Every vendor at the NAB Show has a niche – a specific customer market it’s aiming for – and yesterday I had the privilege of meeting with two companies that are going for quite different markets.
First I met with Kevin Emmott, marketing manager at Calrec. What they had to offer were some serious, high-end digital audio consoles, most notably the new Apollo console. Despite the shaky economic climate, Emmott had the utmost confidence in Calrec’s client base and equipment. And when asked if the economy had led to any changes as to the company’s presence at the NAB Show he responded casually that if anything their presence had grown – upward, that is, with the addition of a taller, more prominent branded marquis. more
There are many new product announcements at the Ikegami booth. Among them are several additions to the company’s GFSeries of tapeless HD Flash memory production tools. On display at NAB 2009 are the GFCam HDS-V10 tapeless camcorder, which Bob Molczan, Ikegami engineering specialist tapeless products, pointed out features Bluetooth this year for instant export of thumbnail clips directly to a laptop application for fast logging, metadata insertion, and other workflow advantages. Also on show are the GFStation GFS-V10 Flash memory studio deck and the rugged high-capacity GFPak HD Flash-memory media. more
Jeff Moore, president of Ross Video, showed me several of the company’s new offerings for NAB this year, including the SoftMetal 3000 and 4000 series video servers. The next generations in the SoftMetal family are integrated media servers thatcome with I/O and storage all contained in a compact 3RU package.
The 3000 series is a Server Class Platform available in either standard or multidefinition versions. The 3000 series supports up to eight simultaneous record/play channels in SD and up to four simultaneous record/play channels in HD. It uses SATA drives and offers up to 14TB of media storage.
The 4000 series is a Premium Server Class Platform built with high internal bandwidths and processing power. The 4000 series is a multidefinition server that supports up to eight simultaneous record/play channels in HD. It uses high-performance SAS drives with a total capacity of up to 6.3TB. The 4000 series is designed to support 1080p50 and 1080p60 3Gb/s operation.
Small Tree announced ST-RAID, the newest member of its GraniteSTOR family of shared storage products. The direct attached shared storage technology is designed specifically for Final Cut Pro users looking for an economical, functional and easy to manage storage solution. It provides robust (greater than 500MB/sec), consistent performance over Ethernet networks while offering optimal cost-efficiency, and its low latency ensures there are no dropped frames. Available in 8-, 12- or 16-drive (1TB) configurations, GraniteSTOR ST-RAID enables instant availability and background initialization along with automatic insertion/removal detection and rebuild. For greater flexibility, more storage can be added easily for system expansion.
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
The editors and writers of Broadcast Engineering post live from the 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.
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