NAB 2024
Apr 29, 2024We had an amazing time at NAB 2024!
The show was as always an overwhelming mix of events, demos, exhibition floor, walking, parties and more walking. This year the predominant flavor was more LED walls than ever, and AI everywhere! More emphasis on software tools, and a wide range of industries present, from the obvious broadcast, to Film, simulation, education and almost everyone interested in cameras and computer graphics. Almost all booths had talks and demos and it was impossible to see it all! NAB has truly become a diverse event, attracting people from more backgrounds than ever. Lots of people network there, and this was especially useful due to the challenges currently facing the Film, Games and tech industries. Its a great time to diversify, skill up and meet lots of the right people.
Speaking of lots of the right people, CG Pro helped organize the Virtually Everything Summit one day before NAB at Vu Studio in Vegas. We also did a lot at the AMD booth, and had a wonderful CG Pro team dinner. Not so many parties this year for us. Lots to do!
Virtually Everything
It all began with an information and connection packed event at Virtually Everything with our partners at Vu. We helped to curate the day which started with an amazing opening address and straight into talks split by, categories, Keynote, Executive, Technologist and Creator. Talks and demos were delivered by industry luminaries such as Tim Moore of Vu, Tom Thudiyanplackal from ETC and the Europa project and Andy Blondin on Motion Design from Epic Games. It also featured several CG Pro instructors such as John Waynick, Scott Rosekrans and past students Joerg Bachmaier and Chris Barnett. Edd Dawson Taylor spoke about the state of the art of Virtual Filmmaking, including notes on Procedural creation and emergent AI.
The afternoon began with a gripping keynote from Rob Legato, three time Academy award winner and Virtual Production pioneer. More demos and talks followed from the amazing Phil Galler on the future of storytelling, Alex Pearce of LightSail VR on CG Driving plates, Erik Weaver and Tom again speaking on Europa, and the amazing Alex and Tim Porter on automation in VP through Gaussian Splats. They do great work in optimizing virtual production environments through their company Mod Tech Labs and saved the day on the Europa Project.
The event ended with a great party as you would always expect from Vu. It was a very intimate event with a few hundred carefully invited attendees, providing a warm and high quality environment for conversation and connection.
We had a booth which also included our studio Edge Visual, showcasing some of the work the we did with Sony around the Gran Turismo movie, and an activation we created with Sony, Deloitte, Intel and NVidia. This was for an incredible screen called the SRD that does stereo video without the headset. More on that to follow.
Epic Partner Event
Epic hosted a lovely get together for partners friends and clients at the Sahara. It was wonderful to see the people at Epic we have got to know so well over the years as a Premier(now becoming Gold) training partner. Highlights of the presentation have to be the new Motion Design toolset, which got a full rundown from the amazing Andy Blondin, and some great demos. Ryan Mayeda gave a full and fantastic walk though of all the latest tools for ICVFX and Virtual Production. People have wondered about Epics intentions after last years rebalancing towards its Fortnite ecosystem, and this event left me feeling confident that filmmaking is not slowing down for UE. 5.4 just came out so these tools are all live and the notable amazing additions of Android VCam, Render Graph improvements, Render Layers, and a whole lot more. The Unreal Roadmap is here, and the 5.4 features here. Great to see friends such as Clinton Jones and Jonathan Winbush among many others.
Highlights from the show floor
This is going to be very biased towards Virtual Production and what we saw. It felt even bigger than last year with every hall full. But somehow also quieter which was nice, so you could hear the talks and demos, of which there was one at almost every booth. The Sony booth hosted a permanent space for talks, and live demos on the Europa project. AMD was a great space featuring talks and demos. Black Magic, Ross, Canon and Sony had as usual the largest presence with almost everything they do and make available to try out. Several big tech companies with a lot of AI and cloud services such as Microsoft and AWS had large spaces.
CG Pro did several demos at AMD, including coverage of our work with NASA / Metecs, Training them in to help simulate the moon in Unreal Engine. Byron Qiao demonstrated mocap using his Rokoko suit, and Scott Rosekrans spoke a bit about his environment work on the project For All Mankind.
There were many parties as always, my favorite was the HTC Vive event at the Golden Tiki. We also hosted an internal company dinner just before it which was amazing. It was great to have so many of the team there, and I aim to have more of them with more of our wonderful crew.
We drove back to LA with all the gear we took, and went straight into BCON LA, an amazing new Blender conference showing the strength of the Blender community. Ton the founder of Blender was there as well as many friends who see it as an ever more powerful contender in the DCC space.
Thanks for reading this far. I hope to see you at an event soon. We have several coming up, including Unreal Fest, Siggraph and some of our own. Stay tuned!
By Edd Dawson-Taylor - Head of School