THE FRONT LINE: APRIL 23, 2008
NAB 2008: It’ s All About Media
The National Association of Broadcasters’ annual expo in Las Vegas is shifting from a hardware show to an applications show.
NAB, one of the longer-running trade shows, has steadily evolved over the years to the point where it is basically a mix of the CES, InfoComm, SMPTE, and AES trade shows. There are more “themed” exhibits and pavilions with each passing year (remember the infamous NAB streaming media pavilion several years back?), lots of sideshow events, plenty of keynote speakers, and of course the usual booths full of “gotta have it” hardware.
This year’s show went so far as to try and organize exhibits within halls by categories that included Radio, Acquisition and Production, Pro Audio, Distribution and Delivery, Display Systems, Post Production, and Management and Systems.
Of course, manufacturers who are active in all of these areas couldn’t really be in more than one place during the show, so we still found Harris and Evertz dominating the North Hall, Panasonic, JVC, Toshiba, and Ikegami camped in the Central Hall, and Sony, Thomson, Tandberg, IBM, and Canon holding court in the South Hall.
Missing in action? Apple, which apparently is selling Final Cut Pro nicely through its Web site and Apple stores, and who (according to one source) asked NAB for a space discount for its ginormous booth, didn’t get it, and bolted. Also missing was Avid, although the talk was that they’d return in 2009.
The vacuum both companies created was quickly filled by Thomson and other exhibitors, although the crush of traffic Apple and Avid brought to the South Hall last year was not, leading to some disappointed exhibitors in nearby booths. Indeed, more than one person commented that traffic seemed to be down quite a bit this year, despite the over 100,000 registrations claimed by NAB. (I’d guess the attendance was more like 70,000 to 80,000.)
Figure 1. Got a bunch of RGBHV cable lying around? Why not push HDMI signals through it?
Figure 2. Yes, Field Emissive Displays’ SpindT FED really did look that good.
One man’s misfortune is another man’s luck, so the saying goes, and it was noticeably easier to navigate around the show this year as a member of the press. I kept my schedule light, concentrating on products for ATSC reception, IPTV delivery, and (of course) displays and interfaces. Here are some of the more significant finds:
Kramer Electronics had some clever UTP transmitter/receiver demonstrations in its Tools line. These Cobra interfaces have variable EQ to correct for high-frequency signal roll-off and LED indicators to show you when the signal has been peaked correctly. They also showed a prototype HDMI interface that uses standard RGBHV cabling between the transmitter and receiver, useful for existing analog cable infrastructures.
Fujitsu had an amazing demo of real-time MPEG4 encoding of 1080i HD content, shown during the CBS Engineering Breakfast. Their IP-9500 AVC Encoder created images that were remarkably free of blocking artifacts and mosquito noise, even during a sequence of frames where a woman swayed her head as a sprinkler showered the area behind with drops of water.
Extron returned to the show for 2008 and had a wide range of switchers on hand. The SMX MultiMatrix switcher is a multi-plane design that allows you to install any input and output connectors you want, from analog and digital BNC to VGA and DVI, plus audio follow. It’s also hot swappable and available in 6-slot, 8-slot, and 10-slot configurations.
NHK had an interesting demo of 3D on a tiled LCD display, using four 56-inch LCD monitors, each with 3840 x 2160 resolution, for a total of 7680 x 4320 pixels! This 112-inch “theater wall” drew a pretty good crowd and was accompanied by a 22.2 surround audio system, using a 3D mapping matrix. You had to hear it to believe it.
Figure 3. CSI’s demo of uncompressed HD/SDI through coax and fiber was an eye-catcher.
Figure 4. No, they’re not road signs, but new UHF loops from Antennas Direct.
Panasonic has a new P2 camcorder in the family. The AG-HPX170 is a 4.4-pound design that’s 100% solid-state — no tape used. It accepts all standard P2 card sizes (now up to 64 GB) and includes an HD-SDI output connector. In addition to offering 1080p recoding, this camcorder also has 20 selectable shutter speeds when running in 720p mode, from 12 to 60 fps.
In a private suite, Panasonic also showed a new prototype plasma display with phosphor formulations that match up nicely to the P3 digital cinema color space and adjustable gamma. The goal is to introduce reference-grade plasma monitors (finally!) and from the looks of things, Panasonic is well on their way.
Barco has a new reference monitor of their own design that uses LCD technology. The RHDM-2301 is a 23-inch design with a proprietary scanning backlight system (LEDs, of course) and 1920x1200 resolution. It’s also very quiet and cool, making the most of a heat sink on the rear panel. The RHDM-2301 supports all common broadcast and production signal formats with 2x SDI or 2x HDSDI interfaces.
Communications Specialties continues to push fiber (hey, it’s good for you!) and showed an impressive demonstration of HD/SDI transmission through their 3150-series interfaces, pushing SMPTE color bars from a Tektronix TG700 pattern generator first over 250 feet of coax, then 1 kilometer of multimode fiber, and then 3 more feet of coax into a Tektronix WFM700 analyzer. The 1.5 Gb/s signal exhibited minimal timing and alignment jitter with a mostly-clean eye pattern at the receiving end.
Figure 5. The LG/Harris MPH mobile DTV demo was cool enough,
but now I’ve just gotta have one of these phones.
Almost lost in the back hall was an impressive booth from Field Emissive Technologies of Japan, featuring a 17.7-inch FED display with 1280x720 resolution side-by-side with a small CRT monitor. In addition to excellent color shading and grayscale reproduction, the company also showed a 240-Hz refresh demo against a 120-hz LCD monitor (not even a fair fight) and boasted 1/3 the power consumption of same-size LCD glass. According to company representatives, a 23-inch 1080p model is in the works for NAB 2009.
Christie’s booth showcased a new 6000-lumens installation projector using 3LCD technology. The LW600 has an unusual resolution, however — 1366 pixels wide by 800 pixels tall, scaling to 17:10. (There goes my push for 16:9 to the pro AV industry!) It’s a dual lamp design and has stacking detents for staging applications. Nearby, Christie showed their auto-converging AutoStack software and camera for seamless blending of images across 2x2 and 4x4 projector arrays — it really works!
Tandberg is ready for the DTV transition with their RX8320 ATSC integrated receiver/decoder. It features 8VSB and ASI input, ASI output, and downconversion to SDTV (very important to stations that only get HD satellite feeds from networks), and dual Dolby Digital audio decoding with 5.1 output and 5.1-to-2.0 downmixing. The RX8320 will also respond to Active Format Descriptor (AFD) bits in PSIP to center-cut or letterbox HD programs to 4:3 screens.
Red Digital Cinema’s booth wasn’t nearly as jammed as last year, which gave more of us a chance to see two new camera designs. The Epic has a 35mm-aperture 5K sensor and variable frame rates from 1 to 100 fps, recording raw and RGB files to RedFlash solid-state memory. Outputs include dual HD/SDI and HDMI, plus 2x XLR audio. The Scarlet uses a 2/3” 3K sensor, supports frames rates from 1 — 120 fps and offers similar I/Os.
Figure 6. Four LCD panels and 112 diagonal inches of picture = 33 million pixels!
Figure 7. Barco’s interactive display wall will be put to the test during the 2008 Olympics.
Sony finally released its 42-inch reference-grade LCD monitor. Known as the BVM-L420 Trimaster, it utilizes many of the same design elements and tricks found in its 23-inch cousin, including LED backlights, precise color adjustments and support for standard industry gamuts, and SDI — HD/SDI connections.
The LG/Harris MPH mobile DTV demo showcased IP packetization and playback both on the car’s LCD flat screen (equipped with a Kenwood MPH-compatible receiver), and through specially equipped LG cell phones. In addition to the 15 Mb/s main program from Sinclair station KVCW-29, both mobile versions of that stream and content from KTNV were broadcast using quarter-rate and variable rate coding. A laptop was also equipped with an MPH USB “stick” for reception.
Colorspace Inc. showed what they claimed to be the world’s first uncompressed digital video recorder. It captures 4:4:4 files in real time, weighs less than 15 pounds, supports hot-swappable media, and is battery powered, all for less than $40,000.
Antennas Direct (yes, antennas are still cool!) showed their new ClearStream TV antennas, designed for NTSC and ATSC reception on channels 14-69 (with some sensitivity on high band VHF (7-13) channels, too.) These unique double loops resemble figure eights, but have H-plane patterns closer to that of yagi antennas and not dipoles.
Finally, in a private suite at the Mandalay Bay, I saw a demo of CinnaFilm, a real-time cinema effects processor that can add grain, noise, and scratches; blur motion, perform frame rate conversions on the fly, and fully deinterlace video with per-pixel motion adaptive compensation. It will support pretty much any popular input format including uncompressed 8-bit 4:4:4 and output DV, MJPEG, 8/10-bit 4:2:2 YUV, and 8-bit 4:4:4 (again uncompressed). The demo was quite impressive and the product is targeted at post houses with a monthly lease program.
