Videoguys NAB2006 report (Part I) | Part II | Part III
Before we go into the products we saw on the NAB floor, I’d like to talk about the product we delivered to the NAB show floor. We had Pioneer fly in five sample BDR-101A Blu-ray disc burners to our hotel in Vegas. We had received several frantic calls from some of our vendors the week prior to NAB asking if we could supply them units in time for the show. I was very happy when Pioneer was able to make it happen (as were our vendors). We are still waiting for our first production units to arrive for us ship to customers. We hope to have them here in the middle of May. I’m going to give you our NAB report as a series of articles just as I did last year. I’m going to start with news from two of our biggest vendors Matrox & Avid. Both companies had special dealer meetings (over the weekend - before the show began) loaded with exciting product announcements and news. Matrox introduces RT.X2 and MXO We gave our readers a sneak peak at both these new products just prior to NAB. At the show we had the chance to learn more about them and to actually see them in action. We were blown away! Matrox has long been one of our best vendors and is a leader in the industry. The RTX.100 was one of our best selling products ever, and even to this day it delivers a level of real-time DV performance for Premiere Pro users that no other product could match. As the industry has migrated from DV to HD, we kept waiting and wondering what the gang at Matrox had up its sleeve. With the announcement and imminent release of the RT.X2 and MXO, the magic is back at Matrox!
RT.X2 DV & HDV Editing Platform at a Breakthrough Price The RT.X2 is a PCIe card with scalable architecture that takes advantage of both your CPU power and your graphics card to deliver its real-time feature set. This means that as your computers get faster and more powerful, so will the capabilities of your RT.X2 and Premiere Pro 2. Many of the real-time features found in the RTX100 are now available in RT.X2; only with RT.X2 you can edit HDV as well as DV footage. If you are still using DV you’ll find that the RT.X2 delivers 3 or 4 times the amount of real-time streams as an RTX100! RT.X2 allows you to mix DV and HDV footage in real-time, as well as real-time multi-cam with mixed formats. Real-time effects include color correction, speed changes, chromakeying, blurs, glows, soft focus and of course a plethora of Matrox Flex 2D / 3D DVEs. For $1,995 including Adobe Premiere Pro 2, the RT.X2 is an excellent investment. Matrox is also offering a $200 loyalty trade-in rebate for owners of RT2000/2500 and RTX100 cards. We will include the $200 rebate form with your shipment. Fill out the form and follow the return procedure outlined and we’ll issue you a $200 credit as soon as we get the old card back. We are now taking pre-orders for the RT.X2. We will not charge your credit card until we have a unit to ship to you. As an added bonus we will be including DMTS Inside Adobe’s Premiere Pro 2 training DVD ($88.00 value) free with all RT.X2 pre-orders!
Matrox MXO the “Must Have” product for Final Cut Pro Users So, what exactly is the MXO? MXO is a sexy little external device that attaches to your G5 or Powerbook like a scan converter and gives you broadcast quality HD output. It hooks up using the DVI output from your Mac computer or desktop and delivers both SD & HD output via SDI, analog component, S-Video and composite output. Even cooler the DVI output of the MXO delivers a perfect, flicker and artifact free image to your HD flat panel display. MXO supports Apple Final Cut Pro, Motion, Shake, DVD Studio Pro and LiveType as well as Adobe After Effects. On the audio side you get 8 channels SDI embedded audio output plus stereo audio monitoring. The SDI output is also genlockable. MXO will down sample your HD projects to SD in real-time with pristine image quality and proper color space conversions. For $995 the MXO really is the “Must Have” accessory for Final Cut Pro editors, especially those requiring a portable HD solution that they can bring on the road with their Powerbook. We spent lots of time at the show talking to FCP users and the folks over at Apple. Everyone agreed that MXO was the hit of the show and one of the most important new products in years for FCP users. We are expecting our first shipments of MXO the end of June. We are taking backorders now. We will not charge your credit card until we have units to ship to you. We will be including a free gift – Contour Design ShuttlExpress ($49.95 value) – with all MXO pre-orders.
Lots of Big news from Avid!
The buzz around the Avid booth at this year’s show was pretty strong. Avid made some very important announcements that added up to very good news for Avid editors at all levels.
Avid Xpress Pro ver 5.5 Avid has finally achieved parity for Xpress Pro users on both Mac & PC platforms. With the introduction of Xpress Pro ver 5.5 Mac users will now get the same great features as their PC counterparts. Avid Xpress Pro offers the broadest HD support of any editing software available. HDV 1080i & 720p, DVCPRO HD, 24p, P2, XDCAM HD over FireWire and of course Avid’s DNxHD CODEC. Avid’s open timeline allows you to mix DV & HDV footage on the same timeline and in multi-cam. AVX2 plug-in support provides superior colorspace and keyframing for both native Avid and 3rd party effects. New features in ver 5.5, for both PC & Mac users, include full screen SD & HD monitoring using the host graphics card and inexpensive flat screen displays, enhanced performance with HDV splicing provides faster final output by rendering only edit points and not the entire HDV segment, Varicam support and support for the new Mojo SDI. Registered Xpress Pro owners with a 5.x dongle will be able to download the 5.5 upgrade for free from the Avid website when it becomes available. Those with 4.x dongles will be able to purchase the 5.5 directly from Avid for $49.95. Anyone purchasing Avid Xpress Pro or one of our Xpress Pro Mojo bundles will be able to download v5.5 as soon as it becomes available for free.
Mojo SDI Mojo SDI is a new Avid Digital Nonlinear Accelerator that is built upon the same technology and form factor as the Mojo. With Mojo SDI you’ll get all of the great features of Mojo plus SDI SD (standard def) input and output. You can simultaneously output video to both client monitor and tape. Mojo SDI delivers professional audio I/O including 8 channels of embedded audio over SDI, 4 channels over AES/EBU, 4 channels over RCA and 2 channels over optical S/PDIF. Audio punch-in enables up to 4 channels of audio for voice-overs. Mojo SDI will be shipping in late June with a price of $2,495. Existing Mojo owners will be able to trade-in and upgrade their existing Mojo to Mojo SDI for $1,500. I do not have the details yet on exactly how this trade-up offer will work.
Avid Adds High-Definition Authoring to Avid DVD by Sonic One of the most exciting announcements from the NAB show was Avid & Sonic’s support for Blu-Ray. This makes Avid DVD by Sonic - BD Edition the first full-featured high-definition authoring software for our market. Before this announcement you had to pay over $10,000 for Blu-ray authoring. Avid DVD by Sonic BD will allow you to create DVDs with the same level of interactivity as today’s DVDs, only with HD footage and 16:9 menus. As we mentioned earlier, Pioneer Blu-Ray burners are starting to ship now, with Sony & Panasonic planning to release their own Blu-ray burners later this summer. The first Blu-ray players will be hitting the market later this spring.
Avid DVD by Sonic - BD Edition will be available as part of the new Avid Studio Toolkit v5.5. The new Studio Toolkit v5.5 will also include a new version of Avid FX which will include all of the latest features introduced as part of Boris Red, and a new version of Avid 3D with a much easier to use interface and much more templates and 3D models to work with. The new Studio Toolkit v5.5 will have a $1,995 cost. Those who purchase Xpress Pro PowerPack and Xpress Pro Mojo PowerPack after April 23rd will be able to upgrade to the new Studio Toolkit v5.5 for $295 when it becomes available this summer.
Avid Liquid “Big Splash” Over the past year there has been much speculation about Avid Liquid and what exactly will be Avid’s plan for this powerful, all-in-one NLE and video production software. Avid made it perfectly clear that they are committed to developing Liquid and positioning it as the perfect NLE for the event video, small corporate, multimedia creation and pro-sumer market. Liquid was front and center on the main stage in the Avid booth, and was also featured at the Avid dealer meeting.
On the show floor Avid was passing out $100 instant discount coupons for Liquid & Liquid Pro. Great news! These coupons (LIQUID100) have been re-introduced for orders placed May 17th through May 31st, so you better hurry if you want to take advantage of them. In addition to the show floor presence we were told about the new “Big Splash” promotion, which goes into effect with the new 7.1 releases. The “Big Splash” promotion gives you 3 additional software plug-ins to use with Liquid.
New features in the 7.1 release of Liquid include export presets for Flash, Sony PSP and Apple iPod video, JVC-ProHD record to tape, DVDs with auto-loop, and XDCAM HD & IMX support. Liquid 7.1 will be available as free download for all Liquid 7 owners. The Avid Liquid 7.1 updater is now available as a FREE download to all AL7 owners - you can also download the "Big SplaClick here to learn more about the Avid Liquid "BIG SPLASH" promotion
The other big news from Avid was the announcement of Avid Media Composer software only for $4,995. While the price tag puts this out of reach for most of our customers, those working in and with bigger Avid shops will find this really big news. Now you can run Media Composer on a laptop to edit on the road, or bring your work home to work with on the software only as part of your bigger workflow with Adrenaline and Nitris.
Videoguys’ NAB Report Part II
In our last report we talked about all the exciting news in the Matrox & Avid booths and at their dealer meetings. For this next installment, we’re going to talk about several of our other vendors. In the third installment we’ll be talking about more new products some very exciting new vendors that we are now dealers for – including one that will make you say – “they Final-ly did it”!
Adobe is back!
Sometimes when you walk around a show like NAB you will get a general vibe around a certain booth. Last year the vibe around the Adobe booth was one of “I wonder what’s going on?” They had just announced the acquisition of Macromedia and Adobe Premiere users were left waiting for the next major release. At NAB2006 you could feel the buzz and excitement around the Adobe booth and at the Adobe dealer meeting. The new Adobe Production Studios have been shipping since January and the sales, positive reviews and awards keep piling up. The new Premiere Pro 2 delivers the features and performance that loyal Premiere users have been longing for including Multi-cam editing, enhanced color correction, DVD authoring from the timeline, GPU accelerated rendering, Adobe Bridge media management tool and the most important new feature of all – only available when you purchase Premiere Pro as part of the new Production Studios – Adobe Dynamic Link. Dynamic Link allows the applications in the Adobe Production Studio to work seamlessly together. As an example, you can create a sequence in After Effects as part of your Premiere Pro 2 timeline. When you go back and make changes to it in After Effects 7 the Premiere Pro 2 timeline is automatically updated. The same is true with graphics you create in Photoshop CS2 for Encore 2.0 The Production Studio Standard and Premium bundles are a tremendous value, and Adobe has been offering very aggressive upgrade paths to loyal Adobe customers. Unlike previous upgrade programs, it doesn’t matter what version of the qualifying software you own. If you own Premiere 5.1 you can upgrade to the Production Studio Standard for only $749.00 or to Premium for $1,249 – that’s a $450 savings from the full retail price!. Adobe has been working closely with their technology partners Cineform, Black Magic, PNY, AJA and Matrox. We are working with Adobe and our vendors to put together special bundle offers and promotions to pass along to you. Right now Matrox is including a discount coupon with Axio LE and RT.X2 that will save you around $200 for upgrading to the Production Studio (Std or Premium). Our goal is to come up with something even better! Speaking of Matrox, anyone planning on editing both DV & HD footage in the same projects needs to check out Axio LE and RT.X2. The integration with Premiere Pro 2 is fantastic, and you’ll also see benefits in After Effects and with Dynamic Link. As I said in part 1 of this years NAB report – the “Magic is Back” at Matrox. Last year they began shipping Axio and while the technology was incredible, so was the price and the hardware you needed to run it on. With Axio LE and the new RT.X2 you get all of the realtime features you need at a fraction of the price. While you still need a very fast computer to take full advantage of the new “Power of X”, the cost of these machines is actually quite reasonable.
Canopus / Grass Valley – big things to come! Late last year Canopus was purchased by Thomson/Grass Valley, a global player in the broadcast video market. From the beginning it was clear to us that this was a technology-based acquisition. For years Canopus engineers have been pumping out hardware and software that delivered a level of performance, features and stability that was the best in our industry.
Unfortunately what Canopus has lacked over the past few years is a marketing strategy that would leverage their technology and allow them to grab a significant NLE market share. If you are going to compete with the likes of Apple, Avid and Adobe you are going to have to do more than just build better products. You have to position them properly in the marketplace and price them at a level that will attract and keep customers. We had the chance to spend some time with the guys from Grass Valley who will be guiding and leading Canopus USA going forward. We were very impressed with their understanding of Canopus’ strengths and the commitment to dedicate the marketing resources required for re-launching these great products and achieving the market share they deserve. Canopus Edius Pro 4 Canopus was showing the latest version of Edius, and you can tell from the features they added that they have been listening to their customers. Multi-cam editing, nested timelines, and new keyframable effects such as color correction make Edius a much more professional level NLE. EDIUS Pro 4 provides editors with realtime, mixed format HD/SD editing of HD, HDV, DV, MPEG-2, lossless and uncompressed SD video. The new Edius Speed Encoder accelerates rendering and encoding for HDV output. For the fast-paced environments of broadcast and post production facilities, Grass Valley also offers EDIUS Broadcast. EDIUS Broadcast features EDIUS Pro realtime video editing software, as well as support for industry-standard equipment and formats including: Panasonic DVCPRO P2; Panasonic DVCPRO 50 and DVCPRO HD; Panasonic VariCam; Sony XDCAM Professional Disc System. Grass Valley Rev Pro One of the more interesting new products we saw at the show was the Rev Pro. Basically this is an industrial strength version of the old ZIP drive, configured for video editing and production. The Rev Pro utilizes removable media – small cartridges about the size of a post it and less than a 1/2 inch thick - packed with 35GB of storage. These cartridges are extremely rugged and they can withstand heat, cold, being dropped and even being run over by a car. Even more important, the Rev Pro drive ($499.95 for external FireWire or USB; $479.95 for internal ATAPI or SATA) provides up to 110 Mb/s sustained throughput – fast enough to edit HD footage directly from it. The Thomson broadcast division was showing a new line of Infinity cameras that record directly to Rev Pro media instead of tape. We’d love to see a version that could connect directly to any of the new HDV / HD camcorders that would allow you to record directly to Rev Pro media as well. We think that for now Rev Pro is a nice archiving solution for digital videographers. At $69.95 for each 35GB cartridge it’s the perfect solution for storing your DV and HDV footage. Not only will it last for over 30 years - you can go back and edit directly from it. This means you won’t have to worry about having to recapture it again years down the road.
Award Winning SmartSound Sonic Fire Pro 4 with Moodmapping Over the past month or so we’ve been telling you about the new version of Sonic Fire Pro 4 with Moodmapping. I’ve always been a big fan of the SmartSound soundtrack creation tools. At NAB 2006 Sonic Fire Pro 4 (SFP4) won several best of show awards. In addition there was always a good crowd around their booth. I guess I’m not the only one who thinks SFP4 is by far and away the most powerful and easiest to use soundtrack creation tool around. One of the most important features in SmartSound technology is that the music you create is automatically tailored to fit the duration of your video. Add a few seconds or trim your video down and SmartSound not only adjusts the duration of the clip, but it recreates the entire track to fit perfectly. This is much more than just repeating a loop. Each SmartSound soundtrack you create has an intro, body and outro. With the new version 4 the tools has become even more powerful. With the new version, Sonic Fire Pro 4 is now a multi-track audio tool. Each instrument gets its own track. If you want to add more guitars or have less drums, you can with a few clicks of the mouse. But that’s really just scratching the surface. What really makes this tool so special is Moodmapping. Moodmapping allows you to select different arrangements of the various instruments within a track to better match the tempo and pace of your video. Even more important, you can keyframe the Moodmapping so your arrangement changes over the duration of the video clip. With Moodmapping you don’t need to be a musician to create a score that is the perfect fit for your video - Crank up the drums & bass for the heavy action, lighten the mix for dialog, add more strings and horns for the big ending; it’s so easy with Sonic Fire pro 4! Video editors at all levels will appreciate how elegant and simple the interface is; yet your audience and customers will think you paid a fortune for your own orchestra and custom arrangements. Sonic Fire Pro 4 is available with 2 discs of multi-layered music from the Strata series for $188. For more serious video work you’ll want to take advantage of our Corporate or Television bundles that include SFP4 and 5 multi-layer discs for $425. The best value of them all is the MEGA bundle that includes the first 10 multi-layer discs for just $749.00! Registered Sonic Fire Pro 3 users will receive a $50 coupon good on any future SmartSound purchase when you register your new SFP4 purchase.
PNY Quadro FX For video editing workstations we’ve always recommended the power and performance of NVIDIA Quadro FX cards. These are specially tweaked out versions of NVIDIA graphics cards that deliver additional OpenGL GPU processing power for video editing, compositing and animation programs. Last year PNY introduced the Quadro FX 540 Pro card that includes a special breakout box that gives you SD and HD output for monitoring. With the FX540Pro you can edit HDV footage in Adobe Premiere Pro and view your output directly from the timeline on your HD display via the component video connection. At NAB2006 NVIDIA & PNY introduced the Quadro FX 560 and the Quadro FX 1500 solutions, the latest mid-range offerings to support HD Video output. Both products allow users to preview content in real time on an HD confidence monitor. FX 1500 features 256MB of onboard graphics memory with dual-link support to drive the new ultra-high resolution (WQXGA) 30" panels, which are quickly gaining popularity with HD video editors. HD is transforming the film, video and broadcast industries, and these new NVIDIA Quadro graphics solutions are designed to help users rapidly transition from SD to HD. For even higher end applications they introduced the new NVIDIA Quadro FX 5500 SDI solution, the new flagship product in the Company's line of fully integrated graphics-to-video solutions. NVIDIA Quadro SDI products generate and output standard and high-definition television content in real time and can enhance live broadcast programming with a range of content—from 3D effects to full-blown virtual sets for news, sports, and weather. The latest generation NVIDIA Quadro 5500 SDI solution includes 1GB of dedicated graphics memory and leverages the most powerful programmable GPU available.
NewTek News NewTek had several new product announcements at this years NAB show. For starters Lightwave 9 is almost finished. The rendering engine has been made faster with the implementation of a new ray-tracing engine. They have also added a Node Editor for adding more realistic textures to surfaces. With the Node Editor you will also get several new shader models. We are very excited to be a Lightwave reseller. Anyone who purchases Lightwave 8.5 today gets a free upgrade to 9 when it ships.
TriCaster Pro The next big announcement was about TriCaster Pro – a step up model of TriCaster that adds component video I/O with BNC connections, auto camera calibration, balanced audio I/O with phantom power and XLR connections, plus high resolution projector outputs. TriCaster Pro is now available for $6,995. Unfortunately there is not an upgrade path for those who already own the standard TriCaster. SpeedEDIT The biggest announcement from NewTek was the introduction of SpeedEDIT, World’s Fastest Video Editor. SpeedEDIT is basically the next generation of the editing software that comes bundled with the Toaster. Only now it is available as a stand-alone application. It is resolution independent and it can handle anything from web streaming to DV to any of the new HD formats. For $495 it’s pretty cool idea. I’m looking forward to sitting down with it and putting it though some real world editing tests. The folks over at NewTek are telling me I’m going to be blown away by the ease and speed of the editing environment. I know that Toaster users are one of the most loyal and fanatical user bases around – perhaps SpeedEDIT will finally allow a much broader audience to give it a try and join the community! NewTek also announced VT5 software for Toaster. This new software upgrade ads additional features and capabilities. Those wanting more info on VT[5] should contact your local Toaster dealer.
Boris Red 4 & Blue 1.0 Debut I go way back with Boris FX, back to version 3.0. Back then Boris was one of the coolest 3D plug-ins around for Premiere, Avid, After Effects and Media 100. While a lot has changed in the industry since then (we’re up to Boris FX 8 now), one thing that hasn’t changed is the top-notch software coming from Boris FX. At this year’s NAB show Boris was showing their two latest and greatest software titles Blue 1.0 & Red 4.
Boris Blue Boris Blue is a 3D compositing and motion graphics application based on the award-winning Boris technology. Boris Blue is a stand-alone Windows XP application that combines the legendary Boris 3D creativity with real-time performance. The Boris Blue toolset offers motion graphic artists and video editors an extensive range of real-time compositing and effects creation capabilities including; 3D model import and animation, advanced 2D and 3D compositing, titling, particle creation, and motion tracking.
Boris Red 4 Boris Red is an integrated 3D compositing, titling, and effects solution that provides integrated broadcast-quality features directly inside nonlinear editing systems. Version 4.0 introduces hundreds of new features, including more than 40 new filters, 16-bit color support, and a sophisticated new paint engine.
Designed specifically for editors, Red integrates with more than 20 NLEs, including Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere Pro, and Avid systems. In addition to an unprecedented range of integrated features, the Red Engine provides standalone rendering. Red is a powerful and versatile application that integrates advanced 2D and 3D compositing, industry-leading software DVE technology, robust 3D modeling and animation, native vector titling, motion tracking, vector paint, rotoscoping, Adobe Illustrator file animation and extrusion and more, all in a single plug-in.
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This year’s NAB show was very different from the last couple of years. Unlike the previous 2 shows, this year we saw a bunch of exciting new products that will be shipping within the next few months! That’s right folks, we’ve finally turned a big corner. We didn’t spend time looking at products we may sell in the future, we spent our time seeing products that our customers will be able to buy and use almost immediately.
Professional realtime native HDV and DV editing
Avid Xpress Pro 5x Software
Order Avid Liquid 7 & Liquid PRO 7 from the Videoguys
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to the NEW! Production Studio Premium for only
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