NAB 2012 - Game Changers

Posted By TJ Ryan on April 16, 2012 12:45 pm | Permalink
NAB 2012 is finally here and this year it's not just about going to Vegas.  There are actually new things to see.

The show kicked off to a fast start, faster then the $500 I lost at poker last night.  There is already a buzz with some great new game changing products.  Everyone is talking about the new Camera from Blackmagic Design. Whopping 2.5K Resolution for Under $3000.  The camera rocks 2.5K recording in RAW formats, meaning the image won't suffer due to in-camera compression and will preserve extremely broad dynamic range. More impressive, though, is the price tag.  

Looks like Blackmagic has all the basis of production covered with routers, switchers, frames and now the camera.  

AutoDesk's big debut of their new Smoke software had a wall of people around their booth cramming to get a peak.  Load the Smoke for mac (about $3500) on a lap top and plug in a Promise Pegasus thunderbolt drives and enjoy 700 mb/s read and write speed while doing editing and effects from your boat.  

AJA never disappoints and this year was no exception.  The new KiPro Rack unit is perfect for studios or post.   Record all your camera iso's and line cut from one interface.  John Thorn, the product manager of the Ki Pro, has taken this unit to a whole new level.  AJA also unveiled the T-TAP.  This is a mini converter with thunderbolt to SDI and HDMI outputs.  Perfect for when you want to play out SDI from your laptop.  Of course they still have the IO series and the new IOXT has thunderbolt connectivity. Thunderbolt, thunderbolt, thunderbolt.  That's all any one cares about this year.  With the most promising solutions coming form Sonnet tech.  In addition to their thunderbolt expansion chassis and thunderbolt drives, they have put together some really nice mac mini rack solutions that offer thunderbolt connectivity as well as PCI slots.  The AJA booth has one of the new rackmac mini's with a Kona card in it and if you hop over to the Promise booth, they are running a san with mac mini's and their new SanLink, a thunderbolt to Fiber adapter.  Looks like my next XSan will be two mac mini's in a rackmac mini with fiber cards.   I know, I know you want a thunderbolt SAN.  Well, I can't give you all my secrets.  Just in case your storage solution is bigger and more critical then the average Joe and you don't trust a mac mini, then all you need to do is head over to Active Storage and check out their active SAN.  

I spoke with Jordan Woods from Active and he showed me how their new servers can import the volume config from your old Jurassic XServer and you can have a rock solid solution with their servers. It makes sense, apple stopped making the XRAID so they made an Active RAID, apple stopped making the XServe so Active made the Apple SAN.  Thank you Active.  For a critical deployment there is no better option.  And just when you thought fiber was dead and 10 gigE was the future, Active Storage introduces their M-Raid with 8gig fiber just in case you need 1000 mb/s read and write.  Me likey.  And just for fun you can add their M-Vault.  The M-Vault is a 4 RU chasis with 60 drives.  Yes, I said a 60 drive Raid.  Oh, I almost forgot, I stopped by the Quantel booth to check out the Pablo, a personal favorite of mine but out of my price range.  So, I thought.  Not anymore.  They now offer a software solution that comes with everything the pro version has.  This solution can be custom configured in any machine and runs off multiple graphics cards with a video IO card.  Very similar to the product line the DaVinci took.  

Of course this wouldn't an article about game changers without mentioning RED.  Their new RED Dragon 6K resolution camera is something to behold.  And there is a line stretching around about 100 people deep to get into their theater to check out their new 4K projector.  Okay, I think my feet are rested, back to walking the floor.  

Check back later for more posts.

TJ Ryan