Future plans?

So as I scan through site after site of staging equipment as well as video equipment I am struck with an odd sense that no one vendor from a video side completely understands or wants to take on the daunting tasks of integrating all of the elements of producing a live show. It strikes me as odd because I come from a broadcast model that in recent years showed more and more vendors working on the overall automation goal. As event production people we would love to find a turn-key solution that was fault tolerant as well as automated. Barco/Folsom collaboration comes close, but no one has looked at the playback side in conjugation with a switching and routing platform. I know there are some companies like Medialon working on the automation side, but I long for something like the Optima switchers from Echolab. The ability as a production person to cue up and trigger the next event all in one place is priceless.

Okay so those are the big boys, but more and more the economy of scale comes down to how you can use your tools in an economical way. After spending 10 years at a Cable Company doing Local Origination programming I tell you I appreciate doing things as cost effectively as possible, and I am excited with the technologies I am seeing. Of course the leader for some time is a company called Newtek who basically took the economics of scale to heart and invented what truly was the first studio in a box with their Video Toaster for the Amiga computer. Yes for you technophobes out there the Amiga! It was truly liberating what I was able to do on this box ten years ago. It would seem that they are doing that same thing today with the PC version. I have spoke on this Blog about the Toaster, but they have a new version that even has an internal frame buffer that would allow say a PowerPoint show to be running and be able to use it as an actual input on the switcher. Event production just got a lot easier.

So if 7000 lumen projectors would come down to $7,000 instead of 15K plus we all could do events.... Well not exactly.... Come back tomorrow and I will tell you why it would be good to hire the experts!