An ebullient Dean Lyon, Marketing Director for da Vinci Systems, spent a part of the late afternoon Tuesday touring me through the company’s philosophy regarding how best to survive the current economic disorder. Judging from the spate of initiatives we discussed, that philosophy appears to be “full speed ahead.” Or, to be technically correct and in keeping with the official theme of the da Vinci booth, coined by Lyon, the approach could also be called “visualize the future.”

After making sure I enjoyed a quick visit in one corner of the booth to “The Museum of Every Panel da Vinci has ever built” (”A Japanese guy tried to buy one of the original panels yesterday,” Lyon chuckled), which included an ancient SGI O2 box that Lyon insists “two guys were spotted weeping over,” Dean got down to business.

First was the emphasis on the company’s new Impresario control surface finally being sold and shipped to da Vinci users globally (available not only for all flavors of Resolve, but for those maintaining legacy da Vinci 2K systems, as well). Next came discussion of Resolve R-100—da Vinci’s upgradable, less costly version of the Resolve R-series digital mastering technology.

Lyon next showed me a cool tech demo of the powerful uber version of Resolve running on a MacBook laptop. Dean says there is no rush to transform the demo into a full product any time soon, but he eventually admitted there is one out there in the ether—running on the laptop of colorist Stefan Sonnenfeld of Company 3, Santa Monica, who reportedly (according to Dean) wants to be able to color-correct high-end footage while in bed (and why not, considering how busy the frenetic Sonnenfeld has been in recent months).

Eventually, we got to discussing 4k color correcting through a da Vinci 2K system; the concept of, believe it or not, 16k; color correcting stereoscopic imagery (R-3D), including the concept of “3D Power Windows,”; essentially inventing a new workflow permitting Resolve users to work with, store, and convert native Red Raw data in ways that go beyond the codified Red pipeline; and lots of other cool stuff.

Oh, and Resolve 6.2 is in Beta and likely to come out around May time frame, with tools for the Red workflow incorporated, along with stereo display and remote grading.

And one more thing. Lyon told me, as NAB dawned, da Vinci and Kodak were in the process of finalizing a deal to put Kodak Grain Management into Resolve and other da Vinci products. More on that, he says, to be announced in the near future.

Other than that, though, not a whole lot going on over at da Vinci. Still, you might want to pop in and pay a quick visit.

–MG