By Mike McCarthy

I traveled to Las Vegas for this year’s NAB Show, the first since 2019 for me. I missed last year’s event, which was the first NAB I have missed in over a decade. I was happily surprised to see that things have returned to business as usual, as I joined 65,000 of my closest friends in the industry to wander the halls and booths of the recently expanded Las Vegas Convention Center. The addition of West Hall and the closing of South Hall for renovations have led to a reshuffling of booth locations. Most of the post-related vendors were moved to the North Hall, which also housed NAB’s Main Stage.

Here are just some of my takes on NAB 2023 — from hot topics like IP Video to my thoughts on the latest from Adobe, Nvidia, Dell, HP and several others…

IP Video Options
The big theme that I saw throughout the show was video over IP in a variety of forms. SMPTE ST2110 uncompressed video, packetized for networks, is by no means a new standard, but it’s being used more broadly outside of large traditional broadcasting workflows. And that meant there were many new products supporting this workflow on the show floor.

Throughout the rest of this article, I will just refer to it as “2110” because it comes up a lot, and it just means uncompressed SDI data being transmitted over a standard IP network. I personally think that many use cases don’t actually need uncompressed data, but it is the lowest latency (and most expensive) solution to implement at the networking level. Compression decreases the bandwidth requirements by at least an order of magnitude, and I would imagine that 90% of content outside of movie theaters is now viewed as H.264 or similar highly compressed streams anyway, but it does add latency.

NDI is the cheapest IP video solution, offering support from a wide variety of hardware and software products but without some of the higher-end features needed for large-scale deployments. Dante AV is a relative newcomer and is not as widely supported. It uses JPEG 2000 compression to transmit a UHD (12G) signal over a standard 1Gigabit Ethernet connection. The networking costs are much lower, but the processing costs are higher, with J2K compression being processing-intensive and adding some level of latency. Both NDI and Dante AV have lower-bandwidth H.264-based flavors as well.

But one way or another, video is going to be moving over IP streams as more video processing and other work is pushed into the cloud… and as more work on the edge is pushed onto the network to eventually cut costs and increase flexibility. Someday it will work smoothly, and people will hardly remember the period we are about to enter — where many things are on the network but in different formats and standards. We will need all sorts of other solutions to convert between them to allow the different segments of the workflow to communicate with each other.

Whether you are using software to convert from NDI to 2110; hardware, such as AJA’s new Dante AV 4K box, to convert from SDI to Dante; or a cloud application like Cinnafilm’s Tachyon Live to do standards conversion of those IP streams, there are usually a lot of steps required in the pipeline to get from where we are to where we are going.

Adobe
Just prior to NAB, Adobe announced a number of updates to its Creative Cloud applications with a focus on video pros. The apps are getting bumped to Version 23.4, and there are Frame.io improvements as well.

Premiere Pro is getting a text-based editing feature, which won an NAB Product of the Year Award at the show. It leverages the existing transcription functionality to allow users to edit a recorded video by editing the text transcript to remove unwanted lines, etc. And all the transcription processing is now done locally, without requiring an internet connection, keeping users’ content safely on their own systems. Adobe also added a fairly impressive automatic tone-mapping solution for mixing SDR content with HDR and Log content. Adobe Teams also has a number of incremental improvements for that shared collaborative workflow tool.

After Effects is celebrating 30 years and has a new universal properties panel to bring the most frequently used settings to a central location. Essential settings that pass through precomps are also accessible in the new panel for easier editing of deeply buried options. Track mattes are now much more flexible as well. OpenColorIO is now integrated directly into the existing color management engine for better support of ACES and other advanced color workflows.

Adobe’s Frame.io announced support for forensic watermarking for enterprise accounts, in addition to its existing support for live burn-ins. Frame.io’s Camera to Cloud is expanding support for stills photographers with better handling of non-16×9 aspect ratio assets and a side-by-side zooming comparison tool for still assets. Adobe also announced C2C integration in Fujifilm’s newest cameras and the development application Capture One, which doesn’t leverage the existing versioning tools the way I would expect. I am looking forward to a similar level of integration with Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign at some point in the future. postPerspective’s Brady Betzel dives deeper into Adobe’s recent announcements in his article here.

BirdDog
BirdDog may not be a familiar name to many users, but it has a variety of hardware and software products in the NDI streaming and workflow space. It offers a new plugin that streams NDI data directly out of Premiere Pro over SRT to remote users. The plugin easily swaps between streaming the program output, the application UI or the webcam for face-to-face talks during remotely supervised editing sessions.

Avid
Avid has launched an initiative to entice students to Media Composer with free licenses for college students and discounts for recent graduates. Avid was at NAB showing closer integration between Pro Tools and Media Composer and remote collaboration tools like Edit on Demand for cloud-based editing. It also showed Nexis Edge, which supports remote users with full systems that are similar to the local experience.

Blackmagic
Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve has been updated to Version 18.5, with new AI tools, text transcriptions to help with editing, support for USD objects in Fusion, customizable timeline color spaces and easier remote monitoring.

On the hardware side, they have DeckLink cards and stand-alone SDI converters for 2110 IP video support. Somewhat surprisingly, the converters are limited to HD but can pass up to three 3G-SDI signals onto a 10GbE network interface. Blackmagic also has new 4K video switcher products (including the ATEM Television Studio 4K8) that bring broader support for 12G-SDI to those lineups at the mid-level. The newest Ursa camera adds an optical low-pass filter to its 12K sensor, optimizing it for virtual production work where recording LCD screens can cause frequency interference in certain cases.

AJA
Besides its new Dante AV converter boxes, AJA had a variety of updates for its existing products. This includes new color management options for the highly sought-after ColorBox for HDR workflows and the FS-HDR frame synchronizer. The company also added a JPEG XS option to its Bridge Live product. JPEG XS is a newer lightweight, low-latency compression format, an improvement over the ubiquitous JPEG 2000. It is one more potential option in the compression space. It will be interesting to see where it ends up being used.

Dell
Dell had its new 6K HDR computer monitor on display as well as new mobile workstations with 13th Gen CPUs and Ada GPUs. I used to be all about the most powerful desktop replacement I could get my hands on, but now that technology has progressed, I am finding that my needs (high-resolution screen and Nvidia GPU) can usually be met by lighter-weight systems with more portability and battery life.

Apparently 16-inch is the cool new size, matching the MacBook Pro. Dell’s thin and light 5680 seems like a good balance of portability and performance in that space. Dell also has a 14-inch option that appears to pack a punch, with a 14-core CPU and an Ada 3000 GPU.

On the desktop workstation side, Dell is all-in on the new single-socket Xeons, with the rackmount workstation being the only model that supports dual-socket CPUs. I expect the rest of the major vendors to take a similar path by the next generation. The market for greater than 56 cores is minimal at the moment.

Z by HP
HP was showing off its newly updated workstations with Intel’s new Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs. In fact, HP was displaying the one that parachuted out of a plane as part of a release stunt. HP also had a full virtual production environment setup in its booth to interview various industry partners while also demonstrating that its hardware can drive the LED screens needed to provide the 3D environment in the background. HP also demonstrated the recently announced the HP Anyware Remote System Controller for remote workstation access and control.

AMD
AMD had a variety of displays in its booth and was showing off various use cases for its Threadripper Pro CPUs and the newly announced Radeon Pro W7900 and W7800 graphics cards. These new GPUs look fairly impressive on paper, so it will be interesting to see if they will make a dent in Nvidia’s dominance in the pro visualization market.

Nvidia
Nvidia didn’t have its own booth but had a presence thanks to its many partners. In the IP video space, they were showing off the ways the Mellanox ConnectX and BlueField cards are optimal solutions for IP video. Nvidia’s Red Connect demo showed live GPU debayering of a Red RAW feed at 8K/60p, and then Nvenc compression to AV1 to stream it onward in real time, which is pretty impressive.

Nvidia also offers 2110 input and output solutions that run on its cards, with BlueField DPUs having integrated support for the PTP timings required to keep things in sync. They were also demonstrating software that creates a virtual display from the GPU, which is being output from the network card as a 2110 signal. The software then directs the output from Premiere to that virtual display via Transmit, with that output being viewed on another system via Rivermax viewer. Because the display appears in software as being connected to the GPU, this approach can be used by nearly any application that supports a full-screen output, including mirroring of UI outputs, for streaming competitive gaming. Users see their monitor as usual, but the GPU is also sending a copy of the output to the network to be output as an uncompressed stream that can be routed to a video switcher or a recording device. Nvidia also talked about new support for 2110 output from Unreal Engine 5.1 via Rivermax on BlueField DPU cards.

25GbE Networking
In the world of faster networking options, Sonnet Technologies launched 25GbE adapters with both PCIe card and Thunderbolt box options available. QNap also now has a 16-port 25GbE switch, which seems ideal for smaller groups of artists that need to make the jump to 25Gb communication.

Smaller Vendors
Asus was showing off monitors as well as entire computer systems targeted toward content creators. My favorite was a laptop with a glasses-free 3D screen based on live head-tracking. Apparently, Asus is working on a plugin to allow editing 3D in Premiere on that display without 3D glasses. I am not convinced of the market for stereoscopic content, but it is undeniably a fun technology and more comfortable to use than previous solutions.

While I was at Asus’ booth, I saw a presentation by Puget Systems’ Matt Bach, who has been doing some great work in benchmarking and hardware analysis, the results of which are freely available on the Puget Systems website. It’s a valuable resource for those trying to find the best hardware for their particular workflows. Puget Systems had a booth of its own, where they were showing new workstations. They are very knowledgeable about the needs in the industry.

Digital Anarchy was showing off a new plugin called DataStoryteller for converting large, complex data sets into visualized graphics. While this might not sound exciting, it actually is! Digital Anarchy has done a lot of work with presets and templates to make it easier to get started on these types of workflows. Getting your data visualized in front of your viewers in compelling ways has never been easier, especially for non-designers like me.

Cameras
I don’t do much with cameras anymore, but I always like to check out what is new in that world since I will eventually have to edit the footage that these things are recording.

Sony was showing off the Venice 2, which is used for virtual production in combination with its LED wall displays. They also had a volumetric display for viewing 3D assets based on facial tracking and a 45-degree screen. I am not sure what format they use to drive the display or if it’s an entire computer unto itself.

Panasonic was showing a high-tech classroom and had a large demonstration of PTZ cameras using Lego models as the shooting environment. There was also a camera mounted to some sort of wave table to demonstrate an impressive level of image stabilization.

Finally, The Loop
It would appear that a trip to NAB is no longer complete without a ride in “The Loop.”  The new West Hall can be a bit of a trek from the rest of the convention center, but The Loop offers quick access from South or Central halls on board a fleet of Tesla sedans in tunnels 40 feet underground.

I tried it, just for the experience, and it was interesting to see the system at work. Scores of drivers maneuvered their cars into tight stalls with riders queued up by target destination. The tunnels themselves are a narrow bore and not for the claustrophobic, but they zoom under all of the traffic right to your destination. It is like a manpower-intensive, on-demand subway system, and I look forward to seeing how it expands with new connections in the coming years.

Keep an eye out for more NAB news on the postPerspective site, with stories and video coverage.

Mike McCarthy is a technology consultant with extensive experience in the film post production. He started posting technology info and analysis at HD4PC in 2007. He broadened his focus with TechWithMikeFirst 10 years later.