NAB day 2 - revisited

ahh, I feel rested.
It's nearly noon on the East coast (where I'm from) and only nearly 9am here. I'm still tired, but not achy anymore. Walking around all day yesterday made my back hurt. I met up with a guy I haven't seen since college. That was cool. CBN has about 30 people at the NAB this year. They are meeting with apparently everyone. Pat has mandated that everything they do (except maybe over-seas field work) will be HD in January.

The Ultra High Definition demonstration was very cool... very sharp. It has nearly 8 thousand pixels across but I don't know how many vertically. It also has 22.1 channels of audio. HDTV has a max of 1920 pixels across and 5.1 channels of audio. The ".1" audio channels is the really low subwoofer channel.

We also looked at a new camera in development called "red". It's not made by any of the major camera makers but rather someone who's has a lot of money and a lot cameras and wanted to make the camera that was perfect. It's a digital camera that's aiming to be equivalent to a 35mm movie camera. There'll also be one that's equivalent to 16mm. I think the big one is a 4k camera... we're hearing a lot of that term this year. We've barely got HDTV in the homes of America and we're looking at the next stuff. Of course, the better your source image is, the better your output it... even if it's down converted to SD.

We also watched some HD and 4k footage in Sony's booth. The amount of clarity and detail is amazing with 4k too.

Tim and I learned more about gamma, knee and matrix adjustments for his Panasonic HVX200 camera. I think the same kind of adjustments are available on the JVC GY-HD100 we have at the office. It's good to know what those functions do.

We also had some of the features of Maya shown to us. I think we could make some cool looking flaming stuff with that. The athletic teams at the University I work for are called "the Flames."

We did some looking at things for the studio but the first day of exhibits is more about getting acclimated to the goings on. I did learn that from one place it'll cost about $5,500 for a nice green screen corner set with floor. I have the guy's card.

I expect to be more focused on finding and trying products for work on my 2nd and 3rd days at the show.