Final Thoughts from NAB
A Video Nerd's Paradise
The show floor at NAB was a video nerds paradise. I was able to get my hands on so many different things that I’ve always wanted to play with. The Canon Cinema Prime Lenses were awesome to finally get my hands on and test out.
It was an amazing networking experience as well. I was able to meet so many people who knew so much more about the gear than me. I met with reps who offered free rentals of gear that I would love to take out on a shoot! Everyone was so knowledgeable and professional, and the other attendees were also a blast to connect with! They were all just as excited as I was to play with everything and see the innovations in our field.
The Coolest Gear
There was a robot camera that moved at awesome speeds to follow an object thrown through a waterfall into a backpack. I know that sounds ridiculous, but ridiculous was the name of the game for some of the booths. There was a whole different robot camera that was doing crazy fast moves from the floor to about 12 feet off the ground, and it was recording a step and repeat backdrop so people could do fun poses and see slow-mo recording of themselves.
Being able to get hands on the new gear being put out by companies we already use was also really cool. The Sachtler flowtech, the Anton Bauer Titons, and the new Easyrig were just a few of the upgrades I got to see.
The Coolest Software
Every lap I made of the show floor I would find a new booth I had missed before. The software booths were just as much fun, if not more fun, than the gear booths. BlackMagic Design has training seminars for Davinci Resolve setup right across from Adobe’s Creative Cloud training seminars. They were great to watch, and I actually managed to get into quite a few hands-on training courses with the BlackMagic guys. (I even won a training book for answering a bit of trivia!)
The Coolest People
It was a blast hanging out near those booths. I may have spent a combined 10 hours just standing and listening to all of the seminars and learning from the pros. I also got to see all of the other software we use, and got to see a 3D animator create a scene from scratch in Cinema 4D. At night when I wasn’t at the convention, I still ran into a ton of people who really knew their stuff. I had a conversation about 360-video in an In-N-Out Burger! It was surreal to have so many people around who understand the problems of a content creator.
I have a stack of business cards and about 10 sales reps to follow up with and I couldn’t be happier with all of the things I was able to learn at NAB. I can’t stress enough that I wish there were five of me so that I could take every single class they offered. If you were ever on the fence about going, let me tell you here that It was the best learning experience of my professional life.
