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Rebecca Bragee (L) from SF Bio in Sweden and Marcos Senna from Globo TV in Brazil stop to look at a 3D demonstration at the ColorCode 3D booth.
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Until 9 a.m. on Monday, it was all speculation — would there be any attendees at the NAB Show? Opinions varied but predictions tended toward the dire.
The morning dawned and the same familiar crowds gathered around the doors to the exhibition halls, just like in previous years. The cuckoo clock struck nine and crowds streamed through the doors, filling the halls with reassuring sound.
At the South Hall on Monday morning, it was no different. People poured into the hall and flowed around booths like a torrent in a rainstorm.
The South Hall is a mix of big and small, young and old, and the well-known names immediately had full booths and jumping demos. At the Grass Valley booth, John Howard of Fox Sports seemed smitten with a Kayak production switcher enhanced with Grass Valley's new Kayenne technology.
"I want it to be known that we were the first to look at this switcher," Howard said, pointing to his friend, freelancer Zach Greenberg.
Considering there are several exhibition halls, the South Hall had a surprising number of 3D demonstrations, indicating that 3D is either making inroads as an imaging technique or is the fad du jour. Hard to say which is which at this point, although lots of people were gathered around 3D displays wearing glasses and broad smiles.
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Stefan Hierlmeier and Manfred Seidel, both from Tele-Data in Germany, were born to be mild at the Datavideo booth.
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One of the viewers was Rebecca Bragee from SF Bio in Sweden, a first-time NAB Show visitor. She was buzzing with excitement at the show and giggling at the 3D demo.
If the smiles indicate success, 3D could be here to stay. Walking only part of the South Hall, I saw 3D demonstrations at DVS, ColorCode 3D and Numedia, and all looked startlingly good … if you don't mind wearing funny glasses.
At the AJA booth, the crowd swelled quickly and created a traffic bottleneck at one particular display. AJA makes products that convert signals from one form to another, and there were questions about Web streaming and uploading video.
Kent Stipp from Mac Professionals was working at the AJA booth, and showing an encoder to Matt Benda of Insomniac Designs and Milan Krsljanin of ARRI.
"The Web site went active last night, but I don't know what time," Stipp said in response to a question from Krsljanin.
In a few years, they might have to change the name to the National Association of Web Uploaders.