Chances are that if you bank with NAB, or your employer pays through NAB, you probably spent the weekend a little bit poor. Apparently, a “corrupted file” has thrown the bank into disarray for the better part of a week, leaving thousands of customers without access to their funds. More »
Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Cisco is prepping a new line of Flip video cameras to be announced next month at the NAB conference in Vegas. Makes sense! No details on the models themselves, unfortunately. [Silicon Alley Insider]
The NAB has been battling white spaces networks for years, but the technology that repurposes unused TV spectrum as a Wi-Fi signal is finally getting a trial period in Claudville, Virginia. More »
Red’s pocket-sized professional camera, Scarlet has made its promised debut at NAB, and it is the tiny hotness. It shoots in heady 3k resolution with Red’s new 2/3-inch Mysterium X sensor, shooting from 1-120fps (180fps burst) and up to 100MB/sec REDCODE RAW HD, recording to dual Compact Flash cards. It’s got Wi-Fi control (sweet), and all the necessary ports: HDMI, HD-SDI, Firewire 800 and USB2. The 4.8-inch LCD should be more than adequate on this compact HD shooter. Besides coming with an 8X T2.8 Red zoom lens, it’s compatible with most Red One accessories. Price? We’re hearing under US$3000, set for early ’09, no pre-orders. But the note that specs and delivery dates could change is a bit ominous, since the Red One saw some delays. [Red, Brochure]
And no, that’s not the National Australia Bank’s tradeshow (which would make sense that Apple wasn’t attending, I guess). Instead, it’s the National Association of Broadcasters tradeshow, being held in Vegas in April. Traditionally, Apple has a huge stand and uses it as an opportunity to launch something big on the software side – think Final Cut Studio and Soundtrack Pro.
Apparently their decision to withdraw is part of an overall strategic plan to attend less tradeshows this year. Anuj Nayar, senior manager of PR at Apple said: “Apple is participating in fewer trade shows this year. Often there are better ways to reach our customers. The increasing popularity of our retail stores and Apple.com Web site allows us to directly reach more than 100 million customers around the world in innovative new ways.”
Considering the fact that Apple is building one of their flagship retail stores in Sydney at the moment, plus the fact that they just launched photo book printing for Australians through iPhoto, I guess that means they’re really working hard to bring full iTunes functionality, with TV shows and movie rentals, to Aussie shores in the next few months? Am I dreaming? Yeah, I know… But at least the iPhone’s coming this year. Isn’t it, Apple? Isn’t it?
[Macenstein – Thanks Mike!] More »
If you didn’t get enough of our coverage of Red and their Red One 4K camera at NAB, here’s one more thing to tide you over until the release. It’s a clip of Peter Jackson‘s “Crossing the Line” video that was shot entirely with “Boris” and “Natasha”, the Red One prototypes.
This video is only 1/4 the resolution, so you’ll probably only be 1/4 as impressed as people were when they saw it live. – Jason Chen
RedUser [via Crunchgear]
Apple Insider got an “inside” look at Apple’s NAB setup. They reported that Apple’s server included 3/4 Petabytes of storage space, 3 miles of fiber optic cable, 4 M2 Gb networks, 90 Xserves and 40 Xserve RAIDs. Pardon me while I change my pants.
An interesting point was brought up on MacSlash:
There are systems on the list of the Top 500 Supercomputers with fewer and/or slower processors and slower network connections. Who knows? With a little reconfiguration and optimization for the LINPACK benchmark, maybe, just maybe… Just a little something for you to ruminate on while you marvel at the report’s pretty pictures.
Hit the jump for more pictures of Apple’s ubersetup.
After a post yesterday about Adobe's newly announced Media Player, we were intrigued with its possibilities and got a firsthand demo of the technology from Adobe at its booth at NAB. What the Adobe Media Player amounts to is a downloadable desktop application that plays back Flash video files. But what it really is is an RSS reader, giving you TiVo-like capabilities such as a "Season Pass" -like capability to download and view your favorite online programs.
Adobe showed the way Media Player will enable ad-supported programming to be downloaded, and you don't even need to be online to watch it because the ads will be cached. This lets content creators monetize advertisements for downloadable materials, too, approximating the business model of broadcast television where advertisements pay the freight for otherwise-costly programming. That's why Adobe introduced it at NAB.
Sure, there's DRM involved, where you are able to tell the application what sorts of products you're interested in, and then it will show those kinds of advertisements to you. Then the application reports back to the content creator on which ads were viewed. Some viewers may not be willing to do that, but others may think it's a small price to pay to get free content. There's another big piece of news with this announcement, too:
galleryPost('amp', 4, 'Adobe Media Player');
If you're a video shooter who uses a tripod. then you know how important a fluid head can be. It makes all the difference in the world in the smoothness of your pans and tilts. Here's an improvement on the art of fluid heads from Manfrotto, the 503HDV introduced here at NAB. It brings a number of new features to the already-sweet 503. For one, the fluid drag knob was moved to the left side and combined with the release mechanism.
Other welcome improvements are the backlight for the level bubble, a replaceable lock-rosette, and a four-step counterbalancing mechanism. They've refined the profile of the unit as well, so that it has the sleeker lines of the 501 heads. No pricing was available yet, but the 503HDV's predecessor, the 503, is $274.
Get yourself a good fluid head like this one, vid-shooters, and your camera moves will be smooth as a baby's butt. – Charlie White and Curtis Walker
galleryPost('nabmanfrotto', 4, 'Manfrotto 503HDV');
Product Page [Manfrotto]
