Live NAB2011 Report: Sunday's dealer meetings

Sunday before NAB is a very busy day, filled with dealer meetings all over Vegas. We started today with Grass Valley at the MGM, then dashed over to the Aria for Avid. Next it was on to AJA and Matrox. Here is my quick report from day zero of NAB. We'll be posting full details for each vendor later in the week.

Grass Valley
The new management team was introduced and they presented a very honest account of the past couple of years and then jumped into their vision on where they are going to take Grass Valley. To say these guys are ambitious would be an understatement. They are looking to transform themselves from a products company to a solutions company. They certainly have the products and R&D, now they have the finances and the full attention of a new, invigorated management team.

For new products they introduced their new line of ADVC G-Brick converters. The model that most interested me was the everything in to SDI out. We'll post the full details of the G-Brick product line, pricing and availability later.

They also talked about Edius 6's multicam ability to handle multiple mixed HD format clips in real time.

Avid
The big news for our customers from Avid was VERY big, and just the first shot in what appears to be an all out war between the big 3 A's of editing (Avid, Apple & Adobe) for martketshare. Avid announed a Media Composer cross grade for Final Cut owners for just $995. That's right, for under a grand you get the full MC5.5 with Production Suite of 3rd party software! SWEET!!

AJA
These guys are on top of their game. First they invited Ted from Red to talk about AJA and Red. He announced that the KiPro Mini was approved for ProRes HD capture with the Red Epic. AJA introduced the FS2 everything-in to everything-out dual channel converter for under $5k, coming in the summer. A new firmware available on Monday for free will enable 4K support for the Kona3G. AJA then showed two technology previews. "Riker" a super I/O box that will support 5k, 3D and more using a new external PCIe 8x connection. "Phaser" a thunderbolt I/O box based on the IoExpress that will support SDI, HDMI and analog.

Matrox
All MXO2s will now support Thunderbolt thanks to Matrox's sexy new Thunderbolt adapter. So now you can buy your choice of any Matrox MXO2 product in either a desktop, laptop or Thunderbolt flavor. Existing MXO2 owners will be able to purchase the Thunderbolt adapter separately for $299 when it becomes available in July.

Matrox also showcased new real-time streaming capabilities for MXO2 products.

That's it for now. I know we'll have so much more news to report from NAB2011. Don't forget to follow us on twitter for the very latest news directly from the NAB show floor.