You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone not pleased that today is the last day of this year’s NAB show. Not that the show was bad or anything. It’s just that the intensity needed to bring off such a monumental event wears on participants.
This year’s show attendance fell by 6,000 to just over 105,000. That’s down from last year’s 111,000—if you believe the numbers. Me, I just ask the cabbies. They always seem to know the real attendance figures.
Attendees may not be as tired as exhibitors. But remember that vendors haven’t just been here since Monday, or for four days. Most arrived much earlier to set up booths, attend meetings and coordinate a list of activities. Then there’s the issue of booth set up and tear down. Most attendees have never seen anything but a finished show floor. more
Although there’s a rumor that show attendance is down this year, that hasn’t affected Tektronix one bit. While I was at the booth I learned that Tektronix had more than 800 people visit its booth each day this week, numbers that the company was very happy with. Amy Higgins, Americas Region PR Manager, Test & Measurement and Video products, told me that more people visited the booth in just two days during NAB 2008 than visited the booth over the total week of NAB four years ago.
She said the quality of the people who were visiting the booth was fantastic. People weren’t just stopping by to get a brochure and leave. They stayed, and they had questions and needs.
Tektronix gave us a demo of its WFM7120 waveform monitor. The unit has been upgraded to include 3Gb/s single link serial-digital-interface (SDI) support. This capability is added through two new options: a monitoring option (3G) and a jitter measurement option.
Half way through now and I have seen more “workflow solutions” than I though possible. I do wish the marketing folks didn’t run a controlled vocabulary, a bit of variety would be great. In the next print issue I’m running a feature on workflows so I have no shortage of raw content to work with.
The new cameras from Sony and Panasonic look great, something for everyone from the digital cinematographer (F35, new 2700 and 3700 Varicams) right down to the budget shooter. Panasonic were showing prototypes of new AVCHD camcorders with long-GOP AVC recorded to SD cards. Sony had similar cameras recording HDV to CF cards. Although these are aimed at very much at the wedding and event videographer, you can bet they will appeal for many broadcast applications like documentary productions. more
At the TV technology lunchon yesterday Ira Flatow, TV journalist and host of “Talk the Nation,” gave the opening remarks. He joked about how TV has changed so much. He said, at the start of TV, we were all squinting at a tiny black and white screen, and we wanted something bigger and better. Since then we’ve evolved to amazing picture clarity on huge sized displays. But now we WANT to watch video on tiny screens, as more and more people are watching mobile TV on handheld devices. Someone in the audience shouted out “Back to the Future.”
Flatow also discussed the use of avatars during an audio podcast he hosts called “Science Friday” for National Public Radio (NPR). NPR has created a virtual reality community where you literally create a virtual “you” and join a virtual community.
Is this something that TV stations will eventually do as well? I’d be interested to see.
At the TANDBERG booth (SU4210), I met with Lisa Hobbs, vice president of business development for satellite and broadcast. The company is showing two new integrated receiver decoders optimized for high-volume video distribution applications.
The RX8310 distribution receiver uses DVB-S2 modulation and MPEG-4 AVC compression. And it has the option to decrypt multipe services, allowing decryption of a complete multiplex of channels with a single unit. The system allows for single service decoding of MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 4:2:0 SD video and HD service downconversion.
The RX8320 ATSC broadcast receiver provides ASI and 8-VSB inputs for the reception of broadcast services over terrestrial or fiber links with automatic redundancy switchover between inputs. For more on the RX8320 ATSC broadcast receiver, watch a demo on Broadcast Engineering TV.
Yesterday, we started out shooting technology demos at Thomson Grass Valley. The company’s product manager of integrated production solutions, Scott Matics, showed us MediaFUSE. This new content repurposing and multidistribution system provides an end-to-end suite of automated tools that allow broadcasters to increase the amount of content available for Internet and mobile distribution.
I don’t know about you, but I think Internet and mobile are the way of the future. There has been a lot of talk about mobile TV at NAB, and obviously the Internet is a key distribution platform or you wouldn’t be reading this blog.
Our next stop was Sony, where we viewed the TriMaster BVM-L230, a 23in full HD LCD master monitor. The picture clarity was incredible. The monitor features the industry’s first 10-bit LCD Panel driver with full 1920 x 1080 HD resolution. The BVM-L230 also features a Sony developed LED backlight system, which offers wide color spaces and color accuracy not available in conventional LCD monitors.
Canon displayed their new DIGISUPER 27 and DIGISUPER 27AF HD studio lenses (models XJ27×6.5B IE-D and XJ27×6.5B AF, respectively) high end applications. Company officials pointed out that this lens incorporates almost 10 years of research and development on optics, lens coatings and mechanics for lens movement.
The lenses have a focal length of 6.5mm to 180mm. Other innovations in the studio lenses include a maximum servo-zoom speed of 0.5 seconds and a new optional remote-controllable macro-focus feature that allows the camera operator to perform macro focusing from the pan bar. more
At a press conference yesterday Vizrt put on display a collaboration with Perceptive Pixel. Perceptive Pixel has an advance multi-touch graphics display system. Vizrt has integrated the system into its Viz Engine.
Users of the integrated system can control graphics through multi-touch gestures. Listen to Phil Kurz’s interview of Jeff Han, Perspective Pixel’s founder, about the interactive display.
This morning, I got the chance to view a live demo of two of the three technologies being considered by the ATSC as a mobile digital TV standard — A-VSB and MPH. The Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) has set up a van in the Central Hall outfitted to recieve two live channel feeds — one UHF and the other VHF — to demonstrate how each system performs.
For the demo, I squeezed myself into the backseat of the van, where a monitoring wall was set up behind the driver and passenger seats. The two main video displays depicted a live, MPH-enabled feed from a local UHF channel and another live, A-VSB-enabled feed from a local VHF channel. According to Victor Tawil, senior vice president of technology for MSTV (which is performing the trials of all the potential ATSC technologies on behalf of the OMVC), the two systems are periodically swapped between each channel, so that the UHF channel might be getting an A-VSB feed and the VHF channel the MPH one. This keeps things as objective as possible, and is also the protocol for the actual field trials of the systems. more
Broadcast Engineering is shooting video from the NAB Show floor and uploading it to our Web site this week. Let me tell you a little about what I saw yesterday.
I started my morning bright and early at the Open Mobile Video Coalition’s breakfast. NBC News’ Dan Abrams moderated a panel, which discussed the future of mobile video. In NAB president David Rehr’s own words, live television could be on 345 million devices in just a couple years, and “that would be awesome!” The audience had plenty of questions, including, “should the FCC mandate that all devices have a mobile receiver?” The OMVC thinks there won’t be a need for that because consumer demand will make it so manufacturers have to include it. A mobile standard still needs to be established, so there is work to be done, but based on the amount of people attending the breakfast and the questions, it’s evident that there is interest in mobile video. more
The editors and writers of Broadcast Engineering post live from the 2008 NAB Show in Las Vegas as the news happens. Check back throughout the day for the latest in industry news, reports from press conferences and product introductions.
