RedShark NAB Awards - The Results

RED Weapon 8K Wins RedShark award at NAB 2016

NAB has come and gone in a flash, but before we left, we handed out the RedShark Awards

What makes these awards different is that nobody has to pay to be part of them. You'd be amazed how many awards are simply money-making exercises for the organisers. We will never do that, not least because it's never made much sense to us, but also we don't want to exclude potential winners who might not have paid us to be in the running.

Now, it's quite possible that we've missed some amazing products. There are so many small and aspiring companies at NAB that even though we had seven people from RedShark there, we didn't have time to speak to all of them. So we've focused on some of the better known brands and we assure you that we will bring you coverage of some of the the smaller products in RedShark, and perhaps they'll win awards next time.

Meanwhile here's the list of winners.

Best Cinema Camera: RED Weapon 8K

This device should get an award for simply existing. Sitting at the top of the tree in RED's lineup, the RED Weapon 8K exudes modern cinema. We can't wait to see films made with this astonishing camera.

Innovation award: Atomos Flame Series

We think that by making HDR monitoring available at the camera, this is a brilliant - and soon to be essential - development. Priced such that most serious camera operators and production companies can afford them, it's impressive to see how Atomos has evolved their range to include HDR, which shows all the signs of being a must-have feature for the living room.

Best Audio Product: Killer Tracks

Maybe it's a bit of a stretch to call this an "Audio Product", but we just liked this company and the way they do things. It's a simple idea: if you need music for your production, get it from Killer Tracks and, because it owns the rights, it can license you to use the audio in a single transaction. It's that easy.

Best Editing Product: Editshare Flow Story

Flow Story is a new editing application from Editshare. It's designed for fast remote editing, and it doesn't matter whether you're working with locally ingested full resolution material or proxies. Sitting astride a Flow database, all the services and stability of Editshare's Flow ecosystem are available to the new editor. What it means is that anyone in the production chain can contribute to the final production, putting together rough cuts and highlights packages, wherever they happen to be.

Best Post Product: Blackmagic Resolve

What can we say? It won the award at IBC in September and it keeps getting better. It deserves the award because we suspect it packs more professional post capability into a package that everyone has access to.

Best Action Product: Sony Action Camera

Tricky choice here. There's a lot of competition and while highly unscientific, we've heard a few people praising this camera. We think it's a highly credible entry to this market which tends to be dominated by better known products.

Best Drone/Quadcopter: DJI Matrice 600

The pace of innovation that we've seen in drones over the last year has been staggering. How long before UAVs become sentient?

DJI can probably answer that. They deserve this award, not just for the Matrice 600 - a large carry-capacity drone - but for their innovation and ability to turn ideas in to high quality products in the shortest of times.

Best Storage Device: G-Technology G|Rack 12

G-Technology seems to be doing all the right things. Their products are stylish and have unimpeachable performance because they use fast, enterprise-level drives. The G|Rack 12 is their first NAS, and can be configured with truly huge capacities. Having seen it demoed, it just seems to work, and that is praise indeed for a product of this type.

Best Low Price Camera: JVC LS300

Of course it all depends what you mean by "low price". This isn't the cheapest camera but when you take the price and the performance into consideration, it's definitely a small price to pay. JVC deserves a huge amount of credit for designing this clever camera.

Best TV/Drama camera: Panasonic Varicam LT

This new camera has most of the talents of the Varicam 35 at a much lower price. It has a fast, easy workflow, and is capable of gorgeous-looking footage. It seems to us that it is a very good choice for TV Drama work, where you need very good images and a fast turnaround.

Best Documentary Camera

Sony's PXW-Z150 combines a 1" sensor with a great lens to give a 4K handheld camera you can pick up and run with. Light enough to keep with you all the time, it's also capable of some very good images.

Huge congratulations to all the winners, and well done, too, to the products that didn’t quite win, but were nevertheless very good. Next time, it could be you!