Archive for April 16th, 2007

At its news conference, Quantel showed that it would fight for a place in future newsrooms by announcing that Newsbox HD, its nonlinear HD news system ‘in a box‘, will now feature HD for “free”, meaning that Newsbox HD systems will be available for the same price as the SD version of Newsbox.

In a further move pointing up its reinvigorated “match any price” attitude, Quantel will also now move from the previous fixed Newsbox configurations, allowing customers to choose the number of seats, ports, and various other options.

Ciprico presented an engineering demo of an entire new class of DAS (direct attached storage) devices that should be cheap to implement yet deliver high throughput. Due to release by this July, the system employs the new PCI external cabling standard, along with Ciprico‘s established RAIDCore software RAID stack.

By installing a Ciprico SATA 2 or SAS storage I/O card into a standard 20 Gbps PCI Express x8 (or “by 8”, as it‘s spoken) slot, users can attach a simple storage case with cable runs of over 7 meters away. In the demo at the booth, the cable ran to a 3U, 16 drive chassis stocked with 16 of Hitachi‘s new 1TB SATA 2 drives, all running under Adobe Premiere supporting multiple streams of HD.

The throughput speed–which is said to be close to InfiniBand, a favorite of the supercomputer crowd–should even be enough for 2K and 4K post, according to Ciprico.

Ready to move media management to the next level?

Microsoft is. At this point, the Redmond giant may only have a tentative presence in the creative content creation arena (although that‘s changing; stay tuned for a later blog on Silverlight) but that doesn‘t mean they don‘t have some interesting ideas of what might be useful for integrating media production and business chores.

One example: Microsoft Interactive Media Manager, a just announced digital content management package that combines digital workflows and media application integration, all of it accessed via a collaborative front-end Web environment. more

Adobe’s Karl Miller is in his native element; talking and demoing things. Mark Randall is offering pithy play by play. They’re on about the new Adobe Media Player

plays FLB file

not just a player, it’s a browser-based experience as well

you don’t have to be connected to the internet to use it. more

Right now; if you want to virtually join the Adobe Customer Event and get a sneak peek at the new Adobe Media Player go to the Multicast/Akamai driven webcast at www.adobe.com/go/nabwebcast

Apple and Adobe have done a great job integrating their various components of their suites, but many editors need cross suite integration, say to perform multicam edits in Final Cut Pro and compositing in After Effects. You can always export a composite QuickTime file, but then you lose your ability to tweak the individual components. more

Trying to predict the ultimate usability and performance of Apple software based upon an Apple demo is like trying to judge the performance of any republican politician based upon what you see on Fox News. Fair and balanced, it ain’t, and rightly so. Still, at a high level, it was impossible not to watch Apple‘s Final Cut Pro Studio demo and not be impressed, especially at a time when a new barbarian at the gate, in the form of Adobe‘s Production Studio for the Mac, will soon start grabbing for share in the Macintosh editing market.

Final Cut Pro can now adeptly handle multiple formats on the same timeline, a major objection for many event and wedding videographers with one foot in HDV and the other in DV. The new variable speed controls in Motion replace the cryptic controls in Final Cut Pro, turning another glaring weakness into a strength. more

Isilon is devoted to supplying clustered storage for enterprise-class applications. This, of course, generally means big customers. For instance, at NAB Isilon is announcing a multi-year agreement that will supply NBC Universal with about a petabyte of storage each year. That’s a ton of SATA II hard drive clusters for nearline storage of sports, sitcom, movie, and news content. The company is also announcing that NBC is deploying Isilon IQ storage for its coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

Aimed at the other side of the production spectrum — the smaller post houses, the local affiliates — is Isilon’s new IQ 200 storage. This begins with a three-node cluster (6TB) that runs in the mid-$30K range. All of Isilon’s high-end software is leveraged for this entry-level line, and that includes functionality that was introduced in February, such as Migration IQ, which auto-migrates content to deeper storage based on certain rules (last access date, e.g.). And it’s all the same standard SATA II technology. Data protection is handled in Isilon software — at “n+2″ protection, two complete nodes can fail and the storage system can still operate.

Folks from the U.K.’s The Foundry were very pleased to be touting this afternoon the new release of their Nuke compositing software–Nuke 4.7. It’s the first new version of the product since Foundry took over development, marketing, and sales of Nuke from Digital Domain, and Bill Collins, PhD., Foundry’s CEO, made it quite clear that Nuke represents the company’s compositing future, even though Shake (latest version 4.10) continues to spread in popularity throughout the industry.

The idea, Collins says, is to put some Nuke capabilities into new versions of Shake, and many Shake capabilities into Nuke, and then, eventually phase out Shake in favor of Nuke. He expects that transition to take approximately two years, since the company will continue to support existing Shake customers until their natural upgrade cycle comes up again. The movement to Nuke, he insists, will be “easy” for Shake users because of the increased power of the Nuke platform. The new version, for instance, includes, among other things, optical flow node, support for HDRI, RAW and Quicktime, FrameCycler Professional 2006, Truelight, universal binary for Mac OS X and lots of other funky stuff.

–Michael Goldman

To tell you the truth, I never really “got” the Matrox MXO. Why would anyone pay close to $1,000 just to get flicker free PowerPoint slides from a Mac? With features added in version 2.0, and a comprehensive demo in the Matrox booth, the nickel finally dropped.

First, the MXO lets you preview HD footage on an LCD monitor, so you don‘t need to spend a fortune on a high def broadcast monitor. The unit sits between your graphics card and second LCD monitor, and works in YUV, rather than RGB space, so it avoids color aberrations caused by the YUV to RGB conversion. more