NAB 2014: Interesting Sessions (But Avid Still Dull)

Phil Rhodes · April 5, 2014

People often ask me if NAB is worth attending. Based on today's traditionally light selection of press conferences and sessions, I'd have to say - not really, at least not over the weekend, unless you're a journalist, and even then the pleasure is intermittent.

That said, I think the selection of sessions this year is pretty comprehensive. They're still far, far too expensive, of course, considering that a large number of them consist almost entirely of content one could obtain from a dozen youtube and website tutorials and the manufacturers' websites, but there is interesting stuff out there. There's a whole Director of Photography track and elements of the Post Production World track are quite interesting, including a talk on the distinction between raw and log by Mitch Gross, who occasionally posts here (which I missed, natch). It's also nice to see some fundamentals, such as the talk entitled Human Vision, given this afternoon in the big seminar room above south hall.

Later on I'm going to go and see a chat on laser projection, although I'm not booked to see the Christe 4K laser projector demo until Monday, at which time I'll be able to return more usefully to the subject.

The only thing that happened today that I don't quite get is the enormous Avid presentation, upscale even in comparison to their previous shows, which greatly pushed their new collaborative-workflow stuff and launched their new customer assocation. I'm not sure how much of the software changes are new and how much has always been part of the Avid Everywhere initiative, but even by the most generous assessment, I didn't hear a lot about actual new features for the core software, which I fear is still what will sell it to individual users. I must chase this up and find out what the company's attitude is. Perhaps the most interesting point was that they're going to an optional rental model, which at least offers more, well, optionality than Adobe's all-or-nothing approach.

P