I love Vegas as much as the next someone , but a few days at a time in Sin City to extend theNAB barter showis more than enough for me . Everything is much farther away from everything else than it looks , I ca n’t drink enough urine to keep from getting dehydrate , and the city always finds some way or another to take my money — especially the activities I ca n’t write off . ( I did find it amusing to stare at the Eiffel Tower next to my hotel and perambulation through a doppelgänger Piazza San Marco on my direction to Apple ’s event at the Venetian Hotel — two pot I ’ll be impose for real on my honeymoon next month . )

Now that I ’m back in lovely San Francisco , I have time to reflect on my time in desert . This class , there were more than 108,000 register attendees at NAB ( including 1,200 member of the press ) , and I must have evade or kick downstairs into at least half of them as I darted between meetings , booths , halls , and areas with overt WiFi meshing . Did I mention how far away everything is ?

Obviously , my vainglorious focus was Apple and its product announcement . The daytime after the troupe ’s heavy event , I spent an minute with the product managers for the various products . ( They even found a nice vegetarian lunch for me — ideal for a noon demonstration ) . We dove a little cryptical into Final Cut Server ( I get to see how it worked , something there was n’t time for during the main event);Final Cut Pro 6’sSmoothcam technology ( taken from Apple ’s milk shake compositor ) , used to withdraw jitter and shake while preserve camera movements;Motion 3’sretiming feature with visual catamenia ; and much more ( all while I chowed down on a spinach plant , tomato , pepper , onion , and cheese wrap ) . These one - on - one sessions with Apple after announcements are always utile for get a small more than big demo can offer .

In addition to Apple ’ magnanimous booth about a quarter of the way back in the South Hall , Macs were all over the place . In fact , it was hard to walk through the video - heavy South Hall without see a prominently displayed iMac .

Some of the other cool Mac mathematical product I saw admit anupdated rendering of SmartSound Software ’s $ 199 Sonicfire Pro soundtrack creation software program , which adds a Smart Recall feature that embeds SmartSound datum in exported AIFF or WAV files to make it easier for future editing , as well as a new $ 299 - per - seat internet Edition and a SmartSound BackStage overhaul for Sonicfire Pro 4 customers with devote access to unreleased music and custom compose or customs duty converted euphony . Particle effects party wondertouchshowed its $ 399 particleIllusion 3.0 standalone app with more than 1,500 emitter , and Particle Emitters for Motion , which includes 65 , 200 , or 337 emitter ( $ 39 , $ 99 , and $ 149 , respectively ) , such as bullet , fervidness , water , explosions , glisten , desktop , movement art elements , and animal that work within Motion . And in addition to its software system encoders , Telestream showed off its$1,950 Pipeline net computer hardware encoder , which takes an SDI sign and convert it in substantial - meter to DV25/50 or IMX 30/40/50 into Final Cut Pro . And because it connects using Ethernet , it ’s available to any exploiter on your mesh .

I also ran into some hoi polloi from Axiotron — inventors of the upcoming ModBook — who were proudly show off a pre - production unit of their tab Mac ( perhaps the same one they lent me for a few days ) . Axiotron was in a corner of Wacom ’s cubicle ( Axiotron recently announced that it would be double the pen sensibility of the ModBook , available next month , from 256 grade to 512 stratum using Wacom ’s ironware ) .

Of naturally , I ’m just one man ( and one who need to get back to the office while we ’re getting quick to ship out the next outlet of the cartridge ) , so I did n’t see ( or write about ) everything Mac - relate at the show . If you saw or hear of something cool from NAB that we have n’t covered , I invite you to mail about it here .