NAB Recap, Part Two: Opening Day

One of the big stories coming out of NAB for the sports market was NewTek’s introduction of the TriCaster 8000. The live-production system featured a bevy of upgrades and, on Monday, was already attracting attention from many major U.S. sports organizations.

Highlights of Ikegami’s NAB Show booth included the new Unicam HD-camera line with 3G-SDI and multiformat HD performance, the Hi-Motion II ultra-slow-motion camera system, a versatile new low-profile fiber base station, and a convenient new high-resolution LED-backlit 9-in. flat-panel LCD monitor.

Canon USA will provide more than 75 HDTV lenses, two PTZ HD cameras, and a Canobeam HD-video–transceiver system for NBCUniversal’s coverage of the 2012 London Olympics from London.

At a Monday-morning press conference, Miranda spotlighted two of its latest product offerings: Enterprise Suite on Demand and iTX graphics integration.

Blackmagic Design made a big splash with the introduction of a high-octane compact digital cinema camera priced at just $2,995. But the big news for the broadcast market coming out of the company’s Monday-morning press conference was the revamped Teranex 2D and Teranex 3D processors.

AJA Video Systems’ preshow press conference announced Ki Pro Quad, a new solid-state portable video recorder capable of capturing high-quality edit-ready files in such formats as 4K (4096×2160), Quad HD (3840×2160), 2K (2048×1080), and HD (1920×1080) with 10-bit 4:4:4 and 10-bit 4:2:2 color support.

According to several router manufacturers, including Stagetec USA President Rusty Waite, the European style of total-truck automation might become part of the U.S. truck-management protocol in the near future.

When dealing with on-air graphics and image processing, broadcasters are often forced to use lower-quality images in order to get the product to air with minimal latency. NVIDIA aims to change that by introducing its graphics-processing–unit (GPU) technology to a wide range of I/O devices at the NAB Show.

EditShare unveiled new shared-storage capabilities and systems. EditShare networked-storage solutions now support project sharing for the brand-new Adobe CS6 Premiere Pro video-editing software.

Tiffen Co. introduced the Steadicam Fawcett Exovest, an ultra-light exoskeletal Steadicam vest that transfers weight into anatomically appropriate areas and bridges areas that should not be loaded.

The shift toward MPEG-4 transmission has accelerated exponentially in recent years, especially for sports telecasts. Encompass Digital Media EVP of Worldwide Occasional Services Chris Myers does not see this trend halting anytime soon.

In the transmission market, bigger does not mean better. Bigger transmission trailers are costly to keep on the road, leaving companies like Frontline Communications to find new, innovative ways of providing more in a smaller form factor.

Loudness monitoring and measurement might just turn out to be the most fecund digital-audio product category since the microphone. The NAB Show saw multiple new entries into an already crowded field.  Here is a look at some of them.