To describe the annual National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) event in Las Vegas as “huge” understates its sheer enormity.
The mammoth Las Vegas tech convention is where the future of moviemaking surrounds you, blasting your senses with wild new products from a seemingly infinite spectrum of companies, some of which recently arrived on the scene while others are operating in their third century.
Even by Las Vegas standards, the annual conference for the National Association of Broadcasters is one of the biggest trade shows of the year—drawing more than 102,000 attendees in 2018, from 161 countries—with nearly 1,800 vendor booths spread across four cavernous expo halls, each the size of about three football fields, and one outdoor parking lot filled with food trucks.
Everywhere you look at NAB is somebody’s version of the latest and greatest in media technology: cameras, spotlights, audio equipment, drones, even transmission infrastructure such as FM antennas ready to snap on to city skyscrapers.
For a stalwart like Nikon, the inescapable theme was robots—powerful, industrial-looking cyborgs, capable of fast and sharp moves, mounted with cameras capable of withstanding some of the most formidable environments on Earth.
Down the hall, the rival to photorealism widely known as Canon used live actors in colorful displays doing “normal” things such as yoga, reading, and sewing while surrounded by screens that pro-jected the resolution of new 8K devices and their real-life counter-parts for conventioneers to compare.
Attendees are surrounded by tens of millions of dollars worth of A/V fantasy gear, and MovieMaker dove in head first, wading through endless fields of shiny bright objects to find the best gear for indie moviemakers ready to take their productions to the next level.