The Digital Media Dude (me) will be there and I will be bringing all the cool vendors, happenings and the show floor action directly to you via The Digital Media Dude EXPOzed podcast.

Today, I attended the DV Expo 2007 in the Los Angeles Convention Center. The show was great, with lots of vendors there showing off many cool products.

What a fantastic conference! The Adobe CS3 conference was a two day (June 19 and June 20) networking, product immersion and just plain old fun “experience” for only $199; can’t beat that!

That price not only included a bunch of classes and networking opportunities, but also a fantastic dinner on the first day (I mean shrimp, prime rib, Chinese food and even an open hosted bar).

There were plenty of networking opportunities as well, including the lunches and dinners, the get-togethers after the days ended and a bird-of-a-feather meeting.

Pre-conference Sessions
The conference started with a “Pre-Conference Session”. There were 5 sessions to choose from, including Rich Internet Application for Developers, Video, Management/IT, Photographers and Print Service Providers.

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!

Ok, so it’s my last day here at NAB 2007. Now back to reality (aka work). Damn. I wish it could last forever. Anyhow, my last day consisted of walking the floor some more and of taking the following classes:

• Creative Lighting with Shadows
• Green Screen Lighting

Walking the Floor
I got to see the NewTek booth and played around with the Tricaster Pro (see my blog entry on this). Basically, it’s a portable studio in a box. A must see if you are webcasting.

I also visited other smaller booths and did another walk around the Apple and Adobe booths (what can I say, I’m a fan). Now on to my classes.

Creative Lighting With Shadows
This was a really neat class that inspired me again to be more creative and not just strive to finish the video and deliver it immediately. Taught by Victor Milt, legendary cameraman and director (he shot the famous Irish Spring commercials, plus lots more), the class covered how to “paint your scene with shadows”.

Do you need to webcast a meeting, event or anything else live to the internet? Have you tried seeing how much people charge to do this? From production to distribution, it can cost your company well over $15K to webcast a meeting or event to an internet audience.

Most of your cost will come in at the production level. Getting your equipment (camera’s, lights, switchers, etc). I found this really great product at NAB 2007 from NewTek called TriCaster that may bring your costs way down if you purchase and reuse for many events. Basically, Tricaster is a production studio in a box.

TriCaster & Pro allows you to connect up to 3 cameras, a VCR, a laptop and edit all of those live as the event is happening. It then allows you to switch between sources, watch the program monitor, add lower 3rd text so that your program looks “network quality”.

Obviously, this is not an extensive list of what’s in NAB 2007, but it’s my list of things I’m interested in, and since this is my blog, I can post what I like! Just kidding. Sorry for the attitude. I’m only here for 1 more day and I’m kind of bummed to have to go back to reality (a.k.a. work)!

Anyhow, below is a list of products that I think will greatly improve and/or help you in your corporate media making abilities (I know they will help me).

Adobe Photoshop CS3
The coolest thing that I saw about Photoshop CS3 (Extended version) is the ability to import video into it. That’s right. You can now open a video file directly into Photoshop and there is even a brand new timeline to allow you to move through it frame by frame. Why would you want to bring in a video into photoshop? Rotoscoping baby! That’s right. You can remove whatever you want from the video on a frame by frame basis using all the tools you already know in Photohsop. So you can now be a rotoscoping artist with Photoshop! One more thing to add to your resume! Yeah!

Oh my! So many new toys, so little time to play. Let’s get to it. Here is a recap of my day in NAB 2007.

I started out by visiting the Avid booth (since that the main one when you enter the show floor). Anyhow, besides the cool looking booths they had, nothing from them really interested me (though they did have a booth dedicated to both event and corporate videographers, which is a sign of the times….that is, everyone is videotaping these days and Avid wants to get a piece of that pie…funny, Adobe and Apple are going the other way…that is towards film).

Anyhow…After I passed the Avid booth I went straight to the Apple booth (by-passing momentarily the Adobe booth). I was really excited and interested in seeing the new Final Cut Studio (especially Color) and also Final Cut Server. So let me start with Apple.

Final Cut Studio 2.0 now consists of the following applications:

Final Cut Pro 6.0 – Video Editing
SoundTrack Pro 2.0 – Audio Editing
Motion 3 – Graphics / Compositing
DVD Studio Pro 4.0 – DVD Authoring
Color – Color Grading
Compressor 3 – Compression (Duh!)

OK, so I must have walked 10,000 miles yesterday in NAB. I don’t understand how women with high heels in the show get to do that all day long? I was wearing really comfortable shoes and I still was dead by 6pm. But anyhow, that’s not why you are reading this article.

I’ll make this one short. I’ll be posting another blog soon.

Red, I see Red everywhere!

No, it’s not a song by UB40, it’s the new 4K camera that will sell for under $20K. Yes. Film is officially dead (well, almost, not yet but soon, very soon my child). I didn’t get to “touch it” because the line was extremely long and had to wait over 1 hour just to put my hands on it, and that was cutting into my Final Cut Studio 2.0 presentation schedule, but I did get some great video footage (check out my videos for more videos)

I’m still in my room (the NAB 2007 show floor does not open until 10:15am after the keynote). Regardless, you can start checking out some of the cool stuff companies like Adobe and Apple are going to introduce now on the web. Here is a quick rundown:

Apple:
Final Cut Studio 2 (http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/)
Final Cut Server (http://www.apple.com/finalcutserver/)

Adobe Labs:
After Effects CS3 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/aftereffectscs3/)
Premiere Pro CS3 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/premierecs3/)
SoundBooth CS3 (http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/soundbooth/)

Yet another great learning day. My main focus today was Podcasting, since we are starting to do a lot of podcasting at work and I’m about to launch The Digital Media Dude Podcast (yes…I know you can hardly believe it…)

So here is the list of classes I took with a short description of each. For the full day’s notes, please get them here.

• 9:00am to 10:15am – Finding Your Voice; Finding Your Podcast Topic
• 10:30am to 11:30am – Keynote – James Thomas, Editor of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
• 10:45am to 1:00pm – Marketing Your Podcast
• 2:00pm to 3:15pm – Final Cut Pro – Effective Titles For Video Editors
• 3:30pm to 4:45pm – Building Buzz & Traffic For Your Podcast Through Social Media
• 5:00pm to 6:15pm – Automating Your Podcasting Workflow

What a fantastic day today. It started with me waking up at 6:30am (after going to sleep at 2:00am due to watching the TV show 24 with my wife on DVD (Season 4 Episode 2….great episode by the way). Anyhow, I left Excalibur and got on the monorail in MGM to head on to the Las Vegas convention center. It was a very long walk, but I need it anyhow. So it’s all good.

Ok, So it’s about 12:20am and the kids are finally asleep. Yup, I brought my wife and kids to NAB 2007. We had a nice dinner (actually, it was ok, it was the buffet at Excalibur, not bad for the money, but not great cuisine either). My wife and kids will be hanging out by the pool tomorrow all day while I take all my classes at NAB 2007.

It’s going to be an interesting day. Here is what I have scheduled for tomorrow:

8:00am to 8:45am: Sessions Orientation

One day left and I’m off to NAB 2007. I’ll be leaving for Las Vegas tomorrow around 2pm PST ready to arrive for a nice dinner, relaxation and then start the full day of post-production classes.

I’ve signed up (thanks to the generosity of the company I work for) for the Post-Production world seminars, and I will be taking a variety of classes, from production (shooting, lighting) to post (editing, dvd authoring) to web (Flash and AJAX).

I can’t wait to see what the announcements will be. I know Adobe will be showing their CS3 suite, though I saw most of it already at the MGLA (check out my last post on Adobe & MGLA). What about Apple? Will they introduce Final Cut Pro 6? Will they introduce FCP 6 Extreme (the competitor to Avid)?