NAB 2008 – Great expectations

It was my very first National Association of Broadcasters (NAB Show). At the press office, I overheard an NAB official ask the editor of a leading trade rag, what he thought were the most exciting developments of the show. The newsman declined to answer, saying he could find nothing new or interesting worth commenting on.

This year was the 21st NAB, the time when any event comes of age with remarkable, exciting technology. The most palpable excitement at NAB came off engineers, designers, entrepreneurs, etc. looking exhausted but excited that they were presenting their finished ideas for the world to judge.

Back in 1989, Avid Techology presented their first NLE, a Media Composer running on an Avid/1 (a Macintosh II fitted with an innovative video capture card). Company founder William J. Warner pointed to a small image, not much bigger than a postage stamp, playing directly off the Mac’s drive. He was proud of the fact that even though the demo had been running for more than an hour or so, the system only seemed to drop a few frames now and then.

Those early systems didn’t come cheap, priced between US$50,000 and US$80,000. But they offered a new approach to editing, and heralded radical changes that were soon to come to hundreds of then thriving mid-range broadcast and post-production facilities. The Media Composer soon integrated a room full of hardware – all the monitors, tape decks, and switching gear that were previously needed to get from one place to the next in the video editing process.

In 1996 Walter Murch accepted the first Editing Oscar awarded to a digitally-edited film (The English Patient), which he cut on an Avid.

By NAB 2008, of course, Avid no longer bothered to attend the show, even while it fends off challengers to its once dominant position as its own business model takes a hit from dramatically decreasing technology costs. A software-only version of the latest Media Composer costs US$2,495, an incredibly low price point for software that has been improved every year since its introduction 19 years ago.

NAB 2008 provided new products from all the camera manufacturers: Sony showed off the PWW-EX3 and Red showed prototypes of the 3K Scarlet and 5K Epic, while Panasonic showed the upgraded HVX 200A/201A and the completely tapeless DVCPro HD 170/171. Canon has upgraded the XLH1 with two new models - one of which cuts the price of the flagship model with interchangeable lenses by a third. JVC moves towards tapeless workflow offering a compact flash recorder/hard drive unit to work with its top end camcorder.

Overall it's exciting times in the world of acquisition, however, the editing world remains stationary on the Mac with no major announcements at NAB 2008. Perhaps this is a sign that developments in the editing applications are yet to come in the near future or that we have reached a point where these products have been refined to the point that manufacturers have to work harder than ever to find something new to offer.

And nothing changes?