NAB 2016: What is standing the test of time? (The 1 Week Edition)

[David Mathis]

Two things that caught my attention is the Ripple panel frim Tangent and the Automatic Duck plugin to ship clips from Final Cut over to Motion which will be available later this year.

Resolve is starting to look more impressive but without a beefy system I am a bit uncertain as using it as an editor right now. One thing that really tickled me pink is the Fusion Connect command which will be a huge time saver. The deliever page has improved and more FX available. I do wish software makers woud focus with what’s under the hood rather than go for a new, shiny interior or a jaw dropping body on a car (no super models). Talking about the latest and greatest feature though fad is a better description.

Disappointed that there has been no update to Final Cut Pro X as of yet. Then again this should not come as a surprise. I am really hoping for a role based mixer, the ability to apply a video transition without adding an audio dissolve at tne same time, precision editor in a secondary storyline and being able to save a custom layout. One other request would be to set your preference for spatial conform. To me, it’s the little things that matter most. The latest fad (feature) is of a little use when playback performance or other meaningful improvements are put aside.

The only piece of hardware is the Ripple panel from Tangent thst really caught my eye. I cannot believe how “expensive” it is. I was worried about the build quality but after reading what others had to say it is next on my list of things to purchase, right with the update to Color Finale which is scheduled to be available very soon.

Other than that I added some products from Moion VFX, Core Melt and Ripple Training to my system. I even purchased Shot Notes X to make for a more efficient workflow.

One last item is Boris FX offerings. I am planning on going with a subscription plan with the new version. Still not out for Final Cut as of yet but there will be an automatic update once available. That is all for now!

[Bill Davis]

[Tim Wilson] “Those are always gonna be my PERSONAL big three: storage, cameras, and software…but what about you?

Last but not least, what are the questions I’m failing to ask?
“

At the risk of once again sounding like I’m anti-Adobe (and I’m actually not except for the part about the “sticky-ness” of the current subscription model) when I was watching the ABOBE stuff, the thing they seemed to promote heaviest this year at NAB was Adobe Stock – their in-the application photo licensing play. They were pitching it as a way for pro and lucky amateur photogs (and presumably stock video shooters) to make extra income from their best photos – a kinda sorta crowd sourced shutter stock?

Which seemed pretty cool to me at first, and then I realized that it can also be viewed as the first step in “app-izing” their regular applications. After all, “in app purchasing” is what drives most of the revenue in the app market space. The actual app is free or nearly so, the revenue stream from in-app purchases is what really matters.

IF this is an extension of that “in-app phone purchasing” model into core software, it’s a pretty big play, IMO.

Will we someday see FCP X have an iTunes music store area dedicated to buyout production music directly in the app?

Will Resolve plumb in a “pay for famous color grades” gallery?

Why or why not! More revenue from the programs plumbing, rather than the features of the application itself.

Evidence of the new thinking that the new business models are making possible.

One of the few things that stuck with me on the plane ride home. FWIW.

New signature under construction and coming soon. Please stand by…

[Oliver Peters]

[Bill Davis] “Oliver, what stuck with you? Anything you noticed that you think that you’ll look back on NAB 2016 and remember as the year (IDEA X) changed things?”

My gut feeling was that this was a “selling” show. A lot of product that was shipping or very close to that. Less vaporware than normal. 4K is mainstream – at least everyone has real products addressing it. 8K is still far off for most, but it was there.

HDR struck me as more “smoke and mirrors” as I looked at more and more solutions on the floor. Very ill-defined at this point. Most displays seem to bank on the “Best Buy” effect (crank up the “vivid” mode), rather than real science or viable post workflows, IMHO.

360VR strikes me as a niche – albeit a large one (maybe). Since I’ve worked in themed attraction productions, things like 8K and 360VR seem quite viable to me in specialized circumstances. I just don’t see these as the way most of us will do productions for many years, if ever.

As far as FCPX, I didn’t see nearly as much FCPX presence in and around the show, as some have stated. It was almost all Premiere Pro, including video journalists in the press room. However, as I looked around at the audience in the “WTF” keynote at PPW on Sunday, I did get the sense that a lot of the folks seemed like they were hearing some of the workflow benefits for the first time.

There were certainly some cool products, like AJA HELO, AJA KONA IP, the Blackmagic 4K SD card recorder/duplicator, the GoPro HERO4 array for flat 360 (16 GoPros in a Circle-Vision style rig). I liked Avid NEXIS – struck me as only applicable to the big boys and the first chance Avid had to drop the ISIS name. But it also struck me that Avid is delusional, because some within the company seem to think Avid storage can live on its own without the customer wanting to also invest in Media Composer as their hero NLE. In fact, at Avid Connect’s new products keynote, MC received NO mention, even though 8.5 is still a recent update and one of their best. What DID get a mention was their Media Central UX (interface to search and access media in Avid storage) control panel for Premiere Pro. Hmm…..

Drones were also big – both figuratively and literally, with a lot of good alternatives to DJI, which seems to be the favored system in the past few years.

Sony was a yawn. Panasonic was a yawn, except for Varicam LT. RED has a good story to tell, but friends of mine who were shopping cameras there were put off by RED’s usual squishy delivery schedules. ARRI still makes the best image (to my eye) even if you want to argue whether or not it’s truly 4K. I don’t care. In the testing I’ve done, even early Alexas HD video (and then upscaled to UHD 4K) still looks better than many actual UHD (4K) cameras on the market today. The exception would maybe be the BMD URSA Mini 4.6 or the AJA CION. But I digress…

So no, I didn’t see anything that I would call a “game-changer” at NAB 2016. Everything was more evolutionary than revolutionary.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Shawn Miller]

[Oliver Peters] “Sony was a yawn. Panasonic was a yawn, except for Varicam LT. RED has a good story to tell, but friends of mine who were shopping cameras there were put off by RED’s usual squishy delivery schedules. ARRI still makes the best image (to my eye) even if you want to argue whether or not it’s truly 4K. I don’t care. In the testing I’ve done, even early Alexas HD video (and then upscaled to UHD 4K) still looks better than many actual UHD (4K) cameras on the market today. The exception would maybe be the BMD URSA Mini 4.6 or the AJA CION. But I digress…”

Totally agree here. I think the Ursa Mini 4.6k and the Cion are a COMPLETE STEAL at $5k US (assuming you get a working Ursa Mini). I agonized over choosing one or the other this year, but came away with the Mini4.6 for various reasons. I’ll also add that I’m pulling for the Craft Camera and Kinefinity’s newest 6k offering.

I still find it rather irritating that the mainstream manufactures refuse to deliver 10/12bit, 4:2:2 cameras for less than $15k. I can almost understand making internal raw recording the thing that delineates the product lines… or maybe even dynamic range, but 4:2:2, 10bit?!?! I feel as if that should be the standard rather than the exception for anything considered a professional capture device (in the 21st century). Not that I don’t adore the Canon C100 MKII, or Panasonic’s GH4 and DVX-200 (though, I’m still not exactly sure who this camera is for).

Shawn

[Andrew Kimery]

[Bill Davis] “They were pitching it as a way for pro and lucky amateur photogs (and presumably stock video shooters) to make extra income from their best photos – a kinda sorta crowd sourced shutter stock?
“

AFAIK all the stock footage sites accept content from independent shooters so Adobe is just letting people know that Adobe Stock works like that too.

[Bill Davis] ” After all, “in app purchasing” is what drives most of the revenue in the app market space. The actual app is free or nearly so, the revenue stream from in-app purchases is what really matters. “

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between in-app purchasing (which is just buying something from w/in an app) and the freemuim business model where you give away (or sell very cheaply) a barebones app but then charge users a fee to unlock features (more filters in photography app or batch uploading for a cloud storage app etc.,). It’s a much maligned business approach (especially in the game community) but consumers love ‘free’ so it’s business reaction to race to the bottom that has gutted software companies over the last few years.

What Adobe is doing (and what Avid did 4 or 5 years ago but it never really caught on) is offering a portal from within the app that connects you to first and third party content that you’d normally have to leave the app in order to access. Instead of leaving the app to get a photo from Adobe Stock or a video clip from Pond5 or an effect from That Studio you can just do it from within PPro. I don’t see this as a tiptoeing towards a freemuim model (as that wouldn’t jive with their subscription approach) but just Adobe offering convenience to their users.

Avid’s attempt at this wasn’t nearly as smooth because it really wasn’t integrated the way Adobe’s panels are. With Avid, when you clicked on the Avid Store button (or whatever it was called) it would basically open up a web browser within Avid and you’d be on an ‘app store’ type web page that had all Avid plugins and the like. When you bought something you’d still have to manually install it so it didn’t do much for users aside from showing off how relatively small MC’s ‘eco system’ is.

[Bill Davis] “Will Resolve plumb in a “pay for famous color grades” gallery?”

There are companies/people that sell Resolve presets and I think it would be cool if Resolve could do something like Adobe is doing so you could have a one click, buy-and-install experience directly in the app.

[Mark Raudonis]

Agree with everyone’s comments so far, and will add this:

Large scale “Jumbotron” direct LED panels are approaching a level of resolution that may render projectors obsolete! The “pitch” of each individual LED is now down to .8mm, which means if you’re more than 15 feet away from the screen, the image looks extremely impressive.

There were giant sized walls (25 ft high by 30ft wide) displaying 8K video that was spectacular. I was considering installing a traditional projector and screen for one of our large gathering spaces, and now I’m thinking LED panel instead. This technology has really advanced in just the last year. The LED panels are brighter than any projector, and work in a daylight environment in ways that are just impossible for the old projectors and screen.

My take away is that these large LED panels are going to become even more ubiquitous as cost comes down. This translates to more business opportunities for the creative community for programming to fill all these screens.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Tim Wilson] “No other camera news worth talking about?

Me, I think an NAB without a new “disruptive” camera is a GOOD thing”

How about a fully modular camera from a secret company? Is that disruptive enough for you? 😉

https://www.craftcamera.com/

[Tim Wilson]

I put “disruptive” in quotes because I don’t know that we’ve actually seen a “disruptive” camera in the precise nature of the word.

As the owner of the first 2 RED cameras off the line notes, RED most explicitly does NOT fit the bill. Superlative analysis here: The RED Camera Was Not A Disruptive Innovation.

That said, I’m floored by the Lytro. The idea of being able to set focus and shutter in post, extract keying data from depth maps, etc., strikes me as a staggering amount of science, backed by the most extensive optics innovations in years. It’s currently the size of a compact car, to accommodate the giant brain behind the system, so obviously only useful for a handful of applications (I’d think more or less limited to soundstages)….but I can’t imagine that the future of filmmaking isn’t visible in this.

Of course, as Shawn notes, 4:2:2 10-bit should have been “the future” a long time ago.

ALSO of course, I’m wrong about a lot of things, and the future is consistently at the top of the list of where I miss the mark….but that ain’t gonna stop me! LOL

[Tim Wilson]

[Oliver Peters] “I just don’t see these as the way most of us will do productions for many years, if ever.”

As much as I tend to hype, I’m not feeling much VR, but I’m VERY much feeling 360. It’s already moving into the kinds of mainstream where very many of you are working — news at the New York Times, red carpet events, Coachella, YouTube, etc. I think perhaps most immediately as things like DVD extras and their streaming equivalents — that is, not MOVIES, but things that allow you look around sets and stages. All the way around behind the scenes if you will.

Videoblocks is also already monetizing 360 stock, and I KNOW there are a lot of stock shooters among us.

I’ll save the rest for an essay I’m working on, including why I’m less bullish on VR than 360, but I think it will be PART (but no more than a part) of what more folks are doing than they might think, sooner than they might think.

[Oliver Peters] “it also struck me that Avid is delusional, because some within the company seem to think Avid storage can live on its own without the customer wanting to also invest in Media Composer”

Surely this was NAB jiggery-pokery, right?

Bill’s understandable impression notwithstanding, there’s simply no question in my mind that Adobe is the current big dog at NAB, and if you want to swing for the fences, there’s no point in delivering a solution that doesn’t include Adobe compatibility.

Not that there’s anything wrong with bases-clearing doubles for FCPX-only solutions, but no kidding, anybody playing to win is taking Adobe alllll the way into account.

Because my experience inside Avid was that they knew that Media Composer is the ONLY reason why anybody buys Avid storage. They just also know intimately that the days of shops with Avid-only approaches are long gone, if they ever existed.

(I’m not sure they ever did, but I’m CERTAIN they’re hella rare anymore.)

You can see this yourself if you suggest to anyone there that they “admit that MC is done” and just become a storage and services company. Uhm, MC is NOT done — as Herb observed, the Avid booth was as packed as any on the floor — and it’s the beating heart of any of their workgroup based storage solutions.

That said, if anybody there DOES believe that a non-MC customer will even glance twice at NEXIS, I agree: delusional.

Here’s my observation as a geezer. There was a time when NAB attendance was rare. Initially, the only people who went were actual broadcasters. Then the first wave of “cheap” NLEs that were in fact well into 5 figures led to people going to NAB to check out robust video storage, and emerging digital solutions, including DigiBeta and SDI.

Even into the turn of the century, the majority of FCP folks were folks relying on SDI solutions, including Cinewave.

This made sense. Travel to Vegas was hard. Freebie tickets were not widely available. There were very few rooms available at discounted rates.

It’s only been since 2002-ish, 2003-ish has become a mainstream thing, as tickets to Vegas have gotten dirt cheap, discounts are everywhere, and nobody in their right mind is buying tickets for it. Any stereotypical YouTube vlogger with an attitude can to get to NAB and back, staying at real places and eating real food, for the price of a couple of GoPros.

As a result, EVERYONE’s messaging has trended downmarket from the niches they were in 15, 18, 20 years ago. As deplorable as many here find subscriptions to be, it makes the barrier to entry less than $100, instead of $1000, or a bottom of the line $20,000 MC as recently as 10 years ago.

(This is the 10th anniversary of MC Soft! Which I was privileged enough to introduce on the NAB stage myself.)

I don’t think that this has turned NAB into an extension of the Supermeet…but it kinda has. And even the first Supermeet (which I was at — and the year BEFORE that, I was encouraging Michael Horton to do it, when he didn’t believe that NAB was “an FCP show”) understood itself to be not 100% mainstream. And it wasn’t.

And now it is.

I don’t think this is by any means a bad thing. I was certainly one of the people exerting “downward” pressure on NAB 20 years ago. But I do think the overwhelming success of this leads to a distortion of messaging (you’re right, Oliver: pitching NEXIS as a specifically PPro solution is nonsense), and an unhealthy obsession with shiny.

Which is one of the most revolutionary things of all about this year to me: bucking the trend toward “innovation” and focusing instead on “growth.”

More of this, please. 🙂

I’m definitely learning more about things I missed, so please keep those observations and opinions coming, y’all!

[John Davidson]

[Tim Wilson] “Software, it’s Resolve and Keyflow Pro”

Thanks for mentioning KeyFlow Pro Tim. I don’t think the world really gets what this application is capable of, but I think the next few updates are going to blow minds.

This is me, Monday, in an Uber screening footage from the office Keyflow Pro server over an LTE connection. At the same time the team in office were logging SOTS with markers so I could write scripts and build a storyboard. This is not a screen share, this is an actual client to server connection. No cloud needed.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.