NAB Twenty Years Ago

The Las Vegas Convention Center after NAB tear-down.

Today is the first day of NAB. For those of you unfamiliar with NAB, it stands for the National Association of Broadcasters. Held every year in Las Vegas, NAB is the biggest show of the year for companies that build tools for video and film. All of the biggest players such as Adobe, Apple, Avid Technology and Sony usually make their major announcements at NAB.

I went to my first NAB twenty years ago, when I was working for Avid Technology. At Avid, it was my responsibility to make sure that all 200+ systems were set up and working properly before the start of the show. This was not the most relaxing position to be in. Sometimes the hardware just didn’t want to cooperate. The worst years were the ones when the computer maker decided to reduce the number of card slots, requiring us to strap on a trouble-prone expansion chassis. My stomach is turning just typing about it.

Setting up the Avid booth.

During my tradeshow tenure, new technologies were continually announced. It was during the early 90’s that discussion of a network-based video post collaboration workflow began to make the rounds. The mid-90’s saw the first file-based professional video camera. Fast forward to 2013 – both network-based workflows and file-originated video editing are the norms. With more and more full-digital workflows (meaning no analog at any stage), the need for larger storage systems to archive and retrieve your digital media becomes all the more important.

In next weeks blog, I'll discuss the announcements I found  to be the most exciting from NAB 2013. I’ll be interested to hear readers impressions of the biggest announcements this year. Below is one of the early NAB trade-show videos I worked on for Avid Technology. In fact, that's me in the audio section of the video.