Kevin P. McAuliffe: NAB 2014: My Experience

PVC by Kevin P. McAuliffe

What's it like for someone to work AND play at NAB 2014? Here's my experience!

I have to admit. This year’s NAB was like my Oscars. Normal people (like you and me) would go to the Academy Awards to do some “Stargazing”, as the expression goes. That’s what I feel that I spent almost a week doing. Star gazing. Yes, I was there for work, and work I did, but as we all know, NAB is much more than that.

There are the booths, the gear, the plug-ins and, of course, the people you go there hoping to meet. I’m a HUGE fan of a lot of people in our industry like Brian Maffitt, Andrew Kramer, John Dickinson and a whole bunch more, and not only did I want to go to NAB to see the toys, but I also wanted to track down a lot of these “celebrities”, and simply say thanks. Thank you for everything you’ve done to help me get to where I am today. Now, we’ll get to all of that shortly, but to start out with, I want to talk about what amazed me at the NAB show, as there have been tons of videos on PVC, but let’s get down to this editor’s perspective.

THE WORK EXPERIENCE

I was primarily down at NAB for two purposes. One, I was working with the awesome team at Avid Blogs, lead by Editor-In-Chief Adam Kranitz, and my job was to track down what I thought were some of the great Avid “Partner” companies, and get Media Composer editors excited about the products that they offer us (Yes, me included).

Next, Boris FX’s (@borisfx) BCC9 for AVX, which includes new effects like Len Distortion (fixing GoPro fisheye problems), Grunge (great for adding textures quickly and easily to titles), Edge Grunge (again, great for Titles), Chroma Key Studio, a combining of multiple chromakey effects into one, real-time, effect and even a new sharpen filter to take blurry footage and sharpen it up. Now, this is only scratching the surface of the over 35 effects in the new bundle. If you’re a MC editor, download the free demo at borisfx.com to check out the new offerings. read more...