The National Association of Broadcasters’ annual assembly takes place this year from April 14-18; five days when, however briefly, attention is redirected somewhat from the usual Vegas distractions. It’s a time when propeller heads arouse more interest than showgirls, slot machines are put to shame by the endowments of the other hardware in town, and fear and loathing are replaced by curiosity and acquisitiveness.

NAB 95 was attended by more than 83,000 broadcast, post-production, multimedia and telecommunications professionals and assorted hangers-on. This year’s convention will see not only more but a wider spectrum of industry representatives, reflecting the increasing convergence of computer and video technologies.

NAB 96 will encompass 11 separate conferences, 1,000 exhibitors, and over 642,000 square feet of Vegas real estate at the Sands Expo and Convention Centre and the Las Vegas Convention Centre.

The first nab convention was held in October 1923 in New York, and over the convention’s 74-year life span it has evolved from a humongous shopping mall to a mandatory forum for those keen on absorbing the vibes of the industry, keeping on top of trends and providing feedback – kudos and complaints – that influence the development of equipment and techniques in all fields.

NAB Multimedia World, cosponsored by nab and the Interactive Multimedia Association, will assume an even more prominent role this year as a one-stop multimedia extravaganza for developers and end users struggling to determine which multimedia avenues are passable and which are lucrative.

The conference’s venue has increased in size by about 15,000 square feet, with exhibitors’ booth size requests increasing 39%. Last year, more than 70% of buyers attending nab made a specific stop at Multimedia World, and over 60% of those buyers purchased multimedia-related equipment on-site or within a year of the event.

Multimedia World sessions cover wide ground, including title authoring strategies, dvd publishing, virtual reality, ceo perspectives from the industry’s leading companies as well as a series of multimedia ‘boot camps’ which give newcomers an overview of key issues. Adjacent to Multimedia World will be internet@ NAB96, featuring Net-specific demos and exhibitors.

Dan Forgues, art director at new media developer Digg Design, a subsidiary of film, tv and new media production facility General Assembly, Ottawa, calls nab a must for his company for all aspects of broadcast and multimedia business.

‘It’s a twofold trip for me,’ says Forgues. ‘We follow developments in new media products like Macromedia Director and Sound Edit 16. We also want to see what tools are available on the broadcast side and how they’re evolving, how I’m able to use those high-end features in new media development, and any new developments that have trickled down from motion pictures that are now available on desktop platforms. That’s what gives us a creative edge; people are judging cd-roms now on what they see on tv.’

Forgues says he has seen increases in ga’s broadcast opening business as a result of software found at nab where new products are made relevant by interaction with developers and up-close demonstrations.

On the post side, high atop many a priority list this year will be checking out disc-based technology, film scanners and advancements in film transfer systems.

Silicon Graphics will be hogging a good part of the spotlight with its new stable of hardware and systems, but nabers will also be cruising the floor looking for that yet unknown software company, the obscure super geek who will solve problems that haven’t even been encountered yet. Many acknowledge there is increasing crossover in production disciplines and technology, and that conferences like siggraph and nab are becoming more similar.

NAB 96 will feature the 50th Anniversary Broadcast Engineering Conference, and the NAB/ITS Advanced Teleproduction Conference will reprise last year’s ‘How’d They Do That’ sessions, which feature discussions of techniques used in Monitor Award-winning work.

Dan Krech, head of Toronto’s Dan Krech Productions, says his company is ‘looking for software that no one has written yet.’

Krech says he recently upgraded the Imagica film scanner in the Toronto facility and is looking for new 3D software to plug into dkp’s Infinity Optics open architecture networked system. Krech is also looking out for software to facilitate an increasing amount of international work, resulting in part from dkp’s production association with l.a.’s OPEN Films, announced last year.

‘We’re looking for software that goes intersite to speed up data rates and interconnectivity between our sites,’ says Krech.

Don Thomson of Vancouver’s Finale Post Production says nab is the strongest of the three to four conventions he attends yearly and provides an opportunity to meet, greet and compare notes with the competition and the rest of the industry.

Thomson says he’s already shopped for most of the new toys for his facility, which is in the midst of a move, but will be looking for systems-oriented equipment like digital switchers to facilitate the smooth operation of the new offices.

Tony Meerakker, vp engineering and operations at Toronto’s Magnetic Enterprises, also says film-related products and disc-based technology are on the nab list of things to watch for.

Meerakker says Magnetic will be looking at Quantel’s Domino or Discreet Logic’s Inferno film products as well as a film transfer device, keeping an eye on Rank Ursa Gold, bts and a third mystery company reportedly getting into the telecine business, but acknowledges the importance of the unknown pioneer. ‘It’s the little guys in the back corner that I’m intrigued about,’ says Meerakker. ‘It’s the whole thought process that gets your juices flowing.’

Many eyes will be turned to the demonstrations of Silicon Graphics and the impact workstations and the Onyx Infinite Reality supercomputer powered by the new MIPS R10000 and R5000 microprocessors as well as new products and services from subsidiary Silicon Studios. sgi’s nab show will feature ‘end-to-end’ solutions including uncompressed editing, motion capture, video servers, Web servers, asset management and network distribution.

Toronto’s Calibre Digital Design will be buying into new Silicon Graphics hardware this year, upgrading its Onyx with R10000 processors and Infinite Reality graphics.

Calibre’s Neil Williamson says the facility just commissioned a Silicon Graphics Maximum impact workstation and will be going to nab to check out the latest software versions running on the new systems.

The facility is banking on the new feature enhancements for Montreal-based Discreet Logic’s Flint compositing software, maximized for impact workstations, which boost its abilities for realtime video, bringing its performance closer to Discreet’s flagship Flame compositing software.

Williamson says Calibre’s new impact-driven Flint suite will play off Flame, allowing some of the work currently done on Flame at premium rates as well as prep work for Flame sessions, to move to Flint.

Discreet will be showing Flame and Inferno running with sgi’s new Onyx and Infinite Reality, which will boost speed and performance significantly.

Discreet demos will also include the Riot, a standalone film product which will feature grain and image processing tools and a film scanning and recording interface, and Fire, an online, open-platform, non-linear editing system marking its first appearance at nab. Fire will incorporate ‘gestural editing,’ touted to be a more intuitive interface and more analogous to real old-fashioned film editing.

‘It goes beyond editing done strictly with commands and controls,’ says Discreet director of product marketing Phil Neray.

Although Neray considers Vegas a ‘depressing place,’ he says nab is the company’s single most important show and expects that show costs will be more than recovered by sales made there.

Discreet will also showcase the Vapour virtual set system and Stone and Wire infrastructure systems, which facilitate high-speed realtime video storage and networking using the hippi (high-performance parallel interface) networking standard, providing over 60 megabytes-per-second bandwidth.

Toronto’s Side Effects Software, which has had a presence at nab for four years, will be working in the Silicon Graphics booth demonstrating Prisms 3D animation software, recently used in the creation of the Kelsey Grammer vehicle Down Periscope and John Woo’s Broken Arrow (both from 20th Century Fox).

Prisms 6.0.2 was released earlier this year to work with the new sgi workstations, and the Prisms demo will focus on the software’s realtime texture mapping capabilities on impact.

Side Effects’ next generation Houdini 3D animation software, scheduled for release in June, will be shown in a separate demo suite.

Williamson says he’ll also be looking at user groups for Calibre’s existing software like Avid’s Advance and the result of last year’s mergers between Avid and London, Eng.’s Parallax Software. Tewksbury, Massachussetts-based Avid will be featuring the Media Spectrum, an open-platform online suite allowing editors access to a number of tools for painting, rotoscoping animation and effects as well as the ability to edit uncompressed full-resolution images.

Avid showcased a technology demo of the Spectrum environment at NAB 95 and will feature developments incorporated over the past year. Avid will also demo new features for the Media Composer digital video editing and finishing systems.

In a nod, perhaps, to its u.k. heritage, Quantel will feature a double-decker exhibit booth in which it will stage a multimedia presentation on ‘crossing boundaries.’ In addition to showcasing new features of the speedier Henry and Hal effects systems, Quantel will have a demonstration of its Clipbox random access video server, which will work simultaneously in separate booths with Louth, a manufacturer of tv station automation systems, and the Newswire-2000 desktop news production system.

Pierre Raymond of Montreal post facility Hybride Technologies says Hybride will be looking at motion-control systems and film scanners, but this year will also attend nab as a vendor: the company’s r&d division recently wrote the first software for the Ultimatte module for Flame.

Integrating another element of production and technology will be Uplink 96, the International Satellite Conference, new to nab this year. The conference brings together many of the players in the international satellite community, and sessions deal with emerging technological changes and overviews of the direct-to-home market with representatives of service providers, equipment manufacturers and regulatory agencies.

Stuart Jacob, vp marketing for u.s. dth service Alpha Star, says nab’s value as a forum for programmers has increased and he’ll be leaving Las Vegas not only with more technology savvy but with a better understanding of the changing economics of production and distribution.