Broadcast & Video Expo

A couple of weeks ago I attended the annual Broadcast & Video Expo, the UK’s only event dedicated to technology within the broadcast, video and new media worlds. It was an opportunity to check out the latest video technologies and make contact with the industry’s key players and innovators.

Highlights included demonstrations of RED, a new digital camera system with incredibly high resolutions, and the latest incarnation of Adobe Creative Suite, CS4.

The RED camera system is capable of recording at resolutions of up to 4096 horizontal by 2304 vertical pixels (to put this into perspective, standard High-Definition has a resolution of 1920 by 1080). The exciting thing about RED is the relatively low cost and weight, considering its high resolution and image quality. The camera was introduced by the producers of the TV series “Wallander”, who made extensive use of the system throughout the production process.

As exciting a prospect is Adobe CS4, which includes essential video software like Premier Pro (for editing footage), After Effects (for creating stylish animated sequences) and Encore (for authoring DVDs). The new offering is very streamlined, allowing for dynamic, on-the-fly swapping of video sequences between the programs without the need for any rendering. It also offers a ‘media encoder’ applet independent of the programs, in which anything that needs rendering or encoding can be dumped and left to tick over in the background. For one that has spent many an hour staring at render bars this is a huge benefit.

There were many other demonstrations and seminars in addition to these – in fact, too many to see all of them. Next year I’ll have to get there even earlier!

Tom