brevig, Peter Anderson,ASC, and Vince Pace, to just name a few have joined us over the years. Might want to pop on and see many of our panels streaming : https://hdexpo.net/virtual/panels.htmlstreaming
I will take all of your thoughts, comments, venting and reflect on what we can do to “step it up” for all of our expos and workshops for that matter. Live events are ever evolving and we are committed to delivering an even better experience every time. Give us a chance to take in your feedback in and evolve.
I would agree that the business of trade shows is changing and we hope to also be changing with the times. We are in the midst of a major name/brand change to Createasphere. We have outgrown a name that is connected to a technology and we offer so much more from exhibitors and technology than just HD. Createasphere is a better reflection of who we serve – content creators. One of the news aspects is to have monthly evening events around the country. We kicked these off with an evening of 3D at 3ality Digital and this Thursday in NYC at Mega Playground.
With all this being said, I apologize and hope to serve you and our community better with your comments. We want to hear from you — so please feel free to contact me Kristin@hdexpo.net
Learn, evolve & create!
Kristin
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