Hope springs eternal, and every spring, a young man's fancy turns to NAB.

This month in Las Vegas the annual gigantic, colossal, enormous National Association of Broadcasters Convention (Did I mention, it's pretty big too?) will take over the entire Las Vegas Convention Center, as it does every year.

Dirck Halstead and I will be there and file reports from the show for our May issue, but for now, here are a few things I hope to see at the show:

• For Final Cut Pro to have the ability to be Project-based and not just System-based. This would mean that the Project Folder you create, with all the media and everything else associated with that project, is attached to that project each time you open it, once you set the Scratch Disks for the first time for that project.

(Speaking of Scratch Disks in FCP, how about one click to set the Capture Scratch, Waveform Cache, Thumbnail Cache and Autosave locations instead of each one separately?)

• A new handgrip from Sony on the EX1. The current handgrip is just plain painful, and not very fun to use. My hand can't reach any controls easily or comfortably.

• For Sony to address the back focus problem in the EX1. This occurs when you zoom in the manual focus and then pull back to shoot; the focus does not stay.

• For Sony to address the various electronic issues with the EX1. My second camera from Sony is working fine – but it took two cameras to get it right.

• You know, Sony, how about we forget the EX1 and chalk it up to experience? Let's see an EX-2, with a handgrip that is comfortable and all the improvements needed. (Hey, I have a novel idea – take the handgrip from the Z1U. That worked great.)

• An archiving system for tapeless workflows that is the killer video archive app.

• A compression program that works the way it should. (Memo to the compression program company: you know who you are).

By the way, one of the highlights of the NAB is the 7th Annual NAB FCPUG SuperMeet on April 16th, 6:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. at the MGM Grand Hotel. The best $15 you'll spend in Vegas. http://www.lafcpug.org/nab_2008

See you in Vegas, baby!