NAB Show Opens With 55,000 Attendees Expected; Hollywood’s approach includes virtual and cloud-based production –

After a three-year absence due to COVID, the NAB fair is back in Las Vegas, where National Association of Broadcasting projects could reach 55,000 delegates, which they say will be a huge number for a fair in the era of broadcasting. pandemic.

Finally, when the NAB was held in person, in 2019, around 91,000 people attended the event. As the exhibition opened on Sunday, the audience was significantly reduced, although it also exceeded many expectations.

“It’s the first day, I’m happy to have a lot of people here. “It’s not normal, but it’s wonderful to interact with customers again,” said Dan May, president of Blackmagic Design, an exhibition in the United States. the hollywood reporter the sunday. “We can still produce without fairs, but we still need to talk, give feedback. We still enjoy these types of shows. ”

This year, NAB continued to use the familiar Central and North Halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center, but the South Halls were empty and exhibitors such as Amazon Web Services took over real estate in the new West Hall. , opened during the pandemic. (like Elon Musk’s Vegas Loop, now running, which takes participants through underground tunnels between various Tesla rooms).

Not surprisingly, the exhibition’s two main production trends developed during the pandemic: virtual production and cloud-based remote production.

“Virtual production is the foundation of physical production, because we constantly need the collapse of geography for certain stories, where we just can’t travel to enough places and we don’t satisfy the director and producer to tell the story in a productive way,” he said. Gainer. Head of Physical Production at Amazon Studios, who achieved THR On the exhibition floor. “We are putting ourselves in place [again]. … [But with virtual production]”You’ll be able to tell a bigger story in less time.” Amazon Just Used Virtual Production Technology to Create the Thriller all the old knivesWhich debuted earlier this month.

Sony has also contributed to the benefits of virtual production and its tools that support the process, including its glass LED screens and the new Venice 2 camera already used by select cinematographers, including Oscar winner Claudio Miranda, who uses the previous model. The Venice lens is highly anticipated Top Gun: Maverick.

“What was impossible a year ago is possible today,” said Sam Nicholson, co-founder of Stargate Studios, which offers virtual production systems for movies and series. “The pandemic has dramatically accelerated virtual production.”

The pandemic has also fueled the growth of Frame.io, which in 2021 acquired Adobe in a $1.275 billion deal. I was at NAB to showcase developments in their Camera to Cloud collaboration system, including improved support through integration with partners like Atomos and FilmLight.

Other developments include the new AMLOS, Canon software and camera system designed to support joint meetings. And Blackmagic, creators of the widely used Resolve post-production system for color evaluation, highlights their new Blackmagic Cloud, which can be used for remote collaboration on Resolve project libraries (this is not a software subscription service).

“Traffic was very strong throughout the day,” said Len Musmechi, Canon’s senior product manager. “It was great to see everyone come back, get involved. In the last couple of years we’ve seen a lot of innovation as everyone struggled to stay connected and we’ve seen an increase in the use of imaging products to achieve this. ”