NEWS
The Future Ain't What It Used to Be
Siggraph 05 Offers More of the Here-and-Now by Michael Kunkes
photos by Tomm Carroll
On
the plus side, Siggraph 2005 in Los Angeles, the 32nd conference on
computer graphics and interactive techniques, was attended by 29,122
artists, research scientists, developers, production and post-production
talent and academics from 81 countries. From July 31 till August 4,
there were five days of conferences and three days of exhibits, featuring
more than 250 companies in 70,000 square feet of exhibit space at
the Los Angeles Convention Center.
However, the attendance belied a convention that was largely running in place and was basically a repeat of the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show from earlier this year. A lot of companies displayed incremental improvements on existing products rather than presenting much that was new and groundbreaking, while headhunting studios trolled for new talent. The ever-expanding world of Final Cut Pro was increasingly visible, however, via numerous plug-ins, accelerators and capture and storage solutions.
With the technology sessions, papers and classrooms geared towards 3-D topics, one panel did offer something off the beaten path for the sound branch. In a panel titled “Ubiquitous Music: How are sharing, copyright and really cool technology changing the roles of the artist and the audience,” Atau Tanaka of Sony CSL Paris presented his Malleable Mobile Music project, a hub-based experience based on a handheld mobile terminal connected to a wireless network with streaming audio, a local synthesis engine and a sensor subsystem. The point, he said, is to create a “social remix,” to which users log in to listen to a single piece of music that is being streamed, with all connected users logging into the same stream.
“The
idea, which I call ‘reflective translucence,’ is to bring
magic back into music,” says Tanaka. “Each user has a
clear sense of his part in the whole and can hear everyone else’s
contribution.” Issues of quality and bandwidth aside, Malleable
Mobile Music would seem to offer music editors and music supervisors
an opportunity to add to and exchange sound and music files on the
go, while en route to or from sessions.
Sound editors and electronic composers with a dramatic flair might
check out the Sonic City Project, introduced by Lalya Gaye of Sweden’s
Viktoria Institute’s Future Applications Lab. Using city streets
as a musical interface, the prototype consists of a laptop, micro-controlled
sensors that are worn over the body––á la virtual
reality––a microphone and headphones. Tested in Goteborg,
Sweden (the very height of urban sprawl), Sonic City acts as an enhancer
of everyday settings, kind of an ad hoc interaction with the local
resources at hand, and lets the user navigate through the city, motivated,
says Gaye, “by an ever increasing search for sources of input.
It’s an incredible way to create and socialize music and sound
in an urban setting,” she explains.
The exhibit hall, while less esoteric, offered more of the here-and-now
for post professionals, starting with MetaCommunications, Inc. (www.meta-comm.com).
The company debuted Digital Storage Manager, which it says is the
first Intranet search and archive management system for creative workgroups.
Similar to Mac OS 10.4 Tiger’s new Spotlight search technology,
Digital Storage Manager is built for networks of servers and online
and offline storage.
“Digital Storage Manager is intended as a solution for some growing problems in the post industry––namely, finding, tagging and archiving the vast numbers of files used in the post-production process,” says Robert Long, the company’s executive vice president. “We allow you to tag files with all the information that’s useable to find the files, plus there’s an automated system for archiving it all off to tape, DVD or anything else.”
A turnkey system, Digital Storage Manager utilizes MetaCommunications’ Virtual Ticket, which enables users to easily search an entire network of online servers and offline repositories to accurately find any file, regardless of location. Online production servers are automatically indexed by server agents, creating a mirror of pointers to actual files. Users can then use customizable file tickets to easily add metadata to individual files or entire folders in real time.
“The cool part is that the indexing engine picks up all kinds
of metadata, and it’s all searchable,” Long adds. “Our
system is geared for the creative production workers because the search
engine is built around their own files, not some external entity.”
Digital Storage Manager is licensed by the total amount of storage
under management. Prices start at $995 for 100 gigabytes, and go up
to $19,995 for unlimited storage.
At
the plug-in pavilion, Digital Anarchy (www.digitalanarchy.com)
showed its set of eight plug-ins aimed at creating effects for Final
Cut Pro and After Effects users. Ideal for editors dropping in temp
effects, doing previsualization, or even final effects on lower-budgeted
movies, commercials, TV shows or documentaries, a couple of the plug-ins
proved especially interesting.
Psunami Water is a 3-D photorealistic water simulation tool for After Effects and Final Cut Pro. Used on sequences in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, Psunami’s effects are all created within the software, according to Digital Anarchy President Jim Tierney. “You can go above or below the water, texture-map the water surface with logos or surface reflections and use displacement maps for ripples and whirlpools. You can even attach the After Effects’ 3-D camera to the water’s surface and capture the up and down movement perfectly.”
For environments above the waves, Tierney also displayed Aurora Sky,
which creates photorealistic 3-D clouds and skies, as well as suns,
stars, volumetric haze and light, smoke, etc. Built-in camera controls
allow users to navigate and animate the sky; they can also project
graphics or skywriting, and use a displacement map or Bézier
path (a definition of a curve) to shape 2- or 3-D clouds. “We
support Final Cut Pro primarily because Apple supports the After Effects
API [application program interface],” says Tierney. “That
makes it very easy for us to port things over.” Psunami Water
is available for $199; Aurora sells for $169, or both are available
for $299 in a “nature bundle.”
da vinci Systems LLC (www.davsys.
com), a fixture in the color-correction business for two decades,
introduced Revival, an extremely sophisticated set of digital restoration
and remastering tools for aging motion picture film. A server-based
system, Revival counteracts the time intensiveness, high cost and
generally poor tools that are currently the norm, putting the repair
of even the most obscure titles within affordable reach. Available
in stand-alone, SGI (Silicon Graphics) and Intel platforms, Revival
is resolution-independent, and supports eight- or ten-bit images in
2k or 4k resolutions.
“Most of the time, a digital noise reducer is the only solution
post-production people have for digital restoration,” says da
vinci’s product manager, Gary Adams. “The beauty of Revival
is that you are able to go frame by frame to repair vertical scratches,
fix actual physical tears in the film, stabilize the image, de-flicker,
remove grain and hide scratches. You can also import and export EDLs
for scene detection, batch generation and quality control. It’s
a very powerful tool, and I just don’t think anything is going
to ever replace film, especially for preservation and archival purposes.”
Revival is priced around $25,000, depending on versions and options.
AJA Video Systems, Inc. (www.aja.
com), a ten-year-old company that specializes in video capture
products for post-production, displayed Kona 2, a line of high-end,
Tiger OS-ready video capture cards built to provide capture and playback
for Final Cut Studio. The company also makes a line of stand-alone
firewire capture boxes, identical to the cards, that attach to a desktop
Mac or PowerBook with a single firewire cable, making them ideal for
portable news editing, live capture in the field, reality shows and
sporting events.
Introduced last year, Kona 2 provides uncompressed video, eight-channel AES and embedded audio, up/down high definition/standard definition (HD/SD) format conversion and component analogue output, all on a PCI-X 133 MHz card. The card also provides for dual-monitor desktop viewing to accommodate any editing situation, with full support for Final Cut Pro High Definition Real Time Extreme effects as well as hardware acceleration for the new DVC PRO HD (digital video compressed) codec.
AJA
also displayed its Io, Io LD and Io LA products, co-developed with
Apple to provide a cost-efficient “everything in, everything
out” video finishing system for Final Cut Pro. Full connectivity
to video tape recorders (VTR), generator locking devices, and OS X
drivers is provided, as well as direct video output to common applications
such as After Effects, Combustion and Apple’s Motion 2.
“Our products have been embraced by the broadcast industry,” says Chuck Whitlock, AJA’s marketing manager. “This year, we’re also showing a beta of our new utility software for the whole product line that allows you to use the products without Final Cut Pro, just doing batch capture and using a VTR exchange utility to lay captured material onto disc. It’s free to our customers.”
Kona 2 sells for $2,490, and a stripped-down version––the SD-only Kona LS (also available in a box)––goes for $990. Io carries a list price of $2,290, while the lower cost LD and LA configurations go for about $1,000.
All in all, Siggraph ‘05 was a not a bad place to be for editors––but only if they knew where to look.
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