What to see at NAB NYC 2022

NAB Show comes to the Big Apple for NAB NYC 2022. If you’re heading to the Javits Center yourself, here are some highlights to investigate from the hundreds of exhibitors that will be there.

Despite two years of tumult and disruption caused by the pandemic, the trade show calendar is getting back to the shape it used to be. So that old familiar rhythm is reasserting itself again, and if it’s October that means you’re either in Monaco for Sportel, Mumbai for Broadcast India, or New York for NAB Show New York (or NAB NYC as pretty much everyone calls it).

The Covid fallout continues however and, reflecting what has happened everywhere else, NAB NYC is probably a slightly smaller show than it was in the pre-pandemic era. That said though, more than 230 exhibitors will be in the Javits Center in Manhattan’s West Side, and that number includes 32 first-time exhibitors and 19 companies who won a Best in Show at the main event in Vegas earlier this year, so it’s a decent line up.

Oh, and fun fact: the first NAB Show reputedly took place the year the organisation was formed and was held in New York in 1923. Safe to say things have moved on a bit since then. So, here’s what to see….

disguise - Booth #1031

Lots to talk about on Booth #1031 as disguise shows the latest updates in its mission to bring virtual production to pretty much every echelon of the industry. It’s already involved in one of the more interesting conference sessions of the show, a Tech Chat highlighting how its Porta can be used by broadcasters to control the Unreal Engine Avalanche plugin to easily build CG elements (Thursday 15.20-15.40). Porta was developed with Polygon Labs, which was acquired by disguise earlier this year, and the speed with which it has produced such a system shows just how fast and how far the company is moving. One to visit to understand where the boundaries of mixed reality currently lie — for the moment at least.

Matrox - Booth #1431

Matrox is going to be showing the latest developments in its broadcast hardware and software portfolio that power today's most in-demand on-premises and cloud-based live production workflows. What does that translate to on the booth? Equipped with built-in tally and talkback, 4K, and genlock support, the Monarch EDGE purpose-built remote production (REMI) encoders and decoders will combine with the GlobalM cloud-based SRT streaming platform to showcase a cost-effective approach to acquiring and sharing high-quality, low-latency contribution streams for REMI productions. As well as that, the new ConvertIP standards-based converters will demonstrate how to integrate and convert ST 2110 IP signals to confidently monitor ST 2110-20 and ST 2110-22 sources on HDMI or SDI monitors—and overcome the challenges of ST 2110 monitoring. 

Extio 3 IP KVM extenders will also be at the show, delivering secure, seamless, and glitch-free 4Kp60/quad-HD 4:4:4 video extension and switching over IP to support the growing demand for remote access and remote operations. 

Lastly, Matrox's industry-renowned broadcast developer portfolio will show why it is rapidly becoming the de facto choice for ST 2110- and SDI-based, on-premise solutions and how it is also helping broadcasters build towards a future of cloud-native live productions. Always worth a visit.

Symply - Booth #1638

Symply so far has had a bravura year with its storage solutions at all levels of the market and has a lot to show on Booth #1638 as a result.

“SymplySPARK is our hyper-fast shuttle RAID and can be desktop-based or rack-mounted,” it writes in a preview ahead of the show. “Featuring Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and speeds of nearly 3,000 MB/s read, it's one of the fastest, most efficient RAID solutions around and even enables self service with user accessible drives, fan, and power assembly. 

“Our range of LTO products also breaks the mould when it comes to workflow enhancements. From integrated SSD bays to Thunderbolt ports with power delivery there's a SymplyLTO solution to fit every need on set, in the studio, or for content archiving. 

“And we didn't forget the cloud. SymplyNEBULA is a full-featured cloud platform with no charges for egress, PUTs, GETs, or API calls. Just one flat fee for the amount of storage you use. You can even replicate files across datacenters for quick, easy access. All secured and with 11 9s reliability. 

“New for 2022 are SymplyWORKSPACE XE and SymplyPERIFERY. WORKSPACE XE is the NAS you’ve always needed: a new all-in-one portable desktop collaborative storage appliance that provides the ease of ethernet/network connectivity and offers the block-level performance provided by a SAN. SymplyPERIFERY builds on Symply’s NEBULA cloud service and offers customers an in-facility appliance that is S3 cloud native. PERIFERY provides unlimited scalability, embedded application support, and both tape and public cloud connectivity.”

AJA - Booth #1724

Aways plenty on show from AJA, but the tech we’ve probably been most impressed with in 2022 to date has been the ColorBox. It’s essentially a neat, compact box that enables a range of HDR and SDR conversions and allows DITs to easily load, modify, save looks, and create reference images for dailies to ensure color accuracy across an entire production pipeline. Read more about it here. 

Avid - Booth #1631

Avid rowed back on its no-trade show stance as the year progressed and the pandemic eased its hold on the industry. Here’s what Avid CEO & President Jeff Rosica said just before IBC in September: “This trade show will mark the start of our gradual return to exhibiting our solutions, but with a more limited scope than previous years, so we can focus on our customers’ most pressing needs, including remote collaboration and migrating their workflows to the cloud.”

So, expect the cloud to be very present. Avid is one of the companies capable of lobbing an entire post workflow into the cloud, enabling facilities to spin it up and ramp it down as and when needed. They have some cool remote workflow stuff too, such as Avid Nexus Edge that enables basic things to be done to content in a browser that can then be picked up later by an editor in Avid Media Composer. 

Blackmagic - Booth #703

None of the big camera companies are at this year’s show, so anyone looking for things to shoot with will have to be hunting around booths such as Blackmagic’s for sustenance.  While doing so they may well stumble across the new ATEM Mini Pro, which has pulled off one of the more impressive price drops in recent broadcast history. Not only did it replace a previous model, the much loved ATEM Mini, but it did so while adding a raft of new features and slashing around 40% off its price, which is not the sort of trick you see performed everyday. The company says increased manufacturing efficiencies are at the root of it all, in which case hurrah for people with detailed spreadsheets and an eye for cost-effective components.

Editshare - Booth #943

Fresh from its debut at IBC, the latest suite of EditShare FLEX software solutions for out-of-the-box cloud and hybrid workflows are making waves. “The post industry is changing, in part reflecting the changes enforced by the pandemic, and in part because creative talent is looking to shift the work/life balance,” commented Said Bacho, Chief Revenue Officer at EditShare. Before the Amsterdam show. “What we now present is an eco-system where editors and other post artists can choose their preferred tools, and work where they like, when they like, without it in any way compromising their creativity or limiting the quality, even as we move to 4k and higher resolutions, and to HDR.”

EditShare storage spaces and FLOW workflow tools are built to synchronize projects across popular NLE platforms, including Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve. Also look out for EFS Multi-Site which allows users with multiple locations to leverage built-in file acceleration to synchronize project storage between EFS clusters in different facilities.

Grass Valley - Booth #1039

Grass Valley has had a busy year across its portfolio. We’re not sure precisely what it’s going to be showing at NAB NYC, but partly that’s because it’s got such a lot to choose from. New introductions at IBC included the new LDX 135 camera, a significant upgrade to the Kula switcher, the new Kaleido-IP Multiviewer, and Sirius router models.

It also was highlighting the progress of its AMPP, the Agile Media Processing Platform. AMPP is a production and distribution platform designed specifically for the media industry that — tl;dr — uses a microservices architecture to swiftly develop cloud-based services from GV and third party developers. That means a lot of new stuff in a short time. At IBC, Grass introduced 24 new applications and over 80 platform enhancements, and it may well have more a mere six weeks later.

Quantum - Booth #814

Quantum’s StorNext 7 shared storage and collaboration platform has allowed plenty of media companies to ‘re-invent’ their storage workflows with the ramped up performance of F-Series NVMe storage, the ease of management and deployment of the award-winning H-Series converged storage, or even seamlessly scale to manage Petabytes of content with speed and unbeatable economics of ActiveScale Cold Storage and Quantum Scalar tape systems. In other words, as a company it does a lot, and that’s before you get to the fact that it recently made StorNext available in the AWS marketplace to boost remote editing workflows.

“Be sure to talk to our experts on hand and see our latest workflow solutions for Adobe Premiere Pro collaboration, StorNext and Quantum CatDV integration, StorNext cloud deployment, NVIDIA-powered video transformation pipelines, and automated content and enhancement powered by NVIDIA AI and ML, and more,” it writes ahead of the show.

Seagate - Booth #1443 

One of those NAB Product of Year Award Winners we talked about at the start, Seagate is one of those companies whose products span pretty much the full spectrum, from people putting video together in their bedrooms to mammoth corporations looking to tool up their data centres for future decades.

So, on the one hand you have Exos CORVAULT, a high-performance, self-healing block storage system that delivers multi-petabyte capacity, five-nines availability, and hyperscale efficiencies for data center and macro edge environments. On the other you have the Lacie range of external SSDs, whether that be SATA or NVMe SSDs, USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt 3. And in the middle somewhere you have Lyve Cloud, which stores digital copies of your analogue assets in the cloud with full assistance for digitization, storage, and management (not to mention reusing, improving, and monetising).