IBC turned out to be whirlwind 7-hour tour for me this year, due to the fact that I needed to get back to the states for my day job. The second annual fxguide gathering on Sunday night was fun…a great chance to meet other artists and discreet folks. We covered discreet’s annoucements last week, so before I hop on the plane here are some quick notes about Digital Fusion, The Foundry, Apple, and more. Read on….
Eyeon Software — Digital Fusion
Eyeon Software showcased versio n4 of Digital Fusion, as well as a variety of plug-ins, including ones from GenArts and Algolith Inc., a spin-off of Miranda.
The Sapphire Plug-ins pack for Digital Fusion is a collection of four boxes including over 200 image processing and synthesis effects that can quickly and easily transform any film or video clip. Sapphire Plug-ins seamlessly integrate into the DF UI, are resolution-independent and include multi-processor support for faster rendering. This joins an ever-increasing number of platforms that Sapphire supports.
Algolith was also showing their plugins at the DF booth. They include an impressive set of field-motion removal, resizing, and noise reduction tools — perfect for uprezzing and format conversions of HD video. The technology is based upon Miranda’s image processing algorithms used in specialized hardware, but now adapted to software-based plugins. The results of the tools is quite impressive, and fxguide will be publishing an up-close look at the tools shortly. Currently, the plugins are shipping for Shake.
Apple’s The Future of Digital Production
Saturday evening at IBC, Phil Schiller who is Apple’s Senior Vice President, Worldwide Product Marketing, spoke at a special event on Apple’s vision of the future of digital production. The event was attended by several hundred end users who were treated to a recap of Apple’s Pro Product line – Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack, Logic, Shake, and the newly released DVD Studio Pro 2.
The event was essentially a recap of the major features of the hardware, as well as an overview of the new versions of software. Schiller emphasized that Apple was commited to providing high-end software to creative artists — something that is central to their product strategy. As announced at WWDC earlier this year, Apple still plans to have a 3gHz G5 desktop computer within 12 months of that conference — a 50% leap in processor power.
Of special interest were several demos showing G5 technology previews. For the presentation, Apple used early versions of the software which included some G5 optimization. One of the clearer examples of the potential of the G5 was the ability to play back 6 real time streams of standard definition video in Final Cut Pro — each stream was reduced in size to create an animated 6-way splitscreen. The video footage was stored on a XServ RAID system.
Schiller also mentioned Silicon Color, which has created software for realtime 2K data processing and was announced at IBC. What is interesting about the product is that it runs on a fairly standard platform, though you would obviously need a large investment in storage architecture to work with it. They also promise 4K in the future. It is quite an impressive product and could actually impress Fred Ruckel at some point.
The Foundry
The Foundry announced that Furnace is now shipping as a sparks package for discreet products such as flame and fire. The tools provided are very similar to those that fxguide profiled last month. According to Simon Robinson, who heads the Furnace product, several improvements were made over the Shake version which are possible due to the discreet architecture. Due to the ability of sparks to access various frames within a clip, the temporal workarounds used in Shake aren’t necessary in the sparks version — simply one less thing for the artist to worry about. The regrain tool also contains a response curve, so that grain doesn’t need to be applied at one level over an entire image — different areas of luminance are treated differently. The WireRemoval tool now has 3 points for adjustment (instead of the 2 points in Shake), so that curved or sagging wires can be more easily removed. The tools also make use of The Foundry spline drawer, which will auto-create a spline around an object which the artist lassos with the pen. This spline can then be tracked (using the external discreet stabiliser) and animated over the duration of the clip. For
Bruno Nicoletti took the time to preview for fxguide a very early version of Tinder 5 — a new set of plugins due to be released before NAB next year. The set includes numerous particle and fluid-dynamic based effects such as smoke, flag, ripples, and puddles. What is quite interesting about the ripples spark is that the user can input a bounce region matte and have the flow of liquid seemingly reflect off objects in the foreground. Also included is an improved Rays module which combines much faster processing with new effects such as smoke through the rays, the ability to fill the rays with a user grad, and other improvements. Nicoletti also showed an early version of a “cartoon” spark, which analyzes the image and draws color-filled shapes to give the appearance of flat cartoon art.
PC/Mac-Based Capture Cards
Blackmagic Design debuted its new HD 10bit PCI catpure card at IBC this weekend. The DeckLink HD is the first PCIX capture card available for the new Macintosh G5 (other standard PCI cards such as the AJA Kona HD are still available).
According to Grant Petty, founder of Blackmagic Design, the PCIX slot makes a tremendous difference in the ability to capture HD material. It was an oustanding (and necessary) decision to include such slots in their new system. For those without a G5, SD capture is available when the card is used in a G4 machine, so users can buy the card now knowing that they can have HD capture abilities when they upgrade their hardware. The price point of the DeckLink HD – $1,995US – is still less expensive than the AJA Kona HD card. At IBC, AJA announced that they had reduced prices on their cards to $3,995 for the Kona HD and $2,495 for the Kona SD.
The Blackmagic cards are supported on both Macintosh and PC workstations (the HD version of the DeckLink for PC will be released shortly after the Mac version). The cards are actually technically the same, the only difference being the drivers which are installed on the system. According to Petty, the company ships over 200 new cards a week to users.
The company has taken a leading role in providing capture cards for the Mac platform. This spot was once held by DigitalVoodoo, but a somewhat stagnant Macintosh product line as well as a difficult transition to OSX has hurt their position in the market. The company recently announced it was getting out of the mac video card business.
Digital Voodoo’s PC division Bluefish444, however, announced that they had begun shipping HD|Lust, a high def capture and playback card for Windows. The card contains two HD SDI inputs, two HD SDI outputs, 8 channels of AES/EBU Digital Audio, and simultaneous HD 4:2:2 or SD 4:2:2 downconversion. The card will record RGB 10-bit Cineon files or YUV QuickTime V210 files. The Bluefish444 cards are used by various manufacturers, including Nucoda , and compatible with Digital Fusion, Combustion, After Effects, and other programs.