Disk-based products big winner at NAB

It’s final frontier-crossing events, like witnessing last hurdles to the virtual cast being navigated – hair modelling – that bring them to nab. In addition to the digital rug demos, the more than 80,000 techies returned from this year’s National Association of Broadcasters convention with information overload and a tan as the annual event wrapped in Las Vegas April 13.

NAB ’95 eclipsed its 1994 record attendance record by 12,326, clocking 83,408 this year versus last year’s 71,082 broadcasters, production and post-production folk who trekked in from as far away as Istanbul, Bombay, Italy and Spain.

More than 1,000 manufacturers demonstrated wares, aiming to play a part in making film and television production and post-production faster, cleaner and easier in a digital environment.

What wasn’t fast or easy this year was making it from one end the exhibition to the other. Booths covered an area of over 10 football fields, and in many spots it was standing room only. ‘It’s getting to the point where you have to take a number to see the salesmen,’ jokes Bob Walton, cbc manager of planning in the television production department.

Nevertheless, new toys didn’t fail to excite. The crowd gravitated towards the new disk-based, computer-based technology, leaving the switchers and tape-based manufacturers looking like rotary-dial phone salesmen at a Bell Canada demonstration, says Chris Wallace, president of TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation.

Digital has been the star of the nab show for a couple of years, but this year it had company in the spotlight as the trend towards disk-based technology in the broadcasting sector inspired a new breed of video camera and further blurred the lines between media and multimedia.

After the mergers

Many went south with an eye to what new toys the mega mergers would produce. Avid Technology joined forces with The Parallax Software Group of London and Elastic Reality in January; Microsoft purchased Montreal-based Softimage early last year; and Wavefront Technologies, Silicon Graphics and Alias tied the knot early in 1995.

It is too early to see anything revolutionary from the new conglomerates, says Sylvain Taillon, executive producer at topix.

Modeling, rendering

Developments of interest included Wavefront, sgi and Alias’ work on a new generation of products for modeling and rendering, as well as faster computer chips. The group is rewriting the codes for 3D animation software, but other than that, there was little yet that was really exciting from the three big players, and no evidence of any killer applications in the works, he says.

On the floor, Microsoft and Softimage had booths together and there was much talk of Softimage going into developing Microsoft’s Windows nt platform, although Softimage denies the speculation.

Taillon says hardware suppliers are out in greater numbers than he’s ever seen before. ‘There are so many smaller companies with pc-based systems, it’s impossible to keep track.’

Similarly, Peter McAuley, an editor at The Daily Post, says virtually the entire Multimedia World section was made up of suppliers showing what their software can do on power pcs. For industry players whose business doesn’t depend on lightening-quick post, there’s a cost advantage in using the smaller systems, he says.

‘In a lot of cases, you’re paying for speed. If time isn’t a concern, the lower priced packages do all the same multilayering and compositing that the high-end machines do, only slower. If you’ve got the time, you can save money.’

For example, Avid’s Media Spectrum was unveiled at nab, a digital online edit suite that combines the talents of Elastic Reality, Parallax and Avid into one system. The suite works with uncompressed D1 images and includes picture and sound editing capabilities, layering, compositing and special effects for about us$350,000. The morphing software comes through Elastic Reality, with editing and effects packages Meistro and Matador from Parallax, with Avid’s hardware experience.

To spend or to wait?

It’s doubtful Daily Post will be making any new investments for at least a year, says McAuley. There are significantly faster systems on the horizon, but in the short term, the question for many post houses that have gone digital is, ‘Do I want to spend a whole lot of money to get a little bit faster, or wait for products like Macintosh’s pci system to fully evolve?’ says McAuley. (Macintosh is working on a new computer chaise, pci, which will change how data is transferred through the board and aim to achieve a much faster speed of data transmission.)

On the broadcasting side, the ever-growing trend towards disk-based technology was evident, with products like Avid’s new CamCutter disk-based camera getting a lot of attention from broadcasters.

Avid, branching out from its signature line of digital nonlinear editing equipment, demonstrated its much anticipated digital disk-based video camera, which has been in the works since Avid announced its co-development agreement with Ikegami, Japan, at NAB ’94.

The optical parts were developed by Ikegami and the software designed by Avid, with both a single unit and a dockable unit to use with Ikegami’s Unicam camera family, on display at nab and set for release this summer.

According to nab goers, if the press on the camera didn’t spark their interest, seeing Avid reps throwing the CamCutter’s hard drive around the booth to prove it can withstand the daily wear and tear of news gathering, would have.

The CamCutter was ‘the highlight of the show,’ says Doug McCormack, director of operations at ytv. Within five years, everything in the broadcasting industry will run on disk-based equipment, says McCormack, who is thinking about investing in the camera, which runs on a removable 2.4 gigabyte hard disk called a FieldPak that stores 20 minutes of broadcast-quality images.

The CamCutter runs from us$38,000 to us$60,000, depending upon the Ikegami dns model configuration and accessories chosen, while FieldPaks are us$2,500 apiece. The costs are a relatively steep when you consider a reporter will probably need more than one FieldPak, but it may balance out when the ease of transporting material between the reporter and the studio are taken into account, says McCormack.

‘All the data will be digitized, so you can have a reporter in Calgary able to send his story to Toronto with a phone line and a good modem. That story could go anywhere.’

According to Julie O’Brien, an Avid pr representative and nab attendee, a lot of the smaller companies that traditionally used all-tape links for their systems are moving into disk-based technology.

‘Overall, the industry navigates to products that can do the work faster and cleaner. What we’re seeing is that a lot of broadcasters are realizing that disk-based tech is faster and more reliable and lets people be more creative.

‘Once you have a story on the hard drive on a networked and server-based system, you can cut and paste pictures and sound with great speed and no degradation in quality. Plus, several people can work with the pictures at one time.’

Incompatible

Both McCormack and cbc’s Walton went to nab to scope video servers. ytv’s narrowed it down either the Hewlett Packard or Dynatec models, but Walton is concerned that the jpeg or mpeg compression technologies used by the suppliers are incompatible with the broadcast studio signal.

The video server is the next brick in building a fully digitized broadcasting house, say both, and they plan to attend NAB ’96 with an eye to the future.

For broadcasters, trends included developments in editing and camera equipment that can be used on-site, instead of forcing the reporter to do select clips and edit back at the studio.

Among the portable editing studios, Panasonic is developing a laptop Field Edit Package, consisting of a two-vtr nonlinear edit system, a small field recorder, and built-in monitor, scheduled for release in 1996.

‘It’s a nifty little system,’ says Michael McHale, director of new media and project development for CHUMCity International.

Booths packed

nab-bound to look mainly at Internet applications, McHale was distracted by the Panasonic unit, although it was difficult to get a complete idea of all it could do, he says. ‘The Panasonic and Sony booths were like the Eaton Centre on Christmas Eve. They’ll be mainly looking for more information from the reps when they get home.’

The Apple Computer booth was showcasing the CHUMCity Internet site. There was much positive feedback on the quality of images and the quantity of information available, says McHale.

Over 200 broadcasters throughout North America have sites on the Internet now. Radio stations too are realizing that their call letters give users an easy way to find them in a sea of very much unfiltered information, says McHale.

tv and radio broadcasters ‘are becoming aware that it’s a cheap, effective way to promote your station. It’s very hot right now,’ he says.