It’s turning out to me a strange last day at the show. Many of the visitors have left, so the show floor is quieter, with exhibitors getting a chance to look around. The show have been very buoyant, in marked contrast to the news from the financial centers as the news from Wall Street comes in.
The show has been a great success, with numbers up around 5% over last year, and the show aisles packed. One focus of the show has been stereoscopic technology, with much talk of broadcast in the near future. Hand-in-hand comes 3G, the wideband infrastructure will support left and right signals over one cable, something AES audio has supported for decades!
Yesterday we chose our PickHit awards, soon to be posted on the our web site, and to be featured in Broadcast Engineering world edition in the November issue. As usual a mix of interesting technology, that goes to show how much innovation there is out there, not only delivering new levels of video and audio quality, but delivering cost-savings in operations. At shows it is easy to be blown away by the technology, but at the end of the day the products are tools to deliver content in order to sell commercials. Compelling high-quality pictures produced in efficient workflows are what improve the bottom line for a station. Business and technology in symbiosis are what drives this business, and that is what excites many of us to be in this sector.
Let us hope that the turmoil in the financial sector does not come to hit the TV business too hard. Anecdotes say that when times are tight, folks stop shopping and dining out — they stay home and watch TV.
Saturday morning I rose early for breakfast with Avid. The new management, including CEO Gary Greenfield and Kirk Arnold, EVP Customer Ops, fielded questions on their new direction. Back at IBC with a booth after staying away for a few years, Avid and Digidesign are together to reinforce the move to product integration between the video and audio lines, a process which customers have been asking for many years. Workflow efficiencies demand round tripping between video and audio should be simple and seamless. These moves by Avid can only help. Also promised were much faster support for new acquisition codecs, another traditional bitch.
No sign of economic downturn at the show. Halls were packed from the doors opening, a good sign for all. Lets hope this interest turns to deals!
Friday started with Snell & Wilcox, a company we associate with their advanced motion estimation technology. They lifted the curtain on a new technology, the subject of a session paper, that provides a smart way to change aspect by removing “white space” in the picture. It detect seams between objects, then removes video between seams. That way face don’t get stretched, and important content isn’t cropped. It’s not a product yet, but if it sounds interesting to you, track down the technical paper and have a read.
Next to the impressive Sony booth for a guided tour. Sony announced it is to be a lead technology partner with the UK’s BSkyB in the construction of an all-new broadcast center for 1080P production and broadcast.
Another announcement was that JVC has licensed the EX SxS solid-state record format, a move that will aid the move away from videotape for all but high-end production, where the high bandwidth of HDCAM-SR still offers a video quality that the newer media formats cannot equal — for now!
Our time at IBC starts with a round of press conferences. For the kick off, Thomson took us to the Amsterdam Arena, the home of world famous Ajax soccer team. The connection here is sport, and Thomson cameras. The new LDK8300 shoots at three times frame rate, but also incorporate flicker reduction technology to deal with the problems that ac lighting causes when your not shooting at power frequency.
The IT-enabled Infinity camera adds support for 24P, opening opportunities to use the camera in “film-style” productions. Because JPEG2K codec is 10-bit, color grading can be applied dowstream, a key differentiator from the 8-bit MPEG record formats.
New developments in the K2 server line, again in the sports area. The new K2 Dyno slo-mo controller marks a broadening of the server apps away from straight playout into the production server space.
We left the stadium by very hot bus to the next hot venue (Amsterdam is hot and humid — very little air conn), the Harris press event. Story here was more 3 gig, as broadcasters look to future proof infrastructure investment. The NEXIO AMP platform in version 2.0, now 3Gb ready. For European broadcasters, Harris has returned to the transmitter market with ROHSS-compliant products with a new digital exciter range, software programmable for different modulation standards, and more efficient — saving on those huge power bills.
