Maxon’s Cinema 4D was used to create this image from “A Kinght’s Tale” Photo credit: Columbia Pictures

by Dan Ochiva & Joe Herman

Here’s the second part of our series on what we consider the 10 best products of 2010. You can read part 1 here.

Panasonic AF100

When Canon and Nikon added video to their DSLRs and begat HDSLRs, you could almost hear the shudder that went through the camcorder divisions of Sony and Panasonic. Suddenly, highly portable, relatively inexpensive and easy-to-use cameras could create HD video with the shallow depth of field that was long the hallmark of the high end of professional cameradom.

With its AF100 camcorder, Panasonic turns the tables again, this time using the four-thirds format sensor popularized in new still/video cameras that started delivering in 2008 to take on HDSLRs, which suffer with their own issues, including rolling shutters, moiré patterns, and an awkward-for-shooting-video form factor.

Panasonic’s AF100 is now gaining fans, rapidly. While slightly ungainly to hold, the camcorder offers a good feature set including the ability to use a wide range of interchangeable lenses, XLR mic inputs, uncompressed audio, and external monitoring. Other useful features include a modest though useful slow motion setting (which can be initiated with the touch of an external button), zebras for focusing, and a waveform/vectorscope

With a list price just under $5000 (expect to lay out around $7500 for a more usable setup with added storage, a camera rig, and an added lens) this camera could set the bar for the other single sensor camcorders due to release at NAB in April.

Nvidia Quadro (Fermi Series)

It’s tough in some ways to single out graphics cards for inclusion in any year’s list of best tech, since the blandishments of manufacturers make every new model seem a breakthrough.

But Nvidia has done something considerable with its latest Quadro series. (The previous series uses an “FX” after “Quadro”, which the new series drops.) The Fermi chip integrates three billion transistors, about three times the number of transistors in Nvidia’s most powerful graphics chips now on the market. Tom Halfhill, senior analyst at Microprocessor Report says “Fermi surpasses anything announced by NVIDIA’s leading GPU competitor (AMD).”

The cards offer 2GB or more of the latest speedy GDDR5 memory, the memory bandwidth itself grows by an additional 35 percent and the chip sports up to 512 CUDA processing cores, enabling an average 5x faster graphics performance over the prior FX series. With its considerable parallel processing chops and extensive support for programming languages like C++, the chipset will also be more attractive to HPC (high-performance computing) users. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, for one, is building what it’s calling the world’s fastest supercomputer using the cards.

Besides top performance in 3D and graphics apps, folks in our industries will like the continued integration with the rest of post via Nvidia’s SDI Capture card which enables multi-stream, uncompressed video (up to 12-bit color) to be streamed directly to Quadro SDI-enabled GPU memory. Support for the Quadro SDI output card also delivers integrated graphics-to-video enabling 2D and 3D effects to be composited in real-time with 2K, HD, and SD video.

Maxon Cinema 4D, version 12

Version 12 of Maxon’s Cinema 4D is a great upgrade to this versatile modeling and rendering software. We’ve already reported about its growing importance, especially among motion graphics users. Version 12 has a host of new features and enhancements but we think that the new dynamics system and linear workflow are the most important. Its character animation tools are also top-notch. In the New York Design community, Cinema 4D is a very popular application and version 12 continues the tradition of quality German engineering. Our recent review gives the details on why we like the new version of the app.

If you’ve kept track of the tech details related to Apple’s iPad announcement, it’s been pretty hard to miss Steve Job’s dismissal of Adobe Flash for the new device—he’s already made known that it has no place in the iPhone OS.

It’s not personal, of course, since so many Mac-based creatives rely on Adobe’s justly top-of-the-heap Photoshop, After Effects, et.al.

You can catch up with some of Job’s arguments in Ryan Tate’s article in Valleywag which details what happened when Jobs presented the iPad to Wall Street Journal editorial staff

Flash, as Adobe seems to constantly point out, is nearly everywhere on the Web and installed in computers as well, helping to make the Internet colorful with animation and graphics. Jobs’ anti-Flash arguments are fairly well known too: that Flash consumes too many CPU cycles, presents too many security holes, and finally is an out-dated technology—something he doesn’t want forward looking iPhone and iPad users to contend with.

But while Tate describes Jobs’ as “brazen in his dismissal of Flash”, the reasons are more complex than those most noised about. John Gruber on his Daring Firelball blog says “the larger issue goes beyond performance. Apple sees the web as a platform based on open standards. Flash isn’t part of that.”

Even if those performance issues are finally solved, Gruber argues, Apple won’t include it in the iPhone OS since, as he believes, Apple wants to control that whole OS. Apple is keeping the iPad OS closed too, something that’s not been the case with OS X (for which Jobs has blamed Flash for a great number of Mac crashes and other flaky performance issues).

To replace Flash, Jobs and Apple are pushing the interactive capabilities in HTML5, an open source standard not controllable by any one company. (HTML5 is a huge rewrite of the code that underlies the whole Web, so it will be implemented over a very long–in Web years–12 year time frame from now, even though some minor capabilities are now working with a first considerable stage planned by 2012. There’s more about this complex roll-out here.)

But on 9to5 Mac, Seth Weintraub in a blog entitled “The upcoming Apple vs. Flash battle” says that bringing tools to market to build interactive applications rivaling those now on hand for Flash/AIR are “years away at best”.

While Weintraub agrees that the first mobile devices running Flash will burn through batteries, he thinks the situation will improve quickly with more potent CPUs and GPUs coming to market. This will actually benefit Apple’s rival Android, as devices with Flash “instantly have more “applications” on them than the iPhone.”

So all is not gloomy in Adobe-land. Even of more import to anyone creating graphics and editing video, says millimeter’s Trevor Boyer, is Adobe’s upcoming release of Creative Suite 5, which will charge forward with support for 64-bit operation only (OSX 10.6 or Win7 64) while introducing the Mercury Playback Engine, a completely retooled codec wrangler.

The latter will supposedly be a game changer compared to what’s currently available as it uses a computer’s GPU (i.e. Nvidia only at this point) and CPU in parallel to deliver capabilities including real-time debayering of Red camera files (Red sells a $5k card to do that now), native Red 4K multicam editing, and Red keying; speedy AVCHD playback and scrubbing; zipping through nine layers of P2 files at a time; and accelerated rendering for exports.

Mercury is set to support Geforce GTX285, nVidia Quadro CX,FX4800, or FX580, with newer nVidia cards added to the list as they are released.

At the moment all of that quick, speedy editing comes courtesy of Adobe’s upcoming CS5 Premiere NLE only (look for it in late Spring). Photoshop and After Effects will surely have speed ups of their own going 64-bit native and supporting Nvidia’s Cuda architecture, but so far the Mercury Playback Engine looks like an Adobe exclusive.

Whether that makes it any more attractive to Avid and Final Cut Pro users doesn’t look probable, but the technology, bundled tightly within the whole CS5 suite, could prove attractive to many more potential users worldwide. It should be especially tempting to those shooting HD with DSLRs from Canon, Nikon, and others; this fast growing contingent is one Adobe will be targeting with the new suite. And why not? They’re one group already overwhelmingly tied to Photoshop as their top app.

I attended Panasonic Broadcast’s pre-NAB press conference this past week and heard more about the AG-3DA1 camcorder, now due to ship this fall.

Weighing in around 6 1/2lbs., the camcorder seems a bit ungainly, though it’s adequately balanced when handled. You probably won’t want to do all that much standard hand-held operation anyway, since careful setting of the convergence point is key to minimizing eye-strain on viewers. Panasonic plans to offer a remote control so an operator can dynamically adjust convergence, thus changing the depth of field experienced in 3D images.

The device uses a dual CMOS imaging front-end: six 1/4in. imagers that record dual 24Mbps streams of AVCHD to SD/SDHC cards. Bob Harris, VP of marketing and product development for Panasonic, said that the company is accepting pre-orders for the camcorder with a $1,000 non-refundable deposit for the $21,000 camcorder.

“We jumped into the mainstream with that lower price point,” says Harris, comparing it to the expensive, awkward to use prism systems. Rather than serving an established desire, the move to launch an industrial, even prosumer-pitched product (not his words) came about, Harris said, from the parent companies desire to establish itself in the hoped for, and still nascent, 3D television market for consumers.

At CES Panasonic joined with three other top selling TV manufacturers (Samsung Electronics, Sony, LG Electronics) to pitch their latest versions of 3D TVs, which are claimed to price at not much of a premium to standard large monitors. Panasonic set up a “home theater” built around its massive 103-inch, plasma 3D screen to show clips from recent films, as well as 3D footage from NBC’s broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.

Harris claimed the company was surprised by the interest expressed for the camcorder since its release was announced at CES. Initial interest, according to the company, seems to highlight practical, industrial uses, everything from store kiosks, dental surgery to military, such as showing mid-air refueling.

Director of marketing Joe Facchini admitted that he doesn’t see much theatrical application, unless it’s an image you’d be satisfied with showing output from a standard camcorder with 1/4in. imagers. While Harris remarked on the possibility of going up- or downscale from the current model, no commitment came on either a higher-end system–which would require some sort of complicated rig, at least with current design thinking, to hold two standard-size camcorders–or an even less expensive consumer version.

With a mandate from higher ups to find some way to support the new lines of 3D monitors now set to come out of factories such as Panasonic’s latest in Western Japan (due to come on line this year), I’d bet it’s not too long before we see a much less expensive, simple-to-use model.

While the majority of time was spent discussing the camcorder, the Panasonic management also announced a 25.5in. 3D LCD production monitor, the BT-3DL2550, with a 1920×1200 resolution, dual HD-SDI inputs and a DVI-D input for line-by-line or side-by-side display. The monitor uses passive glasses, said to make more sense in a potential multi-3D monitor environment, which would make syncing active-shutter glasses impractical.

The Panasonic team went on to note a few other products, such as the AG-MSU10 P2 Media Storage Unit, a portable “workflow tool” aimed at simplifying the process of backing-up or aggregating P2 content to a larger removable solid-state drives.

But it was striking about how much wasn’t said: from the 3D camcorder’s unremarked upon third party who will build the optical front-end (no specifics were offered), to the exact rationale behind a multi-billion dollar international company that’s one of the major video systems manufacturers asking for a $1000 deposit before it will “build to order” your 3D camera—a first in memory.

Or indeed, why the product offerings were so slim compared to previous years. There was nothing significant in this pre-NAB line-up besides a tentative 3D move, although other unspecified new products are to be announced at NAB itself.

Put part of this seeming caution to the fact of the company’s 14-percent overall drop in sales in fiscal 2009: Digital AVC Networks sales decreased by 13-percent, with sales of video and audio equipment decreasing 6-percent from the previous year, due mainly to sluggish sales in digital AV products such as plasma TVs and digital cameras, according to a Panasonic press release last May.

The company responded by accelerating business restructuring initiatives (integrating and closing of manufacturing sites), withdrawing from unprofitable businesses, and reassigning and downsizing of workforce.

Pretty grim. Panasonic blamed the worldwide recession and shrinking demand, along with changes in market structure, including a “demand shift to lower-priced products.”

That was the outlook last May. But maybe it’s not quite so grim today. At the beginning of the month, Panasonic reported third-quarter 2010 profit jumped more than threefold due to “cost cuts and robust TV sales”, allowing it to raise its forecast for the year above market expectations. (Safety issues at Toyota however, its biggest corporate customer, could affect its performance, casting a shadow over its longer-term prospects, according to Panasonic.)

Growing demand for LCD televisions pushed most of third quarter growth, according to company stats, but Panasonic said it still planned to cut fixed costs by some $4.1 billion this financial year, up from a lower target announced earlier.

Uncertainty about consumer demand in overseas markets, still hobbled by the high levels of consumer debt and an uncertain labor market, make the rest of the year a difficult haul for Panasonic, Sony, and other Japanese exporters according to Marc Desmidt, COO of Asian equities at BlackRock in Hong Kong.

So don’t expect a flood of big, ground-breaking product introductions at this year’s NAB, from Panasonic or other major manufacturers. That required $1000 deposit? Put that to mid-level management at the video division proving to higher ups that they too are playing cautious. Expect to see a lot of that cautious thinking this year.

–Updated 16 Feb 2010

Attracting interest as Sony’s first AVCHD codec’d camcorder—it’s an upgraded variant of the already successful HDV-based HVR-Z5E, a camcorder that won best of show at IBC 2008—the Sony HXR-NX5U NXCAM turned up at the Sony/Band Pro open house this past week. The relaxed event (okay, not that many folks turned up, which I attribute to minimal outreach) gave me a chance to have a closer look.

Sony’s Juan Martinez at the Band Pro demo

Also helping was the camera demo’r, none other than Sony’s Juan Martinez, who, I understand, had much input as to camcorder’s final design, which offers loads of practical, useful touches. That’s because Martinez, who came over from JVC and is now senior manager of acquisition systems at Sony, not only has plenty of ideas of his own as to what makes a good camcorder, but ferries requests and info between Sony’s engineers in Japan and the many DPs, directors, and others that he listens to here.

There are plenty of good ideas here. Simple ones count, such as the ability to change peaking colors for focusing: a red, white, or blue edge around the subject in the viewfinder, for example, makes it much faster and easier to focus, as a thin edge pops in and out of resolution, while the different colors allow choice of a color that best stands out with the subject’s color.

The basic images the camcorder turns out look improved over comparable HDV offerings anyway, as it’s using the high quality Z5 lens and front end along with the more up-to-date AVCHD codec. No matter how good the Carl Zeiss zoom lens used in the earlier comparable Sony camcorders might be in the abstract, by developing its G Series zoom in-house Sony has been able to optimize the optics and mechanics of the lens for the sensors. The wide angle of view available with the bottom of the zoom–29.5mm—is great for filming in-doors and other tight spots.

Another useful new feature, SteadyShot Active Mode, uses the built-in accelerometer and other technology to reduce the impact of camera shake and movement. If you can hold the camcorder and walk without too much movement, this allows you to turn out a convincing tracking shot without relying on a bulky, expensive stabilization rig.

Here’s a list of some of the more useful pages I’ve found on the NXCAM:

DV User editor Nigel Cooper, who had early access to a prototype NXCAM, offers his take here.

If you don’t care to read, here’s a short video of Cooper’s overview.

Find Adam Wilt’s first review, which I mentioned earlier, as posted on the ProVideo Coalition website here.

D.W. Leitner’s first take on the millimeter site is here.

Here’s a little back and forth on DVInfo.net discussing the merits of the Z5 versus Nexcam.

Nothing especially enlightening here as yet, but Creative Cow usually runs good forum pages, so wait until this heats up.

Not exactly sure why this would be useful or interesting before the camera has shipped (too little footage available), or after it’s hit the market en masse (too much footage), but here’s a Vimeo page devoted to footage from anyone shooting with the NXCAM.

Finally, here’s the pre-order page at B&H where they quote a $3999 price that will supposedly be lower if you make the now time-honored Web sales move to “add it to your cart”. I could never exactly figure the logic of that ploy, although I suppose it’s similar to the enticement a spider might use on its own web site to urge its target to take a step that’s just a little further into its clutches…

Sony’s NXCAM has great specs at its expected price of under $5k

Get an RSVP in to Band Pro early if you want a chance to have a little hands on time with Sony’s intriguing new NXCAM at the open house this coming Wednesday, January 27th.

That’s not all Sony will be bringing to the daylong (well, 11am-7pm if you’re counting) smooze fest at Band Pro East. Sure, it’s a bit of a trek to their office–almost to the West Side highway at 645 West 27th St. But outside of NAB in Las Vegas, this might be one of your best opportunities to check out the buzz causing NXCAM, which records full raster 1920 x 1080 images via AVCHD to a removable 128GB Flash drive. (For a good, initial overview of the NXCAM, check out D.W. Leitner’s article here. )

Also on tap: the new SRW-9000 CineAlta camcorder, the latest EX cameras (the shoulder-mount PMW-350 and the EX1R), the new BVM-L231 evaluation monitor, and more.

Band Pro’s Jeff Cree and Sony’s Juan Martinez are among the tech guys in attendance who can answer your questions.

However, it’s not a huge space and there’s food, a combo that means you’ll have to RSVP to reserve a spot: send an email to RSVP@BANDPRO.COM or call 818.841.9655

Sony’s NXCAM

Adam Wilt, who always turns in a good review, checks out Sony’s soon to release NXCAM “Prime” in a review on the ProVideo Coaltion website. The Prime, a full-resolution, handheld AVCHD camcorder (1080i, 1080p, 720p AVCHD and standard-definition MPEG-2) records to Sony’s Memory Sticks and/or a snap-on 128 GB Flash Memory Unit.