ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
DS10: Avid's New High-Performance Platform
by Michael Kunkes
 Avid DS10. |
Avid Technology recently announced the availability Avid DS10, a major makeover of the ten-year-old Nitris platform, designed to save customers time and money by combining high-performance professional editing, compositing, keying, image retouching, painting and graphics capabilities, along with a host of new features, including full 4:4:4 color-managed workflows, advanced color correction, support for Avid’s shared storage solutions though Avid Interplay, vastly improved conform options, GPU real-time processing, dual-link feature support, and a stereoscopic 3-D container.
 Angus Mackay. |
The release of DS10 is one of the first tangible expressions of Avid’s hyped “new thinking” philosophy, announced earlier this year. “We are dedicated to bringing tools to market that are customer-focused and solutions-driven, rather than being engineered in a silo,” says Angus Mackay, Avid product marketing manager/editor. “We want to make sure the solutions we are offering are appropriate and correct for the work our customers are doing.”
From a hardware standpoint alone, this is a major release. Avid is dropping its proprietary Nitris hardware box and accompanying external acceleration, which has served online editors for some half dozen years with few major upgrades. The new hardware is entirely off-the-shelf, hence the elimination of the “Nitris” name from the product. Avid is also commemorating the product’s tenth anniversary by going from the current version, 8.4, straight to DS version 10. “Improvements in workstation horsepower as well GPU capabilities have enabled Avid to focus its efforts on software development and optimizing the code, so that we have not needed to invest in specific hardware design,” MacKay explains.
Along with Avid’s new thinking comes new pricing, and a turnkey DS10 solution will go out the door for $59,995––a darn site less expensive than the last Nitris version 8 box, which carried an retail price of $147,995. The new package, built around an entirely real-time processing framework, includes a dual quad HP xw8600 workstation, a 3-D OpenGL GPU with and NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 graphics card as well as a dual link I/O card with full 4:4:4 and HD RGB color. There is also a 30-inch monitor, WACOM tablet, eight terabytes of SAS storage and one license of DS10 software, DS10RP (remote processing) Media Composer software and Avid MetaFuze, used to create Avid DNxHD proxy media from DPX, TIFF and other file-based sources. Mackay adds, “The ability to handle higher bit-depth images with 4:4:4 imagery to produce the highest quality final production and the most color information for color correction, keying and image processing is what has driven the development [which has been pretty rapid] of DS10.”
According to Avid, DS10 is a revolutionary product for post producers in three major areas––online effects, compositing and graphics, and high-resolution conform. “DS10 has a very broad and deep toolset,” explains Mackay. “It allows the conform and handling of a variety of offline formats, including advanced conform from Media Composer projects using Avid AFE. This allows post producers to be able to handle any job that comes their way.”
The current Avid DS Nitris system offers multi-stream, 10-bit uncompressed HD, Avid DNxHD and SD finishing and mastering, as well as HD-RGB and 2K/4K file-based editing with real-time playback up to 2K. DS10 includes a whole new range of features and functionality, including the aforementioned new hardware and real-time GPU processing framework, full support for 10bt YUV 4:2:2 color encoding tools, HW support of 720p 23.98 sequence output (or conversion to 1080p 23.98), a stereoscopic container that allows customers to create 48i sequences and set up right and left eyes with output through the 2K3 dual link card, an improved Node builder, about 150 bug fixes, and, as mentioned, the ability for users to connect with Avid Interplay so they can access media with the same indexer as Media Composer.
“Most new features are supported by dual link capability and support 4:4:4 high bit depth images,” Mackay says. “And you are able to do real upconverts of SD to HD and cross and downconvert some sequences to other formats, greatly augmenting the universal mastering capabilities of the system. Now, you no longer have to render different size masters, you can output them using the power of the system alone.”
One key to high-resolution color management in the DS environment is the new 3-D LUT (Look-Up Tables) feature, necessary in a high-resolution color environment in order to accurately represent film material on a monitor. “LUTs are developed and applied to raw film scans to show how film is meant to look when a film-out is finally projected; this goes a long way toward giving our customers that capability,” Mackay adds.
Marc Fisher is a picture editor working as an online editor for television shows such as Cavemen, Las Vegas and The OC, as well as features such as Hostel, Alexander and Rescue Dawn. He has been beta testing DS10 throughout the product’s development. “The 3-D LUTs are a nice new feature,” Fisher claims. “Avid wants to market this as a DI box for feature work, and that is one of the main features we editors have been looking for. When we’ve done our full-on conform and the director and DP have given their blessings to the color, you don’t want to have to then go sit in the DI suite and start recreating everything. With the 3-D LUTs, you can pull your 2K and 4K film files and put the correct LUTs on the system. Then, when you export your information, you can use the same 3-D LUTs that the film scanners are going to use.”
 Marc Fisher. |
Speaking of the software’s high-resolution capabilities, DS10 also implements several dpx improvements to support RGB and other formats such as Filmlights’s RGBA. More interestingly for editors, Avid DS10 will now be able to perform file-based dpx conforms from AFEs (Avid File Exchange), originating from Media Composer and Symphony systems. “Because so many productions get scanned to files, the ability to work with dpx files and do an advanced conform of projects off of a media composer is a great productivity booster for producers working with HD, 2K or 4K,” MacKay points out.
Fisher feels that DS is a much more sophisticated finishing platform than Avid Symphony and that once a few small stumbling blocks are overcome in future releases, DS could ultimately replace the Symphony down the road. Indeed, DS10 is incorporating some advanced features from Symphony, such as real-time advanced secondary color-correction tools that allow users to select specific regions of color space and do subtle manipulations without affecting the rest of a shot. “Symphony was the high-end Avid finishing tool when there wasn’t anything else available,” he says. “The DS was developed right from the start as a finishing tool, so it has a lot more raw horsepower. Avid never promoted Nitris heavily, now that is all changing for the better.”
“This is a tool aimed at the broadest segment of the post market and by adding these capabilities, we are offering customers the opportunity to do greater work and increase the number and types of customers and projects they themselves can address,” adds Mackay. “While it all sounds very film-specific, it is all applicable to general post work.”
According to Fisher, the DS is an extremely powerful tool for feature post, which accounts for 90 percent of his own workload. “The DS is powerful enough to handle any file format or frame size. You can go from an SD edit on Media Composer and then bring it in for an HD pass or a 2k pass. You can’t do that on any other Avid product,” he says, adding that, “Two years ago, I was working on Richard Donner’s director's cut of Superman II and I was able to simply duplicate entire sequences into 2K––and all the effects that editor Michael Thau cut in the composer translated 100 percent into HD and the 2K conform. It was phenomenal, and now it’s become even more powerful. Avid has finally realized what a terrific product they have here, and a lot of other users feel the same way.”
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.