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Sonic Foundry
Another exciting NAB development is the new friendship of two companies I've admired for some time, Sonic Foundry and BOXX. It's a marriage made in heaven (or maybe at this point, they're either dating or "just friends") with SF's underrated Vegas Video 3 and BOXXs powerhouse PCs. The BOXX in this bundle is a dual Athlon 2000+ with a gig of RAM and a huge hard disk, all built to Sonic Foundry's anal-retentive perfectionist specifications. The result? The BOXX rocks. Try matching this kind of performance anywhere else for just over $4K. Here's hoping we'll see more teaming-up of these two smart companies in the not-too-distant future. Can you spell H-D-T-V?
Media 100
The big news up front with the hardware wizzes from Marlboro is the line drawn in the sand by the company's charismatic leader John Molinari, declaring that his new sports car of an NLE, the 844/X, will ship on April 26th. We've reported extensively on this box before, so click here for all the details. Since we saw its big debut a few weeks ago, the company has continued to refine the software, determined to stamp out every bug before its now-declared ship date. According to Molinari, this is just the beginning, too, because 844/X is not just a piece of hardware with software attached -- it's an entire platform on which more and more functions will be built.
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Sneaking into the back rooms with the Media 100 high muckety-mucks, razor-sharp engineers then proceeded to prove all that big talk with a proof-of-concept demo of the next piece of the 844/X puzzle: Uncompressed HD. And there it was, gorgeous 1080i HD video, playing back perfectly with dissolves, DVE moves, and all on the 844/X hardware. The best news is that it'll be a simple upgrade for 844/X users, and insiders tell me the whole shebang will go out the door for less than six figures. Could the recent Avid price cut to its HD entry, DS|HD to $85,000 be a target price that the Media 100 dudes are shooting for? They wouldn't confirm it, but I think so. And, Molinari said that a the price of disk space goes down, so will the price of 844/X. This is going to get juicy.
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| Ajay Chopra, Chairman, Pinnacle Systems |
Next stop on the big tour was an audience with brilliant Pinnacle Chairman Ajay Chopra, who brought glad tidings of Pinnacle's ever-expanding editing milieu. Chopra told me about how CineWave HD is selling far better than anyone expected, and these strong sales place Pinnacle squarely in the catbird seat of HD editing, claiming the honor of being the world's largest seller of HD cinema editing gear. Chopra also celebrated the completion of the port of CineWave to the OS X platform, a feat he described as one that's not nearly as easy as it looks. I saw it running on the show floor, and folks, it's for real, and it's coming to an HD editor near you on July 1st, according to Chopra. His company's also decided to offer a lower-priced version of Cinewave, called Cinewave Classic, for $5500, and that's good for users who already have a copy of Final Cut Pro and don't need Commotion.
Chopra went on to praise his 50 new software coders in Germany, acquired with the FAST purchase of a few months back. And with that purchase, the three colorful NLEs, Silver, Purple, and Blue have sprung back to life, now adding the term "Liquid" before their names and adding new features and functionality. I took a long look at Blue, and the thing is really ready this time. It's actually shipping, remarkable because it's been years in development. And its "every in, any out" philosophy surely will offer great support to Pinnacle's newest strategy, the Palladium architecture, where an entire broadcast facility can be digitally linked, from lens to screen. Chopra's covered all the bases here, and it's no wonder his company has nothing to worry about when it comes to pleasing its stockholders.
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