My last day at the show, Thursday, was more relaxed without back-to-back prearranged meetings, so I had a chance to wander round, seeing new products. Most impressive was the new video monitor from Barco. Although still in the design stage, the pictures were stunning. Both Barco and Sony have shown that LCDs can be used to assess picture quality without distortions added by the display. Although we may mourn the passing of the CRT, the reality is that the broadcast sector represents such a small proportion of display device that it is no longer economic to manufacture the tubes.
The Barco and Sony displays are not those you would buy in the local computer store. For a start they have a 10-bit drive, rather than the eight- or even six-bit displays in consumer gear. Without this, reproduction of blacks is poor, and certainly inadequate for grading. The other differences are LED backlights rather than cold cathode for controlled color gamuts, and 120Hz refresh to minimize the motion artefacts caused by the sample and hold of LCDs.
Apple and Avid did not have booths, but I had the opportunity for a briefing on Final Cut Server. Digital asset management has been a special interest to me since the turn of the century. Back then you needed deep pockets to set up a system, $5M was not uncommon for the software, servers and an enterprise database. Add to that the running costs, on-site database administrators, support licenses.
Apple’s offering starts at a thousand bucks. OK it’s for 10 concurrent seats, but for a local station that is just what they need to manage P2 or XDCAM media. It will be interesting to watch the takeup of this product, and whether we will see competition. It’s long been my view that file-based production demands DAM, but for many it has been unaffordable. Such products make clear the advantages of file-based production over tape. It won’t be long before young folks entering the business will understand “tape” to be data tape, and videotape will join the audio cassette as a historical curiosity.
SeaChange is looking to change the face of video storage. The company is offering a flash-based library system. This system is adapted to one already in use for VOD and focused on play-to-air servers. Flash-based systems are much less prone to failure than disk-based systems, and Chris Nicholson and Sherry Zhu say that the MediaCluster architecture leverages data so you don’t tax one drive. Listen to Sherry Zhu, director of storage based projects for SeaChange, talk about the FML200.
In booth SU5408, Crispin is introducing it’s new and free asset management system for Omneon video servers. The system allows users to browse the contents of the server for clips and view key statistics of the server. It also allows you to search, sort, rename, delete and copy clips from one folder to another.
In giving away licenses to MediaNav for free, the company is hoping to introduce new people to Crispin’s range of other products. Listen to Rodney Mood, Crispin’s chief operation officer, talk about MediaNav.
Last year, Sonnet Technologies exhibited at the NAB Show for the first time, and the company won a Pick Hit award for its Fusion storage system. Today, the company’s CEO, Robert Farnsworth, showed me Sonnet’s latest announcement — the Fusion F2, a portable two-drive RAID SATA storage system. It provides 640GB of storage in a small package; it’s not much larger than two stacked CD cases. The system is designed for on-location video capture or remote use when grid power is unavailable. Its two 320GB/5400 rpm 2.5-inch drives are mounted side-by-side in a rugged aluminum enclosure, ensuring secure storage and durability.
I just watched a demo at the Maxell booth (C8428) for the new iDVR. I spoke with John Eulberg about the product. The unit connects via a bidirectional USB or eSATA adapter to a camera capable of delivering 10-bit, 4:2:2 master-quality video and native full HD video. It can store 160GB of data with a transfer rate of 540Mb/s.
John says that the unit was create to pass military toughness specifications. It has a drop protection of up to 4ft thanks to a hard plastic shell and specially designed shock isolation systems.
Front Porch Digital has launched several new products at NAB. After all, as Dave Polyard, the company’s senior vice president of sales, says, “If you can’t find it, you can’t use it. And if you can’t use it, you can’t monetize it.”
To that end, the company has introduced the DIVAworks family, a range of plug-and-play content storage and protection solutions. The family is available in three configurations designed to suit a range of workflows and budgets: more
At Sunday’s “Networking for the Digital Facility” session, presenter David Bigelow, owner of Gray Matter Entertainment, discussed why post facilities should have a network. He pointed out that Sneaker Net — moving files between systems with your sneakers — is obviously wasteful and takes editors away from the next task they could be doing. In addition, Sneaker Net is prone to clutter and technical damage, and it is disorganized because it leaves copies of content all over the place. more
Saturday 12, the round of press conferences kicked off. The first sessions made many mentions of file-based workflows. Nothing new here, but what the IT infrastructure does enable is outsourcing of “broadcast” functions like asset management, content distribution and multi-format delivery to enterprise service providers.
This got me to thinking, what is a broadcaster, and what do they do? If they do outsource many of their traditional operations from newsgathering to playout, then what is left? In playout, the word is branding, specifically channel branding. But following this through, the television network now becomes a brand, not a broadcaster, with the in-house functions left as program commissioning and scheduling, plus the revenue provider, the sales arm. more
Omneon introduced ProCast CDN, a high-performance content distribution platform. It’s kind of hard to describe, but basically it optimizes file transfers over any IP network providing dramatically increased efficiency over great distances.
Incorporating advanced WAN acceleration technology, network management, and bandwidth prioritization, ProCast CDN enables broadcasters and content distributors to easily initiate, monitor, and manage transfers of large files between multiple geographic locations. 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.
I just watched a demo at the 
Omneon introduced ProCast CDN, a high-performance content distribution platform. It’s kind of hard to describe, but basically it optimizes file transfers over any IP network providing dramatically increased efficiency over great distances. 
