Avid News

Notes From The June Meeting
Of The Avid Feature Film
& Westside Users Group

by Sidney Wolinsky and Jay Cassidy

Another Avid Users Group Meeting was generously hosted by Stephen B. Cohen of Sony's Digital Picture Editorial at Sony Pictures Studios on the evening of June 11th. It began with drinks and snacks in the Rita Hayworth dining room, then adjourned to the Backstage Theater for the meeting itself.

Avid brought a phalanx of high level corporate bosses with a markedly more deferential approach to the Hollywood audience than we heard at the last meeting. Indeed, Michael Philips, Avid's Senior Product Designer, who along with Tom Ohanian, their Chief Editor, demonstrated features of the new Avid "Jaguar" release, began his presentation with a bug list for assemble/change lists and announced that Avid now has assigned one software engineer full time to bug fixes.

The meeting was focused on two issues, information about the development of the fiber channel and a demonstration of the next composer software release "Jaguar".

Dennis Hoffman, product manager for storage at Avid, gave a presentation on the "Shared Media Environment." The essence of this presentation was that Fiber channel, which will one day replace Mediashare is not quite ready yet.

Jaguar

Clearly, many of the new features in the Jaguar software are aimed at the
AVR 77 folk with the intention of finishing television programs for broadcast directly from the digitized media. But there are some new features that people from the film world would kill for.

1. The timeline now scrolls along as the sequence is played and there is a better tool for switching magnification on the timeline

2. True eight channels I/O.

3. Real time "Ride & recall" audio play back with a Midi mixer.

4. New organization to Project window with folders available.

A few other topics were touched on:

1. The new intra-frame editing--a paintbox capability to alter parts of the frame -- introduces powerful new CGI abilities into the effects tool. In the demonstration, part of a small crowd was cloned and moved over to create a larger crowd in the same frame.

2. A 24 fps version of AudioVision would be released in a few months.

3. Media Share (and its performance with the 6.5 PCI machines): there was some concern that at the highest resolution it would not be advisable to have four machines on Media share.

4. The "S" and "M" resolutions and how they compare: the new PCI systems no longer have the E board and there has been some discontent with the image quality of the new "S" and "M" resolutions. The Avid line on resolutions, as delivered by Michael Phillips, is that with 6.5x there is true two-field digitization (like the "E" board) that did not exist in 6.1. There is also a new "M" resolution in addition to the "S" resolution released in 6.1. According to Michael Phillips, the M resolution with the two-field option at the 6M level is equivalent to the 5e resolution we all knew and loved.