Greetings from NAB in lovely Las Vegas, Nevada. It’s Day 2 and there’s a lot of really amazing things going on in the production industry. Here’s some of the personal highlights I’ve gotten to see:
Sony XDCAM PMW-EX1
Yesterday, Ethan picked up the Sony XDCAM PMW-EX1 and we unboxed it last night back at the hotel (video to follow this evening, including some footage we shot). To say that the footage we captured was amazing would not be doing it justice. This is by far one of the crispest images I have seen come out of a camera with such a small footprint. The LCD display is ultra-bright and color-perfect, offering you an amazing window to see what you’re acquiring. The focus and zoom ring, along with the incredible quality of the lens, set this camera far apart from the competition in its price range. Shooting native 1920×1080 is a dream. But what about being able to capture and edit with it? Well, that leads me to…
Adobe Leads The Way
This week, Adobe released an update for Premiere Pro CS3, providing native support to the XDCAM EX format. How well does it work? Let’s put it this way:
- We shot some stuff
- We plugged the camera into my laptop via USB
- The camera recognized the 2 “S x S” cards as 2 hard drives
- I fired up Premiere Pro CS3
- I opened up Explorer and dragged the .mp4 flies into the footage bin
- I dragged the files onto the timeline and IMMEDIATELY started editing…no rendering, no encoding, no indexing and no conforming…straight from the camera!
I know that I may be a little biased, but Adobe never ceases to amaze me. Timing the release of the update for NAB was ingenious, and again showed their commitment to HD technology and making the workflow for those of us in post better and better.
Speaking of Adobe, I’ve had the great privledge of meeting some of my “industry heroes” while out here. Yesterday, I got to see a presentation by Steve Holmes with Energi Design, one of the leading post houses in the US. These guys are taking Adobe tools to the next level. Check their reel out…it is truly impressive.
Also yesterday, I got to talk to Jason Levine, a Worldwide Product Evangelist for Adobe, and a genuinely nice guy. I’ve been following his blog for quite a while, and enjoying his antics as he travels the world sharing Adobe’s vision for streamlining content creation solutions. And today, I finally met Dennis Radeke, another Adobe blogger and After Effects user. His blog is a great place for beginners in motion graphics, and he offers some really good insight and commentary about the industry as well. This was a real treat to finally meet these guys in person.
Adobe is also showcasing Adobe TV, their new streaming service utilizing Adobe Air and Adobe Flash Video technology. The interface is fully customizable based on your content, allowing you to brand your player any way you want. MTV, CBS, Food Network and a bevy of others are offering fresh content as we speak. Also, there’s some really good training available from those awesome guys at xTrain who I’ve spoken about before, as well as Lynda and Adobe on all of their solutions. Make sure to check it out.
I’ll share more later.
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