NAB, April 2011
From AMWA-EBU
FIMS PRESENTATIONS AT NAB
Final version of the FIMS 'generic' presentations used at NAB 2011:
File:Generic FIMS Presentation NAB 2011 Version 2 4.pdf
File:Generic FIMS Presentation NAB 2011 Version 2 2 RUSSIAN.pdf
File:Generic FIMS Presentation NAB 2011 Version 2 4 FRENCH.pdf
File:Generic FIMS Presentation NAB 2011 JAPANESE.pdf
NAB NEWS FROM BRAD GILMER
There is no question that this is the biggest event the AMWA or the AAF Association has ever participated in. We were extremely busy, and traffic only continued to build all the way through the show. I was giving presentations right up to the last minute. Clearly FIMS has hit a nerve.
Not only was there high traffic at the booth, but I noticed some interesting trends - early in the show, some top people in the industry stopped by. A little while later, a few more came by while I was presenting. By Wednesday, we had groups of high-level people coming through the booth. This tells me that people saw the presentation, told others who then came, and those people told more people. I am talking about users here, but I saw the same thing happen with manufacturers. At first I saw a vew senior technologists and CTOs, then more, and by the end of Wednesday I think I had seen most of the usual suspects. This is a very good trend.
My impression, having given a number of the FIMS presentations, is that people quickly grasped what we were up to. I would be interested to know what others who saw the presentations thought, but to me, it was easy to explain, and the demos were clear. I really appreciate that we had a number of vendors on the booth, putting forward a logical workflow.
I received a comment early in the show saying that FIMS was great for automated workflow, but that she had a highly creative department in Post, so FIMS really was not suitable for her. I took some time after the presentation to explain that the FIMS workflow we showed - ingest, transcode and transfer, all were leading up to a manual, creative edit process which might take one hour or one month. And that once the edit was complete, the editor could check the completed job back into the workflow where it could be moved from there to a central store, and perhaps later picked up by an automation system for linear play out. She then understood that FIMS aids both automated and manual workflows.
Aside from the FIMS demo, I have one other observation - we are at an inflection point in the industry. Before NAB I put together some slides that show how MXF, FIMS, IMF, AS-02 and AS-03 fit together. I kept adding to the presentation each night after the show as I thought of other key enabling technologies that are falling into place. It is easy to see how these projects, plus high-speed networking, plus semantic web all come together to cause a radical shift. It is a great time to be in the industry, and the FIMS demonstration at NAB pointed out the fact that we are on the verge of something new!
