NAB 2017 by Bob Zelin

Here's a great look at video and broadcasting industry trends from the floors of NAB 2017. Bob Zelin doesn't focus on new products featured at NAB, rather important trends in the business. If you are a Mac editor and are on the fence about switching to PC, you'll want to take a look at this article:

One of the most impressive booths to observe this change was the StudioXperience booth (near Blackmagic, at the front of the lower South Hall) that showed all the innovations by Intel and HP.

While I enjoyed seeing all the new Thunderbolt 3 products that featured Intel Thunderbolt 3 chips being shown all in one place, the most staggering display was a very simply one by HP. It was a “bare bones” HP Z840 Windows 10 PC, hooked up to the new HP Z31X 4K 31” monitor, with a display port cable. Inside the HP Z840 was a single NVIDIA GTX-1080 GPU card, which was the connection to the HP monitor.

The demo was given by a rep from Adobe, using Adobe Premiere. They were playing back uncompressed 8K media. The image was amazing, and the playback was amazing – no stuttering from playing back these huge files. So this is a bare bones off the shelf computer with a nice graphics card, and a generic “good quality” computer monitor, doing all this amazing work.

But it’s JUST a computer! No cards from AJA, Blackmagic, or Matrox. No insanely priced broadcast monitors. Just off the shelf stuff. And it just works...[continue reading]