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Avid says No to NAB 2008
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Have been resisting mightily to comment further:-) But the anecdotes reminded me of what used to be the Chicago version of NAB once NAB left Chicago, the annual shindig at the now-defunct (removes hat) Swiderski Brothers…
One of my best memories of this was back when the Pinnacle Alladin was brand new and nobody had heard of it yet. Suites were linear A/B roll umatic or beta to one-inch, and your high-end graphics were limited to ADO or Abekas DVE, and while these could do a lot of cool things, they cost a LOT at the time, too rich for a place like our shop. We were hurting for good graphics, with only a VP-2 Chyron and it’s 2 fonts in three sizes, fancy titling was made for us by staff artists painting and using ink, paint, letraset and zipatone on card stock shot under a suspended Ikegami 79e. We tried hard but were sorely limited in the “looks” we could give. The rich guys across town ha da Quantel Paintbox I lusted for, they charged improbable rates for very simple work on it. I went to the Swids show that year and met Paul Holtz, who was sitting at a card-table-sized booth doing a one-man demo to anybody who’d care to walk by. Not many were.
What this reminded me of strongly was an old Volkswagen commercial that itself was a fake retro look at fifties car shows, each booth more bombastic than the next, touting concept cars with things like huge tailfin size or a guy in a lab coat with a pointer expounding on the number of decorative portholes in the sides of the engine compartment… and off in the corner is a nebbishy little guy in a gray suit with a VW bug, quietly talking about what made the car special…
This is what Paul was doing with the Alladin. I watched from a distance for a while, then came closer as I realized what I was seeing was a DVE that, while only single-channel, was stupendously easy to use in realtime without complex programming… and that it ran off a regular PC… that it came with still stores, it’s own virtual switcher, chromakeyer, a paintbox system, a really nice (at the time) CG with hundreds of fonts and even a bundled 3-d animation program. For less than half what an Abekas was going for at the time. I kept asking “Can it do so-and-so?” “Yes, here, I’ll show you”. That refrain went on for maybe 40 minutes. The next closest thing to the capabilities of this box at the time was a Video Toaster, but at that time the toaster’s output was still a little on the rough side, and again, the price was higher.
Next day I told my boss I had seen a single little box and software that would immediately make our edit suite look and work like the big boys downtown, for chump change. We got one and people walking by our edit suite would do a “Kramer” at the door as they saw us do some amazing things. We still use two of those Alladins today, long after Pinnacle dropped them, the first of many mistakes that company made, IMO.
But we’d hardly have noticed or heard of them if it wasn’t for Paul Holtz’s demo skills and ablity to explain the unit.
Paul’s a great guy in my book. He’s still a pretty good VAR as far as I know, though he probably does more training video production now than anything. -
Speaking of urban legends, one I had always heard about NAB’s convention leaving it’s early home in Chicago concerned what happened to Sony one year at McCormick Place. The story goes that the Sony engineers set up their own gear in the hall without using or consulting with the union guys. Or paying them, apparently. Overnight, some kind of suspicious electrical fire consumed the entire Sony booth and gear. Sony refused to come back and others followed them out West. I’m a pro-union guy, but even I have to say it makes little sense to wait two hours for an electrician to come over and plug your stinger into a wall socket a foot away for fifty bucks or more. Somewhere a realistic balance needs to be forged if we’re all to keep making a living.
Story may be apocryphal, and there were certainly other practical reasons the show moved west to Vegas: bigger halls, a limit of available hotel rooms in Chicago, crummy April weather, fewer union problems in Vegas, the allure of gambling and evening entertainment options to what was then pretty uniformly an all-male clientele. I’m curious if anyone else had similar stories from the Chicago days?
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My first year at CNN (1990) NAB was in Atlanta at the World Congress Center. I remember that clearly because it was the year that Sony introduced the D2 deck. Overnight all our Betacam Recorder in B Control were replaced with D2’s so they would be in place for the show. Sony must have brought thousands of prospective buyers through B-Control that week.
I remember that none of us could shuttle the darn things because they were so doggone fast.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR
The new Color Training DVD now available from the Creative Cow! -
Ahhh. Good ole’ b-control. How many times did I hide there on overnights? ….and those D2 decks. I’m getting misty eyed just just thinking about ’em.
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Avid has changed a lot in the last decade. In selling more boxes of software to the consumer world and less product to the professional world, it was bound to become less than cost effective to hit expos geared toward this demographic. They passed the torch. Most of those prolly didnt see em passing it to fcp and premiere but as those products get better and better, well, we just have not seen much effort from Avid in quite some time now.
They use to be specialists. Now they have nothing very special.
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[George Socka] “OTOH, you can try FCP or PPro for less than the cost of attending NAB for a few days and then dump them if they end up being less effective than your existing ading AVID solution. The competition HAS changed.”
Only a child would think this an argument. The LEAST expensive part of any studio is the software. Just ask your accountant. You do have one, don’t you?
It is the person behind the controls and their training costs that far outweighs the cost of a box of software. Only an idiot would change out the focus of their studio on the basis of a cheap box of software.
Yes, the market has changed. More stupid people are now in it than ever before.
charles
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Charles,
I suspect that your comments came about due to wanting to somehow protect the COW following George’s comments in the thread “Protecting your name” above.
Still, I am going to warn you that we do not condone these kinds of personal attacks and ask you to “stand down” on this issue.
George has never been one to have a kind word for the COW or its management and we have come to expect that if anything has an adverse effect on either the COW or on us personally, George will be beating the drum for it. It is just the way that he is.
But calling the man an idiot is off-limits. While we may disagree with it, he is entitled to his opinion. Please respect that as it is a cornerstone of that which has made the COW what it is today.
Best regards,
Ron Lindeboom
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronlindeboom
Publisher, Creative COW Magazine
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“child” “idiot” and “stupid” all in one post. Wow. I am floored
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You are too kind Ron. But digging up a month old post to “retaliate” for a current post seems a bit bizarre to me as well. We live in interesting times indeed.
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Charles,
I forgot to mention that my esteemed antagonist is indeed an accountant, and quite a good one at that from what I have learned over the years. So your argument regarding training costs is likely one that he’s already considered.
Please keep that in mind the next time you seek to insult a man.
Just so you know,
Ron Lindeboom
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