NAB Show 2014

This year was my second trip to the National Association of Broadcasters exhibition (NAB Show) in Vegas as part of the Freefly Systems setup and pit crew. NAB is a huge (~93,000 attendees) expo for media technology, kind of like CES but for the Producers rather than the Consumers. In fact it's in the same venue as CES, the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Last year, the MōVI gimbal debuted and I think I explained the concept of active stabilization (one I can't seem to escape no matter where I end up) to a thousand different people in four days. This year, I didn't even have time to count the number of other handheld active stabilizers there were at the show. Certainly the gimbal trend has taken hold and there is no going back now.

The Birdy Cam!

I think the MōVI brand still holds the top end of the active stabilizer market (highest performance and, yes, highest price). I haven't used and won't ever use this blog for advertising - I'm not good at it anyway - but one big advantage Freefly had was a one-year head start during which some really spectacular footage was created by ever-more-skillful operators, and it's fun to see the results.

One of the event highlights was this interview with Tabb (Freefly president) and Garret Brown, inventor of the Steadicam. I felt like there should be some lighting bolts for dramatic effect given the "Steadicam-killer" hype surrounding handheld gimbals. But in actuality, the point made is an important technical one: active stabilizers control {pitch, roll, yaw}. There are still three degrees of freedom {x, y, z} that are at the mercy of the operator's movement, and Steadicam and its operators have perfected the smoothing of translation over the last 40 years.

Part of the fun of NAB is that I finally get to show off what I've been working on. My big project for this NAB was the EE/software for the new MōVI Controller, possibly the most hardcore-looking RC transmitter in existence:

My pet project, the blue OLED display. (The one on the unit itself, not the SmallHD monitor...) Anti-aliased font support, bitmaps, bar graphs, scrolling, string and numeric formatting, etc., all in a lightweight display driver written from scratch.

The station I somehow ended up manning at NAB: the new controller paired with the largest MōVI, the M15, and the Sony F55, rigged with wireless video and remote focus.

People trying out the new controller. Controlling framing and focus at the same time would take some practice, I think, and there is still the option of having a third operator control focus.

This was a hands-on demo; anyone could walk up and try it out. On one hand this was great, because it means I don't have to hold it the entire time (it was about 18-19lbs, total). But on the other hand, as my Maker Faire experience has informed me, it also means constantly watching the equipment, making sure it stays operational, changing batteries, and reminding people to share...all while trying to answer questions. And of course while most people are very respectful of the hardware, there are the expo trolls who go from booth to booth trying to break things.

In general, booth ops went much more smoothly this year, I think, due to a combination of better preparation and more manpower. There were a few other new toys to keep people engaged as well:

A Zero FX electric motorcycle with a Steadicam arm and M15 gimbal attached to the back. It seems I can't escape electric motorcycles no matter where I end up, either.

The Tero, a 1/5th-scale camera car, made a return as well. It's carrying an inverted M10 gimbal and Blackmagic 4K Production Camera.

Because our hardware was working well, and because we had enough people in the pits to handle the traffic, I actually got to wander around the show floor this year. There was a lot of camera porn, for sure. The Sony a7S was one of the big announcements, a small camera with supposedly epic low-light performance thanks to a full-frame 35mm sensor with just enough huge, gapless pixels for 4K video. On the other end of the size spektrum, AJA and Blackmagic also announced new, relatively inexpensive, 4K professional cameras.

The Blackmagic URSA. I can't get over how nice the machining is. On the other side is a 10" 1080p monitor.

I also went in search of the large active stabilizers - the ones that are mounted to full-size helicopters and camera cars for just about every aerial or car chase scene in a movie ever. There were three that I found at the show this year:

Filmotechnic, camera car specialists, with the Russian Arm and Flight Head active stabilizer (not sure exactly which one).

Shotover K1 full-size helicopter gimbal. This was about twice as large as I thought it was.

Cineflex, about the size I thought it was, but attached to a 27'-wingspan RC plane! Ryan Archer gogogogogo.

Cineflex ATV with one mounted in front and another in back.

A few other random sights of the show:

Crab drive (Or is it Swerve Drive? I can never remember the distinction.) FIRST robot camera dolly.

The circular equivalent of energy chain.

EditShare Lightworks, a powerful and relatively inexpensive video editing tool that I discovered at last year's NAB and have been using since.

Cutaway of a Canon lens...not sure how this even exists.

So yeah, these were just some of the things I saw at the show this year. It's definitely a bit of a circus, with a lot of money spent on impressive booths (and yes, sadly, in this day and age, booth babes are still a thing).

Booth cars I can understand.

Ignoring the flashy bullshit is hard, but underneath there is some cool tech on display and that's mostly what I like to see. Active stabilizers, wireless HD video, less and less expensive high-quality video cameras, more accessible software, etc., all make for an exciting media era - one for which I will happily hide on the engineering side.

NAB 2013: Where are the gyros? / New video editing software.

A couple weeks ago I was at the NAB Show with Freefly for the MōVI launch, the first product I've helped work on at the new job. That meant spending a lot of time doing the chicken head dance and explaining to people that there aren't actually spinning flywheel gyros on things anymore...

It's a camera gimbal, similar to what would be mounted to a helicopter or multirotor, that you can also carry around in your hands while it stabilizes the camera. (If you read this blog, I'm sure you know all about control systems and active stabilization so this probably doesn't amaze you as much as it still amazes the non-technical public...)

Since I spent nine hours a day at the booth talking to people about gyros (Wait, is this Maker Faire all over again?), I didn't get as much time as I would have liked to wander around this expansive tradeshow, which covered three whole buildings. (It's about 10x the size of the EVER Monaco Expo / car show I've been to a couple times.) There were definitely a lot of camera-carrying multirotors this year.

Here is just one of many....

I was mostly impressed by how it folded up.

There was also a giant two-story indoor flying tube where DJI showed off some of their products. And several outdoor booths with all manner of flying cameras ranging from GoPros up to big-budget cinema cameras like the RED Epic. Speaking of RED, they had a clean room installed on the show floor where they were doing live sensor upgrades to their new 6K / 100fps sensor. (So to watch the video it produces, you need nine HD screens in a 3x3 grid and it has to play in 4x slow motion...)

Most of the camera stuff at NAB is way outside my budget, but one thing that excited me was the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, which was also just announced at the show. It shoots raw or high bit-rate compressed 1080p video onto normal (but expensive/fast) SD cards. If I were planning to upgrade from my Panasonic HD camcorder in the near future, the $995 price is not that bad. The only real problem for me is that it weighs 355g, (maybe less than 500g with a small lens?), so I would be instantly tempted to put it on a multirotor, and then I would be at risk of crashing it all the time. I doubt it's as durable as my GoPro...

I think of all the NAB Show things I saw later read about on the internet, the one that caught my attention most was new, free-ish video editing software called Lightworks, by EditShare. I was pretty disappointed that the new Windows 7 edition of Windows Live Movie Maker is a stripped-down piece of crap, even compared to the at least somewhat functional WMM from the Windows XP era. (The old WMM had an active user community with lots of third-party add-ons for people who wanted to use it as an actual tool.) So a new piece of editing software that doesn't cost hundreds or thousands of dollars was definitely something I wanted to try out. And it looks like a very nice tool.

Maybe I was attracted to Lightworks because the desktop layout is almost indistinguishable from that of a CAD program:

Which of these is the video editing software and which makes 3D models?

Despite being a relatively new program (I'm using the Windows beta version), the interface feels very smartly developed and intuitive. Combined with a set of quick-start video tutorials, I didn't have to spend much time at all to learn how to do simple things like make clips, arrange a timeline, trim ins and outs, work with audio tracks, and add simple effects like fades and dissolves. The options for moving a cut are particularly nice: you can make clips on either side of the cut longer or shorter independently or have one get longer and the other get shorter at the same time (to keep sync). Maybe this is a pretty standard feature in professional editing software, but it's my first time using it and I can't imagine how to ever work without it now.

The only part of the workflow that was not quick and easy was exporting video. Importing from various formats works great, but exporting to something other than a hardcore (and huge) editing format was a challenge for me. H.264 support is through Quicktime, maybe? The new beta version may support native H.264 without Quicktime but I failed to make that work. So in addition to buying the Pro version of the software, you have to also have Quicktime Pro to create H.264 files? And then after all that the H.264 output had no audio (a known bug). Luckily, you can export the audio track as a .WAV, so after fooling around for a few hours to get the H.264 export to work, I still had to use my trusty all-purpose MEncoder shell program to reattach the audio.

I'm sure the export quirks will be worked out in newer versions of Lightworks, though. If the software stays the same price ($60 for the Pro version with full codec support, including H.264?), then it's an amazing deal for a real editing tool.

To test out the software, I've finally gotten around to collecting up all my random GoPro clips from around MIT, flying with my Talon quad. No fancy stabilized 3-axis gimbal for me (well, no gimbal at all...just taped to the bottom of the quad), so get ready for a rough ride: