NAB 2026 Preview: Blackmagic, Adobe, Sony

This one is an AI face reshapier, but it's a performance changer. Wow, that's also nuts. That's incredible. You could change an actor's performance.

I could totally see, like, Hollywood casting, like, a, a B or a C level actor who- [laughs]... who's not that good with acting, and then just having an acting coach go in in post and just, like, enhance the performance. [laughs] [static] All right. Welcome back to Denoised.

How's it going, Addy? It's a new day, new models. [laughs] New mo- Well, in this case, maybe less so on the models. We got actual product updates for NAB next week, but yeah, it feels like a lot of companies are just kind of announcing what's happening next week, this week, instead of- Amazing...

it being big- Yeah, you're going to NAB, right? Reveal. Yeah, leaving tomorrow. Going early.

There all week. I'm gonna live vicariously through you. That is exactly what Matt Workman told me too [laughs] when I asked if he was going to NAB, and he's like, "Can't make it this year," but- Hey, uh, congrats to Matt, dude. I know.

Congrats to him- Congrats... for joining Fall, yeah. That's an awesome- Yeah, he watches this show, I think. Yeah.

I know, and we watch his videos. Um- [laughs] Yeah, so yeah. Good- congrats, Matt. Okay, so let's talk about some updates and new product releases and, uh, yeah, and then kind of a pre-NAB thing.

I'll kind of talk about what I'm looking for. I mean, what I'm looking for is, are you talking about agentic AI? Are you talking about MCPs? If I've got an emailer of someone mentioning MCP in it, I'm like, "Hey, let's talk."

[laughs] That's been my, that's been my radar indicator of like, okay, you're thinking... You're forward-thinking about this. Let's talk about what you're doing. Yeah.

You're looking at things from a system and architecture's point of view, not just like little engines. Yeah, it's like, are you building- Yeah... your platform, your app, to be able to connect with everything else and thinking about this agentic- Right... future, this workflow.

Okay, not that. Uh, let's talk about Blackmagic. There was no MCP mentions in there, but- [laughs] Yeah, Blackmagic's already, already making a, a big splash pre-NAB. I saw some other YouTubers.

Um, but I'm curious to see what you got going on here. Yeah, I mean, so in their... Well, they had a bunch of updates, but the kinda big one that we focus on a lot is Resolve. So the biggest one in Resolve, and honestly I'm not that excited or don't care as much about, is, uh, they added a photo page.

So their same color timing tools, all that stuff, uh, there's now a separate photo panel. You can do the same node-based workflow you would do for coloring video with photos. Clearly- Because there's not enough photo editing software out there. Yeah, so they're clearly- You, you need one more...

going after Lightroom or the Adobe ecosystem- Yeah... or just any other photo editing app. I don't know what... I- obviously, uh, Resolve has a big advantage because they have a very powerful free version.

I don't know what the exact limitations are of Free versus Studio and what it can and can't do with photos, but I would imagine you could do a lot for free on the free version with photos. It's an adaptation of their node-based color system for photos. Mm-hmm. I'm, I'm a big fan of Lightroom.

I've been using it for years. Um, what Resolve previewed sh- was more or less like Lightroom, not nor- mo- so much like Photoshop, but more like, you know, photo corrections and, um, color and, uh, geometry, perhaps adding grain, adding vignette. You know, obviously doing, um... I'm, I'm not sure if it does, uh, merge multiple exposures or not, but those would be like Lightroom- Oh, interesting...

-esque features, yeah. Yeah, that's a good point, especially going back to when we were talking about real estate photography and HDR and stuff. That's a key component of taking multiple exposures and combining them together. Yeah, it's, uh...

My, my s- thinking here is like Resolve's ultimate strategy is to create what Unreal created with like a one-stop shop for everything. Mm-hmm. So they have Fusion where you can do some of the stuff that's available in After Effects like, uh, you know, poor man's Nuke, as I like to call it. It is.

I would say- You know? And I was, I was gonna say, I think it's more powerful than After Effects on some levels, maybe a little more, more complicated, but yeah, poor man's Nuke is a good analogy 'cause it's got... They even added more 3D features and shading and, and features into Nuke, into Fusion. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Adobe, uh, uh, the After Effects supports that stuff through plugins, third-party plugins. Mm-hmm. But yeah, you're right. Natively, Fusion is pretty powerful.

I would imagine the photo stuff would be really cool for somebody who's making a YouTube video, and then they need to generate the thumbnail and then edit the thumbnail, and you could do it all under the same application. It's like boom, boom, boom, and you're done. I guess, but I think it's more photo editing 'cause, like, if you're doing a thumbnail, you're looking more for like a Photoshop. Like, you wouldn't even do that in Lightroom because you can't really do text and graphics and all that stuff.

You would kinda move to out of Lightroom to Photoshop equivalent. I, I- Yeah, you would use AI generations nowadays, right? Uh, or potentially that. But yeah, I, I, I think, look, I mean, if you're looking for an alternative and/or you're doing a project that involves a bunch of stills, uh, 'cause there was some...

They noted something of like if the color correction you do on the still, if you bring it into a timeline, it holds that color correction that you already did in Resolve, so it kinda works together. Um- Mm. Right. Yeah, I don't know.

I guess if you're just looking for a Lightroom alternative or you really like the way that Resolve does color and node workflows and that works better for you, then you can have that tool set available too- Sure... doing photos. Sure. All right, talking a lot about photos when I said that was not [laughs] what I cared about.

The other features, they added... So they already had transcription, but now there's more AI clip analysis, so you could run it on analyzing your clips called IntelliSearch, but, like, looking for objects so that it's searchable in your media bin. Uh, Premiere has something similar to this. Uh, you can identify faces.

It has another cool feature called Analyze for Slate. So then it'll actually look at your footage and see if there's the slate, and then extract- Mm... the info from the slate and fill out the metadata field for that clip. That's incredible.

And then some improvement on transcription where now you can basically search in your entire media bin and search across if you'd wanna just search transcripts, if you wanna search that IntelliSearch, like, for assets. Uh, so it's just kind of a better, more unified search experience. 'Cause before it was like you had to load up a transcript and then search it. It was a little clunky.

So now it's- Yeah... uh, a bit more streamlined. Yeah, seems like they're probably running a VLM under the hood to detect features and objects within, um, the media bin. Yeah, 'cause not- And then- Everything they do is local...

cleverly organizing them. Yeah, AI. It's all- Yeah, everything's local. Yeah...

they don't... uh, upload anything to the cloud. I will say I've noticed, I felt like before the last few years with Blackmagic, they've had some of these features, but they didn't call it AI. They would call it, oh, I always forget.

It was, oh, like Neural Engine or Neural Power or something. They had another marketing term for it that was not AI, but was sort of like, "Oh, we're doing some stuff." 'Cause I think that was when Adobe was getting, like, a lot of backlash for putting AI features in, and they kinda distanced themselves. But now AI's kind of okay [laughs] so like there's...

I just noticed that all of their branding and stuff, it was a lot more just calling it AI- Yeah... and not trying to, like, spice it up with a different, with a different title. I would say it's more than just okay. If you don't have AI in your product- [laughs] Right...

you're- What are you? [laughs]... kind of irrelevant, so you need it. Yeah.

You need the AI logo on stuff. They have a built-in speech generator which you can do text-to-speech with a couple preset voices, but then if you give it a sample of, they said all it needs is less than 10 seconds or up to 10 seconds, it can clone a voice, and you can generate with speech. And you have settings and parameters to adjust the speed, the pitch, the variation, and the seed. Wow.

And then you can lock the seed in the future if you're, like, try- if you find a seed that gives a good delivery, and you wanna make it consistent throughout the video, then you can lock the seed and keep, uh, generating with it. These are, these are really useful editor functionalities- Yeah... that they're adding. That's awesome.

Yeah, and this is good even if, you know, if it's just scratch audio, 'cause I know a lot of editors, you know, are using 11 Labs and stuff, but that's still an extra, like- Right... gotta hop over there, subscription, generate. If you're just in Resolve and you're like, "Oh, hey, I need to script out this line," done. You got temp track right there.

Yeah. I, I know Premiere has similar features where you can give it a couple of words that you didn't say, and it'll generate those phonemes and then kinda just blend it all in, into it. They also have a feature called Morph Cut- Yeah... where instead of two jump cuts, it'll kinda like blend, uh, the end frame of one and the beginning frame of another and then just have- Oh...

a smooth transition. That's, that's been around forever. [laughs] Yeah. That's old school.

Yeah, I think they all got it. It's- Resolve's got one, um, I remember- Oh, really? Actually Avid was the very first to do that. That was like 10 years ago.

10 years ago. 10 years ago? Avid had like a Morph Cut 12 years ago, 13 years ago. Wow.

Where you been, man? [laughs] Yeah. 10 years ago, I was deep in Unreal, man. [laughs] I, I, I didn't look up from that.

Yeah, no, I know what you're talking about with the editor Premiere. Is that audio stuff in Premiere, or is it in like Audition? 'Cause I felt like sometimes- Oh... some of the features they put are in, like, different products, and it's a bit like, ah, just put it in like a, a unified one.

Yeah. No, I, I... You're probably right. It's probably spread out throughout that ecosystem.

That's the, that's the other thing. Blackmagic, like, shouts everything into Resolve, so you know it's all, all gonna be in one place. It's all there, yeah. The only q- question is like- Yeah...

is it on the Fairlight page, or is it on the Edit page, or is it on the Color page? Right. That's the one issue. And then they added a couple other kind of filters and plugin, not plugins, but extra filters or, like, Color page e- uh, features.

This one's probably the one I'm most looking forward to, AI Cinefocus. So it creates a depth map and then- Mm-hmm... gives you a more realistic fake depth of field as if it was shot with- Mm-hmm... cinematic lenses.

Yeah, see? It has that gradual falloff that I was talking about. Yeah, yeah. Like, stuff in the back is really out of focus.

Stuff in mid-ground is not so much. Yeah. Yeah, that, that's one thing that AI just doesn't do well, like when it does a- That's-... novel generation...

the first thing that came to mind with this, which was like, this is great. I've said before, like I think Resolve's a really good editing tool for AI, like fully synthetic clips, because it helps. It has the film emulation, and now with this- Yeah... 'cause a big issue with a lot of the AI clips is, like, either everything's in focus.

It just doesn't have the same natural depth of field. So you could still- Yeah... take the clips that you get and not have to, like, keep tweaking it in whatever video generator you're using and then bring it into Resolve and fix or add more depth of field to it. Absolutely.

I would even go far as to have a strategy of generating everything highly in focus, like super sharp with AI. Like, I don't know if you can negative prompt it, but just say, "Nothing out of focus." Give me everything, so then I could just- Give me everything... have that control later.

And then bring it in here- Yeah... and have very good control over it. That's a good point. Yeah, I like that.

These other filters are kinda crazy too. AI Blemish Removal, so like a beauty filter kinda thing, which I know- Oh, yeah. I could have used that when I was 15. [laughs] And then, well, you could be 15 again, 'cause the other one is AI Face Age Transformer.

I am curious how well this works, but it analyzes the face, and then it is a de-ager or up-ager on a subject's face. That's crazy. That's crazy to have aging, de-aging capability in Resolve. This was like- [laughs]...

premium VFX stuff five years ago. [laughs] I know. Like, you would have to pay six figures to get this done. Yeah, you could re- Oh my God.

How far have we come? This is nuts. Okay, and now this one, this one I think is the craziest one, and I'm [laughs] I'm just, I'm thinking like, wait until the online mob finds out about this plugin because [laughs] this is really gonna annoy them. Okay.

This one is an AI face reshaper, but it's a, it's a performance changer. It maps the face, and then you can, like, make them smile more or adjust their eyebrows and change their facial expressions. In the video itself, it was like you could change an actor's performance, and it's like, oh, that's kind of- [laughs] Wow. Um- That's also nuts.

K- [laughs] That's incredible. People are kinda freaked out about that thing with AI, and that was just a, a plugin in, um, Resolve kinda buried in the feature set. I could totally see, like, Hollywood casting, like a, a B- or a C-level actor who, who's- [laughs]... not that good with acting, and then just having an acting coach go in in post and just, like, enhance the performance.

[laughs]Crazy. Uh, yeah Just a crazy dude. What a world we live in. [laughs] I mean, like, if you're complaining today about not making a movie because you don't have the right, you know, you don't have access to the right actors or the right gear, like, no excuse.

There- everything is at our disposal. On the flip side, there's just now so many tools with this where it's just like you can get analysis paralysis of never finishing [laughs] everything- That's true... because you're like, "I could just tweak every single detail about this thing." AI Ultra Sharpen, which they already had a built-in sharpener, but this, I don't know what's happening under the hood.

Yeah, it's like a- If it's a- I'm guessing it's like a Topaz-... diffusion... type deal where they're doing- Yeah, but like Topaz, GAN... some type of AI.

Like OG- Yeah... kinda model. Or like I don't, I don't think it's a diffusion model running under it that- I've used, uh, Resolve's built-in upscaler before. It's pretty solid.

It's nothing- It's good. Yeah, it's good for like a click on. Yeah. And if you're on a PC, and you have an Nvidia card, then you get even more options for the upscaler.

It unlocks more f- um, upscaling options. Yeah, for sure. Because they can tap into the, the GPU. Uh, this one's also really cool and handy.

It is a deblur. Um, so you [laughs] if you have a clip- Oh, is this the enhance button from, like, crime shows? Kinda, yeah. It's, what's it called?

Remove Motion Blur. So if you, like, whip panned or, like, moved too quick, and you didn't get the details, and you wanna bring the details back, it makes a new version of the clip and brings the details back. [laughs] That's pretty good. That, that video just, that's pretty damn good, man.

Even with motion. God damn. I remember when now we were like, "I wanna add more motion blur," and now [laughs] it's like, what if you wanna remove motion blur? [laughs] What if I wanna remove and then add to my liking?

I wanna remove it and then add my own motion blur. I don't like- Exactly... the way it blurs. I need to, like, add- Yeah...

the right blur. Yeah, that's crazy. So that was the craziest stuff that I was like, ah. That's so power- all of those are so powerful.

I still stand by my stance that you cannot replace human performance with enhanced AI performance or mi- you know, puppetry or whatever. Having said that, people are gonna absolutely try to figure out how to, like, save dollars with these features. Yeah. And, you know, actor contracts will have to be [laughs] add more stuff to it [laughs] of what you can and can't do.

'Cause we're already in- Yeah, right... uh, performance agreements and stuff, you know, already having, like, what we can and can't do, like, with voice cloning or ADR. Yeah Or, like, that kinda stuff, and so yeah, it's just gonna get more and more, uh, just, you know, you know, s- so everyone knows, like, what's cool, what's, what's extra permission, what's not cool. I mean, look, also on the flip side, going back to, like, Resolve's great for synthetic videos.

When it's an AI thing, and you [laughs] like most of it, but also you need to tweak the performance of the AI synthetic character, that's a different ballpark. And also that's great if you can generate your video and then bring it into Resolve and tweak the performance, uh- Mm... of the AI generation. Yeah, my, my guess is it, it won't work right.

Uh- It's a fa- I mean, it's a face- I, I forgot where I heard this- It's [laughs]... Joey, but I heard that, um, like, an AI-generated video really struggles with camera tracking because of the inherent noise and, like, it, camera tracking stuff just f- absolutely goes bonkers on top of the AI-generated video. So even if I had an AI video of, like, a human face character- Yeah... it wouldn't, it would have trouble- I don't think it would...

picking up on it? Yeah, it wouldn't stick, yeah. I don't think it would stick really well, like the- All right... the markers and stuff, yeah.

G- all right. Gonna have to try that once I update. Yep. I have not updated, 'cause I, the one annoying thing about Resolve is you have to, like, unlike Adobe where you can have your, like, main release version, but then you can also install the beta version as two separate apps, so you can go back and forth.

With Resolve, it, the beta version replaces the stable version, so you have to, like, commit to going on the beta version, which- Oh... right now I'm like- Got it. It's like Photoshop beta and Photoshop. Yeah.

The beta has all the cool stuff. Yeah, but Photoshop will let you install Photoshop as one app, and then it'll let you install Photoshop beta as a separate app, so you can- Yeah... go back and forth. Resolve won't do that.

You can't. You gotta, like, commit. So I've not committed yet. So- Yeah, especially someone like you who's always editing, producing.

You can't, you can't shake this tree, man. I'm normally, normal Joey was like, "[laughs] Let's go. Just update, install the beta." But lessons learned Joey, going into NAB- [laughs]...

with a team of, like, a couple editors, and we're all gonna need to be- Right... on a stable system of Resolve, uh, is like, we'll wait until after it [laughs] until- Yeah, I'll tell you what. Since I don't do any production anymore, um, I'll, I'll do some beta testing, and then- Yeah, go check it out... we'll try to- Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. Go take some AI clips. I'm very curious about this.

Take some AI clips and see what these filters, uh, how these filters work with it. That's a good idea. Shout out to Blackmagic. Yeah.

Again, I was, I was n- I was expecting new c- I think they announced a new PYXIS camera as well, right? That's, uh, camera-wise- And you're gonna probably see all that at the show and report back. Yeah. I mean, they announced all of it.

Actually, this is kind of a trend thing that I wanna talk about. So, like, the, there really weren't any new, like, new camera bodies or any new, like, big camera updates. The biggest thing was they added 100G Ethernet ports to a couple of the cameras. Uh, so the Cine Camera, the URSA- Mm-hmm...

and the PYXIS 12K. There's a more- Yeah... expensive model. Everything about the body and sensor, like, everything's exactly the same.

Literally, the only thing that changed is 100G Ethernet output. Yeah, it's the- Which-... interfaces that change. Uh, I mean, a- and they're gearing up their product line for broadcast more so.

Yeah. RED is also doing the same. I know RED recently launched an entire broadcast division, so they're taking- Mm... the Raptor, and then just like Blackmagic, they're just attaching a bunch of ports that you need for broadcast, and then it, it's a, it's a new camera.

It's a new product. Yeah, like that's- They're going after it... speed we don't really need for film, but yeah, it was for, like, high-speed data throughput, slow-mo to, to go into broadcast. And yeah, I mean, they kind of built out a additional tools where you could have a live broadcast f-...

version of the Cine Immersive. So they also have support with s- an update with, like, Constellation. There's, like, $100,000 Constellation, like, their video mixer, and some of their other video tools. Like, in the broadcast realm, which we don't really talk about much, but they kind of built out enough of the tool set to have a pipeline where you could do an immersive live broadcast event.

Right. Kinda like what they're doing at COSM, but, you know, COSM, everything with COSM is proprietary to them. Yeah. So this is more- They have their own cameras.

Yeah. Right, right. And the other whole thing is- And so does The Sphere. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So if you are like, "I wanna do stuff like that, but, like, I don't have the R&D budget to build our entire camera ecosystem," now there's, like, a Blackmagic solution. And they did a big overhaul- So-...

on Fairlight, their audio mixing stuff, to have, like, an immersive live audio mixing platform. So you can mix, you can- Wow... capture immersive audio, mix it, have the video camera. The camera is with immersive video.

So kind of the whole pipeline to do some sort of live immersive. Yeah. The... What a, what a age we live in.

I mean, from hardware to software, out to distribution, like, it's all becoming more and more seamless and painless. Yeah. It's, it's incredible. The fact that there weren't, like, any other kinda bigger camera updates, and it's mostly broadcast-focused, feels like a continuation of what we talked about last year, where, like, last year at NAB felt like the most broadcast-centric NAB that I've been to.

It's like back to being National Association of Broadcasters. Broadcasters. 'Cause it was pretty film for a while. It was very film.

I mean, that was where, like, uh, Freefly launched the Movie a while, a long time ago, and then, like, the Ronin came out from DJI, and drones. Yeah. And it was, like, a lot of... RED had a huge booth there.

That was, like, where, like, a lot of the cinema cameras would launch their stuff, and it became- Yeah. ARRI, ARRI had the, the lights and the cameras. Like, ARRI's booths- Yeah... are, are famous at NAB.

RED had a- And then-... built a movie theater. Sony [laughs] Right? Yeah.

And Sony has that corner where they showed off, you know, the new Venices and all that stuff. Yeah. Um, yeah. So i- i- look, i- I think you would probably agree that the big trend is, like, s- film hardware sales is slowing down.

Mm-hmm. And so they gotta recuperate and make up that with broadcast hardware sales. Yeah. Live events, and sports, and all that is- Yeah...

still, like, the one big growth area for, for a lot of the media companies. So- Right... it makes sense that that's most of the focus for what the company's focusing on, 'cause, uh, they've got money to buy. Yeah.

I mean, l- if you look at, like, Amazon and Netflix, who both have pivoted hard into live events, those things need a lot of hardware- Yeah... in order for them to do that. Yeah. Yeah.

One thing I will say I am bummed about, there was really no update for Blackmagic Cloud. They have, like, a new, they have, like, a new deck mountable cloud store thing, but nothing on the software side that addresses a lot of the cloud storage synchronization features and issues with, like, Black- with, um, Resolve, and Blackmagic Cloud in general. So that's my- Yeah... one bummer.

Yeah. You're, you're a b- heavy, uh, BMD Cloud user. My one sort of tinfoil hat theory on that is cloud costs have gone exponentially up, right? With all of the AI cloud inference and training that's happening.

So my guess is Blackmagic's internal AWS cost, or whatever infrastructure they're using, has gone up. And, um, they are probably gonna hold off on cloud development because, um, it's just not something they're making a lot of money in at the moment. I don't know. All right.

Well, that was a tin hat theory. [laughs] Yeah. I don't know, maybe. But also we're trying a new workflow this NAB, which I'll talk about in a second.

All right. Next up, Adobe stuff. Mm-hmm. So Adobe's two big updates.

Uh, the big one at Premiere is they've launched a completely revamped color mode. The theory behind this was kind of redesigning color built more towards editors and not colorists and color specialists. So it's this s- more simplified color wheel, drag and drop interface, where you have more minimal... Like, instead of, like, having your three color wheels, you kind of have this one unified wheel.

Your video's much bigger. Uh, click and drag to- Oh, interesting... make changes. And kind of...

I think the idea was just more, like, getting the change you have in your head, make it easier to do in apply to the video, versus mixing, like, three or four different color wheels and trying to get it right when you're not a colorist. So yeah. So it's kind of a completely new color mode, and a complete revamp, uh, on the system. And there's different ways you could have it just, uh, apply, just color a clip, color your timeline, color your sequence.

Yeah. So I haven't messed around with it, but I'm gonna dig into it soon. But it looked like a pretty good- Yeah... streamlined, like, new color experience for- Yeah.

I mean, it's not just streamlined... new colorists. It's probably doing, it's probably doing so much under the hood. Like, there's probably a lot of neural stuff happening, um, with just, like, one little click, one little shift, that's probably triggering, like, a bunch of different workflows and all.

Like, it's analyzing the media, and, uh, masking, and all types of things. Because a- as they were adjusting the color in that video, I was noticing that it's not a global effect. Like, it is specifically selecting portions of the frame to apply that in. Oh, yeah.

Good point. Like, tying in their smart masking, which they've kind of been rolling out lately with- Mm-hmm... coloring. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good point.

Yeah. I'm curious, too, if it has features to either, like, if you have a reference image, to kinda, like, m- color match, like, against a reference image, to, like, c- match the color timing to that. Or also to match if you have two different interview shots, like, match the color between the two. Um, simple stuff like that, where you kinda...

Comes up a lot, where you, like, have multiple cameras, you wanna just equalize them, if it has easy fe- features to, to fix that. Yeah. I welcome it. I welcome anything that is, uh, simple enough to get 90% of the job done.

Mm-hmm. Right? For the other 10%, you have the colorists who are on Resolve that are gonna go ham. But for most of us, like, if this gets us 90% there and it's a YouTube video, then- Yeah.

And if this looks really right away-... let's pick it up... better than, than what I would've tried to do myself, awesome. Yeah.

And not having to- ExactlyLike, look, Resolve's great and super powerful, but also, like, for, like you said, YouTube stuff, it's like I don't need 20 node trees to do that, and [laughs]- No... [laughs] I don't spend my day trying to figure that out. Yeah. So yeah, it's cool.

And then other Adobe one, this was also pretty neat. Frame.io now has a way to mount, uh, locally. So it's called Frame Drive, and it's basically- Mm...

you can take your Frame.io account, mount it on your computer as a local drive, kinda like LucidLink. So it appears as a hard drive. You have access, you could stream all the videos instantaneously or whatever media you have.

In Frame.io, it shows up w- as, like, as a local hard drive. Oh, wow. That's cool.

It... I mean, that's how Google Drive mounts itself as well. Google Drive falls apart with videos. So, like, it doesn't, like- Right.

Right... if you wanted to edit a video or if you wanted to edit a project and your media was stored in Google Drive, your file, your video files, you would have to pin all those video files to download them locally. There's- Oh... no way that Google Drive is built to stream video files in real time.

Right. It's just not built for that kind of throughput. It's not right. It's built for text files- Yeah...

and just keeping your stuff in sync or easy moving. Yeah. PDFs. Um- Yeah [laughs]...

this, I believe, is it can do, like, similar to LucidLink, LucidLink will do, uh, will stream your files in real time so you can edit off of video files off your virtual drive seamlessly. I believe this will do the same thing, and we'll have that seamless playback. Okay. So you could have your raw video files in your Frame.

io link or Frame.io drive. You could load it up for Premiere, bring in your video files, and edit with them while they're still technically stored in Frame.io.

Yeah, that seems like the missing link between Frame.io and Premiere. Yeah. Like, they're trying to close that last mile problem, which is, which is pretty cool.

Question for you, Mr. Editor. How, how similar or dissimilar is this Frame.io drive to Strada?

[laughs] I'll get to that in my next tab, but [laughs]... All right. But, um- Okay, I will hold that question. What was I gonna say?

Yeah, no, talking about the missing link, I think I probably rambled about this m- multiple times, but that was the advantage that Blackmagic Cloud had with Resolve and that ecosystem they built- Right... where, like, Blackmagic Cloud can synchronize your project for a team, collaborative, plus handle the media and the proxies with their server. And I was always like, it's really frustrating that Premiere has a team feature that sh- just manages a collaborative project. But they were always like, "For the proxies or for the media, you're on your own.

Maybe use LucidLink or figure- Yeah... something else out." I think this should- Yeah, download it and figure it out... be that missing piece.

I haven't dug into, like, the workflow, and I, I, I mean, it would be shocking to me if they built this thing and it doesn't do real-time editing or, uh, you know, can't handle the proxy media or all your media with a Premiere team project. Uh, but this should- Absolutely, yeah... be that missing piece. Like, if not, that's kinda crazy.

Yeah. A- and the solutions that F- uh, Frame.io has developed, like, it's so solid and bulletproof. Like, it doesn't crash.

You know, it works under many conditions, many platforms, and things like that. So yeah, I, I'm sure this will be- Yeah, I mean, like, as much as I love all the other cloud platforms and stuff, w- we still have a robust Frame.io account because the review tools, the video playback- Right... being able to handle, like, files of any size, it just works.

Um, like, so- Chef's kiss. [laughs] I know. So, like, big fan of Frame.io.

Even with all the other tools I use, uh, I still, I still- Yeah... it's still kinda the backbone to a lot of stuff. Yeah. Okay.

Strada Connect. So Strada Connect basically does the same exact thing that I just talked about. Okay. It will mount- Okay, that's what I was gonna get to.

From a user perspective, it will mount to your computer, and you'll be able to edit and stream files, uh, video files in real time, and you can load them in Resolve or Premiere or wherever and, like, edit with this virtually mounted drive. The big difference is Strada Connect has zero cloud storage. So Strada Connect is working off of a, let's say my computer A here, my laptop, I have a hard drive plugged into it with the original media. Right.

I turn this computer into a host. So this computer is on Strada. It's pulling the files from my connected hard drive, and then other computer, editor, anywhere else in the world loads Strada. Mm-hmm.

My hard drive on this computer shows up as a hard drive on their computer. Mm-hmm. And then they can st- still edit the videos in real time, and play back the videos, and bring those videos into Premiere or Resolve and edit those video files. Dude, that's bonkers.

No cloud. That's bonkers. It's basically peer-to-peer. Yeah, so- Yeah, it's like LimeWire on steroids.

[laughs] Yeah. Frame.io, you still have to have your media stored on Frame.io, and you're, you know, still paying your storage cost.

Same with Lucid- LucidLink has, like, the craziest pricing that's, like, uh, 80 bucks a terabyte. So, like, they have, like, the craziest- Yeah... per-terabyte pricing. But they're also very professional grade.

Yeah. I mean, they've been around for a while. Like, it works. Right.

They've built out a system. Like, if you're enterprise and you want something that is, you know, definitely gonna work, LucidLink has proven that. Strada, you know, this is new, but so we are gonna try Strada- At the show? At NAB.

I'm gonna have test out. Um, so basically still using- With the crappy Wi-Fi at the show, you're gonna do this? No, it's gonna be at the Airbnb. [laughs] Oh, okay, okay.

So, like, at the Airbnb, there'll be... Like, Iodine lent me one of their big, crazy, big, uh, like, 20 terabyte RAID hard drive things. That'll store all the original files. That'll be plugged into, like, a Mac Mini that's just always on.

That's the Strada host, and then all the editors will mount that Strada drive and can stream and edit the videos as if it's showing up on their own computer. Also, Strada can handle Blackmagic RAW, which was a big limitation- Wow... before. Right.

It cannot play back Black- Blackmagic RAW [laughs] in real time, to clarify. That's okay. That's okay. You know, they'll have to- I think if you just g- download it, that's fine, yeah.

They'll have to edit in proxies. I mean, we always make proxies anyway, so, like, they'll be editing with the proxies, and then when it's ready to export, it exports from the actual, uh, Blackmagic RAW. So you'll be in Vegas with that. Uh, what I'll do is I'll have BitTorrent up in, uh, in LA, and I'll download the Strada torrent from here.

[laughs] Sounds good. Sounds good. [laughs] You're gonna come in and you're just gonna rip all the footage out [laughs] of the drive. So yeah, Strada works.

I mean, it's gonna be great because, yeah, there's no cloud storage. You just plug in your hard drive, and your hard drive- So cool... turns into a cloud drive, which has been this missing link forever of, um, you know, y- you're like, "Oh, cloud storage is great." It is great, but it never gets smaller, and you're just paying, like, month to month.

It always... You're always just paying that storage fee. So- Yeah, any- Yeah... any kind of innovation and outside-the-box thinking in our industry, I welcome.

So this feels like really outside-the-box thinking. This is awesome. Oh, yeah, for sure. The...

Yeah, it just turns the drive into a cloud drive, and you can just edit video in real time. Um- I wo- I wonder, though, since they're not charging for cloud access a- and storage and all that, like, how is the pricing and the licensing working? It's per seat. It's pretty reasonable.

It's per seat. If you add people to your folder and stuff, it's, like, $12 a user a month. If you want to transfer the files, they do charge a limit to that. So, like, you can edit my files off the drive in real time, but if you wanted to copy those files or if I wanted to receive files from you, I can, like, send someone a link, be like, "Hey," like, a, you know, uh, "Send me the footage.

Like, use this link and upload it," and it'll add that footage to my hard drive. Transfers, they charge a little bit more. But that's pretty much the kinda cap, but it's basically, uh, however many people you add to your project, you just get charged per seat, uh, $12 a month. Yeah, it's, it's really reasonable pricing.

It's, like, half as expensive as Frame.io, like, from what it looks like. And depending how much you use Frame.io and how much you're storing.

So I mean, I connected the, like, 80 terabyte NAS to Strada, so, like, anything on there is potentially accessible, where, like, an editor can access and use that footage. So- Right... that's where it starts getting crazy, when it's like, oh, if you have terabytes of media stored, and you could just turn your entire s- NAS into a cloud drive without having to pay all of that, uh, all those storage fees. Yeah.

I, I guess, like, the... If I were to nitpick, like, the Achilles heel for all of this is really gonna be the Wi-Fi at, at the Airbnb for you. Yes. It's gonna be...

Like, I'll hardwire into the ethernet, but I don't know what the speed is. You know, uh, Michael said that it's run on pretty mediocre Wi-Fi, 'cause it'll just kind of reduce the quality. Um, and there is a cache feature- Okay... so, like, it c- will try to download the active files in the background to the local computer so that it does speed things up.

But yeah, it's, um... You're at the mercy of the internet, you know, just power in general in that area. And also, like, I have to have a host computer running. If that host computer freezes, you know, some glitch with that, then yes, it knocks the entire thing offline and, you know, you're kind of...

There are, like, single points of failure for this. So- Yeah... that, you know, that's the trade-off for- Well, hopefully there's, like, um, you know, built-in error correction and, uh, recovery modes where you lose the connection but it doesn't really kill your session per se. Yeah, I mean, it would just be your video files would go offline because the actual project, we're still using Blackmagic Cloud to manage the actual, like, project library, so, like, that's still saved and local in a different system.

So if, like, the device went offline, it would sort of be like someone unplugged your hard drive by accident and your media files would go offline, but the actual timeline and project itself would still be preserved. Cool. Yeah. Cool.

Awesome. All right. One other update from Sony that's coming is a new feature, uh, in ZIN, which was, like, their kinda spatial capture- ZIN?... world, realm.

Yeah. Remember... I think we've talked about them a while ago. They were...

They, they built some of the, um, like, 3D display monitors, and then they had some of the 3D headsets. Yes. It was kinda like- Yes... an ecosystem for, like, building 3D worlds and tools to, like, work and manipulate in them.

So they have a 3D world scanner pipeline that is... Basically, it's an iPhone app, but you do have to have a Sony camera. But you attach your phone to the camera, run the app, and then use the Alpha camera as the capture device, and then the phone guides you- Right... for capturing the space.

Okay. So it's, uh, it's like, um, the reconstruction is being done on the phone itself. The s- phone's mapping and doing the reconstruction, and you're capturing the images with your higher quality- Correct... Alpha camera.

And then I'm guessing later on- Yeah... you post-process the two and get a threed- it's not a Gaussian splat. It is a- Probably gonna be-... just regular polygon...

regular mesh. Yeah, OBJ or- Yeah... GLB or one of those file formats. What do you think of this?

I mean, I'm just curious why now in 2026. Like, this would've been really suitable for when, uh, 3D scanners were really hot and new, like, you know, back 10 years ago when Lico was rolling out. There's ArcTech. There's a bunch of 3D ca- sc- scanners.

Um, I mean, even with this, um, you have apps on your phone now, like Polycam, which does a really good job with the iPhone camera itself. Yeah, and that's probably... It seems like Polycam on steroids, 'cause it's, you're probably using the same- Right... iPhone LIDAR data that's like, okay, not like a dedicated LIDAR, but okay data, and then a better- Yeah...

image capture from the, the Sony mirrorless camera. Yeah, they should've just saved the money from the development and not let go of all of Pixomondo. That's just my, my opinion. [laughs] Like, to f- I don't see the point of this now, y- you know, bec- especially because AI is about to completely revolutionize this space anyway.

I know. I would see... Like, if they already built the f- found the, the groundwork, they should try to switch this to, like, at least do Gaussian splats, like, right away. Gaussian splats, 4DGS.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. But I feel they need to... Like, it's a cool idea of this workflow where you kinda pair stuff you already have or the, you know, the camera's pretty accessible.

But yeah, this needs to be doing Gaussian splats ASAP. Yeah. And also, like, with a lot of first frame, last frame, like, if you put that through a cling model, like, you can, you can kinda get some orbital stuff out of it, you know, just with two or three images. Oh, so what you're saying, like, these kinda background things you could just generate versus- Yeah, you can just generate-...

capture... and have, like, the parallax that you need or whatnot- Oh, seriously... um, on a case-by-case basis. Like, you don't really need- Yeah...

to capture it. If I'm already there at this place to capture this first frame, last frame, then I'd rather just capture the whole thing. Yeah, I mean, I, I don't, I don't know who the market for the, uh, any of this stuff is, um, who's gonna be buying it. It's certainly not consumers, you know.

Yeah. I mean, I, you know, they're demoing the, the curved look, like as if you're gonna put this on a wall. But I know-A lot of the Zinn stuff is also for, like, headset work and things. Sure.

Sure. Sure. So- Yeah... and games.

Yeah. I don't know who'd use it- Yeah... for virtual production. Maybe...

Yeah, it does say virt- It's funny, it says virtual production- Yeah... even though you guys are closing down some stages. Mm. All right.

Uh, oh look, a disguise thing. Plugin for disguise. Oh, okay. Okay.

So the disguise plugin would most likely be for concert touring or something like that. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense, some sort of more- Yeah... experiential kinda thing than- Mm-hmm...

an actual wall. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, I'm gonna talk to them Sunday morning, so I'll find out more information.

All right. Sounds good. And then on the flip side, well, not a really flip side, but speaking of super immersive worlds, [laughs] Uh, and not really NAB related, but this was going around on X the other day, NVIDIA has a new spatial model, uh, Lyra 2.0.

It's, kinda feels like World Labs on steroids. It is like... Or GE. Yeah.

The quality's high. [laughs] The quality is high on this video. It is moving through a world that is being generated, but, uh, it is like it keeps going, and it's persistent, and you can go back- Right... and it remembers.

I don't know what the duration is, but this... Yeah, this feels pretty crazy. Yeah. I mean, like, after they launched the autonomous driving stuff, which was what?

Just a few months back, you knew that they were working on some incredible world models. Yeah. Well, they all tie together, as we have said multiple times. Yeah.

All roads lead to world models. [laughs] Physical AI, yeah. But yeah, look, I mean, it's moving around this, like, detailed, intricate library house thing. Everything's staying persistent.

Dude, that is so high quality versus, like, a Gaussian splat or something. Yeah, and like- It's insane... we just went upstairs, we moved into different rooms. Like, there's no...

Nothing's falling apart. Well, there at the edge of that door. Right. But, like- Yeah...

we just moved, like, through a house. Yeah, the video render is so sharp. Yeah. So this thing, I'm gonna have to test it out.

This is pretty wild. But yeah, I, I- You can test it out? How would you test it out? I thought they had models open, or code.

Oh, code. I think you'd run it locally. Yeah. Maybe, um, or someone spins it up on the cloud.

Or, or vibe code a UI on top of whatever GitHub- I don't know. I'm just gonna give it to Claude and ask it, like, "Hey, how do I use this thing?" [laughs] Oh, like... Yeah, I love that.

I love that, Joey. Yeah, exactly. [laughs] Just give it the web, web link. Like, I don't have ti- Be, be rude as well...

actually, I don't have time for this. I, I am gonna try... I'm, I'm gonna have a whole, like, kind of a workflow breakdown for the NAB stuff. But one of the ideas is to, uh...

'Cause Resolve has, like, built-in scripting stuff. So I wanna, uh... My goal is to have Claude set up a way to automatically, like, once an editor's done with a timeline, that it automatically just grabs the timeline, spins up Resolve, loads, like, an export preset, and then just exports it. So, like, they don't have to wait, sit around, or, like, wait for that to happen.

That's, that's one of my other goals for the show. [laughs] I love it. All right. Keep me posted.

Claude control. And last one, another thing from World Labs, they released a new version of Spark. So I didn't realize this, but Spark is sort of their web viewable 3D Gaussian splat platform- Right... to view splats on the web.

So they developed it, and then they released a new update to basically- This also feels much higher quality than their last version. It's just to play the splats in a browser, right, versus- Yeah... actual scanning. I mean, they ha- they have released updates to their world model, uh, Marble, in the last, like, few weeks.

Yeah, this is so, like, just make splats more web viewable, uh, and- Mm-hmm... open that up to putting them in the web. Yeah. I, I think in the future, all video models will basically be a derivative of world models.

And that way, you get the consistency of, of, um, spatial spaces. Like, you know, you can put the camera here versus there- Yeah, so it understands-... and you, you'd have accurate-... the space- Yeah...

instead of trying to just make a one frame after the other. Exactly. So, like, even if, like, you dedicate a little bit of inference time to generating that world first and then the rest of the inference to generate the video in really high quality, I think that would make sense. This table might be the most famous table and bicycle in the world.

[laughs] You ever seen... You've seen this table, right? It's from the- No. It's from, like, the original 3D Gaussian splat paper.

It's, like, in this table backyard thing always comes up in, like, all of these, uh- Oh, really?... Gaussian splat demos. Yeah, it's like a table, and there's, like, a bike next to a bench. That was, like, the first demos, and so they always resurface.

Nice. This is, uh, the amazing wrap up to pre-NAB and, uh, a little bit of love for the world mo- world models. Love it. Yeah.

See, I'll be at NAB. Sadly, Addy will not. Sad. Ugh.

This is the second year that I'm missing. I, I'm really bummed. I hope to see you at NAB next year. Yeah.

Yeah. You know what? I'm just gonna go. Just go.

[laughs] Just go, yeah. [laughs] You will be there next year. Ma- manifest it. [laughs] Yes, I'll be there next year.

Maybe next year we'll finally be able to do, like, a live podcast at the show. Yeah, and, uh, any of the viewers, if you are at NAB, you wanna meet up with Joey, take some selfies. Yeah, let me know. Let me know in the comments.

[laughs] Yeah. Hit us in the comments. Links to everything we talked about at de noisepodcast.com.

Thanks for watching, and we'll catch you in the next episode.