Archive for April, 2007

Thursday is NAB‘s rump day. The show floor closes early, at 4 p.m. instead of the usual 6 p.m. And if you stay to the bitter end as I do inevitably each year, you get to hear a voice over the P.A. announcing NAB‘s end, a cheer going up from tired booth workers, then a Scottish bagpiper playing a live version of “Amazing Grace.” I‘ve never actually seen the bagpiper, just heard him.

What‘s truly special about Thursday is that most of the madding crowd has gone. Thursday is viewed as a slow day, and it‘s the day that folks abandon their own booths to go inspect firsthand what else NAB has to offer on display, including their competitor‘s products. Quite a few industry VIPs, for instance, were drawn as if by magnetic force to RED‘s booth today. As I idled my motor near the Phantom High-Speed Digital Cameras in Abel Cine Tech‘s booth a short while this afternoon, several employees of JVC and Panasonic dropped by. more

First, let me say: I realized just this week that I’m truly over the name change and Autodesk feels natural. Maybe it was the sheer, wasabi-colored curtains floating around the booth that gave it that reassuringly Discreet-hip vibe. Maybe also the poker card swag with the old symbols, those tribal fish and branch graphics, paired with hefty poker chips.

But on to news and business. The user group was SRO at about 1500 souls. There to see, among other things, scaleable InfiniBand workflow blending multi-core HP workstations, the Discreet-legacy apps, plus things like Toxik, Backdraft and the new Incinerator accelerator which allows real-time digital 2K color grading for Lustre, and enables highly interactive sessions. (EFilm’s already signed up to deploy a custom version of the Lustre/Incinerator as part of their Eworks). The new stuff is all part of an ongoing Autodesk push to put decades of know how about processing and IT to work. Maurice Patel describes it as “leveraging the raw performance of modern IT and translating it for media requirements.” more

I’m not an animator so my favorite part of my MyToons.com sample profile was getting to skin it with a pink hearts template that won me points with the four-year-old. One of the main things that seemed so clear in the demo I had was that My Toons was a fun and friendly place. If that sounds condescending, I’m not telling it right. The site–which allows members to build profiles and post their moving and still animations has a real ambience and personality and that seems important as more of these types of sites come online. There are some clever Web 2.0 style features, some smart implementation of groups and other things that will allow members to self impose the organization of the site, as well as building profiles that had some whimsy and personal style. It felt like a place that could catch on. Check it out and best of luck to the My Toons team.

Luxology’s Brad Peebler can’t talk about everything on the record, which is the kind of thing that seems more portentous in a limo. So here’s a quickie. Check out the new training division on their site. Close collaboration with Adobe on some aspects of CS3, like on the 3D import side, has also yielded some experience/info on things like how to prepare a model for CS3, how to use Photoshop layers, artist sweetening…etc. The project-based training materials–some CS3 related, some not–are all downloadable iTunes-style. Get a whole project’s worth of lessons for $25, pieces of it for $5 each. It’s beginners level with stuff that also applies to intermediate and advanced Brad says. He says it will help you get closer to “flow” that place where the tools start to disappear into the background of your brain.

Big, rich facilities have workflow problems too; they have to remodel workflow while midstream on projects…like Shrek. I don’t know why it surprised me to hear that over lunch in the HP booth. I already knew quite a bit about the ongoing build out of Dreamworks infrastructure; I’d just been to the facility a few months ago to see the extraordinary Halo conferencing system and listen to the power management guy tell adventure stories about heat management for billion-processor render farms. (it’s not really a billion–6000 I think). I knew they had to do the integration between the PDI facility in Redwood City and the Glendale facility while in production. So I never thought they had it easy over there; money can’t buy everything. more

IO is not one of your marquee topics, but it is one of those essentials, especially when you don’t have enough. NAB was full of technology designed to smooth the transition from format to format, device to device, signal/codec to monitor. AJA’s nifty IoHD–a portable survival kit for Apple Pro Rez users was just one standout example especially for in-the-field and/or small facility editing–it’s been discussed in earlier posts.

Another small victory in IO comes from Ensemble Designs. The Bright Eye 90 series of up/down/cross convertors can do everything from simple aspect ratio conversion in it’s most basic config to a host of HD up and down conversions, with processing that spans audio, HDMI, fiber, USB…. The company expanded the line at NAB offering more options for camera/projector interface, HDMI output for monitoring, upconverting analog camera signal to digital HD, handling HD and SD digital and analog composite signals and AES digital audio.

Late last year Thomson started talking about an encoder product known as “Tiger,” which it had sold to its Technicolor unit for encoding of HD-DVD and Blu-ray contgent. At NAB Thomson was showing the encoder, though without the feline name — at this point it’s just “HD H.264 Encoder.” This is designed with the hardcore compressionist in mind, someone at a major DVD encoding house who’s looking for a powerful way to preserve as much quality as possible in high-def disc deliverables.

As such the HD H.264 Encoder offers a lot of features that will be especially interesting to compressionists who need to work quickly and accurately. The encoder runs on a SAN-based PC cluster architecture. A multipass encoder runs in the background. Tough scenes (such as transitions and those with lots of motion) can start to re-encode while other material is still going through its first pass. For most encoders using this system, 15Mbps VBR is going to be the target bit rate (Blu-ray goes up to about 40Mbps max; HD-DVD, 30Mbps). Thomson told me that a two hour movie would complete its first pass in about six hours, typically. more

One of the most interesting companies in Adobe’s plug-in pavilion was wondertouch, the producer of particleillusion, a sprite-based particle effects program. The company offers two versions, particleillusion pro, for $399 and particleillusion SE for $99. Both are available for Mac and Windows, and at the show, the company introduced a universal binary edition that ran natively on both PowerPC and Intel based Macs.

particleillusion is a standalone program. To produce effects, you load in your background footage, apply and customize the effect, then render the effect with an alpha channel. This makes it compatible with virtually all editors than can import an MOV file and key out an alpha channel. more

I’m turning the floor over to Adobe’s Jim Guerard for this posting. For Jim–formerly of Macromedia (and Hyperion Press!)–it’s been a heady couple of years watching Flash converge with the needs of the Internet video marketplace (something Jim has only so much direct say over)…and watching Flash converge with the increasingly integrated Adobe workflow (something Jim can influence). For me, the promising soundbyte was this: “CS3 makes Flash a first-class citizen in all the Creative Suite apps”. The idea that Flash is an equal format in CS3 (and other places) says a lot about how close we’re getting to multimedia reality. We’ll see how Adobe’s contribution to the revolution plays out once our reviewers and readers dig into the product. In the meantime, show news included an announcement from the BBC that they were standardizing on CS3, so we can also watch the business model play out there. Here’s Jim’s take: more

If you own Autodesk Flame, chances are you already have version 3 of GenArts’s Sapphire Plug-ins and are eagerly awaiting version 4. From what I saw on the show floor at NAB, you won’t be disappointed.

The new version, which will cost $10,000 and is scheduled to ship by the end of Q2, 2007, includes 46 new effects and many functional enhancements. As before, the program offers an extensive array of presets with extreme configurability. With the film damage effect, for example, you can modify stains, dust, flicker, speed, scratches, dust, hairs, shake and defocusing, as well as color controls and motion blur. During the demo, the pristine HD footage morphed into old, damaged celluloid, with good responsiveness and preview frame rate on an HP quad-core Linux box running Flame 2007.

I also looked at the toon tool, which delivered Charles Schwab commercial-like effects with extreme configurability and performance. Check the GenArt’s web site for a complete list of features.