Post NAB 2026: A Quieter Floor, AI, Premiere’s Color Revival?

Series	Office Hours

Five working pros unpack what NAB 2026 actually told us about the next year of color work

NAB 2026 was the quietest show floor our contributors have walked in recent memory. The North Hall was thin. Arri was not there. The startup zone was a ghost town. After three days of valued booth-to-booth conversations and quiet hallway chats with the people who build the tools we use every day, the team came home convinced that something is shifting underneath all of post-production, and that the shift is too interesting to leave to social-media takes.

As we always do, we pulled together a panel to talk about it. Peder Morgenthaler joined from Colorado. Rich Roddman came in from Oxford, where he was visiting. Jonny Elwyn dialed in from London. Katie Hinsen joined from Los Angeles. Hector Berrebi, who has spent the last several months beta-testing what may turn out to be the show’s biggest piece of news, rounded us out. Another Contributor, R Neil Haugen, also joined us from the live audience.

In this Insight, five working colorists and editors compare notes on what NAB 2026 actually meant. We start with the feel of the show floor and then go into the specifics: why generative AI is destabilizing the entire Software As A Service economy at the same time it is quietly making everyone’s job easier, what Alexis Van Hurkman has been building inside Adobe’s Premiere that has skeptics turning into believers, why DaVinci Resolve might be missing something Premiere and Fusion both have, and the strangest hardware story of the year, the one where the LLMs ate all the SSDs.

You will also hear honest worry, dry humor, and a few moments of “wait, who saw that coming?” that I think every working professional will appreciate and, likely, ponder for the next few months.

Key Takeaways

By the end of this Insight, you should understand how to:

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