NAB Diary: Monday
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Since I only had a few meetings to go to today (Tuesday is going to be packed), I spent a large portion of the day walking around. I found it very easy to get around the South Hall of the convention center. It was not as crowded as it was in years past. Yes, there were booths that had crowds, but no booth was so cram packed with people that you couldn’t maneuver around. Not even the Apple or Avid booths, which ironically were right next to each other. A talked to a couple of people, and they said they wouldn’t be surprised if attendance at this year’s show was down 25% from last year. I kind of expected that in light of everything that is going on, but it was the first day of the show floor, and many people may have started at the North end and are working their way down to the South. I’ll spend more time in the North Hall tomorrow and will get a better feel for things then.
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| Sony is located in the South Hall this year, and as usual were showing off their cameras. The 24p line looks like it has undergone a revision and is now 24pV2. |
I did find two interesting products from my walking around. These unfortunately are not the MUST HAVE GEMS that I am looking for but they are unique non-the-less.
The first is the Hi-Pod, a monopod that has the ability to extend up to 15ft. For $2500, you can get this unit that allows you to connect a camera up to 15lbs, an eyelevel viewfinder, and camera controls for zooming and tilting. While this allows convenient portability as a crane replacement, I am very cautious about the unit being top heavy and toppling over in a stiff wind gust. Still worth checking out if you need to get over a large crowd.
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| Say hi to the Hi-Pod. This unit allows you to raise a camera 15ft above the floor and allows for good portablity compared to a traditional crane. |
The final meeting I had today was with DALSA, a company out of Canada, which has developed the world’s first 4K-resolution video cinematography camera. At about the same size as a traditional film camera, this unit promises to be THE thing next year. With a huge image chip capable of capturing 8.2 million pixels of information, variable shutter speeds from 1 to 48fps, this is a company to watch.
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| The future of digital cinema. |
The only things that could potentially prevent this camera from reaching the mainstream are; projectors that can not do a full 4K resolution, monitors that don’t support 4K, which is a real problem for checking the footage in the field, and the amount of hard drive space needed to store the information. I’m not too worried about the projection and monitor support, there are companies out there right now who are developing these systems I’m sure. Currently you need a 1.2TB (Terabyte) array of hard drives that holds only 50 minutes of footage. The unit is roughly the size of a dorm room refrigerator. If you are doing a great deal of shooting in a day, you will probably need to have several of these storage units because it takes 20 minutes to offload footage from the drives and put them on something else. To switch between drives takes less than 30 seconds as the camera connects to this external drive array via fiber optic.
This was the first unveiling of this system, and the audience was even allowed to see some footage shot with the camera. I was impressed that the camera could capture such detail in the blacks, but occasionally the whites blew out, there were a few stray pixel artifacts here and there, and because it is difficult (if not impossible) right now to monitor the video footage in full glory, there were a few shots that were shown that had a slight defocus problem along one side because of a chip misalignment. Currently, the film ISO equivalent for this chip is only 140. By the time the camera is ready to ship (first quarter of 2004) they company plans on having a chip that can handle ISO 400 without a problem.
I have hopes for DALSA, but after seeing the footage (which was very nice), the only thing running through my head was, “Sony and Panasonic will never allow this. One of these companies will buy DALSA out before the units hit the rental houses and then we will have the Sony 4K or Panasonic 4K camera.” I guess we will have to wait until next year’s NAB to find out if I am right on this one or not.
I’m a little tired from my partying with Sammy and the boys last night, so I am hitting the bed early (midnight). I have a very full day ahead of me tomorrow, and I hope to have more exciting news from the oasis in the dessert that is Las Vegas.
Did you miss a diary entry? You can find all the entries below:
NAB Diary: Sunday Part 2 - Avid
NAB Diary: Sunday: Terror at 14,000 feet
NAB DIary: Day 0
When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products Stephen Schleicher can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at schleicher@mindspring.com. You can also visit him on the web at www.mindspring.com/~schleicher
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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