NAB -- The Results

I'm now back in Solana Beach, CineForm HQ, returning a day early from the show. The CineForm reception at NAB this years was simply awesome, with more and more high-end companies seeing the value of compression in high resolution workflows. While most of the staff are still in Vegas, I had to get back to working on our 3.3 release, adding great features suggested by customers and fixing the bugs we always find at show time. Trade shows always have the habit of showcasing bugs, so it is good to have engineers doing the demos with pen and paper jotting down the list of things they will need fix back at the office -- we never hold back demoing work in progress features, but showing the cutting-edge of our development has it risks. This year as no different, but fortunately most the bugs showed themselves during Sunday setup and were fixed by Monday morning when the show opened. It turned out we never tried playing 3K on 4K timeline at full res. before (in preview it worked fine on our dinky 24" displays,) but the at the office we don't have the wonderful 30" monitors Intel loaded us, so we cranked up the resolution to make use of the display area. At show start everything looked great and presented smoothly from HD to 4K. We were playing 125 frame per second over cranked 4K Phantom 65 footage, thanks to guys at Vision Research, AbleCine Tech, and the Dual Quad HP xw8600 workstations that power our booth -- the most demanding footage I have worked with to date (clean, but amazingly detailed, and played real-time even while using Iridas's 3D LUTs.) It fun dealing with the extremes like discussing the detail of over cranked 4K footage with one customer, and the next minute discussing pulldown removal from Canon HV20s.

"All sources welcome" could have be a slogan at the CineForm booth, but fortunately I'm not in marketing (anyone seeing our website will know we don't have marketing department.) On the booth we where showing footage and editing Dalsa Origin, Grass Valley Infinity, Vision Research Phantom 65, Red One, Silicon Imaging SI-2K, and Sony EX1 (likely many more.) Grass Valley kindly loaned us an Infinity camera (pretty awesome BTW) to help us showcase the Infinity support we will be offering shortly, and someone loaned us the tripod to put it on (thank to that unknown company.)

In addition to the regular CineForm crew, I would like to thank those friends of the company that helped out at the booth: Isaac Anderson, Jim Hays, Mike McCarthy and Jason Salonen, providing the much valued outside prospective for CineForm and our customers. Thank you to Steve Sherrick who invited me to present at the Red User Workflow panel, and the warm reception from the engaging audience. For the Reduser presentation, thanks to Terry Cullen of 1Beyond who loaned CineForm a QuadCore laptop, and amazing machine that made the demo fly. And finally to all the companies that made up a "end-to-end digital workflow" booth: Wafian, Silicon Imaging, Iridas and Intel, each one helping with a sizable piece of the digital film making puzzle.