NAB 2007 Pick Hit Awards

Is there a Moore's Law equivalent for camcorders? Whatever it might be, NAB 2007 displayed its hypothetical fruits. We saw a working model of Red Digital Cinema's Red One digital cinema-level camcorder at a body-only price formerly reserved for budget broadcast cameras. Sony debuted yet another flavor of XDCAM. At the lower end — the Lilliputian side of things — were a few cameras that had no business producing such rich HD images with their tiny chips and low AVCHD bit rates.

Add to that expansive new software suites from the usual suspects, LCD technology that can finally be described as reference-grade, and powerful new high-definition I/O gear, and our judges had a wide variety of groundbreaking new products to laud with Pick Hits. They had no trouble filling the 15 slots with worthy debuts. (Check out digitalcontentproducer.com for complete judging criteria.)

Our judges look for products that show significant technological innovation, while promising to have a positive, practical impact on the day-to-day professional lives of digital content producers, and the following list certainly reflects that. Thank you to each of our judges, and congratulations to the winners of Digital Content Producer's NAB 2007 Pick Hit awards.

Last year Adobe's updated video suite, Production Studio, won a Pick Hit primarily because of the new integration among its various components. With CS3, there's a bunch of eye-poppingly powerful new features across the board. It's hard to call out just a few in this blurb, but here's a stab: Adobe Photoshop received support for video layers, Adobe Encore added Blu-ray authoring, and Adobe After Effects got shape layers. The addition of OnLocation (formerly DV Rack) extends the reach of Adobe Premiere Pro past post and into the production stage for recording and monitoring; the integration of Flash as a first-class citizen extends the range of integrated deliverables. With the Puppet Tool, After Effects adds easy “character” animation of images and text. Perhaps most significantly, Premiere is back on the Mac OS, which will no doubt complicate choices for Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP) editors.
Available by July 2007. Price: $1,699; Upgrade from $799 |
www.adobe.com

Sophisticated color correction will soon be a standard tool of Mac-based producers. Apple's acquisition of Silicon Color last year has borne fruit: The previously $25,000 FinalTouch has been integrated into Apple Final Cut Studio 2 as Color. Professional scopes allow precise chrominance and luminance monitoring, and there are 20 customizable looks to get you going. “FCP's 8-bit color corrector and color corrector three-way filters were OK for what they were — a rough means to color-match shots,” says judge D. W. Leitner. “But Color is a separate 10-bit app with professional lift, gamma, and gain controls, Photoshop-like curves, and eight HSL secondaries (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) for keying of circles, squares, and custom shapes, all of which can be mapped using node trees. These bring extraordinary new finishing opportunities which any FCP user will want to take sufficient time to explore and master.”
Currently available. Price: $1,299 for Final Cut Studio 2 suite |
www.apple.com

Compressed HD gets closer to uncompressed HD quality with every passing year — and simultaneously closer to SD bit rates. AJA Video System's slick new I/O box, Io HD, is the only way to encode to Apple's new ProRes 422 codec in hardware. That way, your system's processors are saved for other tasks, and you end up with pristine footage at a manageable bit rate. Io HD connects with Intel-based Macs (including laptops) to compress/input 10-bit 4:2:2 HD in realtime over FireWire 800. There's also HDMI I/O, support for 1080 progressive segmented frames, and the conversion features of AJA's existing Kona lineup — all in an aluminum chassis with a handle that emphasizes the unit's portability.
Available in July. Price: $3,495
www.aja.com

The single PCI card slides into your editing system to allow uncompressed capture direct from your camera's imaging system via HDMI, bypassing HDV compression. The Intensity PCI Express card came out last year as an HDMI-based capture and monitoring solution. It was then a novelty, but now there's a real place for it in the market, as HDMI connectivity is built into almost every new display and small-format camcorder that comes to market. This year Blackmagic Design broadens the appeal of the Intensity line by adding analog connections (RCA-type) to the Intensity Pro in order to support a wider variety of formats. The price remains extremely low, and the company's On-Air is now included for live mixing of two cameras (you need two Intensity line cards for that).
Currently available. Price: $349
www.blackmagic-design.com

The 7.9in. LCD studio/field monitor from Panasonic addresses a difficult challenge that HD cinematographers face: the limited size and resolution of the standard viewfinders found on HD/HDV camcorders. The 16:9 BT-LH80W (800×450 resolution) delivers the necessary real estate, and it also brings some powerful focus-assist functions, such as Focus-in-Red and Pixel-to-Pixel Matching. Power consumption (1.5 amps) is low, and besides its 12VDC power input, there's a 4-pin XLR DC input and an Anton Bauer gold mount. With its one-field delay in converting interlaced signals to progressive, it's also appropriate for installation in a production truck or edit room.
Available this month. Price: $2,700
www.panasonic.com

FCP doesn't have much of a presence in news editing environments — yet. At NAB 2007, Apple made a serious play for this segment of the market by introducing Final Cut Server, a server application that does media asset management and workflow automation. Of course, even smaller post houses could benefit from such an all-inclusive program. It's cross-platform so that anyone in a facility can participate in review and approval, and perform asset searches via keywords and IPTC, XMP, and XML metadata. As you'd expect from Apple, it's designed to work right out of the box — quite a departure from the traditional reputation of MAM applications. Final Cut Server features an offline/online workflow for laptop users, and its shot-selection and editing tool is integrated with FCP 6.
Available in Summer 2007. Price: $999 for server and 10 licenses; $1,999 for server and unlimited licenses
www.apple.com

Introduced in January, the Canon HV20 is the smallest HD camcorder to capture true 24fps “footage.” The camcorder relies on a 10X Canon lens and a single 1920×1080 CMOS imager to record HDV to MiniDV tape, all in a 1.2lb. camera. The camcorder's accessory shoe means that pros can trick out the HV20 with professional accessories to enhance audio and lighting. This is your “in-a-pinch” camcorder, so it's comforting to know you've also got a 3.1-megapixel still camera in your pocket. A Cine setting shifts the camera's gamma curve to emulate a film look. There's an HDMI terminal for easy viewing on an HD display or for direct I/O into an NLE. “Once you shoot in high definition, you hate to go back to SD — even for personal shots and for acquiring B-roll,” says judge Jan Ozer.
Currently available. Price: $1,099 street |
www.usa.canon.com

Using ultra-wideband technology from Tzero Technologies and realtime wavelet compression, this transmitter/receiver pair makes wireless delivery of HD video a reality. Radio signals transmit HDTV signals — with resolutions up to 1080i — from a source to an HD display up to 20m away. All HDMI sources and displays are supported. “The Extender consists of a sender and a receiver module that are both HDCP-compliant and operate with a high-speed transmission rate so there is no delay or signal loss,” says judge Jeff Sauer.
Available in summer. Price: $699 |
www.gefen.com

Rosco's inexpensive LitePad can solve the lighting of a tight space, such as a car interior, with its unique approach: a thin (0.3in.) sheet of plastic with embedded LEDs generates a soft, even wash of 7000-degrees-K light. LED technology means the LitePad produces virtually no heat and is very thrifty on power consumption. All units include a 12V transformer. “Since the light is mostly an empty sheet of plastic,” says judge Dan Ochiva, “you can cut it, put a screw through it, or tape it to a wall.” Six standard sizes range from 3"×3" to 12"×12".
Currently available. Price: $59-$525 depending on size
www.rosco.com

Although it's described as a home theater projector, the DLA-RS1 is also badged as a Reference Series projector. As such, it might be an ideal vehicle for checking how HD programs ultimately will be viewed under near-optimal conditions. The projector has three D-ILA chips, each with a 1920×1080 resolution. JVC employs a new optical design that has the company claiming a 15,000:1 contrast ratio for the DLA-RS1. “A new optical engine allows the RS1 to achieve extremely high contrast while eschewing the dynamic iris of many high-contrast models in the market,” says judge Jeff Sauer. “This affords high contrast not only between scenes, but within frames as well.” It's got all the requisite inputs: component, composite, and S-Video, along with 2xHDMI.
Currently available. Price: $6,295
pro.jvc.com

This camera hits a sweet spot for sure. Situated in Panasonic's P2 HD line between the bigger AG-HPX2000 and the smaller AG-HVX200, the AG-HPX500 shoots DVCPRO and DVCPRO HD at 11 different frame rates to four P2 cards. A shoulder-mount unit, the HPX500 has three 2/3in. CCDs and offers interchangeable lenses. All for a price that should entice smaller news stations to start thinking about high-def ENG. Production houses will enjoy the option to shoot HD with top-of-the-line 2/3in. lenses.
Currently available. Price: $14,000 |
www.panasonic.com

This 1.1lb. marvel is a shade smaller than the Canon entry in this list, but somehow has space enough for three 1/4in. CCDs. The AG-HSC1U records the AVCHD video format (based on H.264/MPEG-4 technology) to solid-state media, and Panasonic claims that shooters can fit 41 minutes of highest-quality 1080i AVCHD onto the included 4GB memory card. The HSC1U also ships with a 40GB SD Store portable hard drive, so you can offload the card while you're shooting in the field. It's not yet clear how discrete its channels are, but the camera features five integrated mics for 5.1 surround-sound capture.
Currently available. Price: $2,099 |
www.panasonic.com

Does the 2540p format sound familiar? Maybe not yet, but it's only a matter of time before 4K image capture becomes relatively commonplace. Red Digital Cinema's Red One, which captures 4520×2540 images via its Mysterium CMOS sensor, brings “ultra high-definition” recording to — well, not the masses, but certainly to the realm of mainstream production. The Red One camera claims a 66dB signal-to-noise ratio and on-chip down-sampling to 1080p and 720p. Red is pushing a modular system, with PL-mount lenses, recording drives, monitors, and an accessory “cage” sold à la carte. “A new wavelet compression format, 4K Redcode RAW, shrinks Red One's output of RAW files to a manageable 27MBps for easy capture to inexpensive hard disks,” says judge D. W. Leitner. “The hidden surprise at NAB was a demonstration of the capability of a future release of Final Cut Pro to import Redcode RAW in realtime for immediate editing on a Mac Pro or MacBook. Everyone who walked away from Red's demo knew they'd glimpsed the future of motion imaging.”
Availability: Recently pushed back, but expected this year. Price: $17,500 for body only |
www.red.com

Sony wasn't the first company to adopt solid-state recording for its camcorders, obviously, but it might be catching the wave at the right time. Recording to next-generation ExpressCard flash media, the new XDCAM EX camcorder was shown as both a non-working and a working prototype at NAB. The XDCAM EX has three 1/2in. imagers, and Sony hasn't yet specified whether they were CMOS or CCD. Serious cinematographers should enjoy the camera's little touches, such as true focus markers in feet and meters, and f/stops inscribed on the inner focus ring. Compression options are the familiar MPEG-2 rates of XDCAM HD, and recording formats include 720p60, 720p50, and 1080 lines at 60i, 40i, 30p, 25p, and 24p.
Available in Q4 2007. Price: About $8,000
www.sony.com/professional

LED backlights have found their way into monitors before — NEC introduced one two years ago — but with the BVM-L230, Sony becomes the first company to integrate the technology into a broadcast reference monitor. In fact, the wide color gamut afforded by LED technology has Sony claiming that the 23.5in. BVM-L230 achieves the critical evaluation capabilities of the CRT members of the BVM line. It also has a 10-bit driver and incorporates Sony's new TriMaster technologies, which include a new wide-color-gamut panel, high grayscale gradation (1,024 levels), and color calibration.
Available in fall. Price: About $25,000
www.sony.com/professional

• Trevor Boyer, video technology editor
• Michael Goldman, senior editor
• D. W. Leitner, director/DP, senior contributing editor
• Dan Ochiva, senior contributing editor
• Jan Ozer, independent producer and author, contributing writer
• Jeff Sauer, DTV Group president, contributing writer
• Cynthia Wisehart, editorial director