Creative COW's NAB 2016 NLE / Post Production Report

Our long time friend Tim Wilson has put together a really insightful and detailed report on what's going on in the world of NLEs and Post Production at NAB 2016. In the article he reflects back to NAB 2001 and it really got me thinking about not only how long we've known Tim, not only how long we've been a part of the COW community, but how long Videoguys has been in the industry. I like to consider us one of the key players in the Desk Top Video revolution. We offered a level of product support, technical support and information on our website that wasn't available anywhere else on the internet. We still do, although there are many additional great places to go, like the COW. Just as we did back in 2001 we have live trained sale and tech support people here who can answer any of your questions and help guide you into the right purchase decision for your budget and needs. The industry and the technology may have changed, but we are still the Video Production & Editing Experts! We are committed to providing the best service and support in the indusrty - BEFORE, DURING & AFTER the sale! Give us call at 800-323-2325, drop us an email sales@videoguys.com or use our Chat feature and talk to us about your live video production, streaming, video editing & post production needs.

Creative COW by Tim Wilson

NAB 2016 NLEs : The Revolution? No Revolutions!

It wasn't that long ago that NAB was a show for – wait for it – broadcasters. The kinds of things that you find in the North Hall these days, with a bit of Central Hall juiciness sprinkled on top. Anything from satellite dishes to switchers, plus cameras, lenses, and lighting galore. The early days of the "desktop video" revolution revolved almost entirely around hardware. Storage and IO were the linchpins. How do you get stuff like video and film into your computer? And then out to storage that's reliable enough to never drop a frame? These were huge problems, with failures far more widespread than successes. Companies lined up to solve these problems, or at least try, sometimes with dedicated software solutions that optimized performance and reliability. Sometimes with a patchwork of solutions from a variety of vendors that required end users to do the heavy lifting of figuring out which IO, storage, and software combinations might offer at least approximately equivalent performance and reliability. Oh yeah, and decks. Decks were an issue. Even if you somehow miraculously stumbled upon a bulletproof combination of IO and storage, you still had to lay it off to tape with even more reliability. A hiccup on your desktop was annoying, but not a crisis. On tape? A crisis. You know what there wasn't a lot of talk about? The software. Comparisons were typically around image quality relative to output requirements. It's been just about 20 years that delivery of "broadcast quality" video from the desktop became a mainstream consideration, and on any wide scale, maybe 15 years ago tops. Hmmm, what was happening 15 years ago? Apple Final Cut Pro reached a robust-enough feature set for "broadcast quality" work (and yes, robust-enough third-party IO, including Pinnacle Cinewave RT), and massive updates to Adobe After Effects (3D layers! >2GB movie output!) and Adobe Premiere (DV! Streamlined web output!). 2001 was also the year that Avid demonstrated the firmness of its commitment to software-based filmmaking – in the FILM sense of the word – with the addition of FilmScribe's featureset around cutlists and a wide range of film gauges to Avid Xpress DV. In all, 2001 was a truly momentous year What ELSE was happening 15 years ago, you ask? And well you should! Because 15 years ago, Creative COW launched! Read the amazing tale here! Did I say 2001 was momentous? I mean MOMENTOUS. There have been other momentous years since then of course, including Adobe Premiere Pro in 2003, software-only Avid Media Composer in 2006, the 2008 (apparently permanent) exit of Apple from the NAB show floor (although of course not from the show itself), the 2011 introduction of FCPX, the 2012 introduction of Adobe Creative Cloud and its 2013 transition to subscription-only... read more...