Wow,
After 10 years of going to the IBC show in Amsterdam, I am used to seeing a fair number of products announced at NAB to be finally shipping. Yet there is usually a good number of new products that are released on the European market too. But IBC 2012, by that standard, was pretty much a lackluster show.
While there were a couple of cool announcements like the newest
Nvidia K5000 Card for Mac Desktops offer users an unprecedented level of power within the Nvidia "Keppler" architecture. Nvidia is really pushing the bounds of computational processing and bring that power to the Mac Desktops really makes me want to see the next machine apple will produce ( hopefully it has multiple PCIe slots to support these oversized CUDA family cards
Aja showed working T-Tap and announced that they are now shipping but there were 2 things that Aja was showing that caught my attention. Finally announcing a Dock with both USB 3 and Thunderbolt for the KiPro Drive modules and new KiStore drive versions utilizing USB 3 instead of FW.
The other product was the Corvid Ultra, this is designed as an OEM product for other manufacturers to build product lines on. Shown at IBC for the first time it evolved from the "Riker" prototypes Aja has shown both publicly and privately for the last 2 years. With extensible architecture for both hardware and software this may be one of those products that will be utilized for Autodesk, Avid and other workflows, shown at the show in conjunction with ColorFront, showing realtime 4K Raw playback from F65, Canon and Arri workflows, this board harkens to the future of DI workflows.
Blackmagic Design showed working models of the BlackMagic Cinema Camera. I attended the BMD Press dinner and had a limited hands on with the camera in a press meeting, but was unable to shoot and process the media to determine effectiveness of the workflow. I was impressed with the weight and feel of the BMCC and the model I held was far better built than any of the models I touched at NAB and seemed up to the tasks one would ask from a prosumer level camera. Hopefully I will get chance to get my hands on a unit for a full evaluation.
Blackmagic also showed UltraStudio Mini adapters to allow separate capture and playback devices in a Micro formfactor and a Thunderbolt enabled 4K ( Really Quad HD ) I/O solution to allow a laptop to output 4K to a monitor or projector. Pretty neat stuff for a TB geek like me.
Autodesk showed off the expanded toolset in the latest builds of Smoke 2013 beta and it keeps looking more and more promising.
Arri showed a new digital connectivity control back for Alexa, but I was far more interested in what is now a complete set of Zeiss Anamorphic lenses designed for Digital Cinema Applications.
Zeiss also announced prior to the show that they were expanding the Compact Cine Lens line with the addition of a couple of short zooms and
Angenieux powered focus and zoom attachment for cine lenses and a new integrated metadata module to tie into the i/Data metadata systems.
So, There were actually a large number of announcements, I just did not find most of the interesting.
thanks
Gary
