Advanced tv systems, all-digital video system lineups, upgradeability and integration are on the agenda at the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, to be held April 5-11 in Las Vegas.

Like the midsection of a visiting slot jockey bellying up to his third all-you-can-eat feed of the day, this year’s nab convention has expanded significantly from even last year’s vast gurgling mass of activity.

NAB ’97 will feature more than 720,000 square feet of audiovisual fun and games at the Sands Expo Center and the Las Vegas Convention Centre; and Barbara Walters, too.

Exhibit space at the Sands Expo Center has been expanded as has the lineup of exhibitors – who will number 1,200 – and despite its unwieldy size, the convention is covered end to end by most broadcast, post, effects and multimedia players, around 100,000 of whom will flock to the show for demos, shaking of hands, airing of suggestions, and making of deals.

This year, major hardware and software companies will be divided between the Convention Centre and the expanded area of the Sands.

Guns like Sony, Philips Broadcast Television, Avid, Tektronix, Panasonic btsc, Chyron, Quantel and jvc will exhibit at the Convention Centre while the Sands will house Discreet Logic, Alias/Wavefront and Silicon Graphics, among others.

At last year’s show, 73% of those who made the pilgrimage made purchases on site or planned to buy shiny new show baubles within 12 months of the convention.

Topping the list of most wanted items are computer products and services, video production accessories, cameras, video products, multimedia products and services and effects equipment.

NAB 97 and NAB Multimedia World will feature over 200 sessions at 13 conferences, several of which are making their first appearance at the ’97 confab.

New this year are the Communications and Connectivity 97 Electronic Distribution Conference, which will tackle the issues in the emerging fields of satellite, fiber and wireless distribution. Sessions will address the international direct-to-home tv scene, the fiber vs. copper wireless, and broadcasting and broadband delivery options.

NAB Multimedia World, now in its fifth year, has grown significantly in size and relevance and this year offers two new conferences: the New Media Professionals Conference, which covers topics including Web animation and graphics and dvd authoring, and the Internet Business Conference, which will include discussions of moneymaking Web sites, virtual reality and Webcasting.

Systems integration, products which increase the speed and efficiency of work, multiplatform developments, server technology, film effects and scanning advances will surely be among the issues uppermost in the minds of visitors representing the film and tv sector as they wade through the throngs of humanity on the floor and talk shop at one of Vegas’ colorful hospitality centers.

Many will also be casting their eyes upward at the Damoclean digital tv sword, hanging far above the orgy of activity.

nab will feature a special technology demonstration of the Advanced Television Systems Committee digital tv standard, adopted in December 1996 by the fcc in the u.s.

With the u.s. decision comes an even keener eye on advanced tv systems on the part of broadcasters and equipment manufacturers as well as production and post shops everywhere which are charged with determining how to gear up for an eventuality while being caught in a waiting game.

Bill Hammond, chief engineer at Vancouver-based Rainmaker, says he will be paying close attention at nab to determine how the market for advanced tv will shake out.

‘We’ve been doing 16:9 work for three or four years now, we already know what that material looks like when they upconvert it to high-definition,’ says Hammond.

‘I think the big question now is how much production work is actually going to be done at high-def and how much is going to be done at 16:9 and upconverted for transmission; how is this going to impact us and how is it going to change what people are asking us to do?’

Hammond says most players are caught in a ‘chicken and egg’ scenario, not willing to make huge investments developing high-definition technology until the atv scenario plays out in the marketplace.

Hammond doesn’t anticipate a full-blown atv display at nab; while some manufacturers will show some atv gear, like tape machines with higher data rate recording capability, or at least concept machines, there aren’t likely to be any all-encompassing atv floor shows.

And Panasonic will use a portion of its display area to show advanced tv systems including the 1125:60 interlaced advanced cameras and a high-definition recording system.

nab will mark the first year the company shows an all-digital lineup of video systems. While the advanced tv/high-def issue is obviously more pressing south of the border, Panasonic product manager Gordon Stephen says the purchase decisions made now will have to be made with an eye to future technological considerations: ‘People will be saying, `Are we going to be upgradeable to atv?’ With some of our products you’re getting to the point to be able to upgrade easily into that domain.’

Aside from another intensely stylish display area and some compelling demonstrations of its software, Discreet Logic (last year’s unofficial coolest booth award winner) promises to reassert itself after a bumpy year while emphasizing product integration, smart-working systems and total film solutions.

‘The primary message for us is we’re back and back with a vengeance,’ says Discreet Logic vp of marketing Marc Nadeau. ‘From a product point of view the message is integration and productivity enabled through integration.’

Discreet will show products from its editing effects and broadcast lines and the entire booth will be running on a high-speed network, facilitated in part by Wire networking software.

‘We will have seamless movement of assets from system to system at rates that go up to two and a half realtime – way beyond what a serial digital network can do – so you have integration between effects and effects systems and effects and editing systems.’

Displays will feature version 2.0 of the Fire online nonlinear editing system, version 5.0 of Flame and Flint visual effects systems as well as Inferno version 2.0 with the Riot film scanner system, which showed up last year as a technology preview and which will be available for release this year.

‘In addition to new releases we’re putting a lot of emphasis on end-to-end digital film production and the Riot is a part of that for managing the film scanner and film recorder elements’ says Nadeau.

Looking at the increasingly common occurrence of effects shops utilizing Flint and Flame suites together, maximizing the less expensive Flint suite for less elaborate elements and using Flame judiciously for the money shots, Discreet is also releasing Flint with film tools which runs on the Indigo 2 platform.

Nadeau says the proliferation of compositing and effects work in film created a demand for effects systems (he says over 50 Infernos have been installed in l.a. alone) and the next challenge is streamlining the process.

‘Wire is a big part of our efforts to increase productivity,’ says Nadeau. ‘With Wire you can move material over from system to system at high speeds so you get a lot of flexibility when scheduling your work because you have very fast asset reallocation.’

While nurbs and metaballs sound like they might be props found in any number of Vegas hotel rooms, they will assuredly figure prominently in one Hilton Hotel suite as Toronto’s Side Effects Software shows a new 1.1 version of its Houdini 3D animation software there, demonstrating the package’s new perks as part of the Silicon Graphics partnership program.

The new version of Houdini, the company’s follow-up to Prisms, has so far been touted for its modeling capabilities, smooth interface and speed. The software also features a Developer’s Kit, a packaged set of documentation and access instruction which extends the breadth and scope of customization of code available to animators as well as character tools, facilitating the assembly of bone-based skeletons.

Side Effects director of marketing Richard Hamel says there have also been upgrades to particle systems in the rendering software, with motion-blur capability and object instancing. The latter allows an animator working on a number of similar objects, let’s say showgirls, to spend time fine-tuning one of those objects, with the software replicating that object for rendering, saving large amounts of computer memory.

Hamel says nab success means not only market visibility and extracting the ‘aha!’ effect from prospective new users, but exploiting the opportunity to network with customers and technology partners and eyeballing the breakneck pace of change in character animation.

‘We need to be able to see how sophisticated the tools are to make lifelike forms and how easy it is for animators to work with those life forms,’ says Hamel. ‘We are looking to see the actual performance of the various tools. Animators work under very tight deadlines so they are looking to operate in as easy and as stress-free a mode as they can to deliver creative quality.’

Toronto-based Alias/Wavefront will show the latest version of PowerAnimator and StudioPaint and the latest demo of architecture-in-development, Project Maya.

While nobody will be leaving Vegas with the long-anticipated Softimage Digital Studio nonlinear editing, compositing, paint and effects system, the company is announcing the package is going into beta testing and the nab display will include a testimonials-based show of the product.

The booth will also feature free two-hour training sessions on its 3D software. Softimage will also show its 3D animation software Version 3.7 on nt and will launch its 2D cel animation software Toonz Version 4.1 on the nt platform.

Dan Krech of Toronto’s Dan Krech Productions will be one of many scoping the floor for additional software developments on nt. Krech says one of his primary investigations at the show will be new 3D and digital compositing packages for nt as well as advancements in nt hardware and he’ll also be looking at fiber channel news and disc arrays.

Don Thompson of Vancouver-based Finale will also be in the market for disc array options as well as looking at investments in SGI 02 and Octane hardware for Finale effects arm Image Engine. Thompson will also be exploring standards conversion opportunities, with an eye to possibly entering that market to better service the West Coast in the standards sector.

Quantel, in its biggest booth ever, will reprise its upstairs/ downstairs approach with the upper ‘Above and Beyond’ level showing yet-to-be-released new technology and enhancements to almost every system in its editing, visual effects server and graphics product range downstairs.

Without revealing too many details, Quantel director of marketing Guy Walsingham says there will be major developments in the Editbox nonlinear system. Walsingham also cites product integration as a major trend as well as the increasing interest in central servers – he says Quantel’s ClipBox server has been central to many of the company’s initiatives – and nonlinear editing.

A highlight of the Quantel display will be the Bravo brushes package for Paintbox, which allows users to brush with variable or user-defined brushes and brush with textures. The company will also show its open-architecture system, which allows the Quantel system to be plugged into other platforms.