After walking the National Association of Broadcasters showfloor for 3 days – clocking in up to 9 miles in one day – the Videomaker staff returned to VMHQ to discuss, debate and analyze the products we saw to present our first ever “Best of NAB 2011” awards.
BEST IN SHOW: Sony NEX -FS100u – Camcorder with Interchangeable Lens
BEST CAMCORDER: Canon XF305 - 3D Firmware Upgrade
BEST COMPUTER: HP EliteBook 8760w – Laptop
BEST EDITING SOFTWARE: Apple Final Cut Pro X (Apple has not yet posted the new product on their site since it is still getting tweaked)
BEST CAMERA SUPPORT: Redrock Micro3D Rig
BEST HARD DRIVE: LaCie Little Big Disk with Thunderbolt – Hard Drive
BEST LIGHT GEAR: Lowel Studio LED 250 and 450 – LED Lights
BEST MICROPHONE: Sennheiser MKH 8060 – Shotgun Microphone
BEST MONITOR: iKan VX7e – Field Monitor
BEST STOCK MEDIA: SmartSound SonicFire Pro Quicktracks – Cloud-based Royalty-Free Music Creation Service
BEST PLUG-IN: Boris FX Boris Red 5 – Video Editing Software
MOST INNOVATIVE:Photon Beard’s PhotonSpot Nova 270 - Light Emitting Plasma Lamp
The criteria for our judging was simple:
a product that was new to this show – meaning it hadn’t been announced at a previous show
a product that was guaranteed to ship within the year – meaning no ‘vaporware’
a product that was good for the Videomaker community – meaning it can’t be too expensive, too niche or built for a huge production facility, but not really feasible for the small crews or Lone Wolf producers that comprise many of the Videomaker readers.
This last criteria was the hardest because at a show called the National Broadcasters Association, you’re going to see a LOT of high-end products that are in use in television stations, movie studios, and big-time facilities. Also, since these are featured products from NAB, they are still most often going to be in the higher-end price range, even for our market, unlike the products we’ll see at CES – the Consumer’s Electronics Show. Read the rest of this entry »
Las Vegas here we come! The Videomaker staff is gearing up for the annual trek to the mecca of broadcast tools and toys: The National Association of Broadcasters, better known as NAB. We will hit the ground running at this year’s NAB 2011, (literally – wearing the most comfy running shoes we can!) as we check out the coolest video production gear possible including cameras and camcorders, mics and lights, computers, drives, software and a myriad of other goodies.
Throughout the event we will be blogging about our finds, as well as Tweeting and sending updates to Facebook – be sure to “like” us and watch for updates – so you can see gear that we hope to have in our headquarters for review as soon as the manufacturers release them to us.
NAB 2011 is jam-packed with video production gear for the Lone Wolf producer all the way to the mega Hollywood productions – If you could see our appointment calendar, you might be amazed that we can cover the NABshow floor so well. Trying to sift through it all every year is a quest, but we love a challenge and we always look forward to not just finding out about the gear, but getting a hands-on chance to see it, hold it, test it out – we’re like kids in a candy store!
After attending more than 12 of these tradeshows, from CES to NAB, I decided to pack a pedometer at last January’s CES 2011. I clocked in an average of 6 miles a day – what an experience! I hope you enjoy the show – virtually – through our eyes. Be sure to stay tuned here, to the Videomaker blog for daily updates throughout the week – and let us know what you’d like to see.
There were a ton of cool gadgets and innovative products to drool over this year at CES 2011. With over 3.2 million square feet of show floor to cover, it can be difficult to see all of them. However, this year there were some gadgets that were so jaw-droppingly awesome that we decided to strap on some gel insoles and get them on video for every video enthusiast to see. One of those products was Sony’s new VAIO F-Series 3D laptop. Not only does it sport NVIDIA GeForce GT540M graphics with 1GB of DDR3 VRAM an Intel Quad Core i7-2630QM processor, and 8GB of DDR3 SDRAM, but it also sported a 16 inch Full HD 3D display. That means that 3D editing has now officially made its way to the world of laptops. All you gotta do is pop in a copy of Sony’s newest version of Vegas and the next video you edit will be popping off the screen for your audience to enjoy. We wish we could have taken more video of the laptop in action but as you can imagine the product was in high demand at CES. Either way, you can take a look at the video of the laptop that we were able to get below to see what all the hype is about. The laptop will start at $1,700.
Let’s be honest, the first thing most of us think about when buying a new computer is the processor speed. Granted, there may be a few lone wolves whose elevator stops just shy of the top that think about the color or artistic merits of the computer first, but undoubtedly most people think of processing speed. Historically, this has indeed been the best indication of improvement to one’s computing experience and deservedly so. I mean there’s no doubt that going from 1 Ghz of processing speed to 2 should technically give your computer speeds that are close to twice as fast (which of course never actually happens), so what’s the big idea behind the title above? Let me explain. First of all, I think we can all agree that Moore’s law (which states that the amount of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on a chip will double every two years) cannot mathematically go on forever, and secondly, that the biggest gains in editing speed is no longer coming from the CPU, but from a fast hard drive and a GPU.
It’s shocking to think that Moore’s law could one day go the way of the dinosaurs. Even more shocking still is to hear a number of experts declare that CPUs are quickly approaching a power “wall” where to make the CPU any faster would mean a melting of the very substance that the transistors rest on. It doesn’t take a genius to know that a melted chip isn’t going to allow you to finish your video edit in record time. That’s why it’s unfortunate that this problem has not gotten a satisfactory answer from the labs at AMD or Intel, meaning that the “wall” may be approaching faster than we think.
On the other side of things, when Adobe announced their newest suite of creative products, CS5, they made a big deal of the close integration and speed gains that both Adobe Premiere and Media Encoder could get with a graphics card running on CUDA technology. This is because both Adobe and NVIDIA finally realized that CPUs are not only slowing their pace of improvement, but also pale in comparison to the processing power of a GPU – especially when today’s GPUs can handle the job of encoding and rendering more efficiently. If that wasn’t proof of the diminishing power of the CPU, it also seems that new versions of operating systems need less processing power and more RAM than they used to. Just a few years ago, when most people were running Windows XP, the minimum requirements for their computers to run was a measly 300 Mhz of processing power and 128 MB of RAM. Interestingly enough, when Windows finally upgraded their OS to the relative stability of Windows 7, the minimum requirements for the CPU went up by 700 Mhz, whereas the RAM went up by almost 1.8 GB, effectively double what the requirements of the CPU are. Even so, the most telling fact of all can be found with Intel’s latest announcement of their Sandy Bridge chip. Shortly after the announcement, MIT’s Technology in Review blog called into question the actual improvements of Intel’s chips saying that they “had little to tout in terms of improved CPU performance.” Instead, it seems that Intel is focusing on improved graphics processing and communication which has very little to do with what the traditional processor does. Though this may be good news for graphic card companies, it most certainly must be bad news for processor manufacturers and computer companies. If chips don’t get significantly better for tasks such as video editing or high end rendering, there will be real concern for these manufacturers as their biggest accounts will slowly fade away. Honestly, who wouldn’t just keep upgrading RAM and hard drives rather than buying a whole new CPU every 2-4 years – especially in our economy?
Hope is not lost however. Thankfully, it does appear that Intel is intent on nipping this problem in the bud by announcing new technology such as memristors and quantum computing, all of which hold promise but still have yet to see the light of day. These discoveries have the potential to allow processing speeds of up to 1 Thz. However, given the current state of the processing industry, there is good reason to doubt that these technologies will be implemented soon enough to stave off the problem. Either way, though it is a shame that processing power may not hold the same importance as it once did, the one thing that won’t be missing the slowing progress of processors is our wallets.
When Videomaker first took a look at Beauty Box back in September we came to the conclusion that it was a useful and time saving plugin that made it possible to make even the most self-conscious talent feel happy about what they’ve shot. We still hold to that conclusion and now with a new GPU-utilizing upgrade that gets rid of our only real complaint with the plugin, we can confidently stand behind our conclusion again. To be clear, Digital Anarchy, the makers of Beauty Box, a plug-in for fixing blemishes, wrinkles, and small defects in skin, recently released a new version of their plugin that can now utilize the power of a computer’s GPU instead of relying on the CPU only. As a result, in our tests we found that to render 10 seconds of footage from our new Documentary Storytelling series in After Effects, took only half as long as the previous version of Beauty Box. Of course we tested this on an Intel Xeon 3.33 Ghz Quad Core computer with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 3800 graphics card so we did have some definite power to start with but that doesn’t change the fact that time is money, and so saving this kind of time is significant. In the past, an editor would have to mask the area of the face, apply a blur, and rotoscope the movement of the talent frame by frame in order to achieve the same face-detecting results of Beauty Box. Oh, I can’t forget to say that Beauty Box 1.2 works best with NVIDIA’s CUDA technology on a 64 bit system. So for those who have been blessed with that kind of computer power, expect a big boost in speed and for 200 dollars, a good price to match.
2010 is poised to be the year where consumers can enjoy stunning 3D experiences across all entertainment mediums, including gaming, photographs, Web browsing, and of course, movies. And, with the forthcoming 3D Blu-ray specification expected to be formally announced later this year, NVIDIA and its partners are pleased to announce that the amazing 3D experience that has proven so popular in movie theaters is about to come home.
“2010 is poised to be a pivotal year for 3D entertainment,” said Joe Roberts, Executive Vice President, Products for Corel. “Hollywood is ramping up production of 3D content, while hardware manufacturers are working to bring new 3D display technologies to market. Corel’s WinDVD brand is a recognized leader in video playback technology and we’re pleased to be working with NVIDIA to help drive this initiative. Our 3D Blu-ray playback prototype is a critical piece in offering a complete solution for 3D Blu-ray playback on the PC.” Read the rest of this entry »
We have high hopes for the Adobe Flash Player 10.1, now available in beta form for Windows, Mac and Linux. The new version is shaping up to be a winner in early testing; it appears to be vastly better about memory consumption and not putting my XP-based workstation’s CPU into a race condition (aka, “becoming a runaway process”). I’ll see how well it works on a 64-bit Win7 setup in a couple of hours.
AMD and NVIDIA have also both put out press releases indicating that a number of their graphics processors will play nice with Flash 10.1, which exploits both Stream and CUDA technology (respectively), and can also eke out a bit more video performance from Intel and Broadcom’s integrated chipsets as well.
Why care? Well, you have to use Flash for pretty much any web site you go to anymore, regardless of the scope of the web site. And Flash is the most popular way to show video online these days, and it’s not too hard to see why–it makes things simple. There’s no mucking through video codecs, because all of the necessary codecs for living in Flash-land are included in the Flash installer. And the codecs in question (Sorenson Spark, On2 VP6 and VP7) are all pretty good performers. And the paranoid (but nice) copyright cartel loves it because it’s relatively easy and pretty much seamless to the end-user to apply DRM to Flash video. (You didn’t really want to download that video, did you? You did? Oopsy.)
If you want to take the 10.1 plunge, Adobe’s release notes warn you to remove your existing Flash players before installing the Flash 10.1 beta. Let us know how your experience goes.
Next: waiting patiently for the 64-bit version of Flash to hit Windows…
NVIDIA has just released it’s new Quadro CX graphics card. It’s been designed in conjunction with Adobe to specifically accelerate certain features of the recently announced CS4 suite. I attended an online demo yesterday and the technology involved looked very impressive.
The Quadro CX allowed very fluid interaction with your content in Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. Many of the simple tasks, such as resizing and rotation were instantaneous, and certain time consuming tasks such as h.264 encoding were greatly accelerated. The Quadro CX is squarely aimed at Adobe professionals, where time is money. We hope to get one in soon to test out for you.
The card itself has 1.5 Gigs of graphics memory and is priced at $1,999, and has drivers for both XP and Vista. A Mac version is currently “under discussion”.
You can read more details in the press release below:
Apple has released new notebook computers and a brand new HD display today.
The new MacBookPro has a 15” LED backlit screen, making it more power efficent, brighter, and thinner than the standard flourescent backlit screens. Another selling point of this model is that the case is machined from a solid piece of aluminum, making it more rugged and solid for location use. There are two graphics processors included in the MacBookPro, The NVIDIA 9400M is an embedded graphics design that runs when you’re doing normal computer tasks, and is more power efficent. The second is the high end NVIDIA 9600M GT, that kicks in when you’re using heavy graphics software such as video editing, or motion graphics software.
One interesting hitch for video editors is that this new model comes without a Firewire 400 port. Only Firewire 800 has a jack on the side of the computer. Firewire 800 is backward compatible with 400, but you will now need a special adapter to make the notebook work with your Firewire camcorder.
The price starts at $1,999, and you can add options from there, available immediately.
Apple has also released a new version of their consumer notebook the MacBook. This new model is spec’d and priced lower than the MacBookPro, at $1,299, but due to the fact that this model only has the integrated graphics chip (NVIDIA 9400M), it makes it unsuitable for video editing purposes. It also has no Firewire port of any kind.
Apple also unveiled a new 24” LED backlit Cinema Display. It has 1920×1200 resolution, making it acceptable for displaying HD video. However, interestingly this monitor only has a mini-display port (no DVI/HDMI) and so it too requires an adapter to work with anything other than these new laptops that were released today. It will be available in November for $899.
After walking the National Association of Broadcasters showfloor for 3 days – clocking in up to 9 miles in one day – the Videomaker staff returned to VMHQ to discuss, debate and analyze the products we saw to present our first ever “Best of NAB 2011” awards.
2010 is poised to be the year where consumers can enjoy stunning 3D experiences across all entertainment mediums, including gaming, photographs, Web browsing, and of course, movies. And, with the forthcoming 3D Blu-ray specification expected to be formally announced later this year, NVIDIA and its partners are pleased to announce that the amazing 3D experience that has proven so popular in movie theaters is about to come home.
NVIDIA has just released it’s 
Apple has released new notebook computers and a brand new HD display today.
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