NAB Show 2024 Recap

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Introduction

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show is an annual gathering that unites thousands of content professionals across the broadcast, media, and entertainment industries. It serves as a hub for innovation, collaboration, and exploration of cutting-edge technologies shaping the future of content creation and distribution.

This year, we had an exceptional experience there, and we were pleasantly surprised by the number of new faces we saw. The Association reported that NAB Show 2024 had 54% first-time attendees, making it the first year with more new attendees than returning. We’re very interested to see what that means for the event’s future, and we think the continued focus on creators will only increase those numbers.

Generative AI

As with just about every event right now, AI was a major theme this year at NAB Show. In general, it can be divided into Utility AI and Generative AI. Utility AI tends to be something everyone loves and is excited about. These things make people’s jobs easier, such as AI rotoscoping, color correction, frame interpolation, upscaling, etc. Then, there is Generative AI. Things like LLMs that can make images and even videos from a text prompt are bigger than you would think in media & entertainment. These are something many are afraid might have a negative impact on their work.

We see AI as a big opportunity for us as many studios have strict policies about data being put onto the cloud, especially for training purposes. That means many will have to run AI in-house if they want to use it. And for the larger studios, AI models will be trained from their own data so they don’t have to worry about copyright issues. This is where our new ML / AI training, fine-tuning, and inference servers will really shine. We are excited to see how things evolve as AI leaves the “experimental” stage and enters the “production” stage!

Virtual Production

Over the past year or so, we have noticed a small dip in stages and volumes being built for the purposes of film and TV production. With that said, we noticed a fairly significant resurgence of interest in virtual production at NAB Show this year, specifically with a broader audience, including small studios, marketing teams, and government institutions exploring the technology’s potential. It seems as though the technology and the barrier to entry have crossed that line to being more readily adopted, and many are getting into building their own small volumes / LED walls. Luckily, more turnkey virtual production offerings are making their way to the market right now to further this in support of those who don’t have the time, money, or capability to build their own. The most notable offering is VūOne (powered by Puget Systems) from our partners at Vū. It clinched the prestigious “Product of the Year” award and underscored Vū’s commitment to innovation and excellence. Congratulations!

SMPTE 2110

With Blackmagic launching a wealth of SMPTE 2110 products to help move the industry to standardize on video-over-IP, many users are looking at adopting this new technology. And it isn’t just broadcast! SMPTE 2110 has a lot of implications for Virtual Production, and potentially beneficial for even smaller post houses.

Customer Interactions

Our favorite part of attending these industry events is the opportunity to spend time with our customers and partners who use our laptops, workstations, servers, and storage products for their amazing work. Sometimes, it is hard to take a step back and fully appreciate how far you’ve come and how much of an honor it is to work with so many amazing people, but I think NAB Show tends to be the event that allows for that to happen. Thank you to everyone who took the time to meet with us and work with us, including Nicki Sun, Jonathan Winbush, Daniel Mallek and the rest of the team at Vū, John Canning and Andy Parma at AMD, Dustin Young of Buddha Jones, Caleb & Shelby Ward at Curious Refuge, Sir Wade Neistadt, Wren Weichman of Corridor Digital, and the team at School of Motion. It was an absolute pleasure working with them all, and the collective effort they all put in made this event the success that it was.

Product Highlights

While we still had many conversations with attendees at NAB Show about our workstations for more traditional workflows like editing, visual effects, compositing, etc, we spent a much more sizable portion of our time this year talking about our new products, specifically Puget Mobile and Puget Server, and the workflows that we’re now capable of enabling, such as AI. Whether you’re running StableDiffusion on the go for storyboarding or training models on local server hardware, we now have the capability to service these workflows fully end to end.

Press & Presentations

Press Interviews

We worked with many different publications at NAB Show this year, and you can find out more about our presence in their coverage of the event:

Presentations

  • Generative AI in Media & Entertainment with Matt Bach, AMD and Vū
    • At the Virtually Everything Summit
  • Panel: Trends on Virtual Production with Matt Bach and Alvin Renz
    • Part of the ASUS ProArt Master Talks series at the ASUS booth
  • Maximizing Creative Workflows with AMD Threadripper with Matt Bach
  • Hardware Considerations for Local Generative AI with Matt Bach
    • Part of the ASUS ProArt Master Talks series at the ASUS booth

Events & Parties

Virtually Everything Summit

The Virtually Everything Summit was an event held the day before NAB Show kicked off, and it was held at Vū’s Las Vegas studio. We were proud to sponsor the event, where Vū and many other industry leaders gave presentations and held panel discussions on various topics, including where the industry is going and how to stay ahead of the curve. Our own Matt Bach even presented with Chris Hall of AMD and Alvin Renz of Vū on generative AI, how it can be used, and what it might mean for media & entertainment. As part of our sponsorship, we also had a real-time StableDiffusion demo set up (a huge shoutout to Davant Studios for providing some of the tools for this) where attendees could walk up and take pictures as our system (one of our render nodes for Vū’s LED wall) stylized the images of them.

MoGraph Meetup

The MoGraph Meetup is run by School of Motion and is an event that we have sponsored for eight years now. It is one of the highlights of our trip to NAB Show each year as it is well attended by those in the motion graphics industry, always provides ample opportunities for great conversations, and, well… School of Motion just knows how to throw a great party!

AI Filmmaking Party

We were also incredibly proud to be a sponsor of this event, hosted by Curious Refuge: an AI filmmaking community, in its inaugural year. The AI filmmaking party was a first-of-its-kind AI esports tournament at HyperX Arena in Las Vegas. As we all know, AI tools and what you can do with them are changing daily, so it was an amazing experience to sponsor this event and help create a platform for idea sharing on how these tools can be better leveraged by this industry.

In Love With the Process Sponsorship

This year, we worked with director Mike Pecci and actor Lance Williams of the podcast In Love With The Process to record a mini-series for NAB Show titled Remote Encounters. If you’d like to listen to those, here is a list of the episodes recorded in our suite at the brand-new Fontainebleau:

Conclusion

NAB Show 2024 was an incredibly rewarding experience, offering valuable insights and meaningful connections within the industry. The notable influx of first-time attendees indicates a growing interest in content creation and distribution, promising new opportunities for collaboration and growth at this event.

Our interactions with customers, partners, and industry peers were a highlight of the event, reaffirming the importance of building strong relationships and sharing collective expertise. We are grateful for the chance to showcase our latest products, such as Puget Mobile and Puget Server, which empower transformative workflows in AI and content creation.

Participating in press interviews, presentations, and sponsorships allowed us to share our perspectives and contribute to thought leadership in the industry. We sincerely thank everyone who contributed to the success of NAB Show 2024, from our valued customers and partners to the organizers and attendees who made each interaction memorable.

Cheers to a great event, and we can’t wait to make NAB Show 2025 even better!