Home again... Away again.

Well, we made it safely back to Lynchburg last Friday. This Friday I'll be boarding a plane for the Pacific Time Zone again. The last trip was for business. This trip is for a funeral. Rebecca's Grandma died and the funeral is on Saturday.

There's so much going on in our lives right now. I feel somewhat overwhelmed, but somewhat at peace. Maybe it's a healthy apathy or maybe it's a healthy trust in God's provision. I have a house to fix and no time to fix it in. I won't say I'm not stressed, but I will admit to being able to admit I'm in over my head. Okay, I haven't been proclaiming it loudly, but I realize I need help and I'm open to receiving it. That doesn't mean I know how to ask for it. ha ha

NAB day 3

Wow, there's so much going on and so much to see that the days here seem very long. Things that happened this afternoon feel like they happened yesterday.

I wrote down a list of things to look at today and promptly lost it. I have a whole stack of papers and catalogs that serve as a fairly good overview of the booths I visited today. I didn't get to see Kevin Adamson again. I guess I'll have to take a trip to VA Beach to do that.

The demo at the JVC booth reinforced the thought that the camera we bought for work was a good choice. They have a couple more models that can be used for live HD production with a wireless transmitter or in a studio configuration. They also have good features for movie makers (like an adapter to let you use 16mm camera lenses) as well as adding the ability to do 60p.

Panasonic was showing off a 103-inch plasma screen. That was really cool, but I totally missed it yesterday because of all the other displays around it.

We ate lunch in the Alladin's shopping center. Matt R and I had relatively cheap sandwiches at Max's Café while most of the rest of the gang ate at a sushi buffet.

On the way back to NAB Ena got a call telling her that she won the drawing in one of the booths and got 2 tickets to, I think, a circ du soleil show. After the expo closed, Ena and Tim went to the show. James B, Unc, Mike, Gus and I went to a Final Cut Pro user group super meeting or something and wasted money on raffle tickets for some really cool prizes.

Tomorrow, we'll go back to the exhibition hall and do whatever else looking around we need to do. We may leave early and go see the Hoover Dam. James B, is having us over to his house tomorrow night as well. Then after all that we have to get up and go to the airport super early so we can get through security in time to board our 6:15am flight. The sad thing is that I may be just about acclimated to the time zone difference.

I really only took one picture today and that was of an LCD field monitor sitting on top of a CRT field monitor with a light pointed straight at it. The CRT was so washed out that the picture was barely visible. The LCD was plain to see.

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.

NAB 2006 Day 2

I'm too tired to write something up now. I did post new pictures. Nothing too thrilling though.

NAB trip day 1

Hi there, 
There was a rumor that we'd have wireless highspeed internet at the hotel here. Nope. I guess that's false. Darn it. I'm using my cell phone (unlimited night time minutes... woo hoo) to dial in to LU's dial-up service. It's a blazing fast 14.4k connection. Well, it would've been blazing fast in 1991.

Anyway, I'm trying to upload pictures I took with my phone and make a little site to document our trip.

http://dwburman.com/nab2006

Monroe, VA

I came accross some info on the town we're moving to... I mean near.

http://www.brainyzip.com/zipcodes/24/24574.html