One DP’s Perspective

Keeping Up With New Technology and Industry Trends While Covering NAB 2026 for DCS

by James Mathers
Cinematographer and Founder of the Digital Cinema Society

I think I first attended the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) convention in the mid-1980’s, and as I recall, it really was, as the name would suggest, a “Broadcast” convention. It was dominated by electronics manufacturers such as Ikigami, Sony, and RCA, with only a small contingent of cinema related exhibitors such as ARRI. However, after I started attending every year and reporting for DCS in the early 2000’s, I saw a steady increase in cinema related products.

Now, for better or worse, I would have to say that the trend is reversing and there is a return to a major focus on electronics for Broadcast, or as it is more commonly referred to now, “Live” production. I should mention that the NAB Show has been trying to offer specialized content of interest to the cinema market with educational presentations in their designated “CineCentral” area. And, of course there are still many manufacturers that have exhibited for decades serving both cinema and live, such as Cartoni, ZEISS, and Fujifilm, but there are so many new LED lighting, Virtual Production systems, and post production platforms that are all electronic and have become dominant exhibitors at the convention.

Every digital cinema camera manufacturer seems to be touting their multi-camera abilities and integrations with IP and computational systems. Blackmagic was even presenting a prototype system for live transmission from their URSA Cine Immersive 100G cameras. ARRI wasn’t even scheduled to have a booth this year, then in a surprise announcement only days before the convention, they were acquired by Thomas Riedel, whose other company, Riedel Communications, is a major player in live systems and ARRI ended up sharing a small space in their booth; (more to come on this, which I believe is a very positive development.) The point is that NAB is now back to being more of a broadcast electronics convention. Cine Gear Expo, which we’ll be covering in June, has remained Cinema-centric.

Each year, when I write a post-NAB wrap-up covering some of the interesting new products we discovered, I also write about the technology we used to cover the convention. It can be challenging, but we always try to put some of the latest tech that we are covering to practical use as we shoot and post our streaming interviews from the show floor. When we first started covering trade shows in the very early two-thousands we were shooting standard def and would take the tapes home with us at the end of the week, digitize them, and a week or two later would have cut some coverage to stream from our website. It showed on what now seems like a postage stamp sized media player, which was all that most internet connections could handle without massive buffering. In a technology environment that was changing as quickly as ours, a couple of weeks to find out what’s new was just too long.  Over the next few years, we upped our game and started shooting HD on mini DV tapes, but we were still challenged to edit and process the tapes for streaming, even though we only had a handful of interviews in those early days of DCS.

We eventually started to bring our Editor, Christopher Knell, along on the trip to Las Vegas to cover NAB and he set up an editing suite in a hotel room across the street from the Convention Center.  We would ferry the tapes, and later the media cards, to him to be edited for streaming within about a day’s time.  After a while, we cut that down to several hours from shooting the interview to streaming it on the web, and with the help of streaming services such as Vimeo and YouTube we were able to reach an international audience streaming at HD resolution. This was pretty much the status quo for several years, recording in HD and later 4K, but finishing in HD to stream, usually within 24 hours.

In 2022, we began using the still nascent technology known as Camera-to-Cloud, allowing Christopher to remain comfortably at home in his Burbank editing room. He would have access to the files we shot within minutes, allowing us to start delivering the interviews in a matter of just a couple hours. Over the next four years the equipment became even more streamlined, but we were still basically using a bonded cellular connection to reach the web.

The first iteration included a separate encoder as well as a huge cellular transmitter mounted atop the camera. In more recent years, Teradek developed a much more compact combination encoder and cellular transmission box which sandwiched nicely between the battery and the camera.

This served us pretty well, but even though we were able to borrow the Teradek equipment and were graciously allowed to use the Frame.io and Adobe cloud services, we still had to pay for bonded cellular service. It was very reliable compared to WiFi, but was also rather expensive since it required jumping between multiple cellular networks to maintain enough robust bandwidth even for the fairly low bandwidth proxies we were sending to the cloud. We also recorded 4K UHD on the camera, but only as a backup and archive. We hadn’t found it necessary to access this in the past, but it did come in very handy this year, (more on that later).

This brings us to 2026; DCS coffers are threadbare and Adobe/Frame.io are no longer “Friends of DCS” sponsors. This is where Strada enters the story. We still shot with the Canon C80, as we had in 2025, which is ideal because it has the ability to simultaneously record proxies and 4K files to separate cards. However, instead of utilizing the camera-to-cloud technique, we avoided the cloud altogether by using a new system from Strada that still allowed our editor in Burbank to remotely access our footage, but this time from a laptop on our production cart on the show floor. This turned out to be even faster than uploading and then downloading from the cloud, and we used standard WiFi, so we not only saved cloud use fees, but also the very expensive bonded cellular service cost.

Although Strada worked great for us, our unique use case is not what the technology was really designed for. It is a revolutionary remote editing system allowing a direct connection between web-connected hard drives, no matter the distance they may be physically separated. In other words, an editor in one city can remotely edit footage on a drive that may be thousands of miles apart as if it were hard-wired and sitting right next to their computer. This remote workflow can all happen without the use of the cloud or transferring the footage from one drive to the other.

We shot interviews featuring the following:

• SAM NICHOLSON, ASC ON VIRTUAL PRODUCTION TOOLS
• FUJIFILM’S MICHAEL BULBENKO PRESENTS THE GFX ETERNA 55
• STRADA – MICHAEL CIONI
• CARTONI E-JIBO RIGFX WITH GARY ADCOCK
• ARRI – LENSES WITH ART ADAMS
• CARTONI CAMERA SUPPORT WITH ELISABETTA CARTONI
• ARRI ACQUISITION BY THOMAS RIEDEL WITH DAVID BERMBACH
• OWC NEW PRODUCTS WITH CEO LARRY O’CONNOR
• ZEISS NANO PRIMES WITH CINEMATOGRAPHER ENRIQUE DEL RIO
• CANON – CAMERAS & LENSES WITH MATTHEW IRVING
• FUJIFILM – OPTICAL IMAGING WITH STOSH DURBACZ
• BLACKMAGIC CAMERAS WITH BOB CANIGLIA
• AJA NEW PRODUCTS WITH BARRY GOCH
• ZEISS AATMA LENSES WITH DAVID WARNER
• BLACKMAGIC DESIGN DAVINCI RESOLVE WITH BOB CANIGILIA
• LAOWA LENSES WITH STEPHEN NEFF
• NANLITE/NANLUX EVOKE 5C WITH BARRY GRUBB
• THE STUDIO B&H – VIRTUAL PRODUCTION SOLUTIONS
• ZEISS – CINCRAFT SCENARIO WITH NICK HAYES
• GVM LED LIGHTS WITH AZHAR ABDULKADIR
• DIGITALFILM TREE WITH RAMY KATRIB
• CINNAFILM WITH ERNIE SANCHEZ AND MAURICE FERKRANUS
• RIEDEL BOLERO MINI WITH WOLFGANG FRITZ
• OWC JELLYFISH WITH LOREN MALLY

I’m very proud of all the interviews we shot. They are informative and timely, but I would like to draw particular attention to a couple that stand out in my mind. One would be our interview with Strada’s Michael Cioni, who basically designed the workflow we used and explains it in great detail.

Another one of particular note would be my interview with Sam Nicholson, ASC; a true pioneer in VFX and Virtual Production who walks us through the tools he’s currently using for Virtual Production. These tools include Cartoni’s JibO encoded arm and their Lifto remote controlled elevation system, Blackmagic’s PYXIS 12K camera, lenses from Sigma, AOTO LED VP screens, a scanner from dConstruct Robotics, and Nanlux lighting instruments.

As mentioned earlier in this essay, there is more to tell about our interview with ARRI’s David Bermbach, who detailed the acquisition of ARRI by Thomas Riedel. First, let me say that I think this is a very positive development, as the two German companies, ARRI and Riedel Communications, are well aligned on corporate culture and both have a strong commitment to providing very high-end products and services. As “sister companies,” they will also be able to leverage their synergies and share each other’s strengths in broadcast and cinema.

However, I would also like to highlight this interview for another reason, which is nothing to brag about, but readers may find insightful, (at least it was revelatory to me). The news broke about the acquisition only a couple of days before the start of NAB, and ARRI was not even scheduled to exhibit this year. It was not only a surprise to us, but also to most of the folks at each of the separate companies. Our interview schedule was tight, as usual, but even more so this year, since we were trying to shave a day off to save on expenses.

When we got to the Riedel booth, where we were previously scheduled to shoot an interview about updates to their impressive Bolero communication system, we found out that ARRI’s Managing Director David Bermbach happened to be available and we could shoot an interview with him if we could make the time.

Note, that Cinematographer Enrique Del Rio, who had volunteered to help us all around, was called away to make a presentation. He was at NAB courtesy of ZEISS to speak about his recent use of their Nano Primes, and as luck would have it, his stage presentation was scheduled for this exact time. This was breaking industry news, however, and even down a crew person and behind schedule, it was an opportunity I could not turn down,

I’m giving you all these details to help explain why in our great rush, our Cinematographer Jon Tucker made a small error which he caught soon after we cut, but there was simply no time to re-shoot. Yes, the Managing Director of ARRI’s interview was SOFT, and not the kind of soft you can fix with a little sharpening. As we all know, shit happens, and it happens more often when we are rushing, so I take responsibility for putting Jon in that situation. But, there is a surprisingly happy ending.

Jon Tucker, besides being a great DP, had been studying up on AI and wanted to take a shot at fixing it with a platform that he had been learning called Topaz. Luckily we simultaneously had recorded a 4K file of the interview, so he ran that through the Topaz AI video enhancer, trying various models for sharpening, motion blur, and detail correction. He then sent the effected file over to Christopher Knell who placed a mask around the face and blurred out the background as final touches and had it up and streaming before the end of NAB.

As we readily admit, it is not perfect, but we hope the newsworthiness of the content makes it acceptable under the circumstances. There has been a lot of resistance to using AI in motion pictures, (including by myself,) but in this case, it saved my ass and I’m grateful to have these tools at our disposal.

I’ve already mentioned our team on the show floor, Cinematographers Jon Tucker and Enrique Del Rio, and our Editor of many years, Christopher Scott Knell, but I need to also specially acknowledge our Producer and DCS Executive Producer Charlene Mathers. They all did a wonderful job and deserve a lot of credit. I know I certainly appreciate their contributions. I also need to thank the interviewees for making themselves available and the many people working behind the scenes to coordinate and bring you this coverage. Special thanks as well to Canon, Strada, OWC and all the folks working the NAB Show.

You can view all of our coverage archived here: https://dcsonline.org/nab-2026/
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