by Geoff Poister~ April 25, 2006
TV TECHNOLOGY
While many companies at NAB2006 branch out into new areas, da Vinci Systems is refining what it does best.
The da Vinci name is synonymous with high-end film and video color enhancement, and all of this year's new initiatives advance their corner on the market.
"da Vinci is best known for 2K," said da Vinci General Manager Bill Robertson at the start of a press conference Monday. "We are now introducing version 4.1 with a number of enhancements and support for DCI."
Da Vinci also announced the release of Resolve Digital Mastering Suite Version 3.2. This new release adds enhanced tools for 10-bit, real-time log grading, which enables colorists to enhance material intended for high-resolution film. The new workflow allows colorist to use film-centric controls to adjust low lights, highlights, and brightness, and colorists are able to reposition 10-bit log files in real-time with rotation.
"Sizing is intricately linked with color when you are defining the presentation of an image," said Jim Mackrell, senior product manager at da Vinci. "And we've provided real-time sizing tools in the color suite so colorists can do this without iterating through renders."
Resolve v3.2 also uses polygon windows allowing colorists to generate isolation windows with up to 100 points.
The highlight release this year, however, is da Vinci's Splice, a new product that creates a "virtual telecine" for the da Vinci 2K and 2K Plus, which are currently the industry's leading color enhancement systems.
This is particularly good news for current owners of da Vinci 2K systems because it adds a host of controls and converts the 2K system for use in a nonlinear environment. Splice takes the functions ordinarily found in a telecine and enables them to be used in a non-linear fashion.
Splice is powered by da Vinci's Transformer image processing accelerator that allows colorists to conform, transform, grade, arrange and deliver images in any order, in real-time. Splice presents itself as a new device on the control panel and provides operators with controls found in the telecine environment.
© 2006 NAB
