I'm getting ready to hop on a plane to Vegas to attend the NAB show (National Association of Broadcasters). Really looking forward to seeing what's new and different this year; 1080p & 4k cams, LED studio lighting, etc. If I see anything especially cool, I'll take some pics and post them here in this thread. I encourage anyone else attending to do the same.

These shows are often "reunions" of sorts for me, as many of the hired bikini models and booth-babes are Vegas & SoCal girls that I have done WAM shoots with in the past. It's weird to see them clean and dry

Have a great time!

Watch for this announcement about Canon and Technicolor:
http://dpreview.com/news/1104/11040803canontechnicolor.asp

It's been a busy week here, so I'm just now getting time to post this. This forum gets almost no posting traffic so I'm going to break the "no bumping" rule by making several posts, which will let me group the images and comments more easily.

NAB was pretty good this year. A big percentage of the 2 million square feet of exhibit space was dedicated to broadcasting and the satellite industry, so that mostly doesn't affect us in this business. Last year, both CES and NAB were all about 3-D screens, cameras, and production tools as the "next big thing". As I suspected, it was relegated to the corners of both shows this year with very little fanfare. It was there, but it's mostly right back to being a gimmick rather than everyone's main product.

There was a huge amount of green-screen technology though, with probably a half-dozen companies basing all or most of their display space around it. The live presentations were pretty impressive, with subjects moving around in virtual space both in front of and behind them.

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Like last year, LED lighting is being pushed hard with lots of new companies building panels and fixtures around the newer high-power white devices as well as some with red-green-blue groups and controllers. Florescents are still popular too, but I didn't really see anything new there. Mostly the same big twist bulbs with umbrellas and soft-boxes or panels of long tubes. Here's a panel with barn doors and a boom mount.

The big movie stuff is still all incandescent though. Check out these giant soft boxes. They have standard high intensity bulbs in them.

Now for the 4k/2k stuff.

It took me awhile to find the RED Cinema display. They weren't in the center building with all the big dogs of the camera world (JVC, Canon, Panasonic, Sony) Finally found them over in the post-production area.

Like the past 3 years, the Scarlet is still on display. Still not in production and the booth guys of course will not answer any questions about price or a shipping date. The official party line, as always, is "affordable" and "soon"

The first pic is a Scarlet in a basic usable configuration. The rest are the new Epic, which is actually shipping. The config shown is about $60,000

JVC has an interesting 4k/2k offering in the works. They had a prototype on display, but strangely, it was in a plexiglass box and not available for handling. It seems to be stuffed into one of their existing camera bodies and was being used (they claim ) to play back footage shot with the cam, which was very impressive. It had 3 or 4 video outs operating as a group though. Apparently that much info can't be squeezed thru one cable and chipset at this point. They were also displaying a DSLR (also locked away in the plexi box) based on the same imaging system. I can't figure out if the tech is called "FalconBrid" or "FalconBird". I've seen both on the internet so maybe one is the vidcam and the other is the DSLR, or maybe it was just a typo. Nobody in the booth spoke English very well.

The JVC presenter claims the vidcam will be "under $5k" and will ship "later this year". One of the guys over in the Canon booth says that JVC has been trotting out basically the same prototype for a couple of years now. Like the RED Scarlet, I'd say this is pure vaporware at this point.

And now back to reality

I was basically looking around for viable high definition replacements for my Sony VX series DV cams and was pretty disappointed to realize most of the current models under $8k used the annoying-as-hell AVCHD wrapper and stupid-high compression on the video file. Anything in the semi-pro range with a decent storage format (i.e. 4:2:2 color space and not massively compressed with mpeg4) was between $8k and $12k.

It looks like my only realistic choices are AVCHD cams in the $3k-$4k range. They are the Canon XF-100, Panasonic AG-DVX100, and an upcoming (June they say) Sony model that I forgot to take a picture of.

There's a lot of 1080 tech with native 60p starting to come out and of course the 4k stuff is going to happen sooner or later, so I decided not to jump into HD just yet. I think I'll wait 6 months to a year to see what happens next in the "affordable" end of things. In the mean time, I went to see a non-WAM producer in Vegas who went hi def last year and traded them a fluid-head tripod for a Sony PD-170 they had laying around to replace my ailing VX2000. That means I'll still be shooting in high quality DV for now.

The good news for amateur shooters who couldn't justify a $3k-$5k camera in the DV era and went with a $300 consumer model instead is that you can probably jump into an older semi-pro cam for ten cents on the dollar now if you want to keep shooting in DV.

Wow, some absolutely fantastic stuff and being a tech head I'm almost as excited by the pics as if they were of girls, lol.
That said I still don't see how a lot it can improve films produced in the WAM genre. I think that a lot of improvement can be made simply by employing simple and cost free techniques like planning ahead, planning camera possitions, checking sound levels and ensuring the mic is not exposed to wind which can be achieved often by simple mic postioning without the need for expensive equipment, correct use of lighting, storyboarding, shoot to edit, combine this with a simple but cost effective video camera, some simple but effective video editing software taking the time to learn some easy editing tips from free online sites such as youtube like the 30 degree edit rule and of course a good subject matter and I think you have a recipe for a succesful and greatly recieved piece of work, after all you said it yourself soundguy that even widescreen is hard to utilise in this genre.
But thanks for the tech porn anyway