NAB 2016: Wild and Wacky Edition

NAB 2016 was certainly not a banner year for new, insane, got-to-have-this-right-now products, but as always, there are things that grab your attention.

This green screen set-up was in the Avid Booth, and was demonstrating motion tracking for computer-generated motion backgrounds. Since the background is completely computer generated, and the camera is moving, those backgrounds have to duplicate the move of the camera. Hence the funny sticks coming out on top of the cameras - they are 3D mapping the angle, and sending the information to the main graphics computer, who decodes that information and changes the angle of the CGI background. Cool!

Admit it - you want one of these. 

 Ran into IO Camera in the Central Hall, and hey - they are from London, Ontario! Who knew we had a camera company in London? Has a global shutter to boot!

Now this is a real man's gimbal, not those little girly gimbals that everyone is so ga-ga over.  

Lots of hard drives at NAB (too many in fact), with lots of speed benchmarks, but this liitle Fusion from Sonnet can do about 2100 MB/s when connected through Thunderbolt 3. Considering that the new LaCie 12 Big can only do 2600 MB/s, that's pretty darn-tootin' impressive. It is a SSD based system - the only drawback - it doesn't have a very large capacity - 500GB or 1TB.  

Live switching just keeps getting easier and easier, and Teradek was showing off live switching off an iPad, but what blew me away was their free app that can also live switch on your iPhone! Geez Louise, what is the world coming to?