Archive of the Hardware Category

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.

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.

As Ikegami’s 60th anniversary approached in 2007, things didn’t look all that good for the one-time leading light of video camera technology. Once the maker of coveted high-end cameras that featured electronic circuitry delivering what many felt were the best video images going, by the late 1990s the company lost the lead, as Panasonic and Sony prevailed. Unlike Ikegami, those two industrial giants could also deliver the integrated tape mechanisms necessary to get a rig out of the studio.

Ikegami fought back with its innovative Editcam, launched in 1995. Designed in part with input from Avid, Editcam was the first mainstream camcorder to use ruggedized hard drives to replace tape in the field. more

Final Cut Pro 6 was announced yesterday, and there’s no question that it’s a major update. First, there’s support for mixed resolutions, formats, and even frame rates in the timeline — all conversion is done in the background. For example, drop 960×720 native clips from the Panasonic HVX200 onto the timeline, and FCP auto-scales them to match the native 1920×1080 clips that you’ve already cut together. (Read the press release at The Briefing Room: 2007 NAB Newslink)

One of Apple‘s biggest announcements from yesterday was its new ProRes 422 codec. This is a 4:2:2 (obviously), 10-bit, variable bit-rate, full-raster HD codec that Apple is claiming is much more edit-friendly and effects-friendly than previous attempts to limit the bandwidth of HD video. Apple showed a demo of a ProRes clip — from a project that had gone from 1TB uncompressed to 170GB in ProRes — that had suffered ten encode/decode cycles and displayed it side by side with the uncompressed version. There was no distinguishable difference. more

If you work on color correcting in post, or have to match cameras in the field, it‘s easy to rue the passing of CRT technology. While that analog technology had its limits, moving to LCD monitors meant losing track of colors such as emerald green and dark red, since backlighting the screen with fluorescent tubes greatly limits color fidelity.
At their Sunday press conference, Sony provided a solution with its BVM-L230 LCD video reference monitor; the 22.5-inch HD monitor employs a newly developed LED backlight system and display engine capable of producing 1,024 levels of gray scale. (The ability to render a greater number of luminance values directly influences color reproduction fidelity.)
Sony claims the new LCD panel is the industry’s first with to offer a 10-bit driver, replacing 8-bit technology, which is capable of only 256 levels of gray scale. more

Teamworking in post is all the rage. You can‘t read far though the slew of pre-show press releases to learn that playing well with others will be a big part of the news at NAB 07

Quantel does its part with the launch of Genetic Engineering at their Sunday press conference. No need to worry about stem cells piling up on your NLE though: the Brit company is talking about overturning the traditional way of looking at SANs (storage area networks), allowing Q users to hook together any of its products–whether eQ, iQ, or Pablo–and getting access to the same clips at the same time without copying, reformatting, or moving the media. more

Listen to Digital Content Producer‘s The Briefing Room 2007 NAB Newslink podcast with Maurice Patel, Director of Product Marketing for the Media and Entertainment Division, as he discusses with Online Editor Jessaca Gutierrez the integration of the Alias products, new products the company will be showing at NAB, and bringing the company‘s mantra to life with the Autodesk product lineup click here.

More podcasts from The Briefing Room