I just got back from wondering around the Las Vegas convention center and am a bit overwhelmed with the number of companies out there, especially the ones I don’t know what the even do. I mean, how many distribution/AVC Encoding/IPTV company’s do we need? But I thought I’d list what things I saw that I thought were cool.

Red Camera
Red of course was incredibly busy. They were showing off  prototypes (if you can call them that, they just looked like empty cases) of the Epic, Scarlet, and Red Ray. All ship in early 2009, which means we may actually get to see it at NAB next year. The Epic records at 5k and the scarlet records at 3k. If you want more information Engadget has some stuff on it.

Adobe
Adobe’s booth was exactly the same as last year, the only new stuff I saw from them was that Premiere, an editing system I don’t use, now supports XD-Cam. They also had the Adobe TV thing, which is really just an AIR program they developed. One funny thing, an Adobe guy was ripping apart Apple Compressor because their Blu-ray compression was bad. By bad he meant MPEG II and not AVC. And I guess if you encode H.264 with compressor it’s not Blu-ray spec, so he was saying you should use Encore to do all your compression. Apple doesn’t even have a Blu-ray authoring program, so I don’t exactly see what this has to do with anything, but that’s ok. Other than that, nothing too impressive from them.

Digital Rapids
Digital Rapids released version 2.5 of Stream. There aren’t a ton of new features so I just hope it’s not as buggy as 2.4, which was released last year at NAB.

Other Random Stuff
I saw a “Roll Your Own SATA Raid” company called Firmtek. They had a 5 drive eSATA array for around $500. You then just buy whichever drives you want and put them in. I’m not sure what the savings would be over a LaCie Biggest S2S, but I’m sure it would come close.

There was a company called Avocent that offers a KVM switch over Cat 5. What you would do is setup all your edit bays with the same setup, then this switch can send any system to any bay and connects to your video router so that you get the correct video signals. I always thought this would be a great way to run a post house so that moves would be super easy. All you would have to do is move some monitors and stuff and run a new Cat 5 cable. Much easier than dealing with expensive DVI cables and everything else you need.

Along the same lines I saw a lot of DVI/HDMI over Cat 5 by company’s like Gefen and Green-Box.

Panasonic is REALLY pushing AVCHD, which I don’t blame them for. It seems like they are pushing P2 to the side a little. I guess this is their answer to XD-Cam.

I didn’t see Cinamacraft there, though I’m sure they were and I just missed them. I also wanted to give CableLabs a hard time about the SDV adapter for TiVoHD, but I didn’t see them either. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 3:41 pm and is filed under Flash, H.264, Online Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.