The Sunday before NAB opens is traditionally a day for the press to tour some of the bigger companies that will be showing their wares. Today was no exception - although the number of companies doing pre-show events for the press has now expanded into Saturday and Sunday's press conferences are all over the (Las Vegas) map on Sunday.
If today's news is any indication, one trend of NAB 2014 is an uptick in companies merging or, another way of putting it, consolidation: Quantel, which bought Snell, came to NAB for the first time as a single company; Grass Valley is now a Belden Company (with the Miranda brand permanently gone, except the purple color in the logo); and Dalet Digital Media Systems just acquired AmberFin.
Companies spin the mergers as a benefit to the end customer, in that the synergies of two related companies result in a host of benefits to the end user: more expertise, more capability, more customer service, and so on. In many cases, there's justification to those claims.
In the Quantel/Snell press conference, for example, Quantel Executive Chairman/CEO Ray Cross summed it up this way: "Two great companies have now joined forces." He went on to enumerate the benefits: more scale, local support in 14 worldwide locations, zero product overlap."
In the case of Dalet and Amberfin, Dalet's Media Asset Management (MAM) solutions, software and services now merge with AmberFin's video ingest, complex media manipulation, transcoding and quality control (QC) solutions. And Grass Valley noted the similar engineering culture and complementary products" between GV and Belden. "The merger creates an entity with over 79 years of expertise in broadcast," said Grass Valley president Marco Lopez.
The trend towards partnership went well beyond company mergers. Sony announced the addition of Apple ProRes on-board recording as a future hardware upgrade option for its F5 and F55 CineAlta 4K cameras; ProRes files will be stored and recorded internally to the F5 and F55 via Sony's SxS PRO+ memory cards,
Quantel announced that it has licensed Apple ProRes encoding for "its full range of software and turnkey Pablo Rio" color correction and finishing systems." ProRes encoding will be part of the V2.0 rev8 software update for Pablo Rio and Pablo PA. Quantel also has a new integration with Fairlight; via its QTube's API, Fairlight's Gateway audio editing system gets instant, real-time access to Quantel video within the Fairlight software. Grass Valley is now partnering with Brightcove, Elemental, Excitem and Delatre. These partnerships are nothing new in our industry, but they seem to be picking up in pace, and they signal a new willingness to play well with others.
Ultra HD, or 4K, is probably NAB 2014's signature trend, as I stated in my pre-show NAB coverage. That meant lots of "end to end" 4K workflows that I saw today and expect to see every other day at the show.
Autodesk's new Flame 2015 features an end-to-end Ultra HD workflow along with a range of new creative tools and multi-GPU capability. (As an aside, Autodesk is also following the trend of moving from software boxes to SaaS ; Its Smoke 2015 will be available only as a desktop subscription starting May 8.)
Grass Valley identified 4K as one of its key areas of advancement. That included 4K routing, 4K Dyno Replay, Edius 4K, 4K monitoring and 4K Kayenne. GV also unveiled a new 4K camera: the 4K Native B4 Lens LDX camera with no loss of viewing angle, depth of field or sensitivity, and better color resolution in a 3-sensor topology. The camera is currently a technology demo only; trials will begin in summer. GV also unveiled LDX ExtremeSpeed, which offers 6x slo-mo. (Also new, the K2Dyno with AnySpeed, allows real-time control of playback speed!)
Sony's MVS-7000X and MVS-8000X production switchers now have real time 4K processing capabilities, and prior models can also be upgraded. The company also announced upgrades for all its 4K cameras, and introduced an ENG/documentary version to its 4K line-up.
NAB is rife with rumors of other new 4K cameras from AJA and Blackmagic Design, which may already be announced by the time you read this. Bottom line: expect Ultra HD to dominate the floor.
Another up-and-coming trend is IP (Internet Protocol). Although this distribution model doesn't have the buzz of 4K, it's an important shift in the industry and was mentioned nearly everywhere I went. "Quantel and Snell share a vision for an IP future," said Cross, who noted that IP is the answer for real-time signal routing. That "vision" features routers that are agnostic and transparent to transported media; broadcast services at the edge (in other words, leaving the core IP routing intact); and an interoperable environment.
Sony not only talked about IP - it demonstrated it live at the press conference, between the Mirage Hotel and the Convention Center Floor where we got a real-time tour of Sony's IP production tools including the NXL-IP55 At Sony's booth during NAB 2014, a video demonstration will connect with Tulsa, Oklahoma via IP, and show real time camera control. Grass Valley also focused on IP as "a company strength." We can expect to see more IP offerings from more companies in the coming months. Who knows? It may be the buzz of NAB 2015.
Along with IP is more emphasis on the cloud, which enables software-as-a-service, and the continuing decline of tape as a medium. Digital Nirvana, for example, introduced FIFOPro, an ingest back-up system for broadcasters that eliminates tape by making digital back-up recordings of multiple HD-SDI feeds. It's so ironic that, just as celluloid is coming to an end, so is the videotape that long ago was purported to obsolete it. As it turns out, film had a much longer, more successful run than videotape. Film may have changed and evolved in the early days, but video has had over 40 different format incarnations.
Tomorrow, the opening day of the show, catch me at 9 am at Teradek's booth for a live-streaming show featuring Ted Schilowitz talking about his new venture, Devil & Demon Strategy, and a discussion of distributive post with a top-notch panel from Hula Post, Technicolor-PostWorks and Digital FilmTree. I'll also be visiting AJA, Panasonic, Maxon, Facilis, Thinkbox, AmberFin, HP, Gefen, EditShare, CineDeck, Boris FX and Canon, so look for more analysis of trends in tomorrow's report.