BLOG

NAB 2019 Recap & Interviews

Get private event invitations, exclusive promos & industry updates. Subscribe to our newsletter.

The Annex Pro team was once again in attendance at NAB 2019 (the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas April 8-11). The amazing week that was NAB 2019 (and Connect 2019 hosted by Avid the weekend prior) has officially come to an end. NAB 2019 featured the top media and entertainment technology companies in the world showcasing the latest in content creation tools for TV, film, animation, VFX, post-production and more.

No one could cover the entire show (there were over 100,000 attendees!) but check out the highlights from NAB & Connect which we thought were most impressive.

Annex Pro Insights from NAB 2019

Key team members at Annex Pro shared their insights and observations from this year’s event. The highlights are below; you can also read the complete article for more.

Kerry Corlett
Founder & CEO

What was your favourite product that you saw at NAB?
My favourite thing at NAB isn’t a product, it’s our relationships with customers and partners. Meeting so many of them and hearing about their successes in 2018, ambitions for 2019, and thinking about how Annex Pro can be helpful in making those happen is my favourite thing at NAB.

Read more of Kerry’s insights from NAB 2019

Bryon Low
Senior Account Manager

What was your favourite product that you saw at NAB?
The new Avid Pro Tools│MTRX DigiLink Option Card adds 64 channels of DigiLink I/O per card enabling multi-HDX and multi-workstation systems to connect to a single Pro Tools | MTRX interface. The MTRX DigiLink option card will be available in the second quarter of 2019.

Read more of Bryon’s insights from NAB 2019

Stuart Dean
Chief Technology Officer

What was your favourite product that you saw at NAB?
Not just one, but almost everything now supports some level of 4K HDR, from applications to I/O devices to routing and monitoring.

 

Read more of Stuart’s insights from NAB 2019

There were a number of exciting announcements from Avid that were discussed in our coverage of Connect 2019. Highlights include the latest version of Sibelius, an Editorial Management update, Cloudspaces, MediaCentral 2019.6, and two new Maestro announcements.

At NAB, the big news was new Media Composer 2019. Offering aspiring and professional editors, freelancers and journalists the inspiration to work more creatively by taking advantage of a new user experience, Media Composer 2019 provides a next-generation Avid media engine with distributed processing, finishing and delivering capabilities, a customizable role-based user interface for large teams, and so much more.

Pro Tools users will be excited for Pro Tools Multi-seat Network Site Licensing also announced at NAB. These licenses will enable facilities to administer multiple licenses from a single server, reducing licensing complexity and eliminating the need for multiple iLoks that are individually managed across multiple workstations.

Autodesk brought Flame 2020 to NAB 2019, the latest release of the Flame family of integrated visual effects, color grading, look development and finishing system for artists. A new machine learning-powered feature set along with a host of new capabilities bring Flame artists significant creative flexibility and performance boosts.

BeBop and Avid announced a new partnership to make Media Composer and Avid NEXIS available in Microsoft Azure Cloud. The BeBop Cloud platform virtualizes processing-heavy workflows such as visual effects, rendering and animation in the Cloud using flexible high-speed storage. Avid will be the first fully bundled software solution offered on BeBop.

BeBop also announced that GrayMeta’s Iris Media Solutions will now be available on the BeBop cloud platform. Iris Media Solutions is GrayMeta’s suite of studio-grade media players and professional quality control (QC) solutions. With Iris now available on the BeBop platform, users can leverage the powerful QC toolset of Iris to validate content without the need for specialized hardware.

Qumulo performed a live demo of their software capabilities in a 4K editing environment for their hybrid cloud file storage for high-performance and cloud workflows at NAB.

In addition, Qumulo announced an expansion of the cloud-native file storage offerings. The cloud storage works to securely move traditionally on-prem workspaces to the public cloud on both the AWS and GCP platforms. This helps better leverage talent across time zones, so your customers can more effectively collaborate with globally-dispersed teams.

Qumulo also announced its momentum in the media and entertainment file storage market, including:

  • doubled performance for throughput and IOPS,
  • introduction of C-72T hardware platform offers a compelling entry-point & high-performance capacity,
  • new enhancements to Enterprise NAS protocol and security capabilities, and
  • S3 Certified solution with Minio, Inc. enabling customers to run both file and object workloads off of the same storage infrastructure.
EditShare had a number of highlights at their booth at NAB 2019 this year and also took home the “Product of the Year” award in the storage category for the latest feature in their EFS Auditing.

New for NAB 2019, EditShare showcased a shipping version of QScan that now includes support for Dolby Vision HDR. QScan ensures compliance for file-based content to any global standard, including IMF. Key advantages of QScan include fast single-pass scanning, ready-made standards templates, and integration with Flow MAM’s powerful automation tools. EditShare also demoed a new IMF visualizer tree, simplifying the complexities around IMF delivery.

Flow 2019 was showcased with the latest features including Flow News, a module for integration with newsroom systems, and Flow Multicam, a feature enabling clients to cut Multicam files quickly and efficiently without the need of an on-premise editor.

HelmutFX was a major highlight at the EditShare booth for those with Adobe deployments. Taking the complexity out of Adobe project management, HelmutFX streamlines workflows and makes it easier for creatives using Adobe software to efficiently manage individual and collaborative projects.

AJA had an excellent showing at NAB this year, unveiling a number of new product additions to the Ki Pro, openGear and IP Mini-Converter families as well as important updates for their most popular products, including the FS-HDR, KONA cards and Io devices, HELO, and the HDR Image Analyzer. New software brings Apple ProRes support to AJA Control Room on macOS, Windows, and Linux, plus new 8K support and much more.

The Ki Pro GO is a portable genlock free, multi-channel H.264 HD and SD redundant recorder/player that captures pristine quality video to off the shelf USB media. Its flexible architecture with 4x 3G-SDI and 4x HDMI inputs for any combination of four sources to four recording channels with a fifth redundant channel and Matrix Monitoring are designed to meet a range of recording needs.

Fourteen new openGear cards combine the functionality of AJA’s most popular Mini-Converters with openGear’s high-density architecture, with support for openGear DashBoard software. These new cards provide fiber conversion, distribution amplification, and audio embedding/disembedding, designed for the most demanding broadcast environments.

Annex Pro’s Two Minutes with… Video Series

What a night! Guests from all over North America came to the Annex Pro VIP Reception to mix and mingle after a busy second day at NAB.  Check out the full photo gallery for highlights of the event!

Apr 18, 2019 | Annex Pro News

Posts by Category