NAB 2018 Recap

I’m often challenged when writing about the NAB show because there’s just too much information to digest. I was there for almost a week and I still don’t feel like I absorbed all the new software and hardware offerings that were sprawled across 3 million square feet of exhibit space.  I’ve been going to this particular trade show for over 25 years now, and it still amazes me the size of the crowd this event draws.

My involvement at the show was in delivering Final Cut Pro X workshops at various locations around the Las Vegas Convention Center. On Monday, I was the first presenter for Lumaforge’s Faster Together stage. Throughout the week Lumaforge hosted a series of short presentations from some of the best content creators and producers in the world. All of these sessions were recorded (and presumably) will be published online in the near future. Sam Mestman and his team did a phenomenal job bringing this event together, and it was the place to hang out when you needed an oasis from the show floor.

On Monday evening, we co-hosted a Final Cut Pro X event with FCPWorks, Lumaforge, and FMC called Final Cut Pro X: Post without Limits. The event was sold out, with over 500 people in attendance. I had the privilege of introducing Apple to the audience, and if you are wondering how I got that photo, I gave my introduction while holding a GoPro Fusion 360 camera.

Steve Bayes, Apple’s Senior Product Manager, showcased the new features of Final Cut Pro 10.4.1 – namely, Closed Captions and ProRes RAW. The app itself was released earlier in the day, and we simultaneously released a new tutorial on how to create, edit and deliver captions in FCP 10.4.1. We’ve had over 9,000 views since it was posted a week ago.
Mark and I also presented some cool stuff on working with 360 footage in HD or UHD projects and I plan on releasing that portion of our presentation next week on our YouTube channel.
We also saw some cool hardware from Atomos and DJI both of which have products that record in the ProRes RAW format. If you own an Atomos Shogun Inferno or SUMO 19, your device is only a free firmware update away from the ability to record ProRes RAW.
The highlight of the evening was hearing from Director Carlos Perez and his editor Leo Arango. This creative duo have the distinction of creating the most watched video in YouTube’s history – over 5,000,000,000 views (those are the correct number of zeros). The video is called Despacito, and we learned that Final Cut Pro X was their editing tool of choice. It brought Mark and I great satisfaction to discover that Leo had learned Final Cut Pro X using our training. If you want to learn more about the production, you can read about it here.

Blackmagic Design release version 15 of their flagship editing and color finishing application and it now includes integration with Fusion and a host of other updates. Fusion is a motion graphics and compositing app that has a dedicated page within Resolve. You now have access to painting, keying, rotoscoping, particles, text tools and more. This is a huge new feature, and we’re working on a new tutorial to get you up to speed.
If you’re primarily focused on color grading, there’s some new Resolve FX, improvements to noise reduction and an awesome new LUTs browser.
The Fairlight page, (which was announced last year) has some major improvements to its already impressive list of features that now include ADR tools, static and variable retiming, shared sound libraries, audio normalization tools and more.

You can read about the new features here:
Many of you have already emailed us about our current training library. If you need to learn Resolve, our current Library of titles are still viable (for example the tools in the various pages for editing, color grading and delivery have not changed). It takes time to update our tutorials, and we have a policy not to record tutorials whilst the app is still in beta, unless of course, it’s Alexis’ forthcoming New Features title, which should be available by end of May.
Our in-house Resolve editor Spencer Meyer (who also authored our Blackmagic-Certified DaVinci 101 course), has just posted 2 new videos on some of the aforementioned new features on our YouTube channel.
Finally, we are working on an Advanced Color Correction tutorial with my buddy Abba Shapiro. Abba and I are both trainers for Future Media Concepts (FMC), and this year they celebrated 15 years of Post Production World conferences at NAB. The woman in the middle is Liat Kozuch, who ran this year’s show like clockwork.

We are aiming to have Abba’s new training title included in the Blackmagic canon of certified offerings, but we’re still waiting on word from them when their book and test will be made public. And we’re on the front lines of bringing you the best, most relevant Final Cut Pro and DaVinci training on the market.
So in the meantime, we’ll be very busy. And as always, it’s our commitment to bringing you the best and most relevant Final Cut Pro and DaVinci training on the market.