Indie 2.0

Jim Jannard announced yesterday that Red won’t attend NAB in 2009:

RED has decided to skip NAB 2009. We will hold our own RED DAY when we feel we are ready to present the new systems and when they are fully ready to showcase. Date and location will be announced in future.

A minor delay by a major part vendor will not mean much to the delivery schedules but would mean too many non-working prototypes at NAB… which we find unacceptable.

As usual, we will keep you posted on info as we can.

For those that don’t know, NAB is the annual trade show (every April) for the National Association of Broadcasters in the U.S. It had become the defacto showcase for new products and emerging technologies in the movie-making world too–with the advent of digital non-linear editing & post-production, digital video, and digital cinema cameras (like Red).

But trade shows seem to be going the way of the dodo a bit (like a lot of other things–print media & advertising, etc.) Apple didn’t have a booth at last year’s NAB, and is currently attending its final MacWorld Expo.

There will be a lot of Red cameras at Red. Here’s a perceptive comment from Mark Pederson:

There will be a RED camera in practically every booth – with plenty of companies waving the “we have RED/R3D support” flag … the last issue of POST MAGAZINE had the word RED on virtually EVERY SINGLE PAGE.

RED has a pretty damn good “presence” these days.

Oh yeah. And there’s a little thing like the biggest depression since 1929 that is going to tend to make NAB smaller too.

I wouldn’t have been able to attend NAB anyway because, during that week in April, I’m supposed to be on location shooting a feature I’m helping produce (in rural China, on Red) and possibly premiering my new short (shot on Red) at a film festival. I suspect there’s many like me: too busy to attend NAB because we’re full steam ahead using the current Red (rather than anticipating the next Reds–Scarlet and Epic). Out of NAB, I’m most interested in the non-buggy and reliable versions of FinalCut Pro/Color, Adobe CS4 (Premiere and AfterEffects) and Cineform that can handle R3D (and a reasonably priced color correction surface, that can work with Color and Colorista, etc.) And any other software tools to handle and process R3D files on normal prosumer Macs (or pcs)–rather than having me chase Moore’s Law buying very expensive high-end workstations that will be obsolete in 2 years. I have pretty much zero interest in new Red camera accessories until summer ’09–as the new Scarlet and Epic (the latter of which I’ll upgrade to) have a different form factor, which will still be in development at NAB time.

For those worried that Red has to attend NAB to quiet FUD (“fear, uncertainty and doubt”), what will quiet FUD is simply gorgeous movies shot on Red. Period. And since movies that about 2 years to make, these’ll start coming out in ’09. While I’m all for documentation, published workflows and FUD-busting (great opportunities here for 3rd parties as Red is a bit weak here)–the proof is in the pudding. (Dalsa had great documentation, brochures and an NAB presence–but their digital cinema camera never took off…)