I spent a good portion of Monday at NAB 09 in some of the educational sessions offered learning about compression and scene to scene color correction.  Between session I wandered around the JVC and Canon booths. I was amazed by the sheer number of cameras they manufactures are offering. 3D was big for both as well. JVC had a number of monitors setup displaying 3D content. The best example was of the animated film BOLT. It really added a depth and an overall “feel” to viewing the picture that I hadn’t seen before. I’ve seen 3D flicks in the theatres but it’s been concerts and IMAX nature stuff. The BOLT demo was good enough that I could see myself enjoying this at home someday. They also had a realtime 2D to 3D hardware converter. The result of this type of conversion to 3D was less impressive but it did work somewhat which really surprised me. JVC also had a prototype of a 4K camera:

The JVC rep said it should be available at NAB 10 at a cost of around … $200,000. That seems like an insane price so it’ll have to offer something great. What was really amazing was that the camera was displaying its output on a protoype 4K display. If you remember when 1080 HDTV came along many people said that is was kind of like looking through a window. I’ve never thought HD was that good but looking at this 4K display was indeed like looking through a window. Simply amazing. 

Avid unveiled a new logo amongst all their other big changes. The biggest news seems to be that all of the Avid owned companies are now under that single Avid brand and that new logo. A bold move but judging from mood of the people at the Avid booth and the Monday night Avid party people didn’t seem to mind the corporate change at all. One thing that the new Avid is highlighting is their openness. We can see a bit of that at work with this report from the ACE discussion blog on the American Cinema Editors website. Every year ACE does an equipment survey and the send results to the companies represented in the survey. Avid responded with a “specific answer to each comment addressed.” Thats’ pretty open IMHO. The documents can be downloaded at the above link.