by Ron Margolis, Intelligent Media
| For those of you who did not make it to the show, here is a small sampling of highlights for you... |
Canon,
Sony, JVC and Panasonic all had large booths promoting their latest
DV decks and camcorders. The Sony DSR-250 looks like one gorgeous
camera, pushing the envelope of the low end of the high-end DVCAM
units. The PD-150 looks excellent also. Canon was showing a demonstration
of 3D camera technology and had an actress dancing wildly and being
filmed in 3D which could be viewed by show participants using special
3D glasses. JVC has a very cool product in their SR-VS10U dual format
deck allowing users to dub from analog to digital and also providing
a deck that can be controlled by FireWire from a Mac or PC. It's
on sale for only $1694. JVC also has a couple of hot new cameras,
the GY-DV550U and the GY-DV700W. They are serious about their "Professional
DV" concept.Adamation showed their $99 editor running on the BE OS. I'm not sure who is running that OS, to be frankly honest. Adobe had a large and lovely booth showing After Effects and Premiere running real-time on the Wintel platform. Everyone is hoping to see new versions of these flagship dynamic media products from Adobe and hopefully next year will be the year. Photoshop 6 was also being shown. Be Here was showcasing their 360 degree Internet viewing technology which is quite radical and Artel Software showed Boris RED, Continuum and Graffiti.
As
far as high definition is concerned, both Pinnacle and Digital
Voodoo showed their 128 bit solutions for capturing HD. Pinnacle
had a cool display previewing some absolutely immaculate "Toy
Story" footage in 1024p with a data rate of just under 98MB a
sec. They were playing back the footage on a prosumer Panasonic
HD Monitor which was receiving the transcoded signal from an AJA
HD-10C coming out of the HD BOB of the CinéWave. Of course,
this was DV expo so there were offerings from Pinnacle and Matrox,
Canopus and DPS and the like. Even ADS had some low-end
FireWire capture solutions and their inexpensive "do-it-yourself"
drive enclosure which allows you to place an Ultra ATA drive in
a case and then connect the drive to the host computer through
FireWire. The RT-MAC from Matrox got a lot of oohs and aahs. Meanwhile
on the NT and '98 side, Matrox showed their DigiSuite LX and the
RT2000 which with Service Pack 3 has added a lot of new transition
and effects types and stabilized its drivers considerably. There
should be Windows 2K support for RT2000 before too long also.