The NAB according to Bob Zelin

 

 

 

 

 

Bob Zelin, an experienced video engineer who is highly respected in the AV community, has published his usual post-NAB report, in which he gives us his thoughts on the products he found most interesting.

In his introduction, he notes that there were many new features and that everything is becoming more accessible. He also comments that he only focused on the south of the first floor, where the post-production equipment was located, and that there was still so much to see that it was impossible to cover everything.

Logically in this area the show focused on 4K and Thunderbolt 2 technology. This is the translation of a small reflection made by Bob Zelin regarding 4K:

People react to 4K the same way they reacted to HD video. “No one is demanding HD video, so I’m just going to keep using my standard equipment.” Well, look what happened. But now, 4K video equipment is cheap and so every “newbie” will buy it, and everything you will see will be in 4K, and this will make your expensive HD equipment look nothing much in comparison. Nobody ever said this was an easy business. And no one ever said it was fair.

Bob Zelin’s favorites

• Sonnet Technologies

From the beginning, he made it clear that his favorite booth was Sonnet Technologies, and the star product was the new xMac Pro.

This is a 4U rack mount chassis that houses the new round Mac Pro. Inside this mount we will find an expansion chassis that includes 3 PCIe slots and connects to the computer via a Thunderbolt 2 cable. This will allow you to continue using the AJA/Blackmagic/Matrox/Sonnet/ATTO cards you already have, as well as add cards for USB 3 or anything else, without the need to buy new versions of the same products for Thunderbolt 2.

In addition, for an additional $199 (the xMac Pro costs $1,500) it is possible to install an enclosure inside the mount to equip it with an LTO drive, a 3 SATA drive configuration, or 4 2 ½ SSD drives; all in the same chassis and making the new Mac Pros as flexible as the previous generation of computers.

Bob also found at Sonnet’s booth the Echo 15 Thunderbolt 2 version. It is a small box (under $400) that connects to any Mac with a single Thunderbolt cable and provides what Apple took away, like the DVD optical drive, Firewire ports, eSATA, etc. It has space for an additional internal 2 ½ drive (SSD or SATA) and for an extra $100 you can include a Blu-ray burner “for DVD Studio Pro“.

• JMR

JMR showed the JMR ProBracket, a sliding rail for a single rack mount, which can securely hold Mac computers. This is only a rack mount, it is not an expansion chassis nor is it flexible to hold LTO (or other) disks, but it only costs $149.

• Maxx Digital and Highpoint

At both Maxx Digital’s booth, as well as Highpoint’s, was the Netstor disk chassis, which works with Thunderbolt 2. Their disk array comes with a 16-bay and 24-bay configuration, and has an expansion chassis for 3 PCIe slots integrated within the main chassis.

Highpoint also showed the new Netstor with 3-slot Thunderbolt 2 expansion chassis and space for 4 internal 2 ½ SSD drives.

• SMR and Stardom

These two companies showed us their new 8-bay Thunderbolt chassis based on the ATTO RAID controller. As soon as ATTO releases the host card for Thunderbolt 2 we will be able to find it in the chassis.

• Synology and QNAP NAS

This time it is the turn of shared storage, with NAS solutions using the 10 Gig Ethernet interface at very affordable prices. Both companies also offer expansion chassis for these products.

• Sans Digital

Sans Digital showed its first 12GB Areca host cards in its 24-bay SATA chassis. While using conventional 6G SATA drives, it showed a read speed of 3500MB/sec in RAID 0 and some 3000MB/sec in RAID 5, demonstrating that its new 12 Gig technology is much faster.

One note; all the demonstrations that were done with the 12G products were done on Windows. In fact, ATTO Technology stated that there was no performance increase if using a Mac computer (either the new or old ones), so they did not have a reason to write OS X drivers on their new hist 12G cards.

 

If you didn’t have a chance to read about the new products presented at NAB, or just want to get a professional’s opinion, I recommend you read the full original report. It also talks about other shared storage solutions, more Thunderbolt 2, LTO tapes, monitors, and some of the products launched by AJA and Blackmagic. You can find it here and I warn you that it’s not wasted.