After walking for hours around the NAB 2007 show floor and then taking lots and lots of classes, I came to the following conclusion:

2007 will be the year of media everywhere and of HD.

It’s funny if you think about it, because these are two extremes.   On the “media everywhere” side, you have resolutions that are so small and sometimes low in quality (for example, 176 x 208 px for a Nokia 3250 phone and on the higher end HD resolution side you have 720 up to 1080 height resolution with huge screen sizes.

So, as a media designer, developer and or producer, how do you “shoot once and show everywhere”?  That’s our challenge and there are some companies out there trying to help us out.

The challenge is to be able to take your nice footage you shot on your nice HDV, HD or even (heaven forbid) DV camera and be able to create a Standard Def DVD, a High Def DVD, a Flash website and prepare it for mobile phone, PSP and iPod consumption.  That’s enough to drive you mad!

Adobe is trying to help us out by introducing Adobe Device Central, an application you “send your video” to from say, Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and/or Adobe After Effects CS3 so that you can see what your video will look like in a variety of devices.

Currently, Adobe Device Central has over 100 different devices from Casio, Flash, Fujitsu, Kyocera, LG, Mitsubishi, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyon, Sharp, Sony-Ericsson, Toship and Tottorio Sanyo.  You can also easily update these devices with the latest specs by going to “HelpUpdates”.

The great thing about this application is that it lets you preview your video on any of those devices to see exactly what your video will look like, resolution wise, color wise, and under different room conditions (such as when light is hitting the cell phone).  You can then say, crop out some video for cell phone consumption, but allow the full glory of your video for your BlueRay DVD authoring.

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 will allow you to see what your website (and hence, your video on that website) will look like on Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari, regardless of what platform you are developing in).  That’s cool!  It will even check for Javascript issues in your site in those different browsers.

So, as you can see, some companies out there are addressing the challenges that many of us have on a day to day basis to be able to author and support our media development for multiple platforms.

It does not seem that 2008 will get any easier for us, however, it does seem that it will be more exciting full of new and cool technology!

Cheers!