Massive pre-NAB Show 2024 news round up

Lots to talk about ahead of NAB Show 2024 with news from AJA, Ateme, AWS, Avid, Brainstorm, EditShare, Ikan, JVC, Litemover, Mo-Sys, Tilta, and Ugreen.

As you may have noticed, NAB Show 2024 starts next Sunday and judging by the stories already crossing the RedShark news desk, it looks like being a vintage edition.

Small, cheap, but mighty useful: the Tilta Foldable Arca Baseplate 

Let's start with one of the cheapest but potentially most useful things that you could see out there. The Tilta Foldable Arca Baseplate only costs $22 but allows you to quickly transition between horizontal and vertical shooting configurations when using smaller cameras (up to 6.6 lbs, 3kg). A single button allows users to unlock the baseplate in order to swivel and lock the central platform at a 90° angle, while the multi-directional ARCA bottom plate makes it easy to mount onto any compatible DJI Standard ARCA Receiver or Tripod. Simple and neat. (Booth C4725)

Mo-Captury provides all you need for state-of-the-art suitless mocap

Mo-Sys (C5529) will be showcasing its new Mo-Captury product, developed with Dari Motion, which the company says enables superior integration and specific features for virtual production applications. Mo-Captury provides a transparent avatar over an individual, allowing them to interact and even track fingers and facial expressions without the use of suits. The company says it was built on an “outside-in” approach: a series of set-and-forget cameras are positioned around the perimeter of the performance area and, once installed, it allows for near instant talent calibration. The system comes as a complete package, including hardware, software, mounting accessories, and dedicated support. 

Avid (Booth SU2014) has appointed Wellford Dillard as the organization’s next CEO. Wellford succeeds Jeff Rosica, who is staying with the company in an advisory capacity to ensure a smooth and successful transition. Dillard joins Avid after serving as the CEO of Marigold, a leading provider of omni-channel marketing SaaS solutions used by businesses for customer engagement, which tells you a lot about the direction the company is currently heading in.

EditShare (SL8087) completed its merger with Shift Media in September 2023, and at NAB the company is already unveiling major steps in integration and enhancements. Users of FLOW, the asset and workflow management platform integrated into EditShare’s storage systems, will be able to directly access all of the tools in the MediaSilo video collaboration platform to distribute viewing copies and collate annotations, speeding still further the processes of collaboration and content sign-off. It will also be demonstrating for the first time the new EFS NVMe, which enables creatives to work in demanding media formats such as DPX, OpenEXR, 4K/8K and beyond - all powered by the media aware industry standard file system, EFS.

Litemover now works with a whole lot more different lights

The Litemover (C6725 ) remote light adjustment system now works with numerous lighting brands, and there are now over a dozen fixtures which can be positioned using this hands-off system. Due to the requests of crews faced with positioning fixtures and reflector boards weighing up to 220-lbs/100kg, innovator/gaffer Erno Das has created a family of adapter kits to work with his invention. According to distributor Matthews Studio Equipment, Litemover is compatible with ARRI lights including Skypanel, Skypanel X21, X22/X2, Orbiter, and Briklok. In addition, there are now adapters available for Cineo R15, Powerbeam, Creamsource Vortex, SumoLight SumoMax, Lightbridge, K5600, Filmgear, and Fiilex Q10. And for reflectors, there are kits for Matthews Mirrors and Lightbridge CRLS.

More functionality for HELO Plus from AJA

AJA Video Systems (SL3065) has released a new Stream Deck plug-in for its compact HELO Plus H.264 streaming and recording device. The software allows streamers, AV professionals, houses of worship, schools, and gamers to use the Elgato Stream Deck desktop controller for simple, immediate hardware-based control of HELO Plus. The plug-in is compatible with Elgato’s entire line of Stream Deck devices on Windows and macOS, and is available at no cost to HELO Plus and Stream Deck users on the Elgato Stream Deck Marketplace. HELO Plus is available through AJA’s worldwide reseller network for $1869.

2024 is the year of the election, with something around half of the world’s population going to the polls in over 40 countries. Expect a *lot* of election graphics at NAB as a result, and we start with Spain’s Brainstorm (SL4097) which promises a public demo of the features and possibilities of Suite 6, the latest version of its InfinitySet, Aston and eStudio offerings. This public demonstration will showcase, of course, an elections program, combining advanced virtual production with InfinitySet using Unreal Engine 5 and Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada Generation graphics cards. Brainstorm has developed some cool features over the years such as support for multiple scenes, talent tele-transport, and AR graphics including a transparent touchscreen, that allows for displaying in-context 3D graphics and provides additional control of the show by the presenters. 

If you had a dollar for every time someone mentioned AI in the run up to the show, you would probably be able to pay for your flight out to Vegas. ‘Cloud’ though is not far behind, and AWS (W1701) promises a live cloud-powered newsroom production demonstration in collaboration with NVIDIA. Each day will kick off with a one-hour “Good Morning, NAB!” show, which will be programmed like a news show. The broadcast setup will include a production set with a news desk and cameras in the West Hall lobby of the LVCC and a Production Control Room in the AWS booth that attendees can visit. Vision and audio mixing will be done on site in the Production Control Room; graphics overlay, editing, and other tasks will be done remotely to highlight the geo-diverse crewing possibilities of Live Cloud Production (LCP) on AWS using NVIDIA GPU-backed Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) G4 and G5 instances. In addition to NVIDIA,  more than several other AWS partners are contributing to this activation, including AP ENPS, Ross Video, Telos Alliance, LiveU, Haivision, CaptionHub, Zixi, Alpha, Aoto, and Ikan. 

An impressive 40x zoom debuts for JVC on the KY-PZ540 Series

JVC Professional Video will have its new KY-PZ540 Series PTZ Cameras with 40x zoom on booth C4720. As the company’s first PTZ cameras to incorporate this focal depth, the KY-PZ540 and KY-PZ540N with integrated NDI HX3 capabilities are designed with JVC’s 4K imager. The cameras also feature JVC’s Variable Scan Mapping technology, which dynamically scans the 4K sensor to produce a seamless and lossless image transition up to 40x in full-resolution HD. This makes them a good fit for large event spaces and instances when the need to zoom in from a distance is essential. Prices start at $1999.

Ikan (C3835) will be showing showing off its new Lyra POE LED Soft Lights which utilize a single ethernet cable for both power and data, eliminating the need for traditional power and greatly simplifying the installation process. It will also be showing its EG25XR-PRO, a tripod system that includes a fully encoded tripod head designed for XR production, as well as the 19” NDI Talent Monitor, capable of encoding and decoding NDI streams internally and can receive power/data through a single cable.

Ateme’s TITAN encoders now enable new ways of consuming video assets on the Apple Vision Pro. They do this by leveraging Ateme’s Gen 7 compression engine to support Spatial Computing through the MV-HEVC standard. (W1721)

Ugreen's NASync Series presents a cloud drive alternative

Last but not least, for this round-up anyway, the Ugreen NASync Series is currently live on Kickstarter, where early bird prices for the four bay NASync DXP4800 Plus are currently around the $399 mark. Green says that compared with cloud drives, NASync allows users to store massive personal data in trusted local devices, preventing leakage and mitigating against surveillance. Equipped with four SATA and two M.2 NVMe drive bays, the NASync DXP4800 Plus has a maximum storage capacity of up to 96TB. Equipped with a 10GbE and a 2.5GbE network ports, the NASync DXP4800 Plus can reach a download speed up to 1250MB/s (equipped with SSD). Users can also transfer files directly from SD card to NASync through its built-in SD Card Reader. It’s all run from one all-inclusive app and there’s a two-bay model for $259.