This year's showcase was at WCVB-TV's main studio - New England's largest soundstage! It was a unique opportunity to see some of the most sophisticated editing, effects, animation, compositing and audio posting systems on the market. These included specialized systems for news production, HDTV, film, web-streaming and audio post-production. All systems were available for hands-on use with technical personnel from the manufacturers to explain and answer questions.

New this year: State-of-the-art audio solutions! Two of the hottest workgroup storage solutions for NLE's! Automation systems for cable TV!

Very special feature: WCVB pre-released a sneak-preview screening of the first HD Chronicle shot primarily with the Sony HDR-FX1 HD camera. WCVB videographer Art Donahue and representatives from Avid described what it was like to use this camera and answer questions. Art was real enthusiastic - and he had the consumer model! He was greatly looking forward to using the soon-to-be-released professional version.

Among the other products we saw:

• Discreet New Smoke 6.5 and Flint on Linux
• New Avid exhibit
• One Beyond high-performance editing systems
• Quantel's next generation "Resolution Coexistent" PC based editor/graphics production system
• Quantel QEdit laptop news editor
• Pinnacle Liquid Edition Broadcast with new I/O options
• Leitch Velocity HD
• GlobeCaster & its NLE integration
• Optibase Media 100
• Grass Valley/Vibrint/Thomson news editing systems
• Boris Effects Titling/Compositing/Effects
• Broadcast Pix studio-in-a-box
• Digidesign Pro Tools audio production & editing systems

And as usual, extensive refreshments were be served, thanks (as always) to master chef Paul Beck...