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NAB 2008


Jim Jannard

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I'd like to personally invite all that are attending NAB this year to stop by the RED booth. That includes Phil, Max, Keith... and all those that have been true and loyal skeptics.

 

We plan to show the new, fresh sheet of paper, 18-85mm T2.9 RED zoom, a working prototype of the 85mm T1.9 RED prime lens and three new "other things", including Scarlet.

 

The entrance to the theater has been moved outside the tent so it will be easier to get inside and see the stuff. We will show new 4K footage in the theater.

 

I'll be the one that smells like cigar smoke.

 

Jim

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I'd like to personally invite all that are attending NAB this year to stop by the RED booth. That includes Phil, Max, Keith... and all those that have been true and loyal skeptics.

 

Jim

Which "Keith" are you referring to? Surely not me.

Or were you planning to have someone from the FBI there waiting to arrest me if I show up?

 

Why would I want to go to NAB anyway?

 

The SMPTE convention is held here in Sydney every second year. Certainly it's a smaller event, but it's not that small. On a good year I might spend 30 minutes in there, including an overpriced drink in the refreshment area. Every year, stand after stand after stand with slight variations on the same old products....

 

So what else is there in Las Vegas? I am not a gambler, I have no real interest in nightlife, and we already have perfectly adequate deserts over here. Our venomous snakes are world-class and we also have the biggest and meanest ants in the world.

 

Q Of the ten most venomous snakes in the world, how many many of them live in Australia?

A. All of them.

 

Bah. Boring.

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I'd love to go to Australia, but there's a few problems:

 

i. It's seventeen million miles due south of the middle of nowhere.

 

ii. Once you're there, everything's seventeen million miles away. They really should rename Australia "Far", because it is far away, and once you get there, everything is still far away.

 

iii. As our esteemed correspondent mentions above, Australia has the most extravagantly noxious lifeforms anywhere in the known universe. Within seven seconds of stepping off the plane, a selection of them will be clamped firmly onto one's extremities via their inches-long, venom-laden fangs. They even have poisonous seashells, for christ's sake.

 

iv. It is more or less constantly 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and there is more or less no fresh water anywhere on the continent. If your car breaks down, you will die. If your plane is forced into an emergency landing, you will die. If your convenience store is more than a quarter of a mile away, you will die en route, and pizza deliveries don't operate outside of walking distance because it helps avoid them having to send out search parties to find their drivers' bloated, sunburnt corpses.

 

Suggested slogan: Australia. It wants you dead.

 

P

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I'd like to personally invite all that are attending NAB this year to stop by the RED booth.

Alas, NAB always happens during pilot season, and this is the craziest pilot season ever, due to the strike. Hardly anybody from TV production or post will be there, and the few that do go mostly fly in for one day only. Personally, I gave up on NAB about eight years ago.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

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I'm shooting a "dig" of what archeologists are calling "Hobbitts" in Georgia (Europe). More fun than NAB!

 

 

Last year was worth it for me to see RED in the flesh, this year I expect some interesting 35mm format camera mockups/prototypes from the main players.

 

 

Had a look at a RED today for aerial applications it was aptly named after a well know aviator.

 

 

 

 

Mike Brennan

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I'd love to go to Australia, but there's a few problems:

 

i. It's seventeen million miles due south of the middle of nowhere.

 

ii. Once you're there, everything's seventeen million miles away. They really should rename Australia "Far", because it is far away, and once you get there, everything is still far away.

 

iii. As our esteemed correspondent mentions above, Australia has the most extravagantly noxious lifeforms anywhere in the known universe. Within seven seconds of stepping off the plane, a selection of them will be clamped firmly onto one's extremities via their inches-long, venom-laden fangs. They even have poisonous seashells, for christ's sake.

 

iv. It is more or less constantly 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and there is more or less no fresh water anywhere on the continent. If your car breaks down, you will die. If your plane is forced into an emergency landing, you will die. If your convenience store is more than a quarter of a mile away, you will die en route, and pizza deliveries don't operate outside of walking distance because it helps avoid them having to send out search parties to find their drivers' bloated, sunburnt corpses.

 

Suggested slogan: Australia. It wants you dead.

 

P

And so, distance aside, how does this differ from Nevada?

 

There are a lot of misconceptions about our venomous wildlife.

For one thing, snakes, cone shells, stonefish, funnelweb spiders, blue-ringed octopi, box jellyfish sea wasps etc are only dangerous if they bite or sting you.

Aborigines are generally harmless and can often be befriended with the offer of a few coloured beads or slices of leftover bread.

Koalas rarely attack people, and then mostly only people of British descent.

Kangaroos are generally easy going but you should keep your car locked at all times as they are terrible drivers.

The biggest danger from sharks is mercury poisoning, because the only shark feeding behaviour you are likely to be personally involved in is having them served up as the "fish" in your fish & chips.

 

Flying foxes (huge pterodactyl-sized fruit bats that sound like somebody vigorously shaking out a carpet as they fly past) are a reliable source of entertainment as they frighten the bejesus out of foreign visitors as they swoop overhead. However the biggest hazard from them is if they crap on your car and you don't wash it off immediately, as that can permanently damage the paint finish. If they bite you they can give you rabies, but that is reasonably rare, unless you happen to look like a piece of fruit.

 

Man-eating crocodiles abound in the tropical North but they are relatively uncommon in Sydney and other metropolitan areas. It is very inportant that sewer main covers are tightly fitted; there have been unfortunate incidents where these have not been properly maintained.

 

Visitors from the UK are specifically reminded that supermarket produce prices are in dollars per kilogram NOT Pounds per Pound. There have been unfortunate incidents where English tourists have wound up getting about five times the amount of fresh fruit they were expecting for their UK currency, with unfortunate consequences on the flight home. So just remember: fruit is much cheaper here, and overwhemlingly likely to be less than 2 years old.

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> cone shells, stonefish, funnelweb spiders, blue-ringed octopi, box jellyfish sea wasps

 

and the taipan (both coastal and inland), tree goanna, cassowary, saltwater crocodile, great white shark, redback, king brown...

 

...pause for breath...

 

...platypus, copperhead, red-bellied blacksnake, tiger snake (peninsula or mainland), white-tailed spider, huntsman spider...

 

Australia has a hundred and thirty-seven ways to kill you before breakfast. It is huge and terrifying.

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> cone shells, stonefish, funnelweb spiders, blue-ringed octopi, box jellyfish sea wasps

 

and the taipan (both coastal and inland), tree goanna, cassowary, saltwater crocodile, great white shark, redback, king brown...

 

...pause for breath...

 

...platypus, copperhead, red-bellied blacksnake, tiger snake (peninsula or mainland), white-tailed spider, huntsman spider...

 

Australia has a hundred and thirty-seven ways to kill you before breakfast. It is huge and terrifying.

I should point out there have been no reports of fatal Platypus attacks for some years now, although no doubt they do occur in isolated areas and go unreported. This was said to be a major factor in the cancellation of of the proposed "Platypus Dundee" feature. Paul Hogan is a stickler for Scientific Accuracy.

Red bellied black snakes are generally not aggressive unless you stand on one or look like a frog.

Huntsman spiders look like a poor man's tarantula, and sometimes are encountered in large groups that look like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, but they are quite harmless.

White tailed spiders are only dangerous to people with the wrong genes.

Redback spiders are somewhat over-rated - more people die from bee stings.

Tree goannas are most often seen climbing up a gum tree at maximum speed in order to escape predatory humans.

Cassowary?! Have you been consulting the Wikipedia?

Most reports of "attacks" by native animals come from the overactive imaginations of people misinterpreting of the actions of animals accustomed to being offered food by tourists.

 

Many reports of "snakes" in metropolitan areas turn out to be harmless Blue Tongue lizards. I have lived in Sydney for over 20 years in suburbs surrounded by bushland; in all that time I have never seen a single snake, or a single funnelweb spider (a much-feared and hardly ever seen close relative of the Black Widow).

 

By the way, we are currently experiencing some welcome relief from the usual 140ºF heat.

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Edited by Keith Walters
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Koalas aren't bears.

 

But the point of the platypus is not that it's deadly - it isn't. It's not even that it happens to look like several articles of roadkill all at once, as if it was assembled by an absinthe-raddled bohemian taxidermist with some left-overs and a twisted imagination. It is, within these limitations, almost cute. But while it can't kill you, it can certainly make you hurt enough to wish it could.

 

Cassowaries, on the other hand, are effectively velociraptors as depicted in Jurassic Park, and have killed people in the past - to quote, "spilling out the intestines. And the point is, you are still alive when they begin to eat you."

 

Your last words in Australia will be "I say, is that a sn-"

 

And we, soft, northern lilies, who haven't been through a school system that teaches you to shake the scorpions out of your boots and carry a map, a compass and three days' supplies at all times, will be saying that more or less before we've left passport control.

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Which "Keith" are you referring to? Surely not me.

Or were you planning to have someone from the FBI there waiting to arrest me if I show up?

 

OK... you figured it out. I guess I can call of the dogs. Bummer.

 

Since the ruse has been figured out, you are all uninvited.

 

Jim

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I can't wait to see Phil as a contestant on The Amazing Race. I don't even watch reality TV, but THAT I'd tune in to see...

There were quite a few "reality" TV shows made in Australia. Invariably they would be shot on a piece of overgrown former farm land close to a centre of civilization with nice motels etc. They would periodically bring in an assortment of specially bred creepy-crawlies (carefully selected to be fierce-looking but completely harmless), so they could be shown shaken out of sleeping bags and so on.

 

I particularly remember one that a company I used to work for was supporting. They were shooting in a temperate rainforest on an overgrown farm, on the central coast of New South Wales, set in in the middle of green and pleasant highlands, with a blueberry farm next door! About 20kM off Highway 1...

 

Another one, popular in the UK, was supposed to be set in the jungles of far North Queensland but it was actually made just inland from the Gold Coast, one pf Australia's most popular tourist destinations. Apparently some local happened to be surfing streaming radio stations and picked up a UK talkback station where they were discussing the show, phoned them up and spilled the beans!

People were devastated when they learned that had been had.

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OK... you figured it out. I guess I can call of the dogs. Bummer.

 

Since the ruse has been figured out, you are all uninvited.

 

Jim

Wouldn't have done you any good anyway. As soon immigration entered my passport number a certain case number would have come up :lol:

 

Anyway I am not about to spend $5-6K on a trip to Nevada just to see a lot of tedious video equipment, Red or no Red.

 

Sheesh, I couldn't even be bothered spending $5.50 on train fare down to the city last year to see SMPTE, Red or no Red.

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> cone shells, stonefish, funnelweb spiders, blue-ringed octopi, box jellyfish sea wasps

 

and the taipan (both coastal and inland), tree goanna, cassowary, saltwater crocodile, great white shark, redback, king brown...

 

 

And the terrible, terrible Dachshound......

 

....

 

Oh, wait, that is Austria, not Australia.

 

Jochen

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And the terrible, terrible Dachshound......

 

Jochen

I happen to like Daschunds! They're unsurpassed for keeping your house free of Platypus and other vermin!

I am surprised that someone with a name like "Jochen Schmidt Hambrock" can't spell "Daschund":-)

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I happen to like Daschunds! They're unsurpassed for keeping your house free of Platypus and other vermin!

I am surprised that someone with a name like "Jochen Schmidt Hambrock" can't spell "Daschund":-)

 

I have four dachshunds and I must acknowledge that they have been very successful in preventing a platypus infestation hear in Texas. They're pretty good at keeping the cats at bay, but they only seem to keep the squirrels well exercised. BTW, do platypus fair better on the bar-b-que than armadillos?

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I have four dachshunds and I must acknowledge that they have been very successful in preventing a platypus infestation hear in Texas. They're pretty good at keeping the cats at bay, but they only seem to keep the squirrels well exercised. BTW, do platypus fair better on the bar-b-que than armadillos?

Platypus are aquatic animals, so they don't tend to cross roads overmuch, hence opportunities for Platypus bar-B-que are sadly rare. They are too smart to get caught in nets, and cannot be caught with a rod and line.

 

For roadkill cuisine, it's hard to beat suckling wallaby, decoratively tied to the spit with a freshly vehicled carpet python. This is a delightly fortuitious combination as the carpet python is often conveniently despatched while attempting to engulf said freshly flattened marsupial. Attempts to teach carpet pythons pedestrain skills have borne little fruit to date.

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Guest Glen Alexander

Rule of the bush, never sleep near a river at the same location two nights in a row.

The crocs will study and stalk you the first night, then chomp on you for a late evening snack the next....

Edited by Glen Alexander
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