I was at InfoComm this week in Orlando. The good folks at BMD hired me to man the Resolve color grading station at their booth. Since it was my first time at an InfoComm show, I was amazed at the size of the event.
For two solid days the traffic through the booth was non-stop. Just as I finished giving a workflow demo to a few people, another group would walk up and we'd start all over again. I even had two Newsletter readers recognize me and say hello (highlights for me at any trade show).
Here are a few quick take-aways from that experience:
The Blackmagic Keyboard is actually worth the price IF you spend a good amount of time editing. Jason Druss is the master demo artist on that hardware and watching him work dropped my jaw a few times. BMD seems to be 'grokking' how to integrate this old-school analog device into modern workflows. The sum is definitely greater than the two parts. By the end of Day 2 I was comfortable showing a few tricks with that keyboard that had me nodding, saying,
"Yes. I like this. Now they just have to enable it for the Edit Page, too!"
Much of my time was spent talking to cranky Premiere Pro users. They are particularly peeved about the new licensing restrictions and not happy with the software's stability-to-price ratio. I found that pitching the one-timeline-many-crafts aspect to DaVinci Resolve intrigued them (not to mention the pricing). Combine that with a demo of the new Object Removal plugin (which requires creating a mask + tracking) and it gave them a nice taste of what the Color Page
brings to the table vs. grading in traditional NLEs.
The remainder of my time was answering questions about BMD's eGPU. In truth, I didn't know much about that bit of kit. But since my station was powered by a 4-year-old 13" MacBookPro with two eGPU Pros, half the questions were about that! By Day 2 I was well-schooled on it. I'm going to investigate it further in my grading suite, using it to accelerate the MacMini remote rendering ProRes machine.
On Day 3, I walked the show floor - and my eyes started to bleed. I started at the far end of the show, where everything was fog machines and stage lighting. But then I crossed a magical boundry with dozens of MicroLED vendors featuring hundreds of displays for retail, exterior, and uber-high end video enthusiasts (
I'm looking at you Samsung's The Wall). Those
displays don't use backlights. They just shoot photons directly into your eyeballs. They are also customizable to almost any shape or surface you desire. For the first 30 minutes I was amazed. Then my eyes slowly started to melt. The vendors were endless - and every display was turned up to Best Buy levels.
I can't help but wonder if MicroLEDs are our future? If so, it'll take a few years. I saw a Sony 100"
Crystal LED display in a road case - that's about $250k to purchase. So yeah, prices gotta come down. Also, I couldn't get any straight answers on color gamuts and calibration for professional applications. Still early days, I suppose.
That's my week that was. Enjoy this Newsletter's insights into the intertubes week that was (as it relates the craft and business of color grading). Have a great week. I'll see you next Sunday!
