Las Vegas: Products for HD capture, post and broadcast dominated the awards handed out at the recent National Association of Broadcasters conference in Las Vegas (April 16-21).

NAB announced the winners of its third annual Awards for Innovation in Media, which had attendees voting for products launched at the massive tech showcase that ‘best addressed current and upcoming issues in the electronic media industry by boosting efficiency, increasing user flexibility and creativity, and lowering cost.’

Five products were cited in each of the three categories of content creation, management and delivery.

Winners for content creation include the HD-capable Apple Final Cut Pro 5 editing application and Avid’s Media Composer Adrenaline HD 2.1 post system and its Symphony Nitris HD finishing system. Both Apple and Avid drew massive crowds to their product demos in neighboring booths on the NAB2005 show floor.

Final Cut Pro is becoming an increasingly serious challenger to Avid’s dominance of high-end editing. Perhaps the system’s most famous convert is Walter Murch, as detailed in Charles Koppelman’s book Behind the Seen: How Walter Murch Edited Cold Mountain Using Apple’s Final Cut Pro and What This Means for Cinema. For its part, Avid impressed at NAB2005 with demos from editors of three of this year’s best picture nominees: Joel Cox (Million Dollar Baby), Kevin Tent (Sideways) and Matt Chessé (Finding Neverland).

Also making the AIM awards’ cut for content creation was JVC’s highly anticipated GY-HD100U 3-CCD HD camera recorder. Affordable HD was the unofficial theme of the show, and this camera delivers 24p capability for under $10,000.

Products that allow facilities to move data around today’s HD/SD world were cited in the content delivery category. Avid was a winner again for its Avid DNxchange, which allows for the moving of master-quality HD media across SDI networks. Meanwhile, Toronto-based Leitch Technology Corporation was a finalist for two products: its X75 HD multiple-path converter/synchronizer and its Nexio HD video server. A complete list of AIM winners is available at www.nabshow.com.

While it may not have figured in the awards, processor giant Advanced Micro Devices created a great deal of buzz at the NAB MultiMedia World Keynote, led by company CEO Hector Ruiz. Ruiz sung the praises of his company’s 64-bit processors, and backed that up with testimonials from industry heavyweights, most notably Jeffrey Katzenberg, cofounder of DreamWorks and CEO of its animation unit.

Katzenberg showed an HD-projected 10-minute segment from DreamWorks’ animated feature Madagascar, due for release May 27, on which the company opted for AMD’s 64-bit platform for multi-core computing in concert with HP digital workstations.

‘We have a voracious appetite for computing power,’ Katzenberg said. ‘What our artists have been able to do here goes far beyond [previous capabilities]. None of this would have been possible without our partners at AMD and HP.’