Live from IBC in Amsterdam

Hello,
I'm just back from the IBC in Amsterdam, which is the second audiovisual professionnal event after NAB in Las Vegas. As every year, Apple is there with all their professionnal products. No iPod nor iMac here, but a full range of G5s with all the new displays, including 30". On their usually (for such events) well designed stand (a huge black cube noir with many demo machines), there are demos of FCP4HD, Shake, Motion, DVD SP, Logic, Quicktime H264 AVC codec, and Xsan. NewsEdit from Grass Valley (a very commonly used news compositing solution) is now compatible with Final Cut Pro, which is very good news for FCP integration in client servers image managing solutions that are used in TV studios. Of course, many nearby stands would also display softwares and accessories for the Macintosh environment, such as acquisition cards of external storage solutions.
When you get around the stands, most people talk about High Definition. Everyone talk about it and all have their own products related to this now mature technology. The emerging format is the 1080p and the leading compression system is the H264/MPEG-4 that will be included in Tiger Quicktime. The AVC alliance now includes ADB, Apple, ATEME, Broadcom, Dolby, Envivio, Frauenhofer-HHI, Fujitsu, Harmonic, Hitachi, Hewlett-Packard, JVC, LSI Logic, Mitsubishi, Moonlight, Motorola, Nokia, Packet Video, Panasonic, Philips, Polycon, Samsung, Sentivision, Sharp, Sony, ST Micro, Tandberg, Texas instruments and Thomson Broadcast. Quite an impressive list ! Few will bet on Windows Media HD and Microsoft seem to be quite alone on their stand, yet war is raging. Olivier Abecassis,TF1 [n°1 commercial TV in France] new technology leader announces that "AVC is the best choice for mobile services broadcasting and High Definition" and "TF1 consider the ABV technology as the key to the success of French [future] land digital TV in France".
Many brands as Panasonic or JVC have or will have a "general public" HD camcorder in their line. Sony will be selling in the months to come a HD version of their PD150 using HDV format for around €5000 ($ 6000). Final Cut Pro and other compositing systems already include the requested codec for reading HDV files. Most of Plasma and LCD displays now have a sufficient resolution to to display such a quality image and it's funny to see the general public may get equipped with HD material before TV channels do....
IBC is open in Amsterdam until September 14th.

Xsan presentation

An Xserve rack

FCP HD on 2 30" displays

From outside the expo halls : welcome

Photoshop formation demo. 15" Alubooks only

The AJA stand, with a small (Huge) SCSI storage solution with a well known look !