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Another
opinion brought to you by the
Bob Zelin U N L E A S H E
D Series.
NAB 2004 -- What
happened this year at NAB 2004?
Have you heard “nah –
nothing new happened at NAB this year” ? Well these
people were SLEEPING or were too frightened to
admit that their equipment is rapidly becoming
obsolete. NAB2004 was amazing, there were so many
changes, and everything has become so cheap. Here’s
what happened.
The biggest overview of the
show is that this is the first year that Hi Def Video
is cheap. How cheap? Apple and Panasonic had a
joint showing of “new” HD editing that only required a
bare bones Apple MAC G5 and the new amazing Panasonic
AG-HD1200A VTR. This is the DVC Pro HD VTR that is
also being called DVC100. This VTR will play back the
tapes created by the Panasonic Varicam HD Camera, which
has become incredibly popular. This HD VTR is only
$25,000 with the firewire option port. You take the
firewire signal (this ain’t no DV25 compression !)
straight into the MAC G5 running FCP-HD (which is a free
download from Apple if you own FCP4), and VOILA !, you
are doing HD editing. Apple showed three disk drive
storage solutions for this HD system – using 2 internal
SATA drives on the G5, using an external Apple Xserve
RAID, and using the new Apple XSAN shared storage
solution. I want to stress that Apple did not use
ANY video capture cards to make this happen – it was
just a bare bones MAC.
Was this appealing to me –
sure it was, but it was no where as cool as the AJA
solution. AJA introduced the new AJA Kona 2
card. This card allows you to take in HD SDI video
from the new Panasonic HD Deck, but you need to
purchase the optional HD/SDI Option for the Panasonic
VTR (AG-YA120AD) for $6000. This makes the Panasonic
deck $27,000. The AJA Kona 2 is only $2800 complete
with breakout panel. You can now also record HD signals
from a Sony HD VTR that works at the 1080i HD format.
So you can now do Sony or Panasonic format, and it costs
you less money. The AJA will also convert the
Panasonic DVC100 coded into conventional HD formats if
you choose to use the firewire port option. The AJA
will also give you REAL TIME downconversion to
conventional SDI video output, as well as REAL
TIME analog component output (to drive your TV
monitor, or dump out to a Beta VTR) as well as analog
audio. The AJA will also let you record from your Digi
Beta VTR with regular SDI video. The AJA Kona 2 uses
embedded audio (on the video stream for both HD and
SDI), AES Audio in XLR format, or AES Audio in BNC
format. ALL THIS CRAP IS INCLUDED FOR FREE for the
$2800. OH MY GOD HOW CAN THEY DO THIS FOR SO CHEAP !
AND, it’s completely compatible with the regular AJA I/O
box, so if you still have tons of ” and Beta material
that you still have to work with every day, for the
extra 2 grand, you can have the regular AJA I/O box
working as well with the Kona 2. So you get the
hardware for a full multi format non linear edit system
for under $5000 that does every format that you can
think of, and has all the converters built right into
it. WOW!
 
AJA also showed another
product that I really paid attention to. The AJA
HD10C2 converter will take the HD output of the AJA
Kona 2 (or anything else) and convert it to a VGA
signal, so you can finally use your big 42” Plasma TV
for real HD viewing. This little converter is
$1190. Imagine your clients walking into your edit
suite, and you now have a full HD editing system that
does both Sony and Panasonic formats, and you’ve got
this HUGE HD Plasma monitor hanging on your wall, and
you paid less to build this room that you did for your
regular NTSC SDI edit system 2 years ago – and it still
does SD Video as well ! IS THIS REALLY HAPPENING?
(Did I mention that this system does 24p with no problem
as well?).
Blackmagic, the other cool
company for Final Cut Pro capture cards, also showed
their multi format Decklink capture cards that ranged
from $295 for a basic SDI capture card, to $2195 that
did everything, including HD and SDI capture in both
formats. Blackmagic is a great company, but the
coolest thing they showed was a little
converter box that will take the HD SDI signal, and
convert it to the Apple DVI format. They then took
a $99 Apple DVI to ADC converter, and stuck this
into a 23” Apple Cinema Display, and showed HD
SDI 1080i video playing back on an Apple Cinema
Display. This looked FANTASTIC, and this convert
box only costs $1300. Now you can have the worlds
coolest looking monitor playing back HD SDI, and it
costs almost nothing to do it. Imagine this
combination of the Cinema display and the 42” Plasma
screen in your edit suite, all playing back REAL HD,
all for a fraction of the price of a Sony BVM series HD
TV monitor. WOW !!!
Disk drive storage is
really changing, and there were so many companies
showing really cool storage products, that everyone
thought was impossible last year. HUGE Systems showed
their new U320-R RAID 3 drive array. This drive array
has removable storage in case one of the drives fail.
You get 1.25 Terabytes of RAID 3 protected storage
for under $6000, and 2.5 Terabytes of RAID 3
protected storage for under $10,000. But this is
not why I am mentioning this product. HUGE showed their
prototype of their cheap shared storage solution. It
was a one rack unit box that you simply plugged
in your Gigabit Ethernet cables into from each of
your MAC’s. Once you did this, you could do
UNCOMPRESSED SHARED STORAGE between the MAC’s with NO
SOFTWARE – the software was native in firmware
inside the new HUGE box. You just turned on your MAC,
said CONNECT TO SERVER under the GO menu, and BANG – you
had shared storage. They demonstrated 3 streams of
uncompressed over Ethernet, but said that when they
release in June or July 2004, it will ship with 6
streams of uncompressed over Ethernet. AND THEY
SAID THIS COULDN’T BE DONE. Oh yea, it’s only going
to cost under $5000 for this box, and your learning
curve to use this product will be practically ZERO.
WOW. I almost can’t believe what I saw.
Medea showed the G-RAID
FireWire 800 drives doing playback of 8 bit UNCOMPRESSED
Video with Final Cut Pro. AND THEY SAID THIS COULDN’T
BE DONE. ProMax showed the SATAMAX-E removable
drive array, which uses inexpensive SATA drives, and a
SATA Drive controller. The whole thing, with 1 Terabyte
of storage was only $1500 !!!! AND THEY SAID THIS
COULDN’T BE DONE. YES, it played back uncompressed
video. Yes 10 bit uncompressed.
Studio Network Solutions
showed SANmp, which is a software Shared storage
solution that gives you a true, “poor man’s AVID
Unity” system. At $1500 per computer, you load this
software, buy the same components that AVID uses
in their UNITY system (a Vixel switch, a Fibre Channel
drive array, and a Fibre channel card for each computer
that you have), and for under $30,000, you have a
fully functional “poor man’s AVID Unity”. Shared,
uncompressed storage, that is incredibly easy to use.
And unlike solution that I saw from HUGE and Rorke Data
(which were both great anyway), Studio Network Solutions
gives you easy to use management software, so you can
have users “protect” their workspace, so no one
overwrites their files accidentally. I cannot stress
how easy it was to learn to use this software – the
process would take any one only 5 minutes to learn.
So, between Apple XSAN,
Studio Network Solutions SANmp, Rorke Data ImageSAN, and
HUGE Systems shared storage (and there were others too),
there are a HELL OF A LOT OF UNCOMPRESSED SHARED STORAGE
SOLUTIONS out there that actually work. There was only
so much time, but I saw the Command Soft, and I know
that the guys who built AVID Unity were showing their
new solution in a hotel suite in the Hilton Hotel. I
just didn’t have enough time to see all this stuff.
THESE PRODUCTS ALL WORK, AND THEY ARE ALL GREAT.
ProMax and Laird showed
their “convert anything to anything” boxes. The
ProMax model is the ProMax ProMedia Encoder which
is $2195, and truly did anything you can think of to
anything else. It included FireWire, SDI, AES audio, as
well as RS422 control. What a shame it does not work
with the AVID Xpress Pro product (it works, but
won’t input uncompressed video to the AVID).
Sigma showed their new
option for the TSG-470 sync generator that does tri
level sync for you 24p HD users out there. I
mention this product, because this complete package was
under $5000, and was EASY to use and complete. It was
not a card, a cage, and software or control panels that
you had to piece together to work. You just hit the
menu key, select the HD framerate you want to work at,
and away you go. No brain surgery.
One company I was
disappointed with this year was Videotek. Videotek
discontinues the VTM-400, which was the cheapest HD
waveform monitor that I was aware of. Their “low
end” HD scope now is the VTM-420 which is a hefty
$11,000. Kind of high in price, in light of all the
low cost HD equipment that is now out on the market.
It’s still less money than anything that Tektronix or
Leader had to offer for HD, however.
I can go on and on and on
about all the new products, but I know you can only
appreciate so much. Sony discontinued the DVW-A500
Digi Beta VTR, and released the new DVWM-2800
series, that costs $46,800. Of course, the new HDW-2000
series (an HD deck that plays back 1080i format at 29.97
as well as 24p) also plays back Beta and Beta SX tapes,
and costs $4000 less than the new Digi Beta VTR –
it’s $42,000. Yes it’s a recorder too, but won’t
record back at 24p (no big deal for conventional TV
clients).
Adobe showed the new
Premier Pro, which now works with the Blackmagic
Decklink cards to do HD and SDI material on a PC, not a
MAC. AVID showed their HD card for AVID Adrenaline,
which currently does 4:1 or 7:1 compressed HD, and
will do uncompressed HD in the near future. AVID also
showed the new AVID Xpress Studio, which uses the Pro
Tools M Box or 002 as their audio interface.
Discreet showed the SMOKE product running under Linux.
Everything right down to
the patch bays changed. All the bay manufacturers are
making HD video patch bays, and the new audio patch bays
have little switches on them to automatically change the
jacks from normalling to non normalling. Amazing.
I was exhausted from being
at this show, as I just became thinking back about all
that I saw. One thing is for sure- HD is here, and
it’s cheap – as cheap as standard video. Now it’s
just a matter of time for our clients to really start
demanding HD delivery.
Hope to see you there.
Keep
on ranting - keep'em on their toes !
Bob
Zelin in Orlando
**Any
advice given, and all opinions expressed, are strictly
those of Bob Zelin and do not necessarily represent the
opinions of Virtual Media or any of its employees.
Bob Zelin is an independent consultant, and a well-known
member of the Avid community. He is not an employee of
Virtual Media or any of its subsidiaries.
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