By Barry Goch

I almost didn’t make it to the first NAB in three years! I was on hold for weekend edit sessions for ABC’s A Million Little Things, and it wasn’t looking good. With some NAB events beginning on Saturday and the exhibits opening on Sunday, there was going to be a high degree of difficulty in making this work.

Thankfully, the post gods aligned, and after finishing my Friday night edit session, I was released for the weekend, and I immediately left North Hollywood and started my trek to Las Vegas…all the while knowing I’d have to be back to ColorTime at 9am Monday to continue my work on A Million Little Things.

I told you!

Since I was driving my Tesla, I had to make a couple stops for charging. The first was EddieWorld in Yermo, California, home to one of California’s largest gas stations and which also weirdly hosts a roped-off display highlighting a piece of the Lakers basketball court. (Seriously, I’m not kidding — see picture for proof.) My next charging stop was near the world’s largest thermometer (because, why not?) in Baker, California. I finally arrived at my hotel in Vegas at two in the morning.

When I woke up Saturday morning, I decided a hike to the Mary Jane Falls at Mt. Charleston would clear my head in preparation for all the tech I would see at the LVCC. Just one hour outside of Las Vegas, there was snow.

Arriving at the LVCC
After the hike, I hit the convention center and caught the end of the Devoncroft Executive Summit. That included watching Devoncroft’s Josh Stinehour interview the president/CEO of Sinclair Broadcasting, Chris Ripley, about the transition to the cloud.

There was a lot of evidence of support for Ukraine, with banners like this one throughout the exhibit area and conference center. NAB was also handing out lapel pins with the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

After the Devoncroft summit, I attended a Colorfront BBQ at the Artisan Hotel, with Nacho Mazzini manning the grill. Sponsors included Frame.io, Alt Systems, SNS, ARRI, Zeiss and AJA. This was an opportunity to catch up with old friends and make some new ones. It was a wonderful respite before the official start of the show the next day. This type of event is one of the reasons I attend NAB — it’s the opportunity to see people you haven’t seen in years and to make that personal connection.

On Sunday morning, I attended a session by the Colorist Society Hollywood that featured colorist Lou Levinson, who works with Apple in technology development; Company 3 colorist Walter Volpatto; and Warner Bros. colorist John Daro. Lou is quite the character, and he presented his five-step path to grading nirvana, which was a tongue-in-cheek look at his approach to color grading.

Daro talked about trending technologies for colorists, including those for virtual production, AI processing of imagery with matte creation and advanced mattes called Cryptomatte, an open-source software created by Jonah Friedman and Andy Jones at VFX studio Psyop.

This year’s NAB convention looked a bit different than those in the past. Gone was the usual post-centric South Hall, which is now housed in the North Hall, as well as the brand-new West Hall. Because it’s a bit of a trek to get to on foot, the LVCC built what they call The Loop, which connects the West to the North and Central halls. It was built by the Boring company and featured Tesla cars driving folks in a loop between the buildings.

The first booth I visited was AWS, which was featured prominently in the West Hall — the largest booth they’ve had if memory serves. AWS had two separate pods that related to our world of finishing. They were also showing FilmLight Baselight and Autodesk Flame working in the AWS cloud.

Canon

Another welcome change to the show, in my opinion, were the camera test scenes, where camera manufacturers featured musicians instead of having models sit around idly. The image that you see here is from the Canon booth, where there was a live band playing — a refreshing addition to the show this year.

At the Canon booth, I got a demo of Canon’s AMLOS technology, which is a software and camera production suite designed to make hybrid work more interactive. They were featuring Joseph Gordon-Levitt talking about his new short film, A Forest Haunt.

As I zipped around Central Hall a bit more, a couple of things caught my eye, including the headless Sony Venice camera. I had seen a demonstration of this when Jon Landau was talking about using the Sony Venice for the Avatar sequels. It was nice to see this backpack rig in the Sony booth, where the body of the camera is on the camera operator’s back and the head “floats” on the front of this harness.

Adobe

From large cameras to small, I caught a glimpse of the Panasonic GH6 with attached SSD drive for recording higher-data-rate media, such as ProRes.

The other fun part of going to NAB for me was seeing behind-the-scenes footage and learning about new techniques of production. With that in mind, I attended a panel discussion for the HBO Max show Our Flag Means Death, with Stargate Digital’s Sam Nicholson and VFX supervisor Dave Van Dyke talking about the ship they built for the show and how they used virtual production to make it appear that it was on the water.

In addition to learning about production, software vendors had demonstrations and classes on the show floor, as you can see from the Maxon booth and also from the Adobe booth where Michael Cioni spoke about Camera to Cloud and the Frame.io integration into Premiere.

Blackmagic

Finally, Blackmagic Cloud, which was one of the bigger preNAB announcements, was on display at the Blackmagic booth. You could see it throughout Las Vegas near the convention center in the form of large Blackmagic banners on the sides of buildings. I went by the Blackmagic booth to see its new cloud hardware in person and learn about the just-released Resolve 18 and its AI processing, which helps create mattes and cutouts for fine-detail color and effects work.

I finished my fabulous NAB weekend by attending an Adobe cocktail event and a meeting of the Flame Users Group, where I was able to reconnect with people I hadn’t seen for years. It made the exhausting weekend completely worthwhile, and I’m glad I can share my journey with you.

Barry Goch is a post industry veteran, a frequent contributor to postPerspective, the newly elected chair of SMPTE Hollywood, and senior editor at North Hollywood’s ColorTime.