Tag Archives: video plugins

Why we’re done exhibiting at NAB

Partially due to NAB management but ultimately because of the expense.

You would think NAB would WANT to keep long time exhibitors around. Smaller trade shows are mostly gone and NAB is sort of the last significant one standing in the US. The value of exhibiting at tradeshows has been questionable for a long time. Attendance is down more than a third (2019: 93K, 2024: 61K) Why get confrontational with your long time exhibitors? You’re really going to look at our 21 year history at the event and go ‘meh’?

But that’s what NAB did. (more details below)  It forced us to stop and consider what the value of doing the show really is and why we do it. I think we were doing it, in part, because ‘that’s what we always do’. And this forced us to actually look at the numbers and reconsider. The reality is the cost of a booth and related expenses are no longer worth it for us, especially since most of the people we talk to are existing customers.

So now they have two less exhibitors at a time when, for both technological and economic reasons, I think it’s likely they’re going to be struggling to increase the number of exhibitors in the coming years. I’ll still be at the show doing some meetings and, you know, having drinks, but we’re done having a booth. Carla is on a GalNGears panel as well.

There’s still value in the show for doing meetings and, I’m sure for some companies, i.e. hardware companies, there’s a positive ROI. But what we’ve seen over the years is that for small-medium sized software companies, the value is questionable. That’s why the Plugin Pavilion ceased to exist.

We first exhibited at NAB in 2001 and in 2003 I started the Plugin Pavilion, which was kind of a collective of plugin companies that joined together to get a larger space. Instead of a bunch of scattered 10x10s, we had a 20×30 space. NAB was supportive of this and encouraged it.

I think the last pavilion was in 2014 as most smaller software companies just weren’t seeing any ROI on exhibiting. However, Digital Anarchy and Revision Effects continued exhibiting together as we had since 2003. Because we’d been exhibiting so long, we’d get a decent booth space. This made the show marginally worth doing. We even exhibited in the post-pandemic years, which seemed to be appreciated by the NAB folks.

Things changed last year. Despite exhibiting together for 20 years, NAB management was suddenly ‘you can’t exhibit together’. What? To make matters worse, they refused to acknowledge that Revision Effects had exhibited those years… Every year you exhibit you get ‘points’ and these determine your booth location. By a quirk of accounting, since I ran the Plugin Pavilion, Digital Anarchy had all the points. The correct and fair thing to do would’ve been to split the points or recalculate the points for both companies. Especially since NAB itself encouraged the Plugin Pavilion. But no. So Revision got screwed and neither of us exhibited this year (2025). (Revision is showing some stuff in the Dell booth but neither of us have a booth)

There hasn’t been a positive ROI on exhibiting at NAB for at least a decade (for us). There are some soft metrics like having a space to do meetings and whatnot that made it worth it to us, particularly since we’d get a booth close to the front of the hall with at least some traffic. So we kept doing it, partially out of a sense of tradition as much as anything else. Even now it feels weird to say we’re not exhibiting. We’ve been doing it for a long, long time. But a 10×10, with all the expenses, runs about $12-15K. It’s just not worth it, especially if the booth is in the back of the hall or something.

So we’re moving on. As mentioned, I’ll be walking around the show. There is still value in NAB as a meeting place. But when you add up all the costs for exhibiting, booths are increasingly looking anachronistic.

EL Capitan, Plugins and the Anarchist

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First off, the important bit: All the current versions of our plugins are updated for El Capitan and should be working, regardless of host application (After Effects, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, Davinci Resolve, etc). So you can go to our demo page:

http://digitalanarchy.com/demos/main.html

And download the most recent version of your plugins.

If you haven’t upgraded to El Capitan, I’ll add to the chorus of people saying… Don’t. Overall we’re disappointed by Apple as continues its march towards making the Mac work like the iPhone. Making professional uses more and more obsolete. They’re trying way too hard to make the machines idiot proof and in the process dumbing down what can be done with it.

One of the latest examples is, of all things, Disk Utility. You can no longer make a RAID using it and have to use a terminal command. They’ve removed other functionality as well, but for many professional users RAIDs are essential as is Disk Utility. However, it’s now been crippled.

Of course, then there’s Final Cut Pro (which has gotten better but still doesn’t feel like a professional app to many people), Photos which replaced Apple’s pro app Aperture, and the Mac Pro trashcan. (kind of sad that when we need a ‘new’ Mac, usually we buy a 2010-12 12-core Mac Pro, they outperform our D500 trashcan)

Apple isn’t alone in this ‘dumbing down’ trend. Just look at latest releases of Acrobat (which I’ve heard referred to as the Fischer Price version) and Lightroom.

Note to Application Developers- Just because we’re doing a lot of things with our phones does not mean we want to do everything on them or have our desktop apps work like phone apps. There’s a difference between simplicity, making the user experience clear and intuitive but retaining features that make the apps powerful, and stupidity, i.e. making the apps idiot proof.

Anyways, end of rant… I spend a fair amount of time thinking about software usability, since we have to strike that balance between ease of use and power with our own video plugins, and using the host applications and OS professionally. So this ‘dumbing down’ concerns me both for my personal uses and having to help DA customers navigate new ‘features’ that affect our photo and video plugins.

Cheers,

Jim Tierney
Chief Executive Anarchist
Digital Anarchy

Beauty Box is the ‘plastic surgeon’.

Around the holidays, we received a great compliment about Beauty Box from customer Ross Webb. Beauty Box is our new skin retouching software for video footage in After Effects and Final Cut Pro.

I asked Ross about his work. He said, “My history is around AE but I’m using FCP for this. The footage is owned by me, shot on a canon 7D. It’s glamour and the model had really bad scarring on her face.”

Thanks Ross. We wish great success to your project. And continued success to our skin smoothing product, for which you can see examples here.

Beauty Box: Make everyone look beautiful.

And we’re back. Digital Anarchy is once again making plugins for After Effects and Final Cut Pro. Our first new product is Beauty Box 1.0, which was released yesterday. In a nutshell, this plugin automatically does skin retouching, which reduces wrinkles and removes blemishes.

If you weren’t able to hire a makeup artists for your shoot, or you just have regular people who look, well… regular, then Beauty Box allows you to do skin retouching without having to go frame by frame. It’s a powerful new plugin that uses face detection and an advanced smoothing algorithms to smooth out the skin while keeping all the other details sharp and in focus.

Of course, we have the privilege of working with beautiful models. But Beauty Box will make everyone look beautiful! Ok, well, maybe not everyone. But if it’s possible, Beauty Box makes it easier to get them there.

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Continue reading Beauty Box: Make everyone look beautiful.

Patterns in Anarchy

Something that is interesting about doing our customer support is seeing the purchasing patterns. Each week seems to have a different theme in terms of products that are bought and requests that are sent

For instance, two weeks ago, the big sellers were 3D Assistants and Psunami Water. It was water, water, water all week long and everyone needed it yesterday, as if they were gasping for liquid. I have a feeling that the two factors working here were a writeup in Layers magazine about 3D Assistants, and a tutorial on the fabulous Digital Media Net by Kevin P McAuliffe.

Kevin has been a friend of Digital Anarchy for awhile and we always enjoy his articles, even when they’re not about us. :-) You can read the Psunami tutorials here on Audioproducer.com I’m trying to locate the Layers magazine article by Rod Harlan. That’s one of our favorite publications and I know it’s _somewhere_ around the office.

Continue reading Patterns in Anarchy

Cool Video Toys

This gadget came to my attention and I had to buy one. It’s the Jakks EyeClops Bionic Eye.

For $40 (from Amazon) you get an SD resolution macro video camera. If you’re fascinated by things that can only be seem with a high level of magnification this is great. The quality isn’t fantastic, but it’s good, especially considering it’s $40. It outputs via a standard (RCA) SD cable, so you should be able to capture the results.

A worthwhile toy for the video geek on your list…

cheers, Jim

On The Subject of NAB (and Avid)

Now that Avid has pulled out from NAB and won’t be exhibiting in 2008, here have been a lot of users and other folks wondering what it means and what the industry thinks of it. the immediate reaction of the entire industry was to exclaim, “No shit?” and 2.3 seconds later, after the full import of what that meant hit them, was to call their NAB sales rep and promise all manner of favors if they could move their booth to front and center of the show floor.

Since I’m hardly above such things (”I was young and poor and needed the booth space”), I joined in, attempting to move our Plugin Pavilion into the now vacant space of the Avid Developer Community booth. I even had the person from Avid that managed the ADC to call NAB on our behalf. All that got me was a terse email from our NAB rep saying we would definitely NOT be getting it. It’s the new sport in HD, groveling for Avid’s booth space. Look for it on the LVCC cafeteria monitors (instead of the usual strip club ads).

Continue reading On The Subject of NAB (and Avid)