You’ve no doubt heard the buzz from NAB. Pick hits for most of us were Apple Final Cut Studio 2, Adobe Creative Suite 3 and the RED ONE camera. People stood in line for over an hour to peek inside RED Digital Cinema’s iconic alpine tent. They were rewarded with a 12-minute World War I short ("Crossing the Line") produced and directed by none other than Peter Jackson using two prototype RED ONE cameras. This mini-epic was complete with battle scenes and dogfights, definitively moving RED out of the vaporware category.

Aside from gear, there were other benefits to this year’s NAB. FMC Training did another great job with the NAB Postproduction World educational sessions and workshops. Attendees at the FCPUG Supermeet were captivated by noted film editor Walter Murch’s speech, in which he outlined the post for Francis Ford Coppola’s upcoming movie Youth Without Youth and discussed his philosophy of why movies work and his personal working style.

Apple kicked off the week with a packed Sunday event at the Venetian Hotel to launch Final Cut Studio 2 and Final Cut Server. Although many of these features aren’t new to the market, Apple did an excellent job packing a lot of punch into this release, as well as streamlining and integrating software that was only just acquired last year. The audience welcomed the announcements, especially since last NAB was rather subdued for Apple, which was then in the midst of navigating its transition to the Intel platform. You’ll read more about Final Cut Studio 2 and Server in coming issues, but here are the high points.

Apple Final Cut Studio 2 now integrates Color, a theatrical-quality color grading solution based on Silicon Color’s FinalTouch. This application alone makes the upgrade a no-brainer for most Final Cut owners. Beyond that nice surprise, most of the Studio apps each received significant upgrades. Motion 3 now uses a 3D working environment complete with camera views and lighting. Other new features are a vector-based paint system and new categories of motion tracking and retiming behaviors. Soundtrack Pro 2 has a more streamlined interface, surround mixing, a spectral view for noise fixes and an automatic conform function that realigns your mix with subsequent picture revisions. The marquee application, Final Cut Pro 6, gains 150 real-time FxPlug filters and transitions from Motion, an open timeline (mixed formats, resolutions and frame rates), direct editing of Motion 3 templates and SmoothCam stabilization from Shake.

The biggest news to many was the introduction of Apple ProRes 422, a mastering-quality intermediate codec good for SD, HD and even 2K post. Similar to Avid DNxHD or Canopus HQ, Apple ProRes 422 is a full-raster, 10-bit codec designed to avoid degradation during postproduction.

Apple Final Cut Server is a standalone asset management application based on Proximity Group’s Artbox. Designed to work in conjunction with Final Cut Studio, it tracks about 100 file types. Producers can use FC Server to search, browse and organize media and even create simple rough cuts that will open in Final Cut Pro 6.

Adobe had announced its products at the end of March, so booth traffic was quite heavy throughout the week. That’s always a good sign. Adobe is in the process of releasing a huge amount of software under the Creative Suite 3 banner. Creative Suite is broken into three areas of interest: design, Web and video. Adobe CS3 Production Premium (the video bundle) covers every video need, from location acquisition to post to distribution. It also signals Adobe’s return to producing video applications for the Mac.

Besides sizable updates to cross-platform stalwarts like After Effects, Illustrator and Photoshop, now Premiere Pro, Encore and the new Soundbooth audio application will run on both PC and Mac Intel computers. CS3 Production Premium integrates products acquired from Serious Magic and Macromedia, including OnLocation (formerly DV Rack), Ultra and Flash Professional. You also get Photoshop CS3 Extended, the first Photoshop version to handle video layers. Adobe’s CS3 Production Premium poses a serious challenge to Apple Final Cut Studio on the Mac, and Encore CS3 might just be the sleeper application that attracts users. New in Encore CS3 is the ability to generate a standard-definition DVD, Blu-ray HD disc and Flash project for the Web from the same interactive project file.

There’s a new management team running Avid’s video division, and they chose to emphasize quality control over pushing products out the door prematurely. Avid Media Composer 2.7 and Xpress Pro 5.7 were held up until just before the show. These are Universal binary versions of Avid’s popular software NLEs, so you can run them on Mac Intel machines.

Avid Media Composer 2.7 now officially includes ScriptSync and the Avid DNxHD 36 codec, which were first demonstrated last year. ScriptSync uses voice recognition technology to automatically match clip dialogue to a lined script when using Avid’s script-based editing feature. It will shave hours off of the work done by assistant editors who use this function for episodic TV and feature films. The new 36Mb/s codec is a high-quality, draft-resolution HD codec with only a slightly higher data rate than DV. It is intended for offline editing of film and 24p-based content, replacing Avid’s older 14:1 codec.

In other NLE news, Avid announced Liquid Chrome Xe with an expected ship date in the second quarter. Liquid Chrome Xe software is targeted at small shops and uses the AJA Xena LHe card instead of Avid or Pinnacle hardware. Avid Liquid Chrome Xe offers these editors the ability to work with uncompressed SD or HD content. Other Avid announcements included Avid Unity MediaNetwork 5.0, an updated, more affordable version of Avid’s shared storage solution; MediaStream 9000, a new playout server for broadcast; plus additional consoles and a new line of speakers from Avid’s Digidesign audio division.

Autodesk and Quantel continue to release products that push the boundaries of post. Autodesk tends to introduce new products at SIGGRAPH and IBC, so NAB is mid-year for its 2007 product models. At IBC, Autodesk completed the transition to Linux and Windows workstations and showed the first OEM use of AJA cards in Autodesk workstations. At NAB, the products received software extensions, i.e. “point release” software updates available to subscription customers. New extension features include QuickTime support on Linux, enhanced timeline editing, and Autodesk Burn (network processing) embedded into Inferno, Flame, Flint, Fire and Smoke. The Toxik 2007 extension adds Retimer (for clip speed changes) and Grain Management. New features in the Lustre 2007 color grading system include VTR emulation, GPU acceleration with all secondary layers, and additional GPU acceleration of RGB curves, gamma and shape softness.

While there has been a lot of buzz about 4K postproduction, Quantel remains the primary company actually delivering a wide range of products to achieve this goal. For example, the resolution of all Quantel digital intermediate systems (iQ and Pablo) will be increased to 4K. At the same time, all Quantel HD systems (eQ and Pablo HD) will handle processing in HD RGB.

Beyond that, Quantel proudly showed off its new, open, multi-user 4K concurrent working environment—a solution that has already been sold to FotoKem. Quantel dubs this technology Genetic Engineering. In the demo, products from Quantel, ARRI, eyeon Software and MTI were all working with the same 4K files stored on Quantel’s GenePool shared workspace. Not only can all the products use the same drive space, conduit software takes care of opening Quantel file formats to the outside world. Quantel Genetic Engineering products are targeted at high-bandwidth facilities working in digital intermediate post for feature films.

Speaking of hardware, no one has been riding the desktop curve better than AJA Video. In tandem with Apple’s announcements, AJA introduced IoHD, a standalone ingest/output solution that uses Apple’s ProRes 422 codec to transfer high-definition video to the computer over FireWire 800. IoHD was developed jointly with Apple and includes an embedded version of the codec in its firmware to enable the FireWire transfer. IoHD works just like the existing Io with SD video, sending an uncompressed 10-bit SD signal to the computer over FireWire 400 or 800. AJA continues with its popular line of Kona and Xena cards. These cards are now an OEM solution in a wide range of products, including those from Media 100, Avid and Autodesk.

Two other new AJA products worth mentioning are the FS1 and GEN10. The FS1 is a universal SD and HD audio and video frame synchronizer and format converter. Think of it as a standalone Kona in a box—and then some. It offers a full range of up-, down- and cross-conversions, as well as aspect ratio and analog/digital conversions. The GEN10 is a cost-effective, small form factor sync generator with seven outputs for two groups of independently controlled SD/HD sync, including tri-level sync. The amazing part is it’s only $390!

Blackmagic Design—another company known for innovative solutions—expands the Multibridge line with Multibridge Eclipse, which adds 3Gb/s and HDMI connections. 3Gb/s is a new transfer standard that permits Dual Link data to be sent over a single cable, and Eclipse is the first NLE product to employ it.

Blackmagic Design’s Intensity card was introduced at IBC, but a new version, Intensity Pro, was added in Las Vegas. Intensity uses only HDMI connectors. Some HDV cameras send uncompressed HD over the HDMI connector prior to MPEG-2 encoding; such a camera used in conjunction with Intensity provides the lowest-cost method for getting uncompressed HD into a computer. Intensity Pro adds a breakout cable with analog connectors for SD and HD I/O. Intensity includes Blackmagic On-Air 2.0 switching software, so two cameras and two Intensity cards plugged into a Mac can create an inexpensive live HD production system.

Matrox further enhanced its Axio, RT.X2 and MXO products for NAB. In addition to support for new operating systems (including Microsoft Vista and Mac OS X v10.5 Leopard), there is new support for Adobe CS3. MXO remains a Mac-only product, but 2.0 supports the Mac version of Adobe CS3 and adds DVI monitor calibration and new HD editing and display resolutions. The PC-based Axio and RT.X2 board sets were shown with 3.0 software. In addition to CS3 and Vista support, Axio adds Sony HDV 1080p and Canon 24F/30F support. There’s new real-time color correction using RGB curves and new progressive SD resolutions (486p at 29.97fps and 576p at 25fps). In addition to the features mentioned for Axio, RT.X2 version 3.0 software adds support for native editing of Panasonic P2 MXF files and VariCam-style 24p/25p workflows with the HVX200 camera. Finally, RT.X2 gains a new SD-only sibling: RT.X2 SD.

NAB 2007 will prove to be pivotal. RED is just one example. There are quite a few high-end digital cameras, but the crew at RED Digital Cinema walked in with a complete workflow. It’s not just the camera. There’s REDCODE (their own wavelet codec supported by Final Cut Pro 6) and REDCINE, the “glue” application to assemble RED’s camera raw images into DPX files for finishing. Plus Peter Jackson supplied us with a more than adequate proof of concept!

RED, Apple FCS2 and Adobe CS3 make a powerful case for what the new filmmaking tools have to offer. It may take us five years to realize the impact, but 2007 will be remembered as the year that many things changed.