AMD has struggled over the past year with production and marketing snafus, and some worried that the well-regarded ATI FireGL series cards would be in trouble. After all, AMD, which spent $5.4 billion to buy graphics card maker ATI last year, had long-time ATI CEO Dave Orton leave the combined company this past month. (While some speculated that there were problems over the buyout, Orton has only said that he was tired of the long-distance commute from his Ontario home.)

No need to worry, it seems. At the show, AMD announced five new ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerators, ranging from the $299 ATI FireGL V3600 to the first card to support 2GB of RAM, the top-of-the-line $2799 ATI FireGL V8650. more

Better hardware and software are making it easier to do high-end work where it hasn‘t gone before. In July ESPN debuted The Bronx is Burning, an eight-part baseball - themed miniseries for ESPN Original Entertainment that used a compact, truck-friendly HD editing setup that makes for slick location production.

The production, shot on location throughout Connecticut (ESPN‘s home turf), employed Thomson‘s VIPER FilmStream camera system and a full 4:4:4 HD post workflow designed by Creative Bridge and Technicolor. A mobile truck dubbed Technicolor Creative Bridge‘s Mobile Digital Lab and Theatre (MDLT) included Globalstor‘s ExtremeStor DI workstation, a PNY provided Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI card, and Assimilate‘s SCRATCH.

The MDLT truck–first introduced at NAB 2006–enabled 4:4:4 data capture from the Viper‘s storage, full 1920 X 1080 projection, real-time color correction, real-time HD-SDI playback, HD and SD down conversion, and direct to disk file transfers. more

If ever there was a community of manufacturers that listened to their end users and actively worked to implement their ideas, it’s those wacky plug-in guys. That was the message I got a short while ago from Todd Prives, product marketing manager at GenArts, makers of Sapphire plug-in products for most major platforms (including the new version 4.0, for Autodesk systems).

I asked Todd how formal and layered is the system that GenArts uses to solicit input from its users and evaluate that input for possible inclusion in future products or versions of products. “They call us up or Email us,” Todd replied simply, and he went on to tell me the story of how Angus Kneale, creative director and co-founder of The Mill in New York, got into his ear many months ago with all sorts of specific suggestions for useful tweaks to add to Sapphire.

“He wanted racking focus with his own custom lens shape rather than just the ones we included, and along with that, to boost highlight parameters, and other things like that,” says Prives. “We thought he had a good point, so we came up with ‘Convolve’ (a defocus plug-in that is part of the new V. 4 for Autodesk users which lets users create various blur effects using arbitrary filter shapes and colors) to address those concerns.”

That sort of back-and-forth is happening continually at GenArts, according to Prives. So, if you have some suggestions, pop over to booth 321 and let him hear about them.

–Michael Goldman