A trade show as comprehensive as the National Association of Broadcasters’ annual exposition in Las Vegas will never have just one theme. For the last couple of decades, each show has featured everything from tracking rail to transmitter towers, so any attempt to sum up the experience of all 55,000 attendees at the 2025 event will inevitably be incomplete.

The benefit of that is that people working in a wide range of disciplines will find plenty to look at. Until recently, for instance, the iron curtain between broadcast and single-camera techniques was mostly unbroken. As far back as 2013, Ikegami had bought Super-35mm sensors from Arri for the HDK-97ARRI studio camera. People have been duct-taping cinema cameras to studio pedestals since the days of 35mm on shows like Friends. Still, until a few years ago it was rare for equipment - much less people - to work both sides of the fence. This year’s NAB show, however, seemed keen to break that mold.

One example was Grass Valley’s newly-introduced LDX 180. The camera is part of the LDX 100 series which includes cameras using both a single ⅔” sensor and conventional three-chip arrangements. The 180, however, implements a new, large single sensor, an entirely new Super-35mm design in Grass Valley’s Xenios line. Company literature describes this sensor as “10K,” which, assuming it refers the horizontal photosite count, would convincingly substantiate Grass Valley’s statement that the camera produces “oversampled UHD.” That’s more than a 2:1 oversampling, enough to produce images which get quite close to the theoretical limits of the signal.

Grass Valley has been careful, it says, to match the color behavior of other 100-series cameras, such that the LDX 180 will intercut with them. The idea is that flattering closeups of a singer at a concert might be shot on the big-chip machine, with other positions covered with conventional cameras.

Cinema camera manufacturers, keen to sell cameras by the dozen rather than the pair, have pushed their products the other way, as with Arri’s live production system. Grass Valley’s option, however, is a ground-up design with a lot - and it’s worth emphasizing, a lot - of spare performance. Press releases have discussed an all-LDX 180 shoot for “full cinematic environments such as drama productions.” The intent here will presumably be studio multicamera work, but it should also put us in mind of Grass Valley’s much-adored Viper cinema camera of the mid-2000s.

Broadcast productions using large-sensor cameras have begun to rely on cinema-trained focus pullers, particularly on long-lens work facilitated by adapted cinema zooms or dedicated PL-mount broadcast lenses such as Fujifilm’s capable, expensive HZK 25-1000mm box zoom. Canon’s answer to that - beyond its own ranges of cinema-oriented PL-mount zooms - now includes an optional extra for the UHD-Digisuper 122 box lens which is already popular. Referred to as an “optical unit,” the new device takes advantage of a feature in the 122:1 zoom, which was originally designed with an intermediate 1.5:1 extender position. Discovering that this feature was rarely used, Canon deleted it, leaving space in the extender assembly for new ideas.

The company has now designed something to go there which… well, the results are difficult to describe narratively, but things which are out of focus take on a characteristic effect which Canon describes as a “novel look.” It certainly is novel, though the effect in most visible in situations where the background is already noticeably soft. Depth of field, meanwhile, is not technically different, which makes life easier for the operator. It remains to be seen whether Canon’s look will be novel enough to persuade directors, but the idea represents an interesting third option offering something different to both conventional ⅔” and Super-35mm designs.

Over in the west hall, we discover Amazon Web Services’ substantial exhibit. Despite the sheer scale of Amazon’s presence at the show, it seems fair to say that the film and television industry is weighing its relationship with public cloud computing more than it was a couple of NABs ago. It is, sometimes, hard to shift the impression that a lot of asset management and storage options are a relatively thin layer over an off the shelf cloud resource.

The immediate scalability and global connectivity are still selling points for people looking to cover a single demanding job, though media and entertainment production as a bloc seems to have realized that video represents a large quantity of data, and sending large quantities of data over someone else’s network costs large quantities of money. The huge enthusiasm for public networks as an alternative to costly satellite time for remote contribution is unabated, but within other applications the mainstream seems to vacillate between public cloud and on-prem facilities - which a cynical traditionalist might characterize as buying a computer and using it.

Ultimately, all of this is a reflection of a reality in which COTS hardware will always enjoy vast R&D efforts that mission-specific gadgets can never possibly hope to match. That, ultimately, is why equipment at every level of media and entertainment is being gradually subverted by software. Devices which have been resistant to that change have been those which must provide a certain level of user experience, often meaning a large field of easily-pressable buttons, hence the vast popularity of video switchers and USB-connected control surfaces for digital audio workstations.

It is perhaps a sign of the times that Ross, a long-time manufacturer of high-end picture handling electronics, has been working hard on its Streamline asset management offering. Simultaneously, the company is looking to unify its Acuity and Carbonite switcher ranges, which currently exist somewhat in parallel. While some of the control panel hardware has been interchangeable for a while, the company seems understandably keen to do the underlying engineering work once, and once only.

At the same time, Streamline feels very much like a product of the moment, with a tidy timeline editor built right into the web interface. Yes, there are new features this year, though the company seems keen to keep the user interface straightforward and clean. As with so much else, the user experience is now fully decoupled from the hardware doing the work, and the hardware is COTS. The days of switcher panels being closely coupled to racks of hardware are now in the past, even where high video bandwidth still means that the heavy lifting is done in the same building as the person pressing the buttons.

As Grass Valley so ably demonstrated with its new sensor design, though, there comes a point where technology and reality must interface, often through the medium of a warm body. Vinten - the storied name from which the entire Videndum brand derives - has been providing precision devices to that end for a very long time, and at NAB 2025, showed its Versine 360 tripod head.

The head was seen at IBC last year, but picked up an award at NAB for its engineering excellence. Company reps are painfully honest about the challenge of selling new ideas when the existing design has lasted decades, but the Versine 360 has been designed to be as tempting as possible. Built for outside broadcast positions using non-box lenses, the design process took in every possible item of feedback from the people who will be loading them onto trucks. The payload range is larger, the adjustment wheels neatly geared down on concentric knobs, and there are a wealth of ball and flat base mounting options. It is a human interface device, and as such at little risk of being replaced by a piece of software - at least until artificial intelligence learns to tell a soccer ball from an official’s bald head.

Of all these innovations, though, one thing that isn’t much in evidence at the NAB show - and which hasn’t been for years - is any hint of any serious demand for higher-capability video formats. Grass Valley’s new camera is an interesting case in point, inasmuch as it has a lot of pixels on its sensor, but the design intent is fairly clearly to produce the highest possible quality circa-UHD video by oversampling. Beyond that, nobody is pushing 16K for home distribution.

Except…

Blackmagic’s Ursa Cine Immersive is something of a standout, inasmuch as it boasts two sensors each at 8160 by 7200. Anyone who has ever thought seriously about the end of the race for resolution and frame rate might well have recognized the remaining need for more pixels in special-purpose video such as visual effects background plates, theme park ride films and, yes, head-mounted displays such as Apple’s Vision Pro. The new Ursa Cine Immersive provides more pixels and more frame rate, capturing those large frames in stereo at up to 90 frames per second to match the Vision Pro’s behavior. For comparison, the company’s Ursa Cine 17K has a single sensor with something near the same number of total pixels on it, although it tops out at 60 frames per second at full resolution; whether it’s fair to compare these RGB plus white sensors to conventional Bayer designs is a vexed question.

Either way, the need for high frame rates is well-established in head-mounted displays, where slower-updating video can provoke motion sickness even given precise, high-performance tracking of both camera and head orientation. Crews working in conventional drama production must exercise care that camera motion does not produce distracting judder in 24-frame images, which is distracting in cinema but potentially nauseating in VR and adjacent applications. Modern displays for video gaming suffer similar concerns, and increasingly advertise refresh rates up to 240Hz - or even beyond - to alleviate motion sickness and improve coordination between the virtual hand and the real-world eye. In this context, 90Hz doesn’t actually seem that fast, but it’s enough to both break away from nausea and to make the camera work very, very hard to capture enough pixels that quickly.

Blackmagic is also promoting updates to Resolve which will allow it to handle the heavyweight material from the new camera using its established hybrid raw workflow. There are also a number of new metadata- and picture-handling capabilities intended to facilitate easy production of material for Apple’s headset. There are two main takeaways here. First is that the collaboration with Apple is a huge coup for a company which barely made cameras a decade ago. The other is that no matter how much cleverness the world manages to build into its technology, someone will find a niche in which that performance is stretched, and the Ursa Cine Immersive really does have an enormously large amount of absolute performance.