CES on Content Creation, Rebuilding Tomorrow Andy Marken January 29, 2025
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I can't lie about your chances. But you have my sympathies. Rook, Alien: Romulus, 20th Century, 2024
A few short weeks ago, we made our annual trip to Sin City to see how much consumer electronics providers and tech were going to change the content creation, production and delivery industry; and it's a lot.
During the early part of the week, industry players (networks, studios, streamers) made a series of announcements to reshape the industry.
At the end of the week and about 300 miles due West, mother nature reshaped everything devastating the homes and lives of people in the industry as well as folks and businesses that support and serve the Hollywood bubble.
CES has always been a hairs breath away from the film/show industry. In recent years, the lines have blurred.
Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang and his firm has blended the industry by rolling out the new Blackwell GPU (graphic processor unit), GeForce RTX 50 series graphic cards and a comprehensive AI roadmap (Cosmos) for game developers/players, content production and AI-enabled tools, applications and systems across the industry spectrum.
To illustrate the advances, Jenson said, Blackwell is the most significant computer graphics innovation since we introduced programmable shading 25 years ago.
To emphasize how far his firm has advanced the technology, he showed off DIGITS, a $3,000 laptop AI supercomputer, that will deliver 1,000x the processing power of a typical laptop and run 200B parameter AI models.
It may be a little expensive and a big overkill for the standard laptop user, but his vision of the next level of computing would put tremendous power, performance and capability in the hands of people on the set for content production/postproduction.
He also noted that the GPUs and AI models work with the firm's Omniverse - a physics simulation tool - to create more realistic video and enable rapid expansion of AI-enabled development tools and technologies.
LG introduced a new family of premium WOLED monitors that are excellent for postproduction and game play.
The 45-in screens offer high brightness, true blacks, stunning colors and optimized curvature to put the editor in the middle of the action.
The units feature ultra-high 5K2K resolution and 21:9 aspect ratio to deliver optimum immersion in the creative work and provide one-touch, dual-mode switching between preset screen resolution and refresh rates.
Breylon's virtual monitors are unique to say the least, using AI video-based processing with a lot of software and hardware advances compared to units we've seen at other events.
According to company officials, they can now upscale lower-dimension to multiple, higher-dimension streams using what they refer to as a generative display system using AI computation and optics to assign different depth values to content in real time for rendering images and information overlays.
With prices that range from $5-$8,000, it's not going to be a monitor that is on every editor's desk but if you're heavily involved in immersive game or video content production, it could be an excellent addition.
We're not big fans of headsets unless they're for a special purpose - spatial and immersive content creation or if we're really involved in the game video gaming.
In collaboration with Siemens, Sony unveiled its new XYN mixed reality headset that seems to be both comfortable and effective for animation, real-time entertainment production and yes, gaming.
The headset flips up to return to the real world and its ring/swipe controllers make it easy to point at things and move around AR (augmented reality) objects. For improved look/feel realism, the headset incorporates a pair of 4K OLED displays for vivid colors and deep black levels.
Home TVs are a mainstay of CES with outstanding units being shown by LG, Hisense and TLC. Even Panasonic is back with some excellent screens, but Samsung seemed to offer the best lineup of QLED and OLED units with screens ranging from 32 - 98 inches plus.
The flagship Neo QLED 8K unit is slimmer and smarter thanks to Samsung Vision AI that improves upscaling, adaptive settings and Auto HDR Remastering Pro.
We were especially impressed with the Vision AI's live translate feature that currently supports seven languages which can translate content being viewed in real time by translating the closed captions. In addition, they introduced a new AI-based voice removal with audio subtitle feature to enhance viewing enjoyment for the visually impaired.
We're biased toward professional film cameras for movie/video production, especially the Blackmagic family of devices; but we've also seen a growing number of professionals and social media creators using Apple's iPhone with amazing results.
So, it was no surprise to see firms adding components - including lenses - to make the smartphone better and easier to use.
Belkin introduced the PowerGrip MagSafe which connects to an iPhone 12 or newer via a magnetic ring, making it easier to work with the slim device. It provides 10,000 mAh battery capacity and can be recharged wirelessly or with a built-in USB-C cable.
If you're serious about your film work, the Tilta Khronos Ecosystem delivers rugged and light performance.
It's anti-slip quick-release system makes the unit quick and easy to set up with the iPhone 16 and still provides complete pass-through camera control.
Frankly, we can't wait to see translation/localization everywhere, all at once so you can watch a project from anywhere in the world and immediately understand it.
Samsung rolled out real-time translation for their TVs, Timekettle and introduced their W4 Pro earbuds that provide two-way translation for phon
