People always said that NAb was big. They were lying the convention centre is huge and every inch of it is filled with new stuff to see and learn about. BVE has nothing on this.
So what did I see?
First thing was to meet up with the Hollywood Edge guys, good to say Hi and finally meet John Moran but visit was short there.
Soundminer was up next. Justin was demoing his new Soundminer HD which is kind of Miniminer on speed. It’s Spectral Search function (designed for the music libraries primarily) will be superb once rolled into the Pro version. Also the new multi selection/multi region spot feature will be huge. Basically drag over multiple sections of a waveform and hit spot and it will spot end to end on the timeline. Very cool.
Headed up toward the Avid booth largely to see who was around rather than what but as expected massive crowds meant that meaningful interaction was difficult to come across. Heading back Tuesday to catch up with David Gould though.
After a spot of lunch (an incredibly messy pulled pork sandwich) and fighting with Wi Fi connectivity (it doesn’t work there no matter how hard I tried) figured I’d drop in on Euphonix. They are obviously in a little bit of flux after the announcement of acquisition by Avid. Really liked the MC Artist Control section. Hadn’t seen that before but maybe it isn’t that new. Switching between applications was completely intuitive and the surfaces adjusted instantly. Very impressive technology ad will be good to see how Avid utilise their engineering power going forward.
Next up was Aspera. As you may have read on a previous post I have pretty strong feelings about their maintenance of Digidelivery. As expected they see it now as more of a maintenance rather than active development project but their new systems, Cargo in particular, are very impressive.
Cargo is basically a Digidelivery-like client that is email like in it’s interface and tool set. KC who is the UI engineer took me through the system and was interested to get feedback on what other features it needed in order to make it a usable replacement for Digidelivery. The underlying server system is their Fasp-Ex server and delivery technology. If you are in Vegas for NAB then drop by the booth and see KC to learn more or drop them and email for demos. It’s the most complete and useful package for that sort of delivery (one to one or one to many) system that I’ve seen.
Headed into the Pro Audio section after that and met up with Brian and Douglas at IOSONO. It’s a 3D sound system that is starting to be rolled out into theatres. Going to head to the Chinese on Friday to see a live demo but from the way it was described yesterday it involves a matrix conversion from 32 channels up to 200+ individual speaker outputs. The idea behind it is that you are able to mix into channel 15 of the system which when played back in a compatible theatre the sound gets de-matrixed into the equivalent speaker channel. Mix once and it will play in each theatre in the appropriate speaker channels. eg at the Chinese theatre there are 320+ channels whereas the Todd system has 220+ channels. The system knows how many channels that theatre has and de-matrixes appropriately. Hoping to understand it more by Friday but definitely worth a look if you are around the convention centre today.
Headed off to the Renaissance Hotel for the Sohonet party. Good opportunity to network with lots of people, much colder than I anticipated but you know, warmer than Britain at the moment. Met with a lot of the team at Universal Pictures which was good and various other people. The Technical Design team from Star were quite fascinating to talk with, particularly realising how many problems were the same between audio editorial and their 3D modelling worlds.
Absolutely exhausted grabbed some dinner and headed home. Ready for another busy day at the show today.