The NAB 2020 Show We Should Be Having
Today would have marked the second day of NAB 2020- and while the show is canceled this year, there are plenty of manufacturers announcing new equipment and software that can keep us hopeful for when we’re welcome to return to work.
So, let’s all close our eyes for a minute. Imagine that we’re walking down South, Central, and North Hall- exploring the latest announcements made by broadcast, post production, and A/V exhibitors.
The trending technology this year is a bit obvious- while on any other year we’d be talking about 8K resolution or cloud tools, this year the focus is almost entirely on remote production tools, working collaboratively from home, and supporting our industry during these challenging times. We’ve already covered remote editing, remote meetings, and ZOOM to live streaming trends in previous blogs.
This blog is about looking at the product announcements our top manufacturers have been making over the last 60 days. Here’s a quick recap of the product announcements made thus far, that would have likely been the buzz of the NAB 2020 show floor:
ADOBE
Last week, Adobe announced Adobe Productions for Premiere Pro, providing a flexible and highly scalable framework for organizing projects, sharing assets between them, and keeping everything streamlined, whether you’re working on your own or collaborating with a team.
When you have large or complex workflows, Productions allows you to divide them into smaller pieces, based on the existing Premiere Pro project format. Productions connects the projects, making them into components of the larger workflow and enabling a variety of use cases. For example, an editorial team working on a film can use Productions to organize their workflow around reels and scenes. Episodic shows can be grouped by season, so it’s easy to access other shows to retrieve things like title sequences or audio elements. Agencies can allocate a Production to each client, so they can quickly reference and retrieve assets from existing projects.
This has been a critical feature request that Hollywood feature film and episodic post production houses have been requesting from Adobe for years. You can learn more about Adobe Productions here.
AVID TECHNOLOGY
Avid announced that will be delaying its new product until summer in order to allow its customers to concentrate on dealing with the implications of the coronavirus pandemic. That being said- there is a lot to talk about.
Avid announced free 90-day licenses of Media Composer | Ultimate, Pro Tools, Pro Tools | Ultimate, and Sibelius | Ultimate for creative professionals working from home due to the Coronavirus. This was really useful for post production houses that quickly shifted in March to having all of its staff edit remotely.
Media Composer 2020 is currently in public beta and will likely be released within the next few days or weeks. While Media Composer 2019 famously upgraded the entire UI and brought a host of new layouts and features for editors- Media Composer 2020 will introduce support for 64-bit operating systems, including macOS Catalina.
Avid has also released a COVID-19 site dedicated to helping creatives troubleshoot working collaboratively on Avid projects from home.
BEBOP TECHNOLOGY
BeBop Technology’s industry-leading secure cloud platform has made several major enhancements to further ease the transition from on premises to remote post-production workflows. The newest is Adobe’s latest innovation – Productions in Premiere Pro – which is now available in beta on BeBop, alongside increased performance for Adobe applications through BeBop’s intelligent caching. The Foundry is now a BeBop partner and its full slate of visual effects software is now available in the cloud on the BeBop platform, including its compositing software Nuke and look-development and lighting tool Katana. High-powered transcoding is easier than ever with Telestream Flip, also now available on BeBop. Finally, the company is hosting a popular ongoing series of weekly webinars on Wednesdays showcasing best practices for working from home securely for VFX artists, editors, and post professionals.
You can learn more about BeBop on the BeBop website.
BLACKMAGIC DESIGN
Blackmagic Design announced a new ATEM Mini Pro, which includes a new hardware streaming engine to allow direct streaming via its Ethernet connection to YouTube Live, Facebook and Twitch. There is also support for recording the stream direct to USB flash disks in H.264, plus support for recording to multiple disks for continuous recording. The new model also includes a multiview on the HDMI video output that allows all inputs to be monitored on a single monitor, as well as live status of recording, streaming and the audio mixer.
You can find all Blackmagic Design NAB announcements in the Blackmagic Design News Room.
CASTUS
Castus announced their new Castus Stream product, which provides people a way to connect online meeting platforms with any playout server. This couldn’t have come at a better time, as people are rushing to integrate Zoom, Skype, an other meeting tools into their production switcher environment.
You can learn more about Castus Stream here.
EDITSHARE
EditShare is making collaborative cloud-based media production possible with its brand new virtualized video editing and storage platform – EFSv. Initially running on AWS infrastructure, the open EFSv platform supports industry-standard third-party creative tools for editing, audio mixing, and grading with best-in-class security capabilities such as file auditing to propel secure, end-to-end editorial workflows in the cloud. EFSv native drivers eliminate traditional IT bottlenecks and deliver superior performance in virtual environments. And, by leveraging the EditShare RESTful API, customers and technology partners can easily automate advanced storage management workflows. https://www.editshare.com/news/pr-efsv-042120
Also, in response to COVID-19 and the need for remote production tools, EditShare has made Flow 2020, its media management tool, available for free through July 1, 2020. You can learn more about Flow here: https://www.editshare.com/products/flow
FACILIS TECHNOLOGY
Facilis, a leading shared storage company, announced the release of Version 8 of the Facilis Shared Storage System, Version 3.5 of its FastTracker Media Asset Management software, and new Object Cloud remote workflows. These are available immediately and free of charge for any eligible Facilis customer with a current software support contract.
One of the most compelling releases to date, Version 8 includes unique software-defined Bandwidth Priority, SSD Tiering and Multi-disk Parity RAID6 disk-failure protection. Facilis FastTracker media asset management software continues to advance with file movement profiles, duplicate file reporting, and a secure directory browse interface.
You can find all Facilis announcements on the Facilis Technology website.
GRASS VALLEY
Grass Valley is launching GV STRATUS One Pro, an all-in-one production suite that allows content creators to be faster and more efficient with a small- footprint solution. The new platform is one of two new additions to the GV STRATUS One product family, alongside the new GV STRATUS One Express. his latest iteration of the GV STRATUS solution is loaded with a range of key features, including: Four channels of Playout and Record, SDI Ingest and Playout (720P & 1080i), Editing Licenses Included (EDIUS or Adobe), Automated Rules Engine, Multiple simultaneous users, RMI and Archive support, and Social Media & CMA Management.
Learn more about Grass Valley’s new product releases.
IPV
IPV launched CuratorNow to quickly enable remote, collaborative cloud video production workflows. CuratorNow quickly enables media managers to ingest hi-res video and log crucial technical metadata; the ability to easily search and find assets remotely; to edit with frame-accurate proxies using 98% less bandwidth than the hi-res files; to collaborate seamlessly on Adobe Premiere Pro projects and to conform completed content back to hi-res, all delivered through highly secure private cloud.
You can find all IPV announcements on the IPV website.
LIVEU
LiveU’s remote bonded cellular technology has quickly became the must-have product for productions, network television, and news hoping to connect their talkshow guest from home, into the broadcast master control room.
The LiveU At-Home Solution allows broadcasters to go live from anywhere regardless of LAN or high speed connectivity limitations. The solution leverages LiveU’s patented bonded cellular and unique LiveU Reliable Transport (LRT™) protocol to provide reliable, high-quality live video transmission from multiple cameras in the field back to the studio. Once in the studio, a full production can be created, just as if it was done in a production truck onsite but at a fraction of the cost.
The LiveU LU-Smart App enables any mobile journalist or guest to cover live HD news from the field using their own iOS or Android device.
You can find all LIVEU announcements on the LIVEU website.
MASSTECH
Masstech continues to expand the features within their hybrid cloud media and content management tool, kumulate. kumulate is a content manager, workflow orchestrator, and media storage optimizer tool. This year, kumulate will be receiving a ‘direct download’ feature which will allow editors to access and download on-prem facility media, from anywhere.
kumulate Gateway is a brand new content acquisition portal which hopes to simply the media supply chain, secure uploads for suppliers, and run compliance checks, auto-rejects and reports.
You can more information on the Masstech website.
NEWTEK
NewTek announced PTZUHD, the first pan-tilt-zoom camera that transmits full 4K p60 video directly to NDI®-compatible receiving devices across a standard network. The NewTek PTZUHD camera allows content creators to capture and deliver superior quality UHD video with native support for resolutions up to 2160p 60 using a 30X optical zoom lens, and a high-quality Sony CMOS sensor. A single ethernet cable connection is used for setup, power, operation and signal flow
NewTek also announced two new Spark Plus IO converters to the lineup. The new Spark Plus IO converters simplify the encoding or decoding of video for use in an IP-based workflow through the power of NDI®.
You can find all NewTek announcements in the NewTek News Room.
ROOT6
Root6 announced a free 30-day ContentAgent license for remote post production workflows during these difficult times. ContentAgent is helping post production streamline their remote editing workflows, including automating proxy creation for Avid/Adobe workflows for editors on home workstations or laptops, making unwieldly raw footage more accessible for remote users and allowing non-technical staff to manage their own media creation/ingest workflows.
ROSS VIDEO
While we’re still waiting for the official product announcements, Ross Video is announcing Ross Live | 2020 – a comprehensive ten-week program of product launches and live production leadership and expertise. From the middle of April until late July, Ross will be hosting a weekly series of TechTalk presentations, videos and webinars announcing our latest product launches and solutions updates, along with expert discussion of best practice in a variety of live production environments.
You can find all Ross Video announcements in the Ross Video News Room.
STUDIO NETWORK SOLUTION (SNS)
SNS developed a new tool that will allow their EVO Shared Storage customers to work from home. SNS Nomad allows you to quickly access media remotely from your facility for offline editorial. If your facility shared storage is not SNS, you are not out of luck. Once you have a single SNS storage device on your network, you can configure it to allow all media from other shared storage devices on the network to get indexed in Sharebrowser and become available for Nomad remote workflows.
You can learn more about SNS announcements on the SNS website.
STORAGEDNA
StorageDNA will be making announcement later this week. We will update this section once we receive their press release.
You can learn more about StorageDNA announcements on the SDNA website.
TELESTREAM
Vantage announced IMF Producer, a Vantage option that automates the creation of IMF (Interoperable Master Format) packages from Adobe® Premiere® Pro. IMF packages are the preferred method to deliver show masters to companies like Netflix, 20th Century Studios, Disney and many others. Through the use of automated processing, editing staff can focus on the creative functions of storytelling and pacing without worrying about the complexities of the IMF delivery format.
Telestream new OptiQ Monitor enables real-time deployment of live ABR quality monitoring at scale in over 70 global geographic regions and is designed to give broad visibility into the health and performance of live OTT channels delivered through CDN partners.
Inspect 2110 monitors ST 2110 video streams at broadcast and production facilities for operations staff, network engineers and content creators. It ensures video flowing across the network is correct, working as expected and synchronized, enabling broadcasters to make the shift from SDI to IP video, while introducing several benefits in flexibility, scale, migration and efficiency.
You can learn more about Telestream announcements on the Telestream website.
QUANTUM
Quantum continues to strengthen its object storage product line with the acquisition of Western Digital’s ActiveScale business. The addition of the ActiveScale product line and talent brings object storage software and erasure coding technology to Quantum’s portfolio, and enables the company to expand in the object storage market.
You can find all Quantum announcements on the Quantum website.
