NAB Report

It's taken me a c couple of days to digest NewTek's NAB announcements. My predictions were way off in some ways.

The big news is not really news if you've  been  paying attention, NewTek is continuing to innovate. It seems the next step in the evolution of their IP based production systems is to (buzzword warning) virtualize them. Now NewTek has always been about "Better Hardware Through Software", making greater and greater use of general purpose computer hardware. But now their plan is to to take it to it's logical conclusion and eventually eliminate the custom IO hardware completely. Or a least push it to special purpose  black boxes.

Convert video at the source to NDI or even use native NDI cameras. Feed that over a standard network to a computer that will act as a production switcher. Feed in audio, graphics and data the same way then output the production via IP to the web or onto some other NDI enabled device.

This is the long term plan. In the mean time they are making it easier to integrate the existing products in a hardware world with a bunch of new and improved stuff.

The TC1 and VMC1 get a new user interface mode designed to use with touch screens. This same UI has also been virtualized so it can be accessed from things like tablets and laptops. This will probably trickle down to Advanced Edition TC's  eventually

A new Connect Spark Pro was announced. This is a full NDI (not NDI|HX) converter that supports HDMI sources up to 4K 60p.

NewTek also announced a SMPTE 2110 bridge device called the NC1 I/O IP While the name is a mouth full it simply translates the SMPTE IP video streams into NDI. This eliminates the primary objection to NDI at the high end.

On the software front we saw the new LiveGraphics CG. This integrates with Photoshop and AfterFx. The idea is to create the graphics in PS then animate it in AE. To make that easier there is a big plugin for AfterFx that lets you pick trajectories off a list. You don't really need to know-how to use AE.

Anyway this post is getting long so I'll leave the rest for another day.