Post: NAB 2013: Wrap Up & Top Picks
Post Magazine
I decided to do things a little different this year. The last two NAB's I've done a video blog, focusing on just a few noteworthy NAB releases. But this year, I decided to go back to a written blog, and just do one longer NAB wrap-up, focusing on a longer list of products. This year, the theme of NAB seemed to be 4K, but a lot of NAB seems to be focused on releasing similar, but improved versions of existing products. We also got to see working versions of products, which were announced last NAB. It also seemed to be more focused on eliminating rolling shutter issues in camera. With Sony's release of the F55 with global shutter a couple of months ago, others are following suit, with Blackmagic Design announcing their global shutter 4K Production Camera, and Red adapting an LCD shutter add on, called the Red Motion Mount.
Here are the highlights from a few of the booths I visited.
ATOMOS
Atomos released a new version of the Samurai Camera Mounted Recorder, called the Samurai Blade, which improves over the Samurai by offering S-Log and C-Log Recording, full size BNC connectors and a higher resolution 1280 x720 touchscreen monitor with waveform monitor, vectorscope, zoom, and adjustments. One of the cool things about the Atamos recorders, is they aren't limited to SSD media, but also support recording to 2.5" HDD drives, which are fast enough for ProRes and DNxHD recording. This is significant since you can use inexpensive 2.5-inch hard drives, and treat them more like tape, putting them on a shelf when you are done, for short term archive, instead of having to transfer the files off like with expensive SSD media. They were also showing the new AC version of the Connect HDSDI to HDMI and HDMI to HDSDI converters.
CONVERGENT DESIGN
Convergent Design was showing off their very cool Odyssey 7 monitor/recorder. I was very impressed by this little monitor. One great feature is a different kind of focus assist in addition to the usual. This focus assist uses edge detection, and looks a lot like a difference matte. It shows much more detail at the center of the focus range, really standing out as you roll focus through the depth of a person's hair, for example. It's hard to describe, but really cool to see.
The Odyssey 7 has a great looking 7.7-inch Touch Screen, with lots of menu controls. It also has two HDSDI inputs, and one HDMI, and the same outputs, but what is really cool, is that they have conversion capabilities, so if you feed into the SDI, you can spit out HDMI, or if you are feeding HDMI from something like a DSLR, you can spit out HDSDI. They also have timecode I/O, which is really useful with the recording functionality of the monitor. If you have an external timecode generator, this gives you a professional feature addition to cameras which you might be shooting with that don't have that feature. It also has dual SSD slots, which can be configured to run in RAID 0 or RAID 1 configurations, so mirrored, or spanned. It also has Android and iPhone remote control, and will support Avid DNxHD, ARRIRAW, and Canon 4K Cinema Raw, with the additional purchase or rental of those codecs. read more...
Leave a comment