Archive of the Workstations Category

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

There was something of a Yogi Berra moment at the Hard Rock Cafe on Sunday when Avid’s new executive VP and then the new CEO took the stage to pledge that this time we’re going to get it right.

Oh no, I thought, not another set of promises about working well with others and thinking outside the box. Well, we got those promises again. And yes there were some snickers around the floor of Hard Rock’s music venue (Avid’s traditional space over their years at NAB) at inappropriate times from the hundreds in the audience of users along with a smattering of press.

After all, neither CEO Gary Greenfield nor Kirk Arnold, executive vp and gm of Avid Video, have any video industry experience. (Give Avid’s board credit though–both of these very recent hires have solid reps for turning around high tech companies.) 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

Let‘s face it; there are a lot of multiple processor, multiple core computers out there. To a degree, they‘re reasonably generic, using the same processors, motherboard chipsets and memory. When I sat down with Boxx Technologies Director of Marketing Francois Wolf, my basic question was “how do you tell them apart?”

By way of background, Boxx Technologies sells high performance workstations into the digital content production market, and was showing their latest product, the 3DBOXX RTX, designed for high definition editors and animators, at the show. Here are the questions he recommended potential buyers consider. more