Re: NAB Urban Legend?

Have been resisting mightily to comment further:-) But the anecdotes reminded me of what used to be the Chicago version of NAB once NAB left Chicago, the annual shindig at the now-defunct (removes hat) Swiderski Brothers...

One of my best memories of this was back when the Pinnacle Alladin was brand new and nobody had heard of it yet. Suites were linear A/B roll umatic or beta to one-inch, and your high-end graphics were limited to ADO or Abekas DVE, and while these could do a lot of cool things, they cost a LOT at the time, too rich for a place like our shop. We were hurting for good graphics, with only a VP-2 Chyron and it's 2 fonts in three sizes, fancy titling was made for us by staff artists painting and using ink, paint, letraset and zipatone on card stock shot under a suspended Ikegami 79e. We tried hard but were sorely limited in the "looks" we could give. The rich guys across town ha da Quantel Paintbox I lusted for, they charged improbable rates for very simple work on it. I went to the Swids show that year and met Paul Holtz, who was sitting at a card-table-sized booth doing a one-man demo to anybody who'd care to walk by. Not many were.

What this reminded me of strongly was an old Volkswagen commercial that itself was a fake retro look at fifties car shows, each booth more bombastic than the next, touting concept cars with things like huge tailfin size or a guy in a lab coat with a pointer expounding on the number of decorative portholes in the sides of the engine compartment... and off in the corner is a nebbishy little guy in a gray suit with a VW bug, quietly talking about what made the car special...

This is what Paul was doing with the Alladin. I watched from a distance for a while, then came closer as I realized what I was seeing was a DVE that, while only single-channel, was stupendously easy to use in realtime without complex programming... and that it ran off a regular PC... that it came with still stores, it's own virtual switcher, chromakeyer, a paintbox system, a really nice (at the time) CG with hundreds of fonts and even a bundled 3-d animation program. For less than half what an Abekas was going for at the time. I kept asking "Can it do so-and-so?" "Yes, here, I'll show you". That refrain went on for maybe 40 minutes. The next closest thing to the capabilities of this box at the time was a Video Toaster, but at that time the toaster's output was still a little on the rough side, and again, the price was higher.

Next day I told my boss I had seen a single little box and software that would immediately make our edit suite look and work like the big boys downtown, for chump change. We got one and people walking by our edit suite would do a "Kramer" at the door as they saw us do some amazing things. We still use two of those Alladins today, long after Pinnacle dropped them, the first of many mistakes that company made, IMO.

But we'd hardly have noticed or heard of them if it wasn't for Paul Holtz's demo skills and ablity to explain the unit.
Paul's a great guy in my book. He's still a pretty good VAR as far as I know, though he probably does more training video production now than anything.