Every year at this time a hundred thousand or more media professionals, producers, broadcasters, and dealers desend on Las Vegas. And for the past few years NAB has been the venue for the major players to showcase the latest and greatest in video editing software.

 

This year expectations are high, with hot hot new releases from everyone. So who's in the game? No surprises there.

 

The high rollers are Sony, Apple, Adobe and Avid. And each will be holding a pretty darn good hand.

 

Adobe will be showing the Adobe Creative Suite 3 (CS3) Production premium suite of applications. With new versions of Premiere Pro and After Effects, plus support for Flash (based on last years acquistion of Macromedia), audio via Soundbooth, and extended video layer abilities in the CS3 version of Photoshop, there is no doubt that Abobe is dead serious about this space. They are toting some pretty heavy ordinance.

 

Apple should be unveiling a new release of Final Cut Pro (6? Studio? Extreme?). This is always a big deal, and always greeted with a lot of excitment and applause for every new feature. This year the spotlight won't just be on the application either - Macs are Intel based now, and Apple just announced those new eight processor Mac's. That should give FCP enough horsepower to compete with anyone.

For some deep thoughts on the FCP, you might read Mike Jone's blog here.

 

Sony Creative Software (aka Sony Pictures) will of course be showing off the latest incarnation of Vegas. There will be a big Vegas announcement on Monday at their Open House at the LVCC. All Hush Hush of course, but evidently AMD will play a big part in the announcement.... And since Sound Forge 9 was announced today, I expect some added audio production integrated with Vegas NLE. The Sony Open House is open to the public, if you'd like to learn more about it, visit http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/email/events/nab2007.htm.

 

And then there is Avid, the high end media production leader who is seeing more and more seats being taken by Adobe, Apple and Sony.  They are not resting on their laurals, Avid will be showing version 2.7 of Media Composer and version 5.7 of Avid Xpress. All with new features and integration with other Avid applications of course. Avid remains the 800 pound gorilla in media production, but the competition has never been more fierce.

 

Interesting tidbits, but we'll have to wait until next week to get all the details. So, if you will be at NAB let me know - perhaps we'll bump into each other and can compare notes!

 

Be seeing you.