And the winners are… the best of the best from Las Vegas as we present the winners of our RedShark NAB 2026 Awards.
It’s probably too early yet to tease out the main theme from this year’s NAB. In some respects it’s been a quiet show. A year of tariffs )which dominated the conversation at NAB 2025), the ongoing memory shortages, and the global unease caused by the US-Iranian war probably hasn’t helped matters.
However, there has still been plenty to talk about, much fuelled by the show’s accelerating pivot to embracing the creator economy. Here are the six products we think this year showcased the best of the show. And, as a reminder, our Awards are never pay to play; they are genuinely what the core RedShark editorial team think are the things most worthy of your time at the show and in the months to come.
Adobe Premiere Color Mode
Three years in the making and developed with input from hundreds of working editors, Color Mode is the most significant thing to happen to Premiere in years, possibly ever. It’s also potentially the most significant thing to happen to grading full stop.
Built from the ground up as a dedicated grading environment nested directly inside the edit timeline, it’s both powerful — it runs in 32-bit color depth for the first time, GPU-accelerated on NVIDIA RTX hardware — and intuitive. Only just moving into public beta now, editors who have tried it say that it flattens the steep learning curve associated with color grading, and color grading software, to a truly impressive degree.
ASUS ProArt PA32USD
The ASUS ProArt range continues to impress, not to mention upend the standard price/performance ratio we are more used to seeing in post production. This is a 31.5-inch 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) QD-OLED panel that runs at 240 Hz with a 0.1 ms response time and hits 1000 nits peak brightness, with VESA DisplayHDR True Black 400 certification. Color accuracy is rated at ΔE < 1 across 100% sRGB, 99% DCI-P3 and BT.2020, backed by ASUS ProArt Hardware Calibration. It also has a built-in motorized flip colorimeter for self-calibration and scheduled auto-calibration without having to turn to external tools.
Dual 12G-SDI ports support 4K60 real-time playback without compression, while additional connectivity includes dual Thunderbolt 4 at up to 96 W power delivery, HDMI 2.1, DisplayPort 2.1, and a USB hub. HDR format support covers Dolby Vision, HLG, and HDR10. The display ships with two stand options and a metal handle for portability, and is something that you can expect to see in plenty of facilities in the future.
Blackmagic Design 100G ecosystem
Grant Petty's company has a habit of walking into NAB and rewriting the economics of professional production. This year the target is live broadcast infrastructure. The URSA Cine 12K LF 100G takes the large format RGBW 36x24 mm sensor and 16 stops of dynamic range from the existing URSA Cine and adds a 100G Ethernet port capable of SMPTE-2110 live output up to 440 fps, transforming one of the world's most capable digital film cameras into a broadcast studio camera at $8,995. The URSA Cine Immersive 100G does the same for anyone looking to produce live footage for the Apple Vision Pro, which is impressive as a technical achievement but also, shall we say a bit niche still.
Around this, Blackmagic has built a complete end-to-end 100G IP broadcast ecosystem: switching, routing, recording, conversion, storage, and audio, all on the same SMPTE-2110 backbone and at prices that will give other broadcast infrastructure vendors a headache.
Oh, and let’s not forget DaVinci Resolve 21, which launched alongside the hardware and introduced a dedicated Photo page among numerous other additions. With long-standing rival Adobe moving its Premiere further into the grading space, Blackmagic going after Adobe’s photographic customers feels like the opening manoeuvres of a whole new battlefront.
Eddie AI v3 / Night Shift
The most telling data point about Eddie AI at NAB 2026 wasn't a spec sheet; it was a packed booth. For a company making its first appearance as an NAB exhibitor, that kind of show floor validation is hard to fake. Eddie AI v3's headline feature, Night Shift, is an overnight batch editing mode that does exactly what editors have quietly been hoping someone would build: drop in your raw footage before you go to bed, and wake up to a rough cut with sorted interviews, synced multicam timelines, logged media, and contextual B-roll placement, ready to open in Premiere, Resolve, or Final Cut Pro.
Basically, Eddie has invented the editing fairy. Crucially, Eddie positions itself as an assistant rather than a replacement — the AI works exclusively with the filmmaker's own footage and leaves the creative judgment where it belongs. A free tier is available, with Pro plans from $200 per month.
GoPro Mission 1 Series
That the big camera news from NAB this year came from an action camera specialist tells you just how much the industry has changed over the past decade. The GoPro Mission 1 Series represents a huge gamble for the company, which has effectively bet the farm on the performance of its new GP3 processor. The 8K60 images look good so far, and the ability to use MFT lenses on the ILS version is a potential game-changer for the company. Will the market be happy with the $200+ price hikes over the previous HERO range? We’ll find out next month when the first two of the three cameras are released.
RØDE Sonaura
RØDE's Sonaura MEMS microphone platform represents a fundamental rethink of how studio-grade audio capture works. Sonaura is positioned as the spectral foundation for a next-generation of professional audio products across RØDE's entire lineup, and provides high-quality audio in a much smaller form factor than traditional capsules. It’s built on a new low-noise ASIC, delivering an SNR of 83 dB and a self-noise of 11 dBA. That self-noise figure puts Sonaura in the same territory as studio condensers, while being both much smaller and considerably more robust. No specific products have been announced yet, but on the spec alone the wait will be worth it.