Digital Video - June 2008 - (Page 8)

DV UPDATE MY STUDIO software. When accessed, Quantel hardware turns these into actual media files that can be manipulated by programs like Nuke, Shake and others. It also works in the other direction. Although Avid opted out of a booth presence, they were in Las Vegas hosting various user, customer and reseller events. There they unveiled the new Avid DX product line to accompany the new marketing campaign, “New Thinking,” along with more aggressive pricing. Both the entry-level Xpress Pro software and the mid-level Avid Media Composer Adrenaline system have been discontinued. The biggest change in DX, which replaces the DNA products, like Adrenaline, is that external hardware is connected using the PCIe bus and not FireWire, giving the engineers 10Gbps to work with. The products now break down into Avid Media Composer (software only), Avid Mojo SDI (left over from the DNA line) and three hardware/software bundles – Avid Media Composer Mojo DX, Avid Media Composer Nitris DX and Avid Symphony Nitris DX. The latter is the only unit in this family sold as a turnkey product, but also signals Avid’s return to the Mac platform with its Symphony product. The key to these new systems is a 3.0 version of the software that takes greater advantage of multi-core processing and the GPU power of modern graphics cards. In fact, the whole effects pipeline was rewritten and demos showed real-time playback of up to eight streams of compressed HD. The new hardware handles I/O and some scaling, but all effects processing is strictly CPU- and GPU-dependant. The Nitris DX break-out box features an embedded version of Avid’s DNxHD compressed HD codec. Avid will continue to position its Avid DS flagship as a high-end finishing product capable of DI film work, but new DS announcements will have to wait until later in the year. The new Media Composer-family software and DX hardware is slated to be available by end of Q2 and will be compatible with Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista. Thomson continues to move forward with the Edius editing platform, acquired from Canopus a few years back. Edius comes in four versions: Neo (for the education market), Pro, Broadcast and Aurora (a collaborative editing version). Edius Broadcast 4.6 was announced, which supports the JPEG 2000 codec used in the Thomson Grass Valley Infinity Digital Media Camcorder. In addition, Sony XDCAM and EX and Panasonic P2 file-based workflows are also supported. Another manufacturer taking advantage of PCIe is Matrox with the new MXO2. The original MXO was only an output system, but MXO2 adds the ability to ingest uncompressed SD and HD as well. It can be used with both MacPro towers and MacBook Pro laptops and works with Apple Final Cut Studio and Adobe CS3 Production Premium on the Mac. It provides broadcast-quality input/output, monitoring and up/down/cross-conversion, but unlike its competitors, can actually be used on location operating under DC power. (See page 29 for more info.) MOTU was able to show off its V3HD, which drew interest last year but didn’t make it to the show. The hallmark of this unit is that it provides hardware-accelerated DVCPRO HD capture on a Mac running Apple Final Cut Pro or a PC using Adobe Premiere Pro CS3. Last year, Apple introduced its ProRes 422 codec for compressed www.dv.com CLAUDE BOOTH FACILITY: CBC BROADCAST VIDEO ENGINEERING N o matter where I'm working, one question always comes up: 'Can you do it cheaper?' More often than not, I have said the same thing: 'You can either pay for quality or suffer the consequences of the shortcuts'. Now, though, I've found something that makes it possible for me to honestly say you can have everything you want at a price even I don't believe. “Recently, I was doing a job for icandy interactive, a boutique design and interactive development house for which I was tasked with redesigning and reintegrating their video and audio infrastructure. They were having signal loss in their new facility along with hum bars, dropped frames in their captures and error messages. I discovered that their cable runs were too long, which explained the signal loss. Next, I redesigned the HD and HD-SDI signal flow, discarding the NTSCera patch bay in favor of the Blackmagic Design Workgroup Videohub. The difference was night and day: hum bars disappeared from the monitors, video captures matched the sources frame-forframe, error codes and warnings went away. “A world of thought went into the key decision to use the Workgroup Videohub, which is actually a cross point router, passes SDI and HD-SDI, has a down-converter and a still store, incorporates machine control in one package while allowing you to choose your own terminology for labeling the cross points, has the ability to connect machine to machine for standup editing to save time and space on the server, and much more. “Peter Cohen, chief editor at icandy interactive, told me this is the easiest, most intuitive postproduction tool he's ever used and he'll be the first to tell you how quickly the Workgroup Videohub stabilized their environment.” 8 dv june 2008 http://www.dv.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Digital Video - June 2008

Digital Video - June 2008 Contents DV Update My Studio Runners World Brevis Flip 35MM Lens Adapter 4160 Soom Tripod System Century Essential-5 Filter Kit Little Big Disk Quadra Instant Expert DXA-2S Adapter Technology Treasures Making What You See Sound Great Click to Play DV 101 Production Diary

Digital Video - June 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.