(NAB does not stand for Nuclear Apocalpytic Birthday!)

The National Association of Broadcasters will be having their annual convention this month in Las Vegas, from the 11th through to the 17th.

And I wish I were going!

Why? For starters, it would be a great way to spend My Birthday/The Apocalypse. Also, I’ve never been. Not to Las Vegas, mind you. The NAB Show could be held in the bowels of a giant squid and admission would require singing I Would Do Anything For Love by Meat Loaf, and I would still, without a doubt, definitely think twice about attending. (I can hear Meat Loaf in the background, But I won’t do that!)

Seriously, though, there’s so much cool stuffs at this show. It’s where creative professionals congregate to teach and learn from each other, and it’s where tech companies come to show off their new hardware/software tools to those aforementioned creative pros. It’s about the future of how people who create things do what we do.

Now, there are other conventions of this nature, but this is the Big One. All other shows orbit this one like moons and sometimes space garbage. (Note: There is some contention to this, as Avid and Apple, two companies with a large, impactful presence at NAB, decided they weren’t going to come play this year.)

So what things am I excited about at NAB 2008? Cameras, actually. Acquisition is making some serious leaps and bounds, and solid state recording formats are popping up everywhere. Here’s some major things I’m looking out for:

(1.) Scarlet - Red Digital Cinema, creators of the Red One, will be debuting their super-secret pocket-camera called Scarlet. All we know at this point, is that it’s a 2K resoution “pocket” cam.
(2.) HVX-200A - There’s the possibility of an upgrade/addition to Panasonic’s HVX-200 and/or P2 line. What kind of an upgrade is another question based entirely on speculation. A wild notion, of my own concoction, involves a resolution to the Reel-Stream/Andromeda conspiracy. Otherwise known as, Where is Juan P. Pertierra?
(3.) The HMC-150 - Lastly, as we land back hard into reality, there is another Panasonic camera that is definitely new and physically tangible, and which we can all get really excited about. It’s called the HMC-150 (if you hadn’t already deduced). Panasonic has already announced it, but is holding off on releasing it’s final specs for, you guessed it, the NAB showroom floor.

The HMC really is a camera we can go gonzo for! Panasonic has said that it is the Hi-Def replacement for the DVX-100 (which is the type of camera I have), so it’s basically a DV Rebel’s upgrade for shooting HD!

The HMC will be priced similarly to the DVX.
It will support 1080p at 24fps.
It records to SD memory cards.
And that’s just a start!

There is an enigma surrounding the HMC-150, which contributes to the excitement, as well. It is not known what the highest bit rate the camera will record to. You see, the HMC’s recording format is AVC-HD, which is a codec that hasn’t seen it’s full potential yet. Up until this point, AVC-HD has only seen low bit rates being used in cameras, but if the HMC utilizes the high bit rate capabilities of the AVC codec, the image quality will be superb, indeed! NAB will be the epicenter of information about what this camera can really do. (Also of note, Panasonic offers a transcoder that will convert AVC-HD footage to DVCPRO-HD for workflow compatibility. And the software is free!) If you want more info, check out the DVXuser site. It’s a forum, but the information is more accurate than other sources I’ve found, and the speculation present is mostly logical and insightful. There’s a good chance you’ll learn something too!

Well, I guess that’s it for now, gang! There’s nothing left for me to do, but count down. Count down to NAB, count down to my birthday, count down to the end of the world, count down to the final countdown…