Lots of interesting things to report.

One of the big trends at the show is turning out to be alliances of every sort and at every level of manufacturer. Thomson, as reported, notched Avid, HP, Telestream, and a host of others in its new Infinity Open Alliance. Avid, as part of its Open Storage Initiative, is working with SGI to fashion huge, fast storage array networks while pledging that they will work with any third party, Mac or PC, to foster the development of further editing scenarios.

Quantum is working to integrate its SDLT-600A MXF-informed archiving data tape drive with Avid‘s Newscutter line. (It will work with other Avid products too.) The 600A is the first such archiving product to enable drag-and-drop file transfers between standard post and archiving storage. (Pictured: Quantum consultant Thomas Goldberg points out the speedy transfer capability of Quantum‘s SDLT-600A as it restores an Avid file from an archive.)

This looks to bring real benefits to anyone who moves back and forth between these two systems on a regular basis. Say you‘re a small facility or cable station which can‘t keep terabytes of hard drives tied up with past work, yet need to access it quickly when a client comes in for a quick change on a commercial, or perhaps prepare a foreign language version.

Being MXF-aware means the 600A allows you to access and edit a specific timecode sequence. Just as if it were stored on your local hard drive, you can pop in a change where needed. With other archiving approaches, you‘d have to re-transfer the whole edit just to change a shot.

You can also transfer between Final Cut Pro and the 600A, although currently it requires one more step for the transfer, using Telestream‘s Flip for Mac software.

Echolab‘s debut of Ensemble Studio brings the price of a turnkey, “best of breed” live production system to a price range from an entry-level $5,000 to a complete version for $16,000 by combining products from a number of companies.

Using Echolab‘s system-on-chip architecture in the Nova Identity4 switcher as the basis (it‘s re-configurable on the fly, so added capabilities are only a software download away), the company combines products from 360 Systems, Compix Media CG, and Avitech.

The result is a flexible switcher that can control a character generator, record and playout to air from a media server, and deliver lower-cost multiviewing. Users don‘t need to know how to plug it all together—or have to worry about whether it will all work together.

I‘ll be back up later for more of my Hodge-Podge Blog of a day.

Pictured: Echolab‘s marketing director Battista Remati stands proudly by the company‘s new Opera Mix&Match I/O, which uses advanced system-on-a-chip technology to create a highly flexible analog/digital router.