NAB Day 4

It was another full day of lectures, booths, badge scannings, and brochure snatchings. I’m honestly kind of relieved to be coming home tomorrow if only to decompress my overly stimulated eyes. There were a lot of highlights today as I spent more time in the post production exhibits in the ginormous South Hall.

Here was a cool demo I saw of Black Magic’s DaVinci Color Resolve Color Corrector. It was awesome seeing the control of the look they were able to achieve with their sexy control panel. The software had a lot of bells and whistles but it honestly made me more excited to start working more with our current software, Apple Color.

Sunder asked me before I left to check out Black Magic’s H.264 encoder. As you can see in this awful picture I took, it’s a small device but it seems to be a pretty handy and time saving piece of hardware. This would be perfect for productions going straight to the web. I tried to slip one in my pocket on the way out Sunder but the RED Security guys were still watching me from yesterday. Sorry.

I stopped over at the MAXON booth for a little bit. They were doing a pretty intense demo of their 3D software Cinema 4D, which we have. The main thing I got from that demo was that I know almost nothing about their software.

Speaking of 3D software, I walked past our old 3D platform’s booth, Zaxwerks. Although fairly simplistic, they’ve actually made a lot of updates on their software in terms of modeling and animating so it might be worth a look at upgrading this far more user friendly app.

I couldn’t help but wander back over to the Production exhibits for one last glimpse at a filmmaker’s dream land. Check out this RED ONE decked out in full Steadicam glory.

Steadicam also unveiled their new model mounted to a segway scooter. I gotta say, it looked pretty sweet but the whole time I kept thinking the operator was going to lose control and ram into the next exhibit!

This was a nifty tripod mount that extended the camera up about 8 feet high. Surely we wouldn’t have people blocking the camera when they stand to applaud with this baby.

Today’s award for the product I would least actually buy goes to this gigantic studio boom. Although I do think it would fun to set this up in our studio.

A close second would go to this “little” gem. A lot of companies have unvelieved their version of the portable dolley system. Unlike the CineSlider (which I absolutely love) and it’s compact design that attaches to a single tripod, this ridiculous model basically has you setting up a full track. The only difference is that it’s suspended on two full size stands that must be weighted and balanced. It takes about 5 cases to move this “portable” track and dolly around. Very helpful.

I looked at a few hi-speed cameras today as well including this bad boy from Phantom called the “Flex”. It shoots up to 2500 frames a second at 1080 resolution. I hope we get to experiment with some hi-speed shooting in the future.

My last highlight of the day was finally averting the RED security and actually getting to touch and use the RED Epic. Here, my friends, is a 5K image taken with an iPhone camera. Pretty sweet, huh? Seriously, it’s an amazing image. I honestly didn’t think it was that much better than the RED ONE’s image but the size of the camera is really attractive. It wasn’t any bigger than a 5D with a few accessories on it. It’s amazing how far the technology has come in the past few years in terms of image sensor  and camera size. Pretty soon we’ll be shooting cinema quality images on our phones. I’m sure Zacuto will make a really great rig for that and sell it for $10,000 but I digress.

And so my journey to NAB 2011 comes to an end. It really is an amazing event that they put on and it’s cool to see so many professionals who are equally as excited about production as I am, meeting and learning together. It’s easy to get lost in the sea of options and tools that are being constantly developed and updated. What’s important to remember in all of this is that no matter the camera, rig, equipment, software, or distribution outlet, it all starts with the story. Without that, it’s all just piles of really expensive plastic and metal. Here’s to making it count!

– Matthew