After four days at NAB I’ve noticed that even though Apple wasn’t at the event, they certainly had a profound impact on the people that were there. I’m not talking about the Macs that were visible at so many of the booths; I’m talking about all of the iPhones and Apple laptops attendees had.

I noticed almost immediately after arriving at the expo on Monday that there was a surprisingly high concentration of iPhones in the crowds. So many, in fact, that it felt almost like I was back at Macworld Expo again. Sure, there were tons of Blackberrys, but the number iPhones was just crazy.

Since so many people come to NAB from outside the United States it stands to reason that many of the iPhones came from other countries, too. Turns out I was right, and I even got to play with an iPhone from Italy. It was unlocked and jailbroken since the iPhone isn’t officially available in Italy yet. Yes, it was cool to play with, and seeing a VoIP app in action on the smartphone was just great.

The media center at NAB had a surprisingly high concentration of Macs as well. While the usual collection of MacBooks, MacBook Pros, and MacBook Airs were scattered throughout the room, there were also quite a few iBook G4s. The pre-Intel Macs were chugging right along and serving their users admirably.

On a side note, I noticed that the Macs tended to be clean, while the PC laptops tended to be grungy and dirty. Considering the small cross section of the human species I was watching, I don’t feel comfortable saying that Mac users are clean and PC users need to take a bath. Feel free to use that information as you please.

The expo itself didn’t have a consistent hustle and bustle feel Wednesday afternoon. I’ll attribute that to the fact that some attendees were heading home and couldn’t stay any longer. Some booths were completely dead, while others seemed packed and overflowing.

There were, however, still plenty of great things to see. Bug.tv made quite an impression on me, and the Blackmagic Video Recorders from Blackmagic Design looked pretty cool, too.

Get this: the Blackmagic Video Recorders connect to your Mac via USB, then suck the video from pretty much any device you connect to them, convert the content for your iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, or Mac, and it all happens with a couple of mouse clicks.

NAB isn’t a Mac or Apple-centric show, but you could still feel the Cupertino presence. There was a kind of Apple vibe both on and off the floor, and that tells me Apple’s mainstream status has moved beyond the iPod to include the Mac and iPhone, too.

Both Apple and Avid bailed on NAB this year, leaving a bitter taste in some people’s mouths, and leaving others wondering if the film and video expo has finally outlived its usefulness. With over 105,000 attendees at the expo it seems there are still plenty of people interested in what goes on at the Vegas event, but it certainly changes the vibe when the two big names aren’t around.

After chatting with people in the Central and Lower South halls on Monday and Tuesday, I came away with the impression that there were more people feeling positive than negative about the event, and I said so in one of my articles about the expo. Later on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, however, I ran into more people that exuded less, um “positive energy” about the event.

One comment to my article asked “Upbeat??? Where are you reporting from?” That would be the Central hall, Lower South hall, and around the areas where classes and other sessions were happening. My later ventures to get a feel for attendee attitudes left me with a feeling that more people were disappointed than happy. Since I didn’t talk with people that were clearly attending sessions, I can only speculate that people attending sessions tended to be more pleased with the event than people that were sticking to the expo floor.

Scientific? Not in the slightest, but interesting none the less.

Without Apple on site to steal everyone else’s thunder it was clear to me that Red had the must-see booth this year. Good cameras, great prices, and native Final Cut Pro support. What more could the budding film maker want?

Red had to limit how may people were in their booth.

Even though some exhibitors were experiencing less traffic than last year, Red seemed to be doing just fine. So many people wanted to see the company’s cameras that they had to gate off their booth and let people in only a few at a time.

Want to know why Office 2008 costs so much? Check out Microsoft’s booth.

Microsoft’s booth was really popular, and Silverlight seemed to be playing at least some part in the booth’s traffic. While Adobe’s booth was popular, too, I was surprised to see almost no traffic at the Adobe Media Player stations. Bad timing on my part, or was there really no interest? Hard to say.

I was really glad to see the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus at NAB. It’s a great resource filling the unacceptable omission of music from so many school curriculums. The work they are doing is absolutely fantastic, and the state of the art recording studio they bring to kids is above and beyond what some pros get access to.

I’ve heard people complain that attendance is down this year, and considering that there were over 111,000 people here last year, there are definitely fewer people around. Based on my adventures on the expo floor, however, it doesn’t feel like a ghost town. Most booths I venture past have a few attendees in them and very few are filled only exhibitor staff.

Several people that aren’t at NAB have asked me if there are “booth babes,” meaning scantily clad women that are strategically placed in an exhibitor’s booth solely to draw in more foot traffic and potentially more sales dollars. I haven’t really seen any, but I did come across something that is far more interesting from a technical standpoint: Mocap, or motion capture, girls. One booth was filming two women dancing in mocap suits and displaying animations of their movements in real time.

Mocap in action: The dots glow only in the picture, so my camera must see something I can’t.

The real time conversion process was cool enough on its own, but it became even cooler when I tok a couple of pictures. It turns out the little dots on their outfits glow in my pictures, but not to the naked eye (No flash used for those pictures in case you where wondering).

Apple and Avid are gone, and attendance is down a little from last year. I hear people suggesting that NAB has jumped the shark, but I just don’t see it. This feels to me like just another transition phase, and that transition feels like it is being driven by the move from SD to HD.

Sure, change can be creepy and uncomfortable, but it’s going to happen. I have a feeling that as long as NAB stays nimble and on top of the current trends there will always be people lining up to see what’s on the expo floor.

Finally, I have one more picture I want to share, but I don’t have a good segue to lead into it. Instead, I offer this picture with an appropriate caption:

Because every car should look like the Millennium Falcon

One of the things I love about creative conferences is that there are so many really creative people around. You never know where you’re going to find something interesting that totally captivates you, like maybe someone from Sesame Workshop.

Nancy Stevenson from the Sesame Street Sesame Workshop spent a morning showing off how her crew creates art — digital assets, for those in the know — for the drawn and cartoon versions of Jim Henson’s world famous muppets at the MOGO media InDesign conference in Miami. Muppets on their own are pretty cool, but seeing how the artists behind the scenes do their magic flat out rocks.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that they rely heavily on Adobe Illustrator and Wacom graphic tablets. Vector-based graphics are scalable, so you won’t lose any image quality as you size up or size down. That makes it easy to repurpose the art for different types of children’s books, art project kits, Web content, promotional materials, or whatever else they want to toss a muppet face on. Illustrator is the right tool for that.

The Sesame Workshop gang totally has this art thing down. They get how to make individual components for the characters they create so they can mix and match parts to build new scenes, show different actions, and put different characters together. Sure, that makes sense, but watching how much works goes into a drawing’s preparation really give you a sense of how much attention goes into the little details.

The cool thing is seeing that what they are creating really is art, and not just a collection of mechanical objects slapped together to simulate a muppet. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that Illustrator users aren’t artists. They most certainly are. I’m just saying that the Sesame team has their own special style, and it shows.

It turns out that Sesame Street doesn’t limit how the muppet characters are interpreted. Along with the flat cartoon-style characters, they also have a whole cut-out paper style, manga, x-sport style, and localized styles for different regions around the world.

I love creativity for creativity’s sake, but the Sesame Workshop people have something special going on. Not only do they get to freely express themselves through the Sesame characters, but they also get to be part of something that’s much bigger: expanding the minds of children all over the world.

As icing on the cake, Nancy gave her presentation on her MacBook Pro in Keynote ‘08. Yeah, the Sesame Workshop people are Mac heads.

On a side note, Disney’s Web site blocks OmniWeb and recommends I download Internet Explorer or Firefox. No thanks, I’ll stick with my trusty OmniWeb and go visit a different Web site. OK, I’ll launch Safari. Why is The Man always bringing me down?

When life gives you lemons, hope the power comes back on soon. Or something like that. Here’s the deal: It’s half way through the first day of the MOGO media InDesign conference and the power went out. Completely. Not coming back on for a long time.

Under other circumstances this would be a minor annoyance, but this is event is loaded with people from several countries that can’t just come back later. So what do you do? Think on your feet, that’s what.

The conference organizers mobilized the instructors and set up impromptu question and answer sessions in the halls — luckily there are plenty of windows for light. Sure, there are some people that are totally bent out of shape. Not that their anger is going to make things any better.

Most people are totally digging the face time they are getting with the instructors that they came so far to see. There are clusters of people around each instructor, and there are several other groups springing up where people are sharing their experiences and issues. This has become an on-the-fly self help event on a big scale.

This is exactly what I love seeing when something that is completely out of our control happens. People are coming together, helping each other out, and breaking out of their personal safety zones and meeting their fellow attendees.

Yes, it totally sucks that power is out, the scheduled classes are off, and there isn’t anything that can be done about that. On the other hand, this is giving everyone a chance to learn in a new way, a more community-focused way. Even better, most people are taking advantage of this new learning environment.

Now, if we could only get that power back on. It’s over 80 degrees outside, and it’s getting hot in here.

Update: The power is back on, well, at least for now. We are picking up where we left off before the power conked out, a little hotter, and with a little more community education that we would have had otherwise. A tip of the hat to the MOGO gang for taking what could have been a disaster and creating a more personalized learning experience.

My conference and expo-going experience tends to be a little different from the average attendee because I’m more often than not on the giving end instead of receiving. By that I mean I’m usually presenting at the event or donning my journalist hat to report on what’s going on. This week I get to indulge myself as an attendee: I’m off to Miami Beach for the MOGO media InDesign, Pixel, Vector and Acrobat Conference.

Oddly enough, I packed as if I was presenting at the event. All of my usual presentation gear including video adapters, backups of important files, and printouts with critical data about the venues I’ll be at is safely tucked away in my carry on bag. Really. Some habits are hard to break.

For all of my traveling, however, this is my first trip to Florida. Thanks to my window seat view, I’m getting to see parts of the U.S. from the air that I’ve only seen from the ground. Yeah, I’m on the plane, and I’m writing. Go figure.

I’ve gone from snow in the air in Denver to what amounts to me as tropical weather, and there’s still a good 45 minutes left in the flight. If my geography is correct, I’m over the ocean and west of Florida right now. At this altitude, you get a very different perspective on the world — much like I’ll get a very different perspective on training conferences all this week.

I also get to watch the other travelers on the plane, and here’s what I’ve noticed: Most people are closed away in their own little worlds, unaware of the amazing things going on around them. The more you pay see, the more you can learn. For example, after I can get at an Internet connection again I need to check up on some geography.

I’m sure — okay, pretty sure — that I saw the Mississippi river at one point, and although I get just how big it is (I’m originally from Missouri, after all), I didn’t get just how big it is. I also need to figure out just where all of those fires I saw was really were. Florida pan handle? Probably, but I can’t be sure until I do some research.

My point is that here I sit, looking out my little window seeing, and ultimately learning, about things that most of the other people on this flight are oblivious to.

Here’s a little observation for you: From this altitude, the ocean waves look like that filmy coating you see on old soup right before the lunch lady stirs it back into the pot. But in a good way.

Believe it or not, I really have a point. It’s way too easy to make up excuses for why you don’t take time to go learn something new, hone your skills, and expand your horizons. It’s even harder of you work someplace where you hear things like “We don’t have time to send you to training. There’s work to be done and deadlines to meet!”

I remember those days, and I also remember how frustrating it was knowing there were new and exciting things to learn, but someone was holding me back. Luckily, life hasn’t been like that for me for some time now.

With that in mind, I’m off to Miami Beach. Sure, I’ve been in the graphic design world for a long time. I remember the good old days of QuarkXPress 3.1, floppy disks, and the promised marvels of PostScript Level 2. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things I can still learn, and I plan on filling my head with cool new bits of knowledge all week long.