Academic Media Technology Show Report April 2009

Stephen Toback Senior Manager, Academic Services

334 Blackwell St Durham, NC 27701

stephen.toback@duke.edu

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 1

Table of Contents Executive Summary ........................................................................................... 4 National Association Of Broadcasters ............................................................................... 4 NAB Show 2009 ­ From Broadcasting to “Broader­casting” ...................................... 4 Academic Relevance ................................................................................................................. 4 

Technology Review ........................................................................................... 5 Capture .......................................................................................................................................... 5 

Best In Show: Immersive Media ............................................................................................................................ 5 Play It Again: Video Delay Playback System For Performance Review ..................... 6 Marantz PDM620 Professional Handheld Recorder ........................................................................ 6 Zoom Audio Recorders ................................................................................................................................................... 7 Wireless Classroom Push To Talk Microphone System .............................................................. 7 Tiny Microphone - Huge Sound ............................................................................................................................. 8 Poddio - iPhone Audio Recording & Editing Tool ................................................................................ 8 Inline Mic to USB Converter ...................................................................................................................................... 9 

Show Report Page 2  

Sound Fixers With MIT Technology Built Right In .............................................................................. 9 Transcoding Solutions ................................................................................................................................................... 10 

Rhozet Universal Media Encoding ...................................................................................................... 10Sorenson Media

  ............................................................................................................................................ 10 

Q-Ball HD Video Camera .............................................................................................................................................. 11 Blackmagic USB Component Video/Stereo Video Recorder ................................................. 12 Vaddio/SONY HD Remote Control Camera System ...................................................................... 12 Azzurro Systems Integration Custom Remote Camera Control System .................. 13 Blackbird Camera Hand-Held Stabilization System ........................................................................ 13 SONY 3.8k Monitor and Thin Bezel Video Monitors ....................................................................... 14 SONY NIPROS/1 Optical Fiber Studio System .................................................................................... 14 Ultra-compact Self-Contained HD Camera .............................................................................................. 15 Portable Photo Booth With Lighting & Turntable ............................................................................... 15 3D Live ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 16 

3dality Provides Training in 3D Stereography ............................................................................... 16 High Performance Flash Memory Drive ....................................................................................................... 17 High Speed (Super) HD Camera ......................................................................................................................... 17 Detach & Roam Free: Wireless Camera Transmitters ................................................................. 18 Mobile DTV ................................................................................................................................................................................ 19 

Open Mobile Video Coalition .................................................................................................................. 19 SONY HD POV Camera ............................................................................................................................................. 20 Lighting ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 20 

Kelvin TILE .........  .............................................................................................................................................. 20ing From Wescott....................................................................................................... 21

LED Kiss Lights ............................................................................................................................................. 21 Florescent Light  

Collaborate .............  .................................................................................................................. 22 NTelestration - It’s ot Just For Madden Anymore ............................................................................. 22 

U-Touch?   Sure! ............................................................................................................................................. 22nExtron An otator ........................................................................................................................................... 23 

Point HD ....  

Duke University NAB 2009

........................................................................................................................................................ 23Pointmaker ....................................................................................................................................................... 24 

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 3  

FingerWorks PC ............................................................................................................................................ 24 Convey ............................  ............................................................................................................ 25

tworks (CDNContent Delivery Ne s) ................................................................................................................ 25 Limelight Networks ...................................................................................................................................... 25 Kaltura - Open   SoEndavo Media

urce Streaming ....................................................................................................... 25 .....  .....................................................................................................................

Brightcove Media...................... 26

 ....................................................................................................................  ...................... 26Abacast – Streaming  Live, On Demand and Digital Rights Management ..................... 27The Platform – A “Media Publishing System” With Reporting, Transcoding and Customizable Players ................................................................................................................................ 27 

Vidizmo - Web based learning object creation tool ......................................................................... 27 TVU Networks - Like a hardware-based uStream.tv ..................................................................... 28 Digisoft.tv – pay per view technologies ....................................................................................................... 28 Static – free social broadcasting network ................................................................................................. 28 Mobile Video Broadcast For The Classroom ........................................................................................ 29 Avatar Consortium - Research Around Media Archival ............................................................. 29 iPharro Media - Find Media Wherever It Is Hiding .......................................................................... 30 Digital Signage – Tightrope Media Carousel ......................................................................................... 30 Indiana University’s WTIU Goes HD With Help from SONY .................................................. 31 No Longer Just A Dream - A Glimpse Into The Future From NICT In Japan ...... 31 Gratuitous iPhone Use ................................................................................................................................................. 33 Wireless VGA and HDSMI Video ...................................................................................................................... 33 Digital Snakes ........................................................................................................................................................................ 34 

The Aphex Anaconda ...  .............................................................................................................................. 34The Whirlwind Connect ............................................................................................................................. 34 

Christie’s Projector Auto-Stack Multi-projector Alignment System ................................. 35 Outdoor all-weather display systems ............................................................................................................ 36 

Confidence Monitor Cart ........................................................................................................................... 36 Rugged Computing For Field Work ................................................................................................................ 37 Cool Refrigerated Racks ............................................................................................................................................ 39 Hot Portable Studio Racks ....................................................................................................................................... 39 eBook reader from Brother ...................................................................................................................................... 40 

Captioning ........................  ...CP Communications   

...................................................................................................... 40

“talking” type Cap  ................................................................................................................................... 40

Aberdeen Caption  tions ............................................................................................................................... 40ing ...........

Caption Solutions ..................  ....................................................................................................................... 40....................................................................................................................... 40

Video Caption Corporation ...................................................................................................................... 40 

Executive Summary

National Association Of Broadcasters The National Association of Broadcasters convention is held annually in Las Vegas each April. The association historically has been for traditional broadcasters but as the line is blurred between traditional terrestrial and cable broadcasting and computer related digital media technology, the convention has become a key resource for digital media professionals across the spectrum of media-related industries. Although attendance was down about 20% from last year, the overall impression was that the vendors and attendees were more serious and were able to spend more time in more detailed conversations than in previous years.

NAB Show 2009 - From Broadcasting to “Broader-casting” The creation and the distribution of content to consumers continue to be the focus of the technologies present at the show. Different avenues to reach consumers from HD Radio to Mobile DTV and, of course, the Web were prevalent throughout the all of the vendor’s offerings. There was a noticeable increase in technologies for creating immersive or 3D experiences at one end of the spectrum and ultra-portability on the other (mobile, etc). This “broad” spectrum of technologies was the basis of the NAB’s (not my) catchy catch phrase for this year’s event.

Academic Relevance Recent projects at Duke in 3D immersive worlds and the recently deployed DukeMobile application clearly demonstrate that Duke is also on the path to find new and more effective methods of communicating the wealth of information and ideas generated on and off campus using both immersive and mobile tools.

The current global economic climate has impacted all of the customers, vendors and service providers at the show. There was a theme in finding new, and more cost effective ways of producing and distributing media content. There were many more “CDN” (Content Delivery Network) service providers there than in years past. Many of our Ivy Plus colleagues are turning to these service providers rather than scaling out the required infrastructure to reach a global audience.

SONY, a leader in digital media tools, announced they have stopped producing content creation tools that are exclusively standard definition. While their new tools will support standard definition in addition to high definition, I believe it is a pretty strong statement that high definition is a direction we should continue to explore. SONY, Panasonic, JVC and others are looking beyond HD to 3D, 3G (very high bandwidth, not related to mobile 3G networks) and Quad Full HD (3840 x 2160) production. SONY’s content capture and editing tools are also largely tapeless utilizing hard disks, optical media and flash memory. The trend to store and move digital media files is also something to closely monitor.

These challenging economic times create a unique opportunity to spend time thinking and testing new technologies that may be still a few years away from maturity. Since the adoption of these tools may be delayed by budgetary constraints, we can use this time constructively to plan for the future and to deploy more cost effective solutions today.

I delivered a series of three live webcasts from Las Vegas (two in one day due to network difficulties at my hotel). The recordings of those webcasts (containing much of what is in this report) can be found at these links: NAB Live Webcast #1 & #2; NAB Live Webcast #3

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 4

Technology Review The technologies have been organized by the categories of services provided by OIT Academic Services’ Interactive Technology Services group. While some technologies may overlap, best effort was made to gather this information in as logical a way as possible.

Capture Technologies related to the recording and manipulation of digital media.

Best In Show: Immersive Media Creating 3D immersive experiences out of video was a big theme in this year’s events. We’ve been discussing creating immersive worlds using computer generated imagery at Duke, and now a new breed of tools are emerging to create immersive experiences using live and pre-recorded video. Immersive Media’s camera looked like the Jedi trainer from Star Wars. They demonstrated real time streaming panoramic video embedded into a webpage. It allowed the viewer to look in nearly 360° space at live video (there was a slight delay). Then, putting on some video glasses, I watched video of a basketball game and was able to turn my head and look in all directions as the video was playing. It felt completely immersive. This isn’t an either/or question between video and computer generated virtual worlds – rather an extension and another tool that could be utilized for creating learning experiences beyond 2D space.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 5

Play It Again: Video Delay Playback System For Performance Review Allen Avionics manufactures a broad line of custom passive electronic components that include precision LC filters of all types from 20 Hz to 40 GHz, as well as electromagnetic delay lines and lots of other things that are hard to pronounce. I really enjoyed speaking with them as they had an amazing entrepreneurial spirit. Most of the video delay products are counted in milliseconds. They saw a need from some of their customers in athletics and other performance related industries for longer video delay systems. When someone completes a floor exercise in gymnastics for example, they can then just walk to a monitor and see their routine immediately, delayed 30 seconds or so. They engineered this system out of standard components and even added a n optional DVR so that they can access the video files. They even added a wireless camera to allow coaches greater flexibility in camera position. There is literally one dial and one button on the system. They indicated other systems cost around $8000 and this one starts around $3500. I could see uses in athletics - viewing a golf swing right after you swing for example, or perhaps in dance or other performance rehearsals.

Marantz PDM620 Professional Handheld Recorder

 

I was impressed by the small size, easy of use and exceptional coverage, 360° around this solid-state recorder. The display was really easy to see and the unit was extremely lightweight. At about $399 street price, it would be interesting to see this in a head to head shoot out with the lower priced, 4 microphone Zoom unit.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 6

Zoom Audio Recorders The new Zoom h4n’s x-y pattern produces exceptional stereo separation. Its four channel mode allows you to simultaneously record from the microphones and from the dual XLR/1/4” jacks at the bottom. They had an impressive recording of two guitars recorded via the mic and through their pickups. The $149 H2 could be a great solution for recording conferences around large tables in Breedlove conference room. You also can use it as a USB mic or record from all 4 mics into one stereo file or two discrete files which can later be converted into surround sound.

Wireless Classroom Push To Talk Microphone System annel infrared wireless microphone system. The 6-channel receiver is $1060 with each mic costing $487 and the 2-channel system receiver costs $450 with each microphone costing $234. The infrared receivcan be mounted on the ceiling and the system is impervious to RF

ature that would allow the faculty member to mute allof the microphones in theroom. There’s a red ligharound the neck of the microphone that lights up to allow the faculty member to easily see who is speakingThis could be a very cost effective solution to building a classroom, as there is nowired integration required.The microphones can be set to run on battery or can be powered with an

Brand new from Azden, a 2-channel or 6 ch

er

interference. There is a “chairman” muting fe

t

.

included power transformer.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 7  

 

Tiny Microphone - Huge Sound I enjoyed a nice chat with thepresident of the company and microphone inventor, Bruce Meyers. The microphone is like a small ziti pasta tube that givit great side cancellation. It can be used for PA or recording. The tone was great and at $5it could have applications in recording any number of the visiting artists to Duke. The mounting system was a unique as the microphone. It used a ratchet type system that gently but firmly grasped the instrument and then the gooseneck allowed for optimal placement. Far superior to a sound you’d get from a

es

99,

n instrument pickup without hurting the instrument at all. They said that Yitzhak Perlman used this mic system on his precious Stradivarius violins. The cost includes the mic, gooseneck mounting system and transformer box.

Poddio - iPhone Audio Recording & Editing Tool Very cool. Poddio is a $10 iPhone application that can record audio, which you can then edit and mash up audio frommultiple clips

right on your iPhone. Once done, you can email it or FTP to any location of your choice. I also saw the

$80 Blue iPod microphone that sounds and looks pretty amazing. You will get Poddio free with the purchase of that microphone.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 8

Inline Mic to USB Converter

 

I’ve been on a quest to find a good quality USB headset/microphone for use with web conferencing primarily but that could also be used to record voice-overs with tools such as Camtasia or Adobe Captivate. Still no new headset mics for professional audio, but Shure just released the X2u for about $150. It is USB bus powered and features a headphone input, which allows you to use any microphone/headphone combination you’d like. Its form factor is pretcool being inline - no box to carry around - you could basically just leave it attach

en on a quest to find a good quality USB headset/microphone for use with web conferencing primarily but that could also be used to record voice-overs with tools such as Camtasia or Adobe Captivate. Still no new headset mics for professional audio, but Shure just released the X2u for about $150. It is USB bus powered and features a headphone input, which allows you to use any microphone/headphone combination you’d like. Its form factor is pretcool being inline - no box to carry around - you could basically just leave it attach

ty

ed to your microphone.

ty

ed to your microphone.

Sound Fixers With MIT Technology Built Right In Sound Fixers With MIT Technology Built Right In iZotopeiZotope is an audio technology company with MIT engineers finding unique solutions to audio recording challenges. RX is an audio restoration tool with a beautiful and elegantly designed interface. I watched it rebuild a waveform from an audio signal that was completely clipped. It is unique in that beneath the traditional linear audio waveform, it has a corresponding spectral display, which displays frequency space from front to back across the spectrum. This allows you to not only select points in time along the audio clip to process/delete, but you can select specific frequency ranges within a time segment to process. This is incredibly powerful. They demonstrated an attenuation of the scratching sound of an artist’s hands moving across the strings of a guitar without impacting the audio of the guitar underneath. The standard version of the software is $395 with the professional version (having

more sound design functionality) is $1195.

ANR-B is a hardware based adaptive real-time noise reduction tool. I’ve seen software tools such as Audacity do this fairly well as long as there was a nice sample of noise without other sound over it to feed to the system. This is also done at the expense of the dynamic range or frequency range of the audio clip. Their tool was able to significantly remove the sound of a car driving and water running in the background (two different clips) with very little if any blank audio of the noise to sample. List price is $4995. This might be a good tool for Duke Media Services to have to help save otherwise “bad” audio recordings as a service to the University.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 9

Transcoding Solutions

Rhozet Universal Media

 

Encoding Rhozet is a division of the 20 year professional encoding and media delivery company Harmonic. What distinguishes this product from the other transcoding solutions on the market is the quality of the algorithms used to convert the media. Rhozet is able to leverathe technology from Harmonic which only years ago sold for upwards of $70,000 and isnow included as free plugins in their $6000 (list) t

ge

ool.

Sorenson Media I spent a good deal of time with Kirk Punches, VP of Sales for Sorenson after seeing the powerful integration of Sorenson Squish into Harvard’s LMS. They have some exciting news coming up soon about some new service offerings. Sorenson Squeeze is a desktop application that does transcoding of video files into many different formats. Squish is a set of javascripts that allow you to embed video functionality into your web application such as drag and drop video upload for server side transcoding based on presets as well as accessing your computer’s webcam to record directly into your web application. We are hopefully getting some test code for Squish to see how that might be used to interface into our media applications and services.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 10

Q-Ball HD Video Camera Q-Ball allows users to obtain video in full HD quality from practically any location, day or night. It incorporates 10X optical zoom (5.1mm to 51mm) and smooth-accelerating pan/tilt motors in a weatherproof aluminum sphere with a diameter of only 115mm. Pretty high cost: About 11k for the camera, $5000 for the controller and another $2500 if you want the master black/color saturation control. This could have a use where a camera is required and environmental or architectural aesthetics are a concern.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 11  

Blackmagic USB Component Video/Stereo Video Recorder Component video/stereo audio to USB for $149? It must be black magic. Easy to use software allows you to select the device/format you want such as iPod or iPhone before you capture. You can also capture full quality for archival. It will also automatically “chunk” captured footage into user definable time chunks.

Vaddio/SONY HD Remote Control Camera System Vaddio makes camera control hardware and software and will sell you bundles of their equipment and cameras. They had mentioned that they’ve worked with Pratt & the Link in the past. I was looking for the Law School and found a great HD solution. For about $11,000 they can have a SONY HD Camera and remote camera control (color, etc). For another $4700 per camera, they could have the ability to remotely control the cameras via fiber. Only the HD cameras are fiber capable. For another $11k (soon to be reduced) you can also get the Vaddio production switcher/remote control unit. The SONY remote unit won’t work with the color shader (adjuster), as it can’t be daisy chained.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 12  

Azzurro Systems Integration Custom Remote Camera Control System Azzurro Systems Integration from New Jersey was showing their remote PTZ camera control system designed to control cameras over long distances via satellite. The system could be adapted for use within the Duke campus for example to remotely control cameras in remote classrooms. The company also does classroom design and systems administration and would welcome inquiries on implementation projects here at Duke.

Blackbird Camera Hand-Held Stabilization System It was nice to find a local Raleigh company at NAB, Camera Motion Research, LLC. These folks are a metal prototyping shop and designed this tool with a series of bends and weights to balance perfectly and respond to motion with great stabilization. At $695, it is far less expensive and complex than other systems such as the Steadycam. I gave them a run for their money with my light weight Flip. People have been complaining about the Filp’s instability (especially when I shoot). I’ll post the test shots to the DDMC site when I return.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 13  

SONY 3.8k Monitor and Thin Bezel Video Monitors SONY’s 3840x2160 native resolution will display a 4K image by scaling it appropriately, or you can use the included 1:1 mapping function. 2K will be fed using dual-link HD-SDI, and 3.8k will be fed using quad-link HD-SDI. Price is $60K + $5-10K for opboards. The thin bezel video panels were nice for multi-panel display walls like the one at the Link. Cost is about $3500 for the 47” panel.

tion

SONY NIPROS/1 Optical Fiber Studio System Sony announced the new NIPROS/1 optical fiber studio system to help meet the demand for affordable high definition (HD) production solutions. The new NIPROS/1 studio system is designed with small handy-type camcorders in mind. The system allows the adaptation of Sony HD handycam-type camcorders for use in studio operations and multi-camera field productions (AC or 12VDC operation). Shown here with the PMW-EX3 camcorder, cost will be less than $30k (list).

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 14  

Ultra-compact Self-Contained HD Camera The CUNIMA MCU measures just 33.5 x 38 x 111.5 mm but still manages to fit a complete HD/SD multi-format camera eliminating the need for an external camera control unit. It features the latest CMOS chip technology created by the German Fraunhofer Institute (creators of the MP3 format), allows for professional HD operations at a total weight of just 182g and an incredible maximum power consumption of 3W. Good applications would be for fixed installation field recording for research in tight locations where power is at a premium.

Portable Photo Booth With Lighting & Turntable The Photosimile 5000 from Ortery is capable of automatically creating professional still photos, 360-degree and spherical product animations. It features PC-controlled camera positioning, turntable and lighting as well as system and camera control software. Other features include remote image capture, annotation, editing, stitching, watermarking, direct image export and batch processing software capabilities.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 15  

3D Live There were a lot of approaches to producing live 3D, from cameras to a processor from JVC that took a standard image, applied some scary math, and generated a 3D image. The top photo is a twin lens camera from Panasonic that is part of their newly announced complete 3D production system. The bottom picture is a camera from Korean tech company Astrodesign. I couldn’t find anything in English, but here is a translation courtesy of Google. That’s me taking the picture in 3D on the image.

3dality Provides Training in 3D Stereography With prices ranging from $2000 - $8000, 3dality helps you raise your “3DIQ” with Los Angeles based courses in live action 3D stereography. As we do more research into immersive virtual worlds, I think there could be benefits to exploring creating immersive video worlds for training or experiencing environments that are either too dangerous or too remote to actually visit. It might be interesting to explore the creations of a virtual hospital using video rather than computer generated graphics to give someone an immersive view into an actual “day in the life” of our health system. Also, creating an immersive 3D archive of one of the many remote places visited by our Duke Engage students might help better communicate the feeling of being there, “on the ground”.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 16  

High Performance Flash Memory Drive Fusion-IO demonstrated 16 servers all mounting this one 320GB Flash memory drive installed on the pictured card. Once mounted, each server launched 64 VLC streams of digital video files that were resident on the Flash drive for a total of 1024 simultaneous streams of video from this one drive. Cost for the 320GB drive is about $20/gb or about $6400. They mentioned that they might already be speaking with Duke as this could have use in research computing whose work often requires high disk I/O performance. One more thing. There’s a spec on their brochure for the 320GB drive that says “Wear Leveling” sophisticated ECC – it’s rated at 48 YEARS of use. Years. I have more details on this demo if you are interested (there was nothing on their web site).

High Speed (Super) HD Camera Photron’s Fastcam SA-2 High Speed High Def Camera was pretty awesome. It captures 2,048 by 2,048 at full 12-bit resolution to over 1,000 fps and Full HD resolution (1920 x 1080) at 2,000 fps! They thought that they might already be working with someone at Duke, but I thought this could be useful in research work.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 17  

Detach & Roam Free: Wireless Camera Transmitters I looked at two systems for wireless high quality transmission of video from a camera: One from Broadcast Microwave Services (BMS) and one from an Australian company, Boxx. Both of these packs allow you to transmit SDI video and 2 channels of audio up to 2500 ft (line of sight) and 150 ft through walls. They use license-free technology – didn’t know you needed an actual broadcast license for some of this (the HD version of the BMS solution on the left for example required a license but the HD version of the BOXX solution on the right does not). I found the BMS solution first and asked about the price. If you have to ask… The transmitter was $21,455 and the receiver was $15,000. Wasn’t sure if I should be nodding or passing out, so I nodded and moved on. I ran into another company, BOXX shown here on the right. Seemed like it pretty much did the same thing as the other model. I asked the price and was told $9,000 for the set – transmitter and receiver. Now I don’t know everything about this technology and it could very well be two different products. I just thought it was really interesting the HUGE price difference between two seemingly similar technologies.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 18  

Mobile DTV One of the benefits of the “regular” TV transition to DTV, is the freeing up of broadcast frequencies. Mobile DTV was huge at the show this year. The delay in the scheduled transition (originally February now moved to June) has caused a hiccup in the roll out of Mobile DTV, but it is actually live in Las Vegas and a few other cities around the country. The photo above displays receiver proof of concepts at the MediaFlo booth that together with technology from Qualcomm. This is not Web streaming, but actual broadcast television with interactive components that can be viewed on portable devices. The photo above shows a USB adapter for a MacBook as well as a Bluetooth antenna that receives a signal and then transmits to the iPhone via Bluetooth. There will be a video of the format in action on the Duke Digital Media site.

Open Mobile Video Coalition The OMVC’s web site has a ton of great information on the DTV Mobile specification.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 19  

SONY HD POV Camera Last November Sony introduced a new full high definition compact point-of-view (POV) camera and solid-state recorder combination, model HXR-MC1. Its design separates the camera head from the control unit/recorder, giving you more flexibility to capture shots in video applications where increased mobility is required beyond the use of traditional hand-held or shoulder-mount cameras. Here’s a link to some test footage. List price is just under $3000.

Lighting There was a buh-zillion LED lighting companies on the floor this year compared to only a guhzillion last year. Another victim of the economy. There were some notable lights to talk about.

Kelvin TILE The Kelvin TILE light from Element Labs (pictured left) mixes colored and white LEDs to let you achieve a wide range of color temperatures from 2200K - 6500K. I lowered the exposure on my camera so you could better see the different color LEDs.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 20  

Florescent Lighting From Wescott LED’s are not the only game in town for “green” lighting. Wescott Lighting has the Spiderlite TD3 above which lists for just over $300 and can use florescent, tungsten or studio strobes. They are super bright and super efficient and offer great flexibility.

LED Kiss Lights Besides the studio lights, I saw a lot more “kiss” lights which mount on a camera and provide great coverage when shooting someone close up. Perhaps you’ve seen a ring of lights in the eyes of a model oactress? The one on the left from

r Gekko

had a cool system of color filters that snap over the ring using magnets. The one on the right used a lot of multi-color lights to try to achieve different color temperatures.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 21  

Collaborate Technologies related to sharing information and ideas utilizing digital media tools.

Telestration - It’s Not Just For Madden Anymore There were a large number of telestration solutions that I thought might be effective for use in the classroom. Many of these are meant to allow the faculty to draw directly on the display rather than using a device such as the Sympodium which is more like projecting someone drawing a piece of paper. My thought is by using these “write on” technologies, faculty could engage their students more vs. having their head down and drawing.

U-Touch? Sure! Pictured above is the Panasonic 103” plasma screen. Still the largest screen I saw at the show and lists for around $70,000. The folks from U-Touch were showing their optical sensor and software that allowed you to write on the screen using a big wooden stick. Literally. Their software tracked very well and was very responsive, featuring the tools you’d expect to mark up both images and video. You had the ability to save screen captures or record video with your annotation (didn’t get to see that work properly). They were using Content Interface’s software to display the images they were annotating. This was the software that I found at a previous NAB and Duke purchased for a ISIS class last year. Using optical sensors around the frame will last longer than membranes do and they don’t require any special tool to use the interactive software (hence the big wood stick).

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 22  

Extron Annotator The Annotator is a hardware-based device that allows for real time annotations over high-resolution computer and video graphics. Also included is the video scaling functionality you’d expect from an Extron device. There are models going from a simple scan converted output up to full HD-SDI output.

Point HD E-mediavision’s Point HD’s price tag of $18,000 was indicative of its ability to telestrate on HD footage. It is an incredibly flexible tool that allows you to bring in any image file (TGA) and use as an icon. You can even bring inimage sequence to have animated icons. The interface is also very customizable and can be stored in sets for particular applications to make things easier for the presenter. They h

an

adn’t considered the education market before but were interested in working out a deal for a software-only version.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 23  

Pointmaker The Pointmaker telestration system is quite basic in its functionality. It is very simple to use and inexpensive - around $2,500. A dedicated keyboard controls its hardware, and you can telestrate either by using the supplied tablet or - as in this picture - using a touch screen. This is the same touch screen we saw earlier on the Panasonic 103” using a combination of the Content Interface software and U-Touch’s own annotation software.

FingerWorks PC At only $600, the software-only FingerWorks PC seemed like the best deal with regard to annotation software. It had many of the same features as the other hardware based tools including many ways to modify the annotations and the ability to use graphics to annotate. It also had a built in PowerPoint player to allow you to run your PowerPoint from inside of their application and have the full set of annotation tools.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 24  

Convey Technologies related to the distribution and display of digital media.

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) A focus of my visit was to begin the exploration of streaming service providers to see if they could offer us cost savings and greater scalability compared to creating our own infrastructure. Many providers offer content management systems (CMS) and will package CDN services with their CMS. The CMS could provide us with more accurate statistics and analytics, and many provide easily customizable players using web 2.0 interactive tools. This is the first step in a long process to determine if this is the right time for Duke to consider a CDN to help bolster the streaming services we currently offer our customers. Many of our IvyPlus peer institutions have either fully transitioned to CDNs for streaming or utilize a CDN service as part of their service offerings. With globalization in our future, it’s possible that a CDN may have a place in conjunction with our internally hosted services - an adjunct, not a replacement.

Limelight Networks We’ve heard a lot about Limelight Networks CDN over the last few weeks. It is acurrent CDN of Harpo.com and will be used by Harpo Productions to stream Ms.Winfrey’s speech at Duke’s commencement this year. A number of our Ivy+ peersuse Limelight as their streaming service in lieu of having their own streamingservers. Many of the value-add media management/transcoding companies resellLimelight’s CDN services as part of their package. Rates start at about $1000/mo

for an annual contract, which allows for 750GB of delivered streams per month. The media can be stored on our servers or their servers with the latter option costing 50 cents per GB. They provide a rudimentary player, but most of their clients use the JW Player (which we are using for our Flash streaming server). If you have an annual contract, they will usually allow you to do live events as part of your allocated throughput. If you are not already a customer, it will cost between $3-4,000 for an event.

Kaltura

 

- Open Source Streaming

Kaltura is a commercial company that has released all of their software into the open source community. They will license you a package that will include re-sold Limelight CDN services with their software. The two most powerful features include the ability to browse YouTube live from within their interface and then utilize videos from YouTube (or your own content) into a really cool mash up tool (shown above). The software is really well designed and could be powerful for faculty to create and publish content. Since the

software is open source, we could have access to make modifications such as Shibboleth integration.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 25

Endavo Media

 

Endavo Media provides a CDN with upload/transcoding to FLV, integrated live streaming, and FTP (batch) upload. The interface is fully skinnable including tabs and features such as comments, links,ratings, etc. Their enterprise$1000/mo for 500GB storage (which is a lot for Flash), 1TB of throughput per month, unlimited admin users, and unlimited branded players. You can have access to download your transcoded media unlike YouTube. The embedded player can be tied to a specific URL so that you can

Shibbolize the host Web page and even if someone gets the embed code, it won’t work on any other Web page.

plan is

Brightcove Media

Brightcove sells Web-based, hosted media asset management and organization tools packaged with content delivery network services from Limelight. Their “studio” module allows you to upload, transcode and organize your media assets into multiple playlists. Their publishing module allows you to build custom players quickly. Their distribution module allows you to email permalinks to the media and/or allow publication to various social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace. Their analytics tool allow for easy integration with Google analytics, which is (according to them) soon expanding on video analytics such as length of viewing on a specific clip.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 26

 

ement

Abacast – Streaming Live, On Demand and Digital Rights ManagAbacast is a CDN that offers many value-added services in vertical markets suchas education. Their offerings combine live and on-demand streaming as well as services for digital rights management and secured assets. Unique to them is an

offering to synchronize PowerPoint presentations to video content as well as moderated Q&A.

The Platform – A “Media Publishing System” With Reporting, Transcoding and Customizable Players The Platform bundles CDN services with a number of value adds such astranscoding and customizable players. Their reporting engine sounds pretty

robust and at around $2000/mo minimum may be worth further consideration. They also offer storage, or media cbe supplied from our own servers and have an SDK and have a multi-tiered administration system which would wowell in our environment. Their “community tool kit” allow you to integrate comments, ratings, tags, favorites, and polls into your players.

an rk

Vidizmo - Web based learning object creation tool How to describe vidizmo… You could call it a Web-based version of Adobe Presenter and Adobe Premiere. It allows you to author (all within a Web browser) learning materials that can include audio, video, still images, forms and documents. You can easily set chapter marks and insert quizzes after select chapters which (if desired) would not allow the learner to advance until they completed the program. The tool can be used either as a hosted model or a licensed model. It also has content based searching – while not using audio to text yet, it does use any text in PowerPoint slides as a way to index the content. A major challenge is that it is Silverlight from Microsoft based. I would have had more screen shots, but when I tried to run the sample footage, it kept telling me I needed a new version of Silverlight installed and then Silverlight said I had the right version installed so it wouldn’t run on my Mac.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 27

TVU Networks - Like a hardware-based uStream.tv The high quality that sets TVU Networks apart is due to the use of a dedicated encoding/streaming appliance and proprietary player. Purchasing their appliance provides unlimited CDN support as well as the ability to gain revenue from your stream. I spoke with them a bit to see if their appliance could be used as a way to move high quality streams across the Duke network to a possible centralized capture point. This would be in lieu of running dedicated media fiber around campus. The cost per box (in the multiple 1000s) makes it less cost effective than just installing capture appliances inside of classrooms. The quality was quite good so I’m including it in my report to see if there are other possible applications around campus.

Digisoft.tv – pay per view technologies Digisoft.tv delivers pay-per-view set top box and Web delivered video technologies mostly to the hotel industry. We had a discussion to see if their technologies could be utilized to deliver content to our students rather than checking out DVDs at the library. The idea is that these pay-per-view companies have already adopted a digital rights management process that is acceptable to the Hollywood studios. They have also licensed many titles that may be of academic interest to our students. It would be interesting to consider a hybrid model where a service like this could offer entertainment based content for a fee to our students, which in turn could subsidize the academic oriented content which we would provide at no cost to students. They would need to digitize any of the content we would want to deliver via their system. This is a concept I’ve been thinking about for a while and they were interested in discussion possibilities more if we thought it was worth pursuing.

 

Static – free social broadcasting network Static is a web 2.0 free site that allows you to broadcast to Twitter, MySpace and Facebook from one site. There are already ways tobroadcast from one service to another, but Static is hoping you put your media with them to help build a viral audience. It’s interesting that this is

from the company

OneSite that I spoke with last year around their appliance that provided a Ning-like social media network within our own network.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 28

Mobile Video Broadcast For The Classroom This definitely falls into the category of not using technology as it is intended. The Ventus 1.0 Signal generator

 

is intended for chip manufactures to use a test mobile digital television broatransmitter. It will broadcast a mobile DTV signal about 100 yards in all directions that can be picked up by a standard mobile DTV receiver. I thought an interesting application for this would be to install into a classroom to provide an interactive video broadcast to the students hand held receivers - allowingthem to view and interact with the video. At $3500 it was pretty reasonably priced, but there is the issue of getting a lito broadcast the signa

as dcast

cense l.

Avatar Consortium - Research Around Media Archival The Avatar Consortium brings together commercial entities (Xyratex and Ovation Data Services) with research organizations (BBC R&D, University of Edinburgh and IT Innovation research center) to think about how to not only store, but also access archives of large media datasets. They hope to have their work productized in the next 12-18 months. A representative from the U of Edinburgh demonstrated their virtualized intelligent file system. It seemed pretty similar to ideas being discussed at Duke around integrating archival into the “workflow” people already use by abstracting where/how the file is stored from the metadata about the file itself. Interesting stuff to keep an eye on.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 29

iPharro Media - Find Media Wherever It Is Hiding iPharro Media’s product uses a proprietary video fingerprinting algorithm to search various forms of media including the internet for matching media. Applications for this technology include advertisers looking to confirm broadcast of their advertisements, digital rights management - looking for your media across broadcast, mobile, online, etc as well as an ingest tool to create searchable metadata for your media asset management system. I think the latter could be used at Duke to help catalog the 100s of hours per month of recorded lectures. It could also have applications for our News and Communication folks to search for Duke-generated media being broadcast anywhere. The technology was developed at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute who invented the MP3 file format. I was able to meet with them at the show as well.

Digital Signage – Tightrope Media Carousel Although I wasn’t on the look out for digital signage solutions this year, this one caught my eye due to its nicely designed user interface for creating content and its relatively low price - $6500 for the server hardware and software and $500 per player hardware and software. You can purchase as a software-only solution as well. It has a very modular design that allows you to pull in information dynamically from a variety of sources such as video content or directory information from a database – on the same page at the same time.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 30  

Cool Stuff

Technologies that don’t fit nicely into other categories.

Indiana University’s WTIU Goes HD With Help from SONY WTIU partnered with SONY to outfit their production studio HD - from cameras through switching and all peripheral gear. The studio is almost exclusively run by students from the over 1000 undergraduates in their broadcasting program. WTIU is the local PBS affiliate in the Bloomington area and is funded through University funds as well as PBS and underwriting. The project seemed to be

subsidized by SONY. I met with their assistant Chief Engineer who welcomed a visit should we decide to move forward with an HD production studio on campus. We could benefit from further discussions around technology as well as their partnership with SONY.

No Longer Just A Dream - A Glimpse Into The Future From NICT In Japan National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) statement of purpose speaks well to their corner of the convention: “While having been invited by NAB, this time, NICT would like to exhibit and introduce the research results of "Basic Technologies of Universal Communications" having a catch phrase, "More Easily, More Realistically, and More Freely.”

The multi-sensory interaction system allows you to “touch” an ancient copper mirror with a pen that provides forced feedback and stereoscopic glasses and sound.

The “gCubik” system allows you to share and grasp and interact with 3D objects, which are projected on all 6 sides of this cube.

The “Universal Media Research Center” display focused on defining remote presence experiences using captured media vs. computer generated images (virtual worlds)

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 31  

3D spatial sound reproduction is shown in the first picture on the left. These three balls contain 26 speakers each corresponding to the 26 microphones used to record the (3) musicians, one of which is shown in the picture on the far right. They are placed in the room in the same position in which the musicians were in the recording studio. You could then walk around the speakers and it sounded as if you were walking around musicians that were standing in those points. They used ProTools to send each track to a discreet amplifier, which fed a discreet speaker. The sense of presence was astounding.

Speaking of beyond HD, they were showing the demo from the last few years of 8k resolution video with 22.1 surround sound. I had heard rumors of 12k video, but alas, there was none. For perspective, high definition television is sometimes referred to as “1k” and film quality is referred to as “2k”.

Using a tool I am VERY familiar with, a Wii remote, you are able to interactively pan and zoom across a video image as it is being played back. NTT from Japan calls this “Interactive Panoramic Video Technologies”. The photo on the right shows the three HD images that were captured and then composited on top of each other. You could isolate the bass player and watch him (if you were like me) or could focus on any other element in the video program while maintaining resolution since the image is actually (3) HD images stitched together. Makes you the director of the programming. This is similar to the idea that Andrew Schretter from Duke’s Math department has discussed doing with a single HD image.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 32  

Gratuitous iPhone Use Why use an iPhone as a teleprompter? Well, because you can. OK, it was cool, but what if someone calls during your shoot?

Wireless VGA and HDSMI Video These wireless VGA and HDMI send and receive units from Gefen can send resolutions as high as 1080i 100 feet with no wires. Each pair of VGA is $599 and the HDMI is $899.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 33  

Digital Snakes The thought of running 64 (or any number of) microphone cables through a wall could be daunting if you are building a facility here at Duke with our big stone walls. These new digital snakes allow you to run multiple microphone signals through just a few fiber cables. This also allows you to run over much longer distances.

The Aphex Anaconda The Anaconda requires microphone pre-amps (at $1500 each for 8) and a set of (2) transceivers (at $2500) to convert your microphone signals to optical digital. It will remain optical digital on the other end for connection to any number of professional audio devices.

The Whirlwind Connect The Whirlwind Connect features 32 mic/line inputs, 8 line level outputs, variable input gain and phantom power for around $2500. It transmits via a single CAT-5 cable. Pretty cool.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 34  

Christie’s Projector Auto-Stack Multi-projector Alignment System Christie’s new AutoStack software allows you to very quickly align two projectors on one screen through the use of a feedback camera. The camera feeds the software, which processes the images to produce a visually seamless image – even fixing throw off at the edges of the screen. You just pick the four points of the screen on the camera feed and voilá – perfect stitching.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 35  

Outdoor all-weather display systems The folks at Display Devices had lots of cool mounts and stands, but they also had their own super bright LED backlight to boost this panel to 2800 c/m2 for use outside. As comparison, the new NEC “super bright LCD” is around 1500 c/m2There’s a light sensor to automatically dim the panel at night so it is not overpowering. They would want to partner with Outdoor HDTV as they’ve created watertight enclosures to mount panels outside. I was thinking of possible uses out in the Plaza or perhaps in Tent City.

Confidence Monitor Cart Also from Display Devices, I thought this might have unique applications in a classroom installation where the monitor could be rolled out in front of the faculty so that he could see a remote location or video playback and still face the class.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 36  

Rugged Computing For Field Work This ruggedized computer from Acme Portable (no coyotes were around) would be great for doing field research or field recording. The two screens fold on top of each other and the computer is built into the back.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 37  

Edirol Visual Sampler

The Edirol Visual Sampler holds up to 72 video/audio clips and allows you to easily call up any one at any time from the unit’s internal memory. This is used sometimes for concerts to control videos in the background. I thought it might be an interesting tool for someone from Visual Studies to experiment creating live and/or interactive artwork as the video can be called up through various remote control means. Cost is around $1300.

.

4G - Mobile Video Conferencing

So if it wasn’t confusing enough figuring out the difference between 3G high bandwidth digital video and 3G mobile data (and adding 3D for good measure), 4G (mobile data format) was announced at the show. Verizon is sponsoring this initiative with AT&T committed to adoption. The new format requires a different radio and completely different infrastructure to support since it is IP Based. Think of it like our recent change from on old telephone system to Voice over IP.

Sprint going WiMax, which will use the same radios and infrastructure.

4G has a theoretical max of 100mBit/sec but will be more like around 5-10mBit/sec once people start sharing towers. This higher bit rate should allow things like two-way video conferencing or multiple simultaneous video streams playing. Now we just need cell phone makers to put cameras on the front!

This will start to be deployed in 2010 and will be backward compatible to the 3G phones.

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 38  

Cool Refrigerated Racks CP Cases offers equipment racks with traditional compressor technology air conditioning or thermoelectric air conditioning. The racks feature internal insulation to conserve energy, without compromising the effectiveness of the anti-vibration mounts. As we deploy classrooms into unknown areas around the globe, having a self-contained eco system for our equipment might be highly desired.

 

Hot Portable Studio Racks Mobile Studios offers a really clever rack system that allows you to quickly unfold and start broadcasting. They will do all the integration and sell you a complete turnkey system out of the box or to your custom specs. They have an HD system that lists for just under $40,000

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 39

eBook reader from Brother Brothers, the p-touch people, have released a Kindle type reader released only in Japan. There’s an SD card inside or you can “print” to the device using Bluetooth. I was struck with the clarity of the readout. There is no backlighting. Estimated cost is around $1000 per unit. He mentioned that they were very interested in the academic market, but at that price, it doesn’t seem likely. Here’s some English info.

Captioning Every so often, I see a request float by on the Duke digital media community list looking for a caption company. I grabbed some cards on my travels around the show floor to create a directory of sorts for people to use if needed.

CP Communications 800.762.4254 / Michael Mason, President / michael.mason@cpcomms.com / http://www.cpcomms.com

“talking” type Captions 310.933.1900 / Elizabeth George, Vice-President / liz@talkingtypecaptions.com / http://www.talkingtypecaptions.com

Aberdeen Captioning 800.688.6621 x211 / Nicole Stone, Account Executive / nicole@abercap.com / http://abercap.com

Caption Solutions http://www.captionsolutions.com

Video Caption Corporation 800.705.1203 / sales@vidcaps.com / http://www.vidcaps.com

Duke University NAB 2009 Show Report Page 40