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A chaotic swirl of noise and hype, the annual National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas serves as a barometer for the state of the industry. The convention caters to the broadcasters who make up the organization’s membership with conferences focusing on subjects such as radio and television management, business law and satellite technology. But most attendees go not for the seminars but for the exhibits of new equipment presented by manufacturers. NAB has undeniably been affected by the economy’s downward spiral. This year, about 89,000 people attended, down from last year’s 92,000. At the height of the Internet boom in 2000, the convention drew 115,000 attendees, but faltering attendance was exacerbated last year by the attacks of September 11, and this year by the war against Iraq and fears of SARS. The Attention Grabbers Some of NAB’s most notable announcements came from Apple and Avid. In their booths, located directly across from each other, both companies presented dramatic advances on their current product lines. Apple
Many of the objections that Avid users may have had to Final Cut in the past have been addressed in FCP4, which boasts over 300 new features. Asymmetrical trimming is now available, and JKL trimming works better now through an option called “dynamic trimming,” which makes the trim as soon as you hit the K key to stop playback. FCP4 now allows you to gang the source and record monitors together, and dailies can be synched through the new Merge Clips function. The user interface is fully customizable, with all tools mappable to any button or combination of modifier keys. Custom window arrangements can also be assigned to a keystroke, and most windows have a new customizable button bar. The program now allows for individual track patching in the timeline — but you still can’t view a source timeline. Using Apple’s scalable “RT Extreme” rendering engine, FCP4 will play as many real-time tracks as the computer’s processor can handle; the user has the option of choosing between more real-time effects at lower video quality, or fewer at a quality level suitable for output. FCP4 now allows real-time effects to be played out to an NTSC monitor or deck over Firewire at full DV resolution. The program will play as many real-time audio tracks as the host processor will handle — about eight with a dual 1.42 GHz Power Mac G4. (The program’s timeline accommodates 99 24-bit tracks, and audio tracks can be nested as well.) Addressing a significant omission in previous versions, the new system offers a customizable onscreen mixer that enables editors to mix their tracks in real-time. The other programs in the FCP suite run as separate but integrated applications. Cinema Tools, Apple’s film list utility, used to be a separate $999 purchase but now comes bundled at no extra charge. For Guild members, the most important new Cinema Tools feature is its ability to do picture change lists. (Audio change lists are not available.) Compressor can perform many of the compression and batch processing tasks that would have required a program like Cleaner in the past. It can transcode video and audio to a variety of formats, and it offers water-marking, real-time preview and many presets and filters. The other two bundled applications, LiveType and Soundtrack, are impressive but may be more useful to industrial and event videographers than to Guild members. LiveType generates animated text, based on LiveFonts, a Mac-only animated font standard. The program includes customizable effects, templates and a library of 350 royalty-free animated textures and objects. Soundtrack also uses a library of existing elements — four GB of musical loops come with the program — that can be assembled into smooth-sounding tracks. Users select different loops (drums, bass, guitar, etc.), and the program then matches those selections in key and tempo. Apple’s new XML interchange format will allow the export of an entire project with bins, clips, sequences and media, as well as transitions, effects, color-correction settings and keyframe information. Quantel says their products will understand the Apple format, which could lead to a post scenario in which projects are offlined in Final Cut Pro, then finished on Quantel machines. AJA Io: Though not an Apple product, AJA Io is an important add-on for a FCP4 system. Developed by AJA with cooperation from Apple, it is the first uncompressed audio/video FireWire capture device for FCP4. Connecting to a G4 or Powerbook via a single Firewire connection, the Io supports component and composite analog video, SDI digital video, four channels of balanced/unbalanced analog audio, four channels of AES/EBU digital audio, eight channels of ADAT audio, two channels of SPDIF optical audio, RS-422 machine control and genlock — all for $2,290. DVD Studio Pro 2: This DVD authoring application has undergone a complete overhaul of its user interface and has emerged a much more intuitive and easy-to-use program. Available in August for $499 ($199 as an upgrade), it incorporates a timeline similar to that in Final Cut Pro and can integrate as many as eight video angles, eight audio tracks and 32 sub-titles. The program comes with a number of templates that can serve as the starting point for projects, and the new Menu Editor and context-sensitive Drop Palettes simplify the authoring process. The program can use Adobe After Effects compositions for motion menus and Adobe Photoshop images for backgrounds and layered menus. Shake 3: While FCP4 has a serviceable selection of keying and masking tools and some very strong color-correction and image manipulation abilities, Shake is Apple’s powerhouse for digital compositing and effects. The upgrade includes support for broadcast monitors; new trackable paint and roto tools that reduce the need for manual keyframing; expressions that can execute repetitive tasks; scripting and macros; and the ability to import AIFF and WAV audio files and display them against animation curves. Shake will be available in June for $4,950. Xserve: Apple’s rackmounted server, Xserve, can support an unlimited number of Mac, Windows, UNIX or Linux clients on a network. Each of four available hot-swappable drives lives on its own ATA channel; as drives are added, throughput is increased and the server can accommodate higher quality video. Additional storage is available with the Xserve RAID, Apple’s new rack-optimized server that holds up to 14 hot-swappable Apple Drive modules for as much as 2.5 terabytes of data at a breakthrough price of $10,999. Avid
Across the aisle, Avid made big news of its own with a completely revamped product line. Xpress Pro with Mojo, Media Composer Adrenaline and Avid DS Nitris all combine updated software with Avid’s new Digital Nonlinear Accelerator (DNA) hardware — separate boxes that take over some media processing that would otherwise have been done by the host computer. No additional hardware is required, which makes setup simple. Media Composer Adrenaline: With its new DNA breakout box, Media Composer Adrenaline offers five streams of real-time full-resolution standard-definition video (or even a few more, depending on the power of the host computer, how much audio is being played at the same time, and so on). Adrenaline supports a broad range of resolutions, including DV25, DV50, IMX and uncompressed 601, all of which it can acquire over FireWire. In addition to its own media, it also plays all Avid legacy media, including ABVB and Meridien, which can be mixed and matched in the timeline. Film systems can now work at 1:1 resolution, a feature restricted to Symphony in the past. Avid introduced two compressed HD formats — a 7:1 version (145 Mbps) and a 4:1 version (220 Mbps). They will be supported in a future Adrenaline upgrade coming in 2004, though initially without real-time effects.
Adrenaline can now handle 24-bit audio and export it via OMF. The system offers only four balanced lines of audio in and out, but it can handle eight tracks via an ADAT connector. It can still play only eight tracks of audio at once, but each track can now contain real-time audio dissolves. These now come in two flavors — in addition to the standard linear, there is also a logarithmic “Constant Power” dissolve. The Adrenaline DNA box has a timecode-in port, which will enable it to lock to timecode and do VTR emulation, so that it can function in a telecine or on a dubbing stage, but these features won’t be available in the first release. One reason to stay with a Meridien system (or buy one, because Avid will continue to sell, develop and support them) is that the Media Composer Adrenaline does not yet have hardware multi-cam capabilities. Avid says that the system will incorporate the feature later. Adrenaline represents a new price/performance level for Avid. It will be available in the second quarter at $24,995 for a kit that includes software and an Adrenaline accelerator; turnkey systems that include either a Mac or Windows CPU will also be available. Xpress Pro: While Avid will continue to sell Xpress DV at $995, the company introduced a more advanced product called Xpress Pro, which will sell for $1,695. Available for both Mac OSX and Windows XP in the second quarter, Xpress Pro can play five streams of DV at once in real-time. It can also play back 24-fps Film Composer resolutions, including 14:1, 28:1P and 35:1, as well as Meridien resolutions such as 15:1s. It cannot remove standard 3:2 during digitization or reinstate it in on output but it still might allow a film assistant to do a significant amount of work, or an editor to take work on the road or to the set. Xpress Pro has full Unity support, so it can share projects with other clients on a Unity network. In a break with past practice, the system can now play one stream of full-res standard-definition 601. To do this, it utilizes Mojo, a paperback-book-sized DNA breakout box. Available in the third quarter at $1,695, Mojo doubles the processing power of the system and gives Xpress Pro the ability to sync-lock video and audio. With Mojo, Xpress Pro can import and export 20-bit audio (though not balanced); while it can’t capture 24-bit audio itself, it can work with 24-bit audio brought in from Pro Tools or an Adrenaline system. Mojo’s accelerated output makes it possible to play projects out to tape via FireWire without rendering; on a system that doesn’t have Mojo, effects must be rendered before output. The Xpress Pro software includes various improvements, such as JKL trimming, which was notably absent in previous versions, and new features such as OneStep AutoCorrect color correction, which enables editors to quickly color correct an entire sequence. A wide variety of other applications are bundled with the program, including Avid IllusionFX, Avid Film Scribe, Avid Log Exchange, Boris Graffiti and others. DS Nitris and DS Nitris Editor: Avid’s finishing systems also have a DNA breakout box called Nitris. With the increased processing power provided by the two PCIX cards in the box, Nitris can perform real-time effects — including dissolves, wipes, titles and Symphony-style color correction — for up to two streams of 10-bit high-definition and eight streams of 10-bit uncompressed standard definition video. The formats supported range from DV25 to 2K, with more than ten high-definition formats. The system offers up to eight channels of 24-bit, 96 kHz digital audio input and output. DS Nitris is expected to cost $145,000. The DS Nitris Editor, which has fewer effects capabilities, will be $78,995. Both should be available in the third quarter.
Sony If you can judge a company’s belief in its products by the size of its booth, then Sony definitely made a statement with a pavilion that, like last year’s, seemed nearly the length of a city block. The company is making a push into standards-based media, and AAF and MXF were much in evidence. Professional Optical Disc: Although a bit specialized at the moment, Sony’s new professional optical disc may accelerate the demise of tape as a recording format. A 23-GB disc with a 30-year archive life, the Optical Disc looks like a DVD in a plastic cartridge. Two Sony cameras and three decks that can use the format will be available in the fall — the cameras run at 25 or 30 fps, with a 24-fps board coming later. The format allows you to see the first frame of every clip on the disc very quickly, and to jump instantly from shot to shot. The Optical Disc can hold 90 minutes of DVCAM or 45 to 75 minutes of IMX, Sony’s MPEG-2 format. Because the disc stores its media in an MXF wrapper, it can include all sorts of metadata. It records full-res images, as well as pixilated proxies that transfer at up to 50 times real-time.
Xpri: Sony’s high-end editing system, now in version 6, allows you to edit HDCAM materials directly by keeping the media compressed on the drive. This makes HD editing much more practical by dramatically reducing the storage space required and allowing the use of lower-cost storage. Xpri systems offer two-stream HD effects in real time and provide most of the functionality of an Avid. Though the systems are designed to handle 24P materials directly, one key thing is missing — film support. Sony also showed two laptop applications that work with Xpri: Xpri MobileStation and Xpri MetaStation. MobileStation allows limited editing and Metastation is designed for logging and management. Both programs are representative of Sony’s new focus on workflow innovation, which they have labeled W/S 2 (“Work Smart/Work Sony”). e-VTR: Sony showed several VTRs that include web servers in the box, which means that they can serve conventional video and audio over the Internet. Sony plans to build more VTRs with this capability in the future. HDCAM SR: Sony’s new HD recording format, HDCAM SR has the same resolution as HDCAM (1920x1080), but improved compression and a color sampling rate of 4:4:4 means much more data on tape. Increased color resolution is particularly important for chroma-intensive applications such as pulling mattes; this may be one of the reasons George Lucas has decided to shoot the next installment of Star Wars with this format using Sony’s new HDC-F950 camera. It will be available in October for $115,000.
Editing and More Lightworks: Lightworks maintained a small presence at NAB, despite an unfortunately timed reorganization by Fairlight, with which it was going to share a large booth. Showing the latest version of the Touch system, the company demonstrated a renewed commitment to its customers by hiring former Avid executives Stephen Goldsmith and Mike Jarvis to help reestablish the company; Goldsmith will develop the Lightworks market in the Americas, while Jarvis will oversee sales in all other territories. Media 100: Version 2.0 of the Media 100 844/X made its debut at NAB. Known as “The Finishing Release,” it includes refined color-correction, matting and rotoscoping tools, as well as keyframeable motion effects and expanded audio support. It also features support for XBLUR, the company’s real-time four-stream 50-pixel Gaussian blur effect, and HDX Tech-nology, a combination of new software and a high-density HDX PCI card that allows the system to work with HD video. 844/X systems start at $24,995, while XBLUR will range between $7,995 and $9,995. HDX should be available in the second half of 2003 for under $15,000. Adobe: Adobe’s principal new product was Encore, a Windows-only DVD authoring program. It can combine video with up to eight tracks of audio and 32 tracks of subtitles. The program does its own transcoding, converting video to MPEG-2 and audio to Dolby Digital while optimizing compression, and it is compatible with all recordable DVD formats, including DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and DVD-RAM. It will ship in the third quarter at $549. Storage In addition to Avid’s Unity Media Network and Apple’s Xserve, numerous other companies presented storage and networking systems appropriate for post-production applications: CommandSoft: Transoft FibreNet was once one of few media networking products that worked with Avid systems, but after being purchased by Hewlett Packard, the product languished. Now, the key people behind Transoft have returned with a new company called CommandSoft. Their first product, FibreJet, is software for high-speed storage area networks (SANs). FibreJet provides media-sharing capabilities on Mac OSX and OS9 systems — with Windows 2000 support in development. It works with all kinds of storage from a variety of manufacturers and with Avid, Final Cut Pro, Media 100 and all major Adobe products. Rorke: Rorke introduced a low-cost fibre-channel-to-serial-ATA RAID system that sells for approximately $8,000 per terabyte, as well as a serial ATA disk-based archive that scales up to 48 TB of capacity and is designed to work with NLE and broadcast environments. Rorke offers a number of high-performance SANs and RAIDs, and SCSI-based disk arrays and rackmounts. The scalable, fibre-channel-based ImageSAN is designed specifically for content creation, output and distribution on Windows NT, XP and 2000, while ImageSAN OSX brings the same functionality to the OSX platform. Medéa: Medéa makes a variety of drive arrays, in both fail-safe and lower-cost striped versions, many of which are SAN-ready. The company offers one four-machine SAN with hot-swappable drives configured specifically for Final Cut Pro, as well as local fault-tolerant storage for Avids (although no SAN). In addition to a hot-swappable FireWire enclosure that holds two 250 GB drives that can be pulled out and moved from system to system, the company makes the AudioRackLP, a rack-mountable fault-tolerant RAID optimized for digital audio workstations, including Nuendo and Pro Tools. Medéa’s fault-tolerant technology allows a crashed drive to be rebuilt automatically while the system continues to work at full speed. Huge Systems: Known for their low-cost, high-speed storage, Huge Systems presented several inexpensive, server-based SANs that can share media among workstations with various platforms, including Windows 2000, NT and XP, Mac OS9 and OSX, IRIX and Linux. Depending on configuration, they can serve DV video to up to 12 editing systems.
Douglas Murray is a sound designer/editor and mixer.
Rob Nokes is a supervising sound editor, effects recordist |
