NAB 2009, Day 2
Started off the day at the DP conference with a good demo of the Phantom HD camera. The camera is a high speed machine, able to capture 2K footage at 1000 frames per second. This produces great looking slow motion footage. The footage that they showed was very impressive. Wouldn’t mind having one of them.
After lunch there was a demo by Grass Valley showing their Viper camera. Not a bad camera, but it just seems like it is a little old and out of place. They were one of the first on the market, but it is showing its age. That coupled with the fact that Grass Valley is up for sale makes it hard to want to invest in them. They also showed their HD camera, the Infinity. This was the most video looking camera that we have seen so far. Definitely not what I was looking for.
Panasonic was next up. It was pretty much just a sales presentation talking about how great Panasonic was. Not useful at all. If I wanted that info, I could have just read a brochure. The one good thing they said was that they were bringing out cheaper P2 cards out. They will have limited read/write cycles but will be significantly cheaper.
The rest of the afternoon was Gary Adcock time. He is a really good speaker, with lots of energy. His first talk was about being a DIT. It is a new position in the film making work flow, and it is vitally important to the whole process. With so many different systems, cameras, recording devices, and post production expectations, it is becoming a super skilled tech job. Not sure how many people are up for being great DIT’s, but I imagine that they will be in high demand. There is a good pdf of tapeless workflow best practices on the Fletcher website. It is a modified version of Gary’s rules.
Gary then talked about LUTs and monitoring. I thought that this was a little too technical, with out a lot of easy to use information. I understand things a little better now, but I still have to do some research to get the basics completely under control. I will also have to check out some of the better monitors during the show.
Exibition floor opens tomorrow. I will have one more day of DP stuff, but will try to look at as much stuff as possible.