NAB has been great. There’s a lot of new products, technology, and techniques that we uncovered on Thursday and would like to share with you.

As we progress more and more into digital file acquisition, we need to find ways to store, file and archive these files. There are several solutions for digital media storage in the market. Many companies are robust in their hardware solutions but seem to lack the software management tool to make it a complete solution. But one company that stands out to have both the hardware and software solution is EditShare. EditShare offers a multi-user storage and editing environment that allows teams of editors to work on a shared project space. What makes this great for DotLot is that it works with the Adobe Suite and allows for multiple editors to work off of the same files. EditShare can also designate specific amounts of hard drive space to an editor or to a project. In addition, if the editor or project needs more space, then with a few clicks of the mouse more space can be allocated. And since this storage solution connects on a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (the first storage solution to offer this speed) the ability to have multiple streams of HD going to multiple workstations won’t be of concern.

Another great discovery is from Gridiron. We’ve seen and heard about Nucleo in the past, but the progression seen in its latest version, Nucleo Pro 2.0, is something for any After Effects user to consider. Nucleo offers background rendering, which is awesome as many MoGraph artists can continue to tweak and make progress on their work without having to take a gaming break. This product also allows for better usage of any PC or Mac multi-processors. When rendering, Nucleo will render several frames at once which cuts the full render time significantly depending on the number of processors in your machine. The last impressive solution this product offers is “Commit to Disk”, which replaces layers with rendered footage to optimize previews. This is great, especially if you have the background approved but still need to tweak the titles of other layers. You can “Commit to Disk” on the background and decrease your rendering time. Cool, huh?

Gridiron also brings another cool product to market. It’s called Flow. How many times have you sat in on another project and the edit or graphic artist has all sorts of sub-sequences or files used in the presentation and has stored them everywhere but where you think they are? This little program automatically tracks and manages all the assets used by illustrating everything with a diagram. Flow tracks each asset for changes and allows you to revert to previous versions. For instance, if your AE sequence has a Photoshop file in it and you decided to change something within that file, Flow will track the changes. Then, if the client decides to go back to the previous version, you can revert back to that file with a couple of clicks, and the whole path is listed out in Flow. Done! Love it. There are many other features we like about this product that we might go into more depth on later.

Overall NAB was a great show to attend. It was very informative and full of new products and techniques to try out. Thumbs up!