NAB bits for those not interested in NAB

NAB has always intrigued me from afar, but since I'm not heavily into the video production side of things, the news that comes out of it is usually of limited appeal to me. However, there always manages to be a few things that catch my eye, so in celebration of my 13th consecutive year of NOT going to NAB (I'm only counting since I graduated from college; I've actually never been), here are a few news tidbits that piqued my interest:

Sparkle begat WPF/E begat Silverlight. This is the "Flash Killer" I wrote about over three years ago. All I'll say at this point is that if Microsoft is serious about courting designers, a Windows-only production environment may not be the way to go (the plug-in itself is cross-platform). Anyway, you can find out more here.

Episode 4.3. What's intriguing me here? The integration with Final Cut Studio? The promise of Episode Engine using all 8 cores in the new OctoMacs? Of course not! I'm interested in the Dashboard Widgets being introduced for drag-and-drop access to batch encoding. The name of the blog is Shallow Thoughts, after all. Press release is here.

LightWave Rendition. Newtek is throwing their hat in the "3D plug-in for Photoshop CS3 Extended" ring. I've used and loved LightWave for 9 years now, and it will be cool to see how the technology does in the Photoshop environment. It'll only be $149; a mini-site with a beta signup is now live, and you can read the press release here.

Adobe After Effects CS3 Public Beta. I mentioned this yesterday, but if you haven't downloaded your copy yet, do so immediately. So far, so good—smooth, stable, and packed with cool new stuff.

Posted at 10:33AM Apr 17, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in In the News  |  Comments[0]