NAB Cancellation Thread: From Adobe, AJA, and Avid to Zaxcom. And of course NAB themselves!

[Bill Davis]

[Francois Jean] “All decisions are individual choices but it is not that easy to decide …
“

This one might not be. (individual choice)

The map of what we know about the virus spread on all the Sunday news shows was pretty daming.
(and this is still before more than a relative handful of test kits have been widely available, so the “actual taken test” to population ratio is still extremely low.)

The single confirmed attendee case out of the CPAC conference yesterday, will also be pretty damaging, I suspect.

George Stephanopolous had Ben Carson on ABC today repping the administration and it did NOT go well. Then they had a pair of ACTUAL health care professionals and the two of them were pretty clear we are well past the prevention stage and into what needs to be a robust mitigation stage.

As with SXSW, you can only attend NAB if they put the show on. And I have more and more serious doubts about that.

We’ll see.

Creator of XinTwo – https://www.xintwo.com
The shortest path to FCP X mastery.

[Ralph Hajik]

Here in Chicago they have already cancelled the Ace Hardware Show which brings in more than 14,ooo people to the city.
It becomes the third event scheduled for McCormick Place that has been scrapped over fears of the coronavirus.

On Monday, the International Housewares Association canceled its annual trade-only event, The Inspired Home Show, which was scheduled for March 14-17 and expected to bring $77 million in spending to Chicago, income for hotels, restaurants, transportation services and entertainment venues. Oracle on Wednesday dropped its conference, Modern Business Experience, which was expected to draw 5,500 people.

The Ace event was estimated to be responsible for 16,000 hotel room nights that would have been used during the show, said McCormick Place spokeswoman Cynthia McCafferty. As more events cancel in Chicago, it will deal a blow to the city’s tourism.

United Airlines became the first U.S. airline on Wednesday to cut both domestic and international flights as companies restrict travel to employees and other conventions across the country cancel shows in an attempt to protect workers’ safety and health.

Happy Travels
Ralph Hajik
RJTravelMedia
https://www.RJTravelMedia.com

[Michael Gissing]

I’ve been musing over this issue for a while. It seems that seasonal flu which killed 650,000 people world wide last year was no reason to restrict our passion for travel and trade shows. COVID-19, currently rare, certainly has a higher mortality rate that seasonal flu (10 x the flu’s current mortality) but is still relatively harmless as a virus, compared to Smallpox, Ebola and others. Highly virulent flu variants like the H1N1 at the end of World War 1 killed between 40 and 100 million, although it’s really hard to know exact mortality. It was the first and most dramatic world pandemic. We always stand the chance that a variant in seasonal flu will be far more virulent than COVID-19.

I’m in two minds about this seemingly over reaction to COVID-19. I applaud the efforts to limit the spread and I have no issue with the cancelling of trade shows. Along with that I applaud anyone who wishes to limit their travel over the next year and who self isolate when they have a cold, just in case. My reasoning is that the greater good this will afford the environment, at the obvious expense of our broken capitalist system, will also make us question our normal social selfishness.

I’ve just returned from a three week location doco shoot with a head cold which cleared up in a couple of days, but it did focus my mind and behaviour, avoiding people who are health fragile and self isolating for a couple of days just in case. It’s pretty clear that I don’t have COVID-19 but I did think more about others than I do when seasonal flu comes through.

I have never been to NAB and now probably this will be the beginning of the end of such shows as the internet age means they are less relevant.

[Tim Wilson]

[Roger Van Duyn] “The panic mentality has really taken hold. “

To me, “panic mentality” is something like stockpiling toilet paper, which is definitely happening where I live. Uhm, what exactly do y’all think is going to happen here?

Whereas canceling festivals and trade shows seems like the bare minimum of prudence, no more or less panicky than washing your hands for 20 seconds.

(Rather than singing the Alphabet song twice, my favorite way to count to 20 is to recite: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.” You gotta put the pause after the word “space”, and I’m sure you nerds know exactly how long to pause. Plus however much time you want to add to sing the theme at the end.)

I’m not saying that YOU’RE saying this, Roger, but the reason why I get nervous when people decry “panic mode” (and yes, y’all can buy the regular amount of TP, please and thank you) is that it can also prevent prudence.

Remember around Y2K, there were engineers saying, “Bad things are going to happen if you don’t address this, and here’s just a taste based on the simulations we’ve run.” It became a game in the media to see who could make the biggest deal out of saying THAT’S NOT GOING TO HAPPEN. And what happened was that people of good intent DID listen, and DID act, and DID pay for the development and rapid deployment of patches to make sure that embedded systems kept working, and indeed they did.

And what happened? These same know-nothing nutsacks that were screaming about Y2K being a hoax were now shouting SEE? NOTHING HAPPENED. ALL THAT WORRYING FOR NOTHING.

No, it wasn’t for nothing. And it wasn’t worrying. It was a warning raised by people who are paid to look out for trouble and issue these exact kind of warnings. And smart people heeded the warnings, and THAT’s why nothing bad happened.

So the ideal scenario is that by this time next month, nobody in Austin will have gotten sick, nobody will have died. And I pray that a bunch know-nothing nutsacks don’t froth at mouths screaming SEE? NOTHING HAPPENED. ALL THAT WORRYING FOR NOTHING….when the truth is, it wasn’t for nothing, and it wasn’t worrying. It was listening to warnings from people who are paid to give those kinds of warnings, taking basic steps, and AFTER THAT, sure, we’re all here to tell the tale, if everything goes right. Let’s make it as easy as possible for things to go right by keeping fewer pieces in motion.

Because look, the best case scenario anyone is talking about is 100,000 dead in the US. THAT’S NOT MUCH, RIGHT? Certainly nothing like 675,000 in 1918. Only about 3x a bad flu season. But we’re still gonna lose those 30-ish thousand folks anyway, so this 100,000 is on top of that, and that’s a best-case scenario.

So let’s just nod calmly, admit that this year is a little different, so we’ll take little steps. Use the normal amount of toilet paper at home for a couple of extra days this year, and maybe not get super-frothy because we don’t get to climb in a germ tube of a plane to fly into a germ-bath of a convention center with thousands of people you don’t even like to be around the few dozen people you do, ???? and let’s do it next year instead.

[Tim Wilson]

And now Adobe has pulled out of NAB. Making the Adobe Summit online-only was a no-brainer, because they were hosting that themselves, but pulling out of exhibiting at NAB is increasingly obviously a no-brainer too (sez me). I’ll let their announcement at The Adobe Blog speak for itself.

Each year, we look forward to seeing our video community at NAB to talk about the latest trends and our product innovations. Over the past few weeks, we have been closely monitoring and evaluating the situation around COVID-19 and have made the difficult but important decision to cancel our presence at the show this year.

While we are disappointed, the health and safety of our employees, customers and partners are always our priority. We look forward to engaging with our NAB community through a digital experience in the near future.

That’s it. That’s the whole announcement. Nothing extreme, no “this is the end of trade shows”, just an acknowledgment that this year is different, so they’ll do something different.

I came across an article at The Verge that presents a statistical model for what happens when you cancel public gatherings like festivals during epidemics called “flattening the curve” — not that event cancellations cause outbreaks to zero out, but that they keep peaks from occurring, which makes treatment easier and creates less burden on public resources. Canceling events early can help keep an outbreak from getting worse

One especially illuminating chart shows the difference between what happened in St. Louis in 1918, which banned sporting events and closed cinemas early in the influenza outbreak, vs. Philadelphia, which went forward with plans for a parade. One of them had a death rate that peaked at only one-fifth of the other, but spent most of the outbreak at more like a tenth of the other. Any guesses which was which?

How’d you do on your guess? LOL Thought so. There’s literally nothing to be gained by treating this year as business as usual, and a considerable amount to lose.

I saw another image in another Verge article that made me think some more about thinking different, in a much broader way. It’s kind of obvious if you think about it, but now that China is observing a number of travel restrictions, it’s made for a huge drop in air pollution. I’m not making any political observations about Chinese policy or government intervention in general. I’m just reading a map, and the map says, fewer cars on the road has meant clearer skies.

Here’s the article, which gets into a lot of extra nerdery. I am an extra kind of nerd, so I dug it, and you might too.

So I’ve been looking at things like, companies who’ve for years strongly discouraged working from home, if not forbidding outright, now requiring it. Companies canceling in-person events. Dramatically reducing, if not eliminating, business travel. Doing all hiring interviews using web conferencing.

What if, just as a tape shortage following a devastating tsunami forced us to acknowledge that there was really nothing holding us back from adopting tapeless workflows, we could use this challenging time to admit that we’ve been making ourselves do a lot of stuff that we just don’t need to do.

There will always be exchanges that are more efficient in person, making dozens of deals in little more time than it takes to make a couple, insights to be gleaned from informal conversations after formal presentations, boundless pleasures of finding miracles in the festival film we saw and loved when the one we’d wanted to see sold out, and so on — but really, honestly, we don’t need to go to the office so often or stay so long. We don’t need to take as many business trips. We don’t need as many events. We really can live longer, be happier, and have everything about our world be better if we just decided that we’d rather do that than chase one more widget that we’ll only believe exists if we see it in person, hundreds or thousands of miles away from home.

All this stuff will be around next year, but it won’t matter if we’re not. And yeah, in virtually no scenario are most of us in the most vulnerable populations, so we’ll all still be around even if we lick all the handrails at the airport….but wouldn’t it be cool if we spent some of the time NOT going to all this stuff and taking all these trips to think about how we can build a media production lifestyle that actually makes our lives more sane, instead of more exhausting?

[Steve Connor]

[Tim Wilson] “So let’s just nod calmly, admit that this year is a little different, so we’ll take little steps. Use the normal amount of toilet paper at home for a couple of extra days this year, and maybe not get super-frothy because we don’t get to climb in a germ tube of a plane to fly into a germ-bath of a convention center with thousands of people you don’t even like to be around the few dozen people you do, ???? and let’s do it next year instead.
“

Sound advice Tim!

[Shawn Miller]

[Tim Wilson] “(Rather than singing the Alphabet song twice, my favorite way to count to 20 is to recite: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before.” You gotta put the pause after the word “space”, and I’m sure you nerds know exactly how long to pause. Plus however much time you want to add to sing the theme at the end.)”

I use the Bene Gesserite litany against fear, it feels appropriate to the times. ☺

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”

[Tim Wilson] “So let’s just nod calmly, admit that this year is a little different, so we’ll take little steps. Use the normal amount of toilet paper at home for a couple of extra days this year, and maybe not get super-frothy because we don’t get to climb in a germ tube of a plane to fly into a germ-bath of a convention center with thousands of people you don’t even like to be around the few dozen people you do, ???? and let’s do it next year instead.”

Amen! ☺

Shawn

[Tim Wilson]

[Shawn Miller] “I use the Bene Gesserite litany against fear, it feels appropriate to the times. ☺

“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.”
“

I said to my wife across the room (yes, both working at home), “Hey, this guy at the COW says that instead of the Star Trek thing, he does the Bene Gesserit fear litany,” and she laughed and STARTED RECITING IT. LOL And now you know one of the keys to us keeping our marriage spicy. LOL

(And in fact, I’d never Dune before I read her hardcover first edition in 1983. Also, check this recent update on Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune and companion TV series coming later this year at IndieWire.)

She asked me to tell you that she loves you too. LOL

[Shawn Miller]

[Tim Wilson] ”

I said to my wife across the room (yes, both working at home), “Hey, this guy at the COW says that instead of the Star Trek thing, he does the Bene Gesserit fear litany,” and she laughed and STARTED RECITING IT. LOL And now you know one of the keys to us keeping our marriage spicy. LOL

(And in fact, I’d never Dune before I read her hardcover first edition in 1983. Also, check this recent update on Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune and companion TV series coming later this year at IndieWire.)

She asked me to tell you that she loves you too. LOL”

LOL – Tim, this makes my whole month, thank you both!! And thanks for the link as well, I’m as pregnant as an axlotl tank with anticipation (for the new adaptation and the series)! ☺

Shawn

[Michael Szalapski]

I haven’t decided if I’m going or not. Much of what I enjoyed about the show was talking with engineers, QC folks, etc. from Adobe about the future of After Effects, Premiere Pro, Character Animator, etc. and with the Adobe team not there, a big reason for my attendance is gone.

Maxon and Red Giant are still (currently) planning to attend. So that means a bunch of folks I like to chat with will still be there.

At the very least, the Mograph.net folks have said that (unless all air travel is grounded) they’re going to be in Las Vegas even if NAB itself is canceled.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

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