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We’ve been doing a lot of traveling the pasts month so the blog posts have been slow. I have a couple in the can I wrote while offline, but they’ll have to take a back seat to this Infocomm 2011 update.
After spending the past several weeks in Beijing, I was very attuned to the level of Chinese participation at the conference. When I last attended Infocomm about 3 years ago, the number of Chinese vendors where few and far between. Now there are even a significant number of “small booth” vendors from China – mainly Beijing and Shanghai. Some American vendors I spoke to also complained that some of their competitors have moved US manufacturing overseas, mainly to China, in order to save money.
I had a list of about 40 vendors I really wanted to take a look at. At the top of the list was Black Magic Design (BMD) and NewTek. I also took a hard look at Broadcast Pix, Data Translation, and Analog way. NewTek I breezed through because I know their product line extremely well, but only had pointed questions about their latest product, the TriCaster TCXD850 Extreme. So far it seems like an excellent machine, but with competitors like BMD and Broadcast Pix on their heels, their current price points may miss the mark.
The ATEM products from BMD were a show stopper. So was their gigantic brown booth. Disappointingly, booth staff were only marginally versed in their new product, and also a big warning flag for me was the quality of their chroma keyer on the 2M/E ATEM switcher. I didn’t have a chance to look at the keyer on the 1M/E version, but because the 2M/E ATEM is the flagship product, I would expect the lesser model to have a similar, if not worse keyer. The demonstration I saw was simply unusable. I may try to go back tomorrow and play with their system to see if I can fix it – but anyone looking at it would find it to be a deal breaker if keying is something they need in their work flow.
The price point and build quality of the the BMD products are stellar however. I got to handle most of the 13 products announced at NAB and I’m truly impressed on how well they are made. We’ll see what customer feedback is like when the products begin shipping and customers start to provide feedback.
Another disappointment was that no one at the booth could give me a definitive answer on whether the USB 3.0 port on the ATEM products would allow streaming through Flash Media Live Encoder (FMLE) or other products that can use USB video devices as the source. They couldn’t even answer the simple question of whether it was DirectShow compatible. Extremely disappointing for such a strong presence at the show. I suppose you are only as good as your least informed employee.
Update: I did get a chance to speak to Ankit Patel of Black Magic Design, who has been an active participant in online forums and doing a lot of good presales work and interacting with his customer base. He said the USB 3.0 port on the shipping ATEM products are not yet active, and promised to get answers from BMD’s engineers in Australia. This is in line with information he has posted in response to the eager masses waiting to purchase products from the BMD product loine announced at NAB this part April. Looks like we’ll just have to wait to see what comes out of the lab!
I yearn for the days of old when manufacturers would send their engineers to the show floor to answer questions. Viewsonic, the monitor manufacturer did so when they first came on the scene, and I think it really helped them generate sales. Now that monitors are pretty much a commodity they may no longer bother – but it’s a business practice that has served them well. The geeks that troll trade floor shows report to the people with money who buy product. Accommodate them.
Panasonic also showed signs of trade show faux pas. They had far too many employees in their booth standing around in clusters talking to themselves. To get to product you had to navigate your way around them, and they seemed too entranced with themselves to provide you with good information. Perhaps they were volunteers standing in the booth on the promise of a good meal. I don’t know what the situation was, but it was truly ineffective. I encountered less-than-informed employees at Canon and Sony as well. Really sad. The NewTek booth fortunately did not show the same level of neglect. For those who did not want to sit through the formal presentation, there was staff on the opposite side of the booth to answer questions. They didn’t know everything, but did an acceptable job, and referred you to the person onsite who had the answers and could ultimately answer them.
A leading example of how to staff your booth was shown by Shure. It could be because it is a mature corporation – but Sony is around the same age, if not older, and did not show the same level of expertise. I imagine it may be a combination of factors – maturity of the company coupled with complexity of the product line. Microphones, compared to many of the devices on the show floor, are relatively simple. The people at the ClearCom booth were models of professionalism as well. They knew their product line and could answer questions in depth and provide solutions and recommendations.
My favorite booth – and I really liked this guy, was an Asian vendor selling helicopters. Yes, I wrote helicopters. He modified one of those toy coaxial rotocraft you see at the airport Brookstone stores to carry a 1/2 pound payload – including a camera and wireless video transmitter. He sold a bundle with camera, transmitter, receiver, and flash video recorder. Really cute and actually useful. The bundled camera is garbage, but not bad for a very sunny day. With a 1/2 pound cargo load, you can put some fairly decent optics on it though. The design is also a really cool Japanimation inspired futureshock techno that would make your video fly-bys particularly cool. The company is called rotoconcepts and can be found at rotoconcepts.com.
The technology for worship pavilion was also well done. The demonstration of Quiet Stage technology was interesting – a great wway to cut down on stage noise coming from monitors. Also great to see was a live demonstration of BMD’s ME/1 switcher and control surface in action. The TFWM setup used BMD’s product this year, a change from Ross switcher products in years past. The on-screen output looked really, really good.
My final thought is that it is the year of the iPad. I thought I would see perhaps a couple of vendors with iPad plays. Nope. There were dozens. It seems like many manufacturers have answered the consumer call to add iPad control to their product line. Hopefully more vendors will follow suit and develop apps that enhance their products beyond being a marketing gimmick.
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Colin, enjoyed your write-up about the Blackmagic-Design booth at Infocomm 2011 . . . would you allow me to link it to my website? As you know, I am really pushing the new ATEM switchers hard . . . the more info at my website the better.