Filmmakers Garage

Randall’s guide to efficient NABing:

1. Get to the convention centre early. You’ll avoid long Starbuck’s lines.
2. While you are waiting for the show floor to open up, visit the NAB bookstore. It gets really busy later, so hit it first, before anyone else realizes it is open. You’ll spot awesome books on filmmaking that you never knew existed. I jot down as many ISBN numbers as I can (learned the first year that books will put me over my weight allowance on the return flight).
3. Start the day at the back of Central Hall. The crowds all congegrate at the front of the room, so you get a lot more chances to have good initial conversations if you start at the back. Lately I start near the Sony booth and work out from there.

There seem to be fewer big product announcements than other years.  Some exceptions:

1. Sony has two new cameras – the F65 that I mentioned in yesterday’s post and the PMW-TD300.
2. There are some Thunderbolt devices being demonstrated here.  At the Blackmagic booth, they’ve got the UltraStudio 3D hooked into a Promise RAID via daisy-chained Thunderbolt cables.  At the Matrox booth they are demonstrating the MX02 device.  When I ask manufacturers about availability, most get squeemish and say they hope to have something by the ‘end of the year’.
3. I had heard of this before NAB, but the Teradek Cube is a very cool gadget.  It does live H.264 streaming from the camera, and it can also be configured to save out the H.264 proxies on a computer.  This means that you can use an iPad as a monitor to view live (granted with a few frames latency) material from the camera, or to view clips that you have shot already.
4. By chance, I happened on the Post Pit just as Taz Goldstein from HandHeldHollywood was starting a presentation on using the iPad for film production.  Obviously, based on my recent activities (www.rippledigital.com) this was interesting to me.  He had highlighted a lot of interesting apps, some of which I did not know about.  He also mentioned POMFORT, who is demonstrating an iPad in a physical slate case here at NAB.  When the clapper claps, their iPad app detects it and records the timecode.
5. The main product from POMFORT, is a management system for materials coming off of camera on set.  It looks like a nice tool and a much more organized way to handle materials than the free and semi-free tools that we are currently using in ATVF.

The other interesting thing I attended yesterday was a presentation in the Content Theatre on the 3D broadcast of the Sony Open golf tournament from Hawaii earlier this year.  All of the primary people involved in making this happen were on the stage to discuss it.  If you have any questions about how they put something like that together, come talk to me when I get back.

I’m very much behind schedule if I want to see everything at the show this year.  Lots of walking to do today!