| Page 5 of 7 |
Ultimatte
Next up was an eye-popping and brain-teasing demo by chromakey experts Ultimatte. They were chromakeying a juggler standing in front of a mirror, with the mirror reflecting objects in the scene. But the juggler wasn't in front of the mirror -- it was part of the background. But then ... well, think about it for a while and you'll see why I call it a brain-teaser. It was a spectacular display of what the best keyer in the world can do. This technology is the company's Ultimatte HD, and it's absolutely top-of-the-line. But, like beer, you can only rent it. This 24p keying hardware is available only through Panavision for rental on what's usually high-end productions. They tell me it's also being used by NHK in Japan for its HDTV news productions. It's amazing how perfect these HDTV Ultimatte keys look. The company was also showing a technology preview of its newest Ultimatte plug-ins for Avid, Adobe and Discreet products, and that's set to ship next month. Using a new formula, the resulting chromakeys not only look cleaner, they're easier to manipulate with an enhanced eyedropper control that works smarter than ever before. Before, the keyer worked on a per-pixel basis, but the new version uses artificial intelligence to get an overall reading of the entire scene and makes it keying decisions from that combined info. The plugins are going to cost $500 for the upgrade for Windows and Mac (OS X version coming "later this year," according to the company), and $2000 for Discreet Flame and Inferno. Pricey, yes, but it's better quality than has ever been available, so I think you get what you pay for here.
Matrox
Next stop on the grand tour was to see what hardware powerhouse Matrox was up to, and that turned out to be plenty. For an appetizer, the company is offering even more real-time plug-ins for users of its hot-selling DV capture card, the DMN shootout-winning RT-2500 (as if over 1000 effects weren't enough already?!). Among the new morsels are some whiz-bang effects you could only get with After Effects before now, including mesh warps, twirls, and the ever-popular spinning cube. But the company's main course at the show is its Networked Broadcast Studio (NBS) which teams up Matrox DigiSuite hardware and expertise using a fibre channel network with various networking and SAN gear from an all-star list of companies. Matrox has been busy doing its homework here, studying what it really takes to put together a networked production system -- I know, because I've seen them working on this project during a few visits to their Montreal headquarters over the past few years. That hard work pays off, with Matrox claiming that NBS is the only networked production system that can actually play out to air directly from its central storage unit. With this system, you're able to bring video into the system, edit it among many workstations from a central server with terabytes of storage, and play it out. Matrox tells me the secret to making it all work is file format compatibility. Matrox has done something many are struggling with these days -- getting networking people and nonlinear editing mavens together in a frictionless production environment. Looks like a great way to bring together all the pieces of a complex puzzle through one central aggregator, and Matrox has figured it all out for you.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
5D
The high-end upstart had a unique setup at its stylish booth, where it showed the workflow from 35mm film, into compositing, then to into color grading (fancy way to say color correction) and finally out to a high resolution data file. At the beginning of the chain was a 5D Commander, capturing 35mm footage at 2K resolution at 17 frames per second, quite a bit faster than Commander's stated 7 frames-per-second rate. Impressive. After that, the footage was moved over the booth's speedy gigabit Ethernet to the newest version of 5D's compositing system, Cyborg v.2. I like the user interface of this software, with its Quantel-like gestural controls. Then the images were sent to 5D Colossus for color grading, where a hands-on user interface with lots of knobs and sliders was being expertly manipulated (see photo). The tracking controls of Colossus are extremely flexible and accurate, letting the demo artist perfectly track a woman's dress while changing its color. This is some really high-end stuff, all running on BOXX workstations with 5D badges on them. The high end film crowd will eat this stuff up.
Canopus
Canopus was showing some great new stuff this year, and maybe this is a result of the 100 engineers the Japanese company is in the process of hiring. Seems that the company is awash in cash after going public in Japan last July, and made the astute decision to pump up its already formidable engineering muscle. Good call. Right off the bat they've offered an upgrade for DV Storm users that raises the bar to five streams of real time video. Now that's what I like to see -- downloadable power enhancements. Here's another example of the advantage of riding that Moore's Law curve, where as processor speed rises, so does the power of your system. But the most remarkable product on display at Canopus wasn't hardware at all. Its new ProCoder is a new compression software conversion tool that some on the show floor were calling a Cleaner-killer. Well, I wouldn't go that far, but this application is remarkable. For the same price of Cleaner ($699), you get the ability to output lots of different compressed formats at the same time from one file that you input. Or, you can input lots of clips and have them all output in a single file, and even add some of Canopus' filters to the result. I have a machine exactly like the one the demo used, and I can vouch for the fact that it can encode QuickTime noticeably faster than Cleaner. The only feature I noticed missing was the ability to fit an encoded file to a certain file size, handy for when you want to fill up an entire CD with a video of the exact size of the CD. I also noticed the lack of a Mac version, either OS 9x or OS X, but Canopus hasn't ever done Mac software before, so that's not surprising. Nevertheless, this was one of the most impressive demos I saw at NAB. Look for it to be available this May.
Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Next
Related sites: • Broadcast Newsroom • Creative Mac • Digital Producer • Digital Video Editing • DV Format • HDTV Buyer • IBC News
Related forums:
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
