Hello, we're here at the NAB Show in Las Vegas.
I'm Matt Frank.
I'm Justin Miller
with Digital Commons, and we're going to talk about
what we've been doing here in Vegas.
This is the end of our second day at NAB.
End of our first real day, we got here yesterday.
Actually made it out to the show about 2 in the afternoon.
This is both of our first time coming to NAB which to start off,
if you don't know what NAB is, it's the National Association of Broadcasters convention.
It's a very large trade show for everyone in the film, television, and radio industries.
Pretty much everyone who is involved in the industry,
be it retailers, camera producers, distributors,
content creators, it really involves all facets of the industry.
There's sections for churches, for educational,
for pretty much every type of organization
that can use video or broadcast.
Yeah. So, that's what the show is.
Really, the show is kind of divided into two parts,
there's the show floor, which is where all of the exhibitors are,
and then there's also the educational aspect of it,
through classes and workshops and hands-on training.
We spent our first day, the few hours that we had running around the show floor.
We got to see some really neat things.
We got to stop over at the Red One booth,
which if you haven't heard of Red One, you should check it out.
It's a new digital film camera that came out what, last year?
Yeah, they premiered it at last year's NAB.
And then they're brining two new cameras online next year, in 2009.
Some really interesting technology,
a little above what we would use for our uses,
but after we kind of toyed around with that a litte bit
we moved on to things that are more applicable to education.
Well, I think that Red One is kind of - it is applicable in a few ways,
because that's the direction it's headed [yeah, exactly],
so you know in five years that technology is going to come down in cost.
And even Scarlet now I'd like to see what the price point on that is.
And Scarlet is the lower-priced model of the Red One camera
that they introduced at here at NAB this year.
So, tell us about what are the cool things you've seen so far.
Well, I got to - we walked around for a little bit - and we after Red One
and checked out the show floor is broken off into three sections
and we pretty much only got to see South Hall so far,
which is one of the bigger sections.
But, when I was walking around and checking things out
I did get to see some live mixing,
via software and hardware for live mixing video would be
how you would edit on the fly or mix video on the fly.
Like switching green screen and everything?
Yeah, it was really neat. They did green screen keying
and then they put people into a 3 dimensional studio,
they had a desk in front of them and 3D studio behind them,
and you could set your cameras up with different angles,
so that you could have from each camera three different shots,
a closeup, a medium shot, and a wide shot, so that was kind of neat.
I think we have a little footage of that.
But, the nice one I was really unexpected by was,
I just saw out of the corner of my eye whisper rooms,
which we had been looking at previously [ Like, what are whisper rooms? ] for,
I'll get to that, for podcasting.
And a whisper room basically is an enclosed area that drowns out all outside noise
and also drowns out any kind of echo or reverb inside the room that you record audio to.
They're used a lot for recording voice-overs,
for film and TV, and all sorts of diferent things, music.
And we had been looking at them to use
possibly for areas that had a lot of noise and we're limited on space.
So, a few of the Digital Commons installations who are interested in podcasting
but maybe can't set up a studio or can't have a Mac in quiet area,
they could set up one of these whisper stations
and we actually recorded a little demonstration on the show floor,
which is pretty much the worst case scenario as far as extra noise.
It is really loud, there's literally 100,000 people there,
it's there's music playing, everyone's talking,
so we recorded a little demonstration to show you guys how much noise
these whisper rooms actually count, actually eliminates from the outside world,
so we'll take a look at that right now and let you see that.
[ crowd noise and music ]
[ door slams, much quieter now ]
[ door opens, noisy again ]
Now, the thing to remember, now that you've seen
that is that we did not do anything to the audio.
We did not edit the audio at all.
That is raw audio that you just listened to.
So, it's interesting to see the vast diference between what a
really noisy worst case scenario is, verses when you step inside
that room and the door latches shut.
Yeah, I was expecting it to cut down the noise,
but I actually stepped in there, I couldn't believe how much noise it cut out.
Yeah, it was just like a low hum, all that noise was just like a low hum.
And it was kind of eery-looking looking out the window
and seeing all these people moving around and you couldn't hear barely any of it.
So, that was yesterday. Yesterday we went around the show floor.
Tell me about today. What have you been up to today?
Today we took our classes. Our first day of classes.
I had a great session this morning that focused on using podcasting
either video or just straight audio for marketing for different things
blogging, it was a lot of the stuff.
It really surprised me, a lot of the stuff that they're pushing in our industry now
is stuff that Penn State already does and is really pushing into.
They talked about Second Life and businesses that are using Second Life.
So, it was really interesting and people would even ask,
one person in the audience asked 'Is there anyone using this stuff for education?'
and right away I put my hand up and said Penn State is doing this now,
this is where we're already at and what we're moving towards.
And they were like 'What was that?'
and they're writing down the name of the university,
so it was really a neat thing to be part of.
What was your first session did you...?
Yeah, my best session today and it was also my first session
was an in-depth training on Apple's SoundTrack software.
So, I'm really familiar with Final Cut as is Justin,
but neither of us have really had a chance to work with SoundTrack a lot,
which is part of the Final Cut bundle now
and is sort of a newer piece of software that Apple's put out.
We get a lot of questions at the Digital Commons about you know,
what's the best way to do audio, how do you remove pops and hum from air conditioning,
because we can't control a lot of the studio environments the air conditioning
to completely remove all background noise,
so I was able to do a lot of that stuff in SoundTrack,
which is software that's already loaded on the Digital Commons machines,
so some really valuable hands-on training with software
that we both have really good interest in learning.
The nice thing is that the standard has always been Pro Tools.
I mean a lot of the communications students still use and learn Pro Tools
and Apple's response to that has been Soundtrack Pro.
And I've just been delving into it recently,
the intro at the beginning of this segment was done
all the audio has been done in SoundTrack Pro.
It's a pretty powerful piece of software.
And then my second session I did was on Apple's Color,
which is another new piece of software in the Final Cut Studio
and got to learn some advanced techniques in that.
The color correction is obviously something that most people want to do with their video.
They want it to look as good as possible, so yeah, I learned a lot today.
I've got another full day of classes tomorrow and then on Thursday
we're going to be out on the show floor, so...
Yeah, absolutely.
I had a few more classes today that were really good.
One thing I learned that I found was really interesting when creating
I took a class on creating Web videos or how to optimize your video for the Web,
and one neat trick that we learned was that you can actually drop the saturation of your video 10-20%
and if you do that in a small screen on a Web-distributed video,
most people cannot tell, a trained eye might be able to see it, but most people cannot tell,
and it's a great way to save a little bit on bandwidth and help,
it helps lower the contrast a little bit,
so that it looks better and is a little easier on the compressor,
and that's something that we can pass on to the students.
The "in" project for most of them is putting video up on the Web.
And about have of that session was "record good audio, record good audio",
because audio is so important.
I think his quote was 70% of what we see and it's so true,
is actually what we hear.
If it sounds good, it looks good
and we can kind of pass if it doesn't look the best,
we're kinda used to that,
but we demand good audio as consumers of video and content.
Well, very cool.
That' pretty much what we've been up to these first day and a half here in Vegas.
So, we're going to try and do one of these the next two nights to show you guys,
tell you guys about what we're seeing.
Like I said, tomorrow's another day of classes
and after that we have another day on the show floor.
What were' really going to get some hands-on time with this equipment,
we'll get a lot more footage of the show floor for you guys to see.
We're really going to look at technology on Thursday
that we might be able to bring home in some sense,
and use back in the Digital Commons,
so that'll be a really exciting day, too.
So, that's all we got for tonight.
Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you guys the next few nights.
We're signing off from beautiful Paris Hotel in Las Vegas.
See ya later!
Bye!