I’m not at NAB this year, because Las Vegas murders my soul and trade shows stomp on the remains—but there are some cool things happening at and around the show already.
First a small but important thing: Red Giant Software is having a big sale between now and April 18. 30% off everything. More details here.
Adobe announced Creative Suite 5, which includes new versions of After Effects and Premiere Pro. Both and standout releases, and I extend a hearty congratulations to the product teams. The After Effects feature that has everyone flipping out is Roto Brush, which uses, presumably, some sort of alien technology discovered beneath the Great Pyramids to semi-automate complex rotoscoping tasks. Like the Content-Aware Fill technology in Photoshop CS5, it has the potential to save you tons of time, which you can repurpose for more important things like staring at your computers screen muttering “How the hell do they do that?” Read more about what’s new in After Effects CS5 at the blog of After Effects Product Manager Michael Coleman.
The CS5 tools we care about are now 64-bit applications, which means many good things, but also means that all your third-party plug-ins need to be re-engineered for compatibility. Red Giant Software’s announcement about this is here.
Redrock Micro has teased some images of new products to be announced later today, including one that apparently eats your iPhone and turns it into Pure Awesome:
microTape Range Finder
iPhone/iPod Touch advanced automation
Storm
The Foundry has released details on Storm, the end-to-end filmmaking tool tool they’ve been teasing us about. As expected, fxguide has thorough coverage.
Panasonic AG-AF100
Panasonic has somehow found the stash of Obvious Pills that have eluded every other video camera manufacturer who also makes the still cameras masquerading as video cameras that have captured all the attention of digital filmmakers. Yesterday they announced the AF100, a “professional” video camera based on the 4/3” sensor from the GH1. Rumored price is to be in the $6,000 range, and although the internal codec is the much-maligned (and, by definition, non-professional) AVCHD, it’s maxed-out 24mbps AVCHD, so it should do better than the GH1. It also will have uncompressed HD out (which your could capture with, say, an AJA Ki-PRO), bypassing the ACVD codec entirely. I hope it also has some buttons.
UPDATE: Oh look, it does:
Jan Crittenden, Product Manager at Panasonic, had this to say about the camera on DVXuser: “There will not be aliasing as we actually have a clue about what causes that.” Nice.
Update
on 2010-04-12 19:30 by Stu
The press release is up now—Blackmagic Design announced today a software-only version of the DaVinci Resolve color grading system, starting at $995. If you think Apple’s Color is immensely powerful and nearly impossible to use, wait until you see Resolve’s user interface. Still, this is pretty much the coolest thing anyone could have imagined doing after acquiring DaVinci last year.
Update
on 2010-04-13 03:50 by Stu
Sony getting in on the game, with a direct dig at RED.
Update
on 2010-04-13 04:15 by Stu
Let’s round out the Best Monday Ever with something super cool: Magic Bullet Looks as a plug-in Module for RedCine-X:
