Archive of the Software Category

Back from the show. I like taking a day or so after my last postings to look through everything I’ve collected, selecting some last items to include in a final wrapup. While that’s not a lot of time for deep reflection, I am at least far enough away from the hype of the moment to enable a bit of perspective.

At the NAB press office earlier this week I overheard an NAB official talk to the editor of one of the leading trade mags. He was asked about what he thought would be among the most exciting developments of the show. Instead, he begged off answering, stating that as far as he was concerned it was all just a rehash. He could find nothing new or interesting worth commenting on. more

When a company with a product line as big and deep as Autodesk makes its NAB presentation, you’ll forgive them for thinking like an auto company and describing the updated apps as their 2009 product lineup.

Trevor Boyer has already posted notes about Autodesk’s Sunday press conference. While each of the major products announced have plenty of notable and usable improvements, I’ll vote for lower price points and ability to work with compressed media as the most significant moves that herald future trends. Smoke 2009’s $64,000 tab for a turnkey hardware/software finishing machine–storage included–is a great breakthrough. For the first time, (fiscal) hope is offered to those many mid-level shops which blanch when faced with six-figure offerings from Autodesk, Quantel, et.al. (At present, this was described as an introductory price available through July 21, 2008. It’s a little unclear what happens after that; maybe if enough new buyers are attracted, the price will hold.) more

Duiker Research Corp., creator of the Color Symmetry plug-in suite, has announced Color Symmetry Version 1.5 with Universal Look Authoring. Color Symmetry is a complete solution for emulating film looks and handling color consistently within industry-standard animation, graphics, effects and post-production packages. Version 1.5 supports a growing number of post workflows and formats as well as today’s increasingly creative look development demands. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

GridIron Flow is a project organization tool for people who don’t want to take the time to get organized. Think of it in the context of Adobe Production Studio, with content like PSD and AI files. At a high level, it provides a workflow map that shows all the content you input into a Premiere Pro, After Effects or even Final Cut Pro project (see Figure). From the map, you can track a particular piece of content through project.

For example, say you created a Photoshop file that you used to create a motion menu in After Effects, as a background for titles in Premiere Pro and a menu in Encore. Client calls and asks you to change the font size or adjust the color. A quick look at Flow shows that while the initial change will probably take 30 seconds in Photoshop, the “collateral damage” in the other applications could take hours to resolve. more

As HBO’s Christian Wilson urged me to do on Sunday, I stopped by the Aspera booth (SU15509) this morning to learn more about that company’s high-speed file transfer software suite. I was fortunate to run into Michelle Munson, Aspera’s president and co-founder, while I was there, and she filled me in on the company’s story.

While the technical explanation of how Aspera’s “fasp 2.0″ software suite addresses the twin issues of speed and ultra-security for major entertainment clients like HBO, Technicolor, Ascent Media, EFilm, and many others–most of whom are building Aspera, one way or another, into their larger digital asset management suite of tools–is interesting and important, I was most struck by another part of the story Munson addressed. more

The Adobe press dinner is always a lot of fun for me; a chance to hobnob with the product folks I talk to all year round, meet with some of the higher ups and drink really expensive single malt scotch (Lagavulin last night for those who care about such things).

And, of course, you get to hear what the product folks are working on for upcoming versions. One item I can talk about is an audio-to-text capability that I’ll see demonstrated in Adobe’s booth this afternoon at 2:00. I couldn’t help but think about the devastating Doonesbury comics lampooning the handwriting recognition capabilities of Apple’s Newton. But even if the Adobe software only successfully converts 75-90% of speech to text, the implications are immense. more

The coolest product I’ve seen so far at the show is an effect filter called CoverFlux from industrial revolution, which allows you to add the iTunes-like Cover Flow effect to images in a slide show. This looks cool on iTunes, looks cool on the iPhone and looks very cool in Final Cut Pro and Motion via CoverFlux. Can’t beat the price, either, since it will be a free download from idustrialrevolution.com once it ships in a few weeks.

Idustrial has other cool products that you can actually buy, of course, like Volumetrix, which shines moving lights through text with an alpha channel, and the campy but cool Superwipe, which comes with a library of image-based wipes like squeegees and airplanes. Even better, you can create new wipes with your own images.

By way of background, Idustrial was exhibiting in the Noise Industries booth, because they build their libraries using FXFactory, Noise Industries effects package. In addition to showing their own effects, Noise Industries also hosted third party developers CoreMelt (transitions, still image animations and other tools) and SugarFx (filters and themes), both worth checking out.

Cinematographer Liz Hinlein gave a presentation Saturday at the Digital Cinema Summit about assisting DP Rodrigo Prieto in color correcting dailies on set using Yuri Neyman’s Gamma & Density Company’s 3cP software system. Today, she explained to me why she thinks 3cP is so useful for people like Prieto. He first used the system on Babel, and then again most recently on Kevin MacDonald’s upcoming film, State of Play, which was shot using a combination of the Panavision Genesis digital camera and 35mm film. The notion of 3cP is to provide a way to precisely preview color on set and communicate decisions about color precisely to colorists and others in the post production and approval chain. It’s built around the ASC Color Decision List (CDL), built on “the logic of cinematographers,” as Yuri likes to say.

Hinlein insists the approach worked well for Prieto because it helped him communicate his intentions to the colorist in a more direct and less labor intensive way than he would otherwise have to do. But, she emphasizes, using 3cP on set is not exactly the same job a digital imaging technician (she calls them ‘DITs’) might do on a broadcast style project.

Listen to a portion of our chat today at the Gamma & Density booth.

–MG

I just sat down with Boris Yamnitsky, the president and founder of his namesake Boris FX. A couple years ago Boris FX purchased the Media 100 line, keeping alive one of the most venerable nonlinear editing systems. It had been an extremely rocky time for Media 100; a company without such a devout and long-lasting user base probably would have folded up shop and discontinued its products.

Not Media 100. Under Yamnitsky’s leadership, Media 100 has advanced to 12.5 software, which was just announced at the show. The software is playing catch-up; one major new feature is HDV ingest via FireWire. The clips can’t be edited natively, but must be converted to another format, such as Media 100 HD or Apple’s ProRes. These fit the workflow of most Media 100 users, says Yamnitsky, and the higher-bit-rate formats hold up much better under the stress of digital effects. more

Back from Avid (see Jan Ozer’s earlier post). And if Dan Ochiva doesn’t fill you in on the new PCI Express-enabled harware upgrades to Mojo and Nitris I will. I didn’t get to ask about the non-future of Xpress Pro, but I’ll try to when I next talk to Avid here at the show they did not attend.

So, by way of segue, Avid certainly gets the metadata concept, and I expect a lot more from them along those lines upcoming. It’s the new black and with good reason.

Metadata is another topic at the Adobe booth–part of their so-called sneak peeks. more