NAB 2003 Top 10 Buzz List

Please note* this is a review of the products that, (in our view ) received the most buzz at NAB 2003.  This does not necessarily suggest these were the top ten products displayed.  It does however give you an overview of the products everyone's talking about, pros and cons, and our recommendations on what's hot and what's not.

1. Final Cut Pro 4

Every year Apple releases a new version of Final Cut Pro @ NAB which generates a sizable buzz among the post crowd.  This year it is Final Cut Pro 4 and you can be sure that the marketing buzz words were flying around.  Here are a few:  

• RT Extreme – Final Cut 4 has a new RT engine for doing effects and transitions in realtime for preview.  The new engine also allows Apple to output to NTSC while doing realtime effects.  This is new on the Mac but PCs with Vegas Video have been doing this for over a year now.  

• Animated Title Generation – Using Apple’s new standards of LiveType and LiveFonts, Final Cut 4 now has a titler to be reckoned with.  Fully animated text on path, wireframe preview, and customizable effects are now resident in the host application.  What they were showing at the booth did look quite nice but I contend that this doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do before with Boris RED.  

• Soundtrack is Apple’s new tool for creating royalty free music from within FCP.  It’s kind of like a hybrid of Sonic Foundry Acid and Smartsound Quicktracks.  For all of those Wedding Videographers and Corporate Video makers I’m sure this could be a very handy addition.  Many of the higher end FCP users will steer away from this tool as the music is part of post that is developed by a separate entity.   

Despite all of the new features Final Cut’s biggest advantage over its PC siblings is still the same as it was with FCP3; a very wide variety of hardware (especially for HD) and software support that is shipping now.  At the moment FCP is the only open platform with a good amount of choices when working in anything from DV to Uncompressed SD to HD.  

2. Digital Voodoo Products

Digital Voodoo (also Bluefish444) announced a new HD solution at NAB this year; the HD Lust.  Digital Voodoo has continued to lead the way in high end HD solutions and the HD Lust is a board that will cement this reputation even further.  New in the HD Lust is the ability to capture and output 4:4:4 material @ 1080 resolution scalable to multiple frame-rates.  This is just in time for Sony’s recent announcement of 4:4:4 HD cameras and decks.  Right now Digital Voodoo is the only company that has announced a 4:4:4 capable solution.  Also PC support has now been implemented for Digital Voodoo products down the line.  Premiere 6.5 was demonstrated on the floor with Combustion and After Effects support in the wings.

3. Blackmagic Designs

Blackmagic is a company that has come from left-field to offer some serious competition for both PC and Mac vendors alike in the Uncompressed SD world.  Blackmagic, as some may know, is the company behind the codec technology for both AJA and Digital Voodoo hardware.  They’ve now taken their expertise in that field and brought it to bear on the uncompressed SD market.  Now starting @ $995 Blackmagic is offering the Decklink series of boards for uncompressed SDI I/O.  Frankly, that price is insane and has caused more than one colleague to dub them the “Crazy Gideon’s of the Digital Video World”.  Once you break a high-end product into the sub $1,000 things are bound to get shaken up and Blackmagic has done just that.  Expect more announcements from this innovative company in the future.   

4. Sony HD Products

Sony had a rather large booth this year to show all of their new offerings.  The focus of their HD solutions was their new 4:4:4 offerings in Camcorders and Decks which include the HDC-F950 and SRW-5000 respectively.  The new CineAlta HDC-F950 is Sony’s first true 4:4:4 camera with dual-link uncompressed output that ties in seamlessly with the new SRW-5000 recorder.  HDC-F950 captures images @ 1920x1080 and features support for a full range of shutter speeds and an increased dynamic range.  The SRW-5000 recorder is a dual-link SDI I/O 4:4:4 capable deck with the ability to playback HDCAM and DigiBeta originals with up or down conversion as required.  12 channel audio and support for 23.98P, 24P, 25P, 29.97P and 50 or 59.94i framerates and 720 and 1080 resolutions make it a very versatile deck.  Neither product has been priced at this time.  

Not content with just the high-end HD market Sony has also released two HD playback decks; the JH-1 and JH-3.  The JH-1 offers play back of HDCAM material recorded at 1080 29.97PsF/59.94i and 25PsF/50i.  Downconversion is also available with add-on modules for real-time DVCAM compressed Firewire outputs.  The JH-3 offers all of the features of the JH-1 as well as 23.98 and 24 PsF playback and pulldown to 1080/59.94i.  Prices are once again unavailable from Sony but are estimated in the sub $20,000 range.  

5. Adobe Encore DVD

Adobe’s presence at the show was a near failure on all fronts save Encore DVD which managed to draw a sizable crowd.  The biggest news about this launch may not be the software itself though as Encore DVD is a windows only products.  You heard right, there is no Mac support.  This is something that may come as a surprise to some but to those that have been following Adobe’s stance lately on the Mac side of the fence; support has been dwindling for some time now.  I can’t blame them, who would want to compete with a company that owns the platform you develop on and will undercut your price no matter what?  

Regardless, Encore is on its way to a PC near you and supports integration with Photoshop (layer manipulation), Premiere (markers transcode to chapters), and After Effects (automated updates to project).  For those use Adobe products regularly (and with Photoshop and After Effects being defacto standards who doesn’t) this will be a big step up in workflow.  Standard features such as MPEG-2 transcoding are included as well as Dolby Digital transcoding which, outside of Vegas+DVD, make Encore one of the most affordable Dolby Digital ready authoring apps available right now.  Adobe also offers support for all DVD recordable formats including DLT, which kick this software right into the realm of professional use.  The familiar Adobe interface with its timeline layout is also quite enjoyable.  Adobe may win the DVD wars just with ease of use.  

6. Edition 5 Pro

Pinnacle is steam-rolling ahead with the Liquid and Edition series of software and has made great progress over the last 6 months in this regard.  Whereas in the past Edition was a single stream realtime application with excellent background rendering, Edition 5 supports multiple layers of realtime video (I saw 5 running without dropping a frame) and graphics as well as excellent background processing.  You can even select multiple resolutions for you playback quality.  All of this leads me to the conclusion that with Edition 5 Pinnacle has supplied the most versatile and best performing realtime software editing solution for the DV market so far.  This is possible by the use of a specially modified ATi Videocard that processes everything over the AGP bus and offers full 2D and 3D transition and effect support as well as Firewire, S-Video, & Composite I/O (Pro version only).  For those users who will only be getting Edition 5 Standard using any OpenGL and DirectX supporting videocard of Geforce 3 caliber or higher will also find acceleration for transitions and effects.

Edition’s titling interface has gotten a facelift and more importantly, DVD authoring is now supported from the timeline within Edition which makes for a very seamless authoring experience.  Overall I have to award Edition 5 Pro as the surprise of the show.  I was completely floored by the progress that Pinnacle has made on the software in the last few months.  Right now this is one of the if not the most feature rich DV application available on the PC.

7. JVC JY-HD10U

With people wondering when HDTV is going to truly explode into the consumer market, JVC has taken a bold step with the introduction of the JY-HD10U.  Meant as an introductory HD camera, the JY-HD10U is the first of its kind.  Although many features of higher end HD cameras (1080 resolution, larger format tapes, lower compression ratios) were sacrificed in this initial offering in the interest of cost (the JY-HD10U costs about 1/15^th as mush as its closest competitor) JVC has made up for many of the cameras shortcomings with some very inventive technology.  

The MPEG-2 compression that the camera uses runs @ 19Mbps, 6Mbps slower than DV video, yet it compresses almost three times as much information as that used in Standard Definition.  That feat may be possible by JVC’s use of a single CCD versus the 3 CCD standards we’re used to.  JVC claims that a single CCD can be as effective as three if used properly, but until we have an in-house model we can do comparisons with, this is going to be difficult to justify.  Also the camera is the first to use miniDV tape as a medium for HD material something that may give JVC the edge in the low end of the market.  JVC is attempting to do with HD what Sony did with DV in their D-8 models--keep it cost effective and fun to use, while using some clever technology to keep quality sacrifices at a minimum.  In this case they may just invent a market and dominate it all in one fell swoop.  JVC JY-HD10U  

8. Avid Xpress Pro Mojo

Avid has had everyone wondering what’s behind the curtain for some time now with the DNA (Digital Nonlinear Accelerator) announcement preceding NAB.  Part of the DNA family that is now being offered for Avid Xpress Pro is Mojo.  Mojo is an outboard hardware add-on for Avid Software that adds the following features: Realtime DV Output, Realtime Analog Monitoring (w/ uncompressed titles and graphics), Multi-channel audio punch-in, Frame accurate output, 20-bit audio I/O, Uncompressed ability, Genlock sync.  Avid Xpress Pro is Avid’s new upgrade to Avid Xpress DV that offers OpenGL accelerated FX, JKL editing functions, group and gang clips, automatic expert color correction, offline editing, and 24p support.  Yes, all that and it’s still an Avid.  Is the sky falling?  No, Avid is just waking up the fact that Final Cut is stealing a huge amount of market share and that they need to do something about it.  This is a very positive move from Avid, which has done a complete about face in their acceptance of the lower-end professional, and prosumer markets over the last few years.  The color correction I saw demoed on the floor was simply awesome, with the ability to automatically match color on multiple clips at a time.  And as a first Avid now has a true NTSC output while doing real-time effects something that has not been available until now.

Note: Some might throw their hands up in the air and shout that the Matrox Parhelia has been doing this for months now but what this ignores is that the TV-Out on a Parhelia is simply a line doubled field, which is not a true NTSC out.

9. Canopus Edius

When the DVStorm debuted it was a godsend for the realtime DV market.  It had incredible performance that scaled with your hardware, realtime DV output, and it was stable.  For a very long time it was the card of choice around our offices for DV based material.  Unfortunately, ever since the launch of DVStorm2 and Premiere 6.5 I’ve been plagued by a variety of integration problems stemming from the latest driver sets.  Where I used to have rock solid systems I started receiving reports of Premiere disappearing, random crashes, problems with long clips, and general instability that caused us to back off of our beloved DVStorm.  

In response to recent trends in the Digital Video Industry most manufacturers have begun moving to proprietary editing software because of such difficulties with Adobe as well as their lack of development for Premiere of the last few years.  Edius is one such product.  With Edius Canopus is hoping to increase the stability of their current offering across the board while adding features that will keep them competitive with other vendors in the time to come.  At its current stage Edius appears to be cut from the same cloth as Premiere.  Timeline functionality is very similar, effects and transitions work almost identically, bin management, preview monitors, you name it they’re similar.  This is the desired effect.  Canopus knew from the start that they were going to face great challenges getting the core Adobe constituency to migrate to a new software and the easiest way to do so was to design Edius to work like Premiere works; and it does.  I can safely say that any Premiere editor that is familiar with Canopus hardware can easily jump into this software and begin working straight away.  This is both a blessing and a curse to Canopus.  On the one hand, they have made a product which will certainly delight those who have been plagued by the Premiere stability issues that have become more and more an issue lately, while on the other hand, they have a software that looks and behaves almost exactly as Premiere does.  Outside of increased Xplode integration there is nothing here that isn’t in Premiere already.  I look forward to what improvements Canopus can make to Edius in the future in terms of workflow and features but for the mean time I’m not compelled to learn it.  

10. Vegas HD & 24p

As always I’ve saved the best for last.  Many Vegas users were doing backflips on Monday (April 7^th) as Sonic Foundry released its first free update to Vegas 4.  Outside of the requisite bug fixes, HD and 24p support were integrated, making Vegas the most cost effective open platform HD capable editor available anywhere.  Add that with the fact that features such as 24 channel audio and NTSC output over Firewire have been resident in Vegas since version 3 and you start to wonder what all of those Final Cut users are so excited about.  Currently HD support is curtailed by the fact there are no HD boards that support I/O through Vegas.  Instead users will have to use proprietary apps or Premiere to get the footage captured at which point it can be brought into Vegas to edit.  While I was on the floor rumors where abound of who would be partnering with Sonic Foundry to get Hardware I/O into Vegas, with both Digital Voodoo and Blackmagic Design’s names being thrown around.  Of course, only time will tell what support is coming but for the mean time Vegas is still the only software on the PC that does HD, 24p, 5.1 Mixing, Realtime 1394 Preview, AC3 export, and a slew of file format exports for under $500.