Oystein Naell (L) of Avid shows off the company’s Media composer 7 editing system to a crowd. Every year the edit system introductions released at NAB Show continue to reflect the technological evolutions affecting the whole production chain. This year things just seemed to get bigger, better, and often, less expensive.
EDITING
The next version of Premiere Pro was previewed by Adobe with significant new shortcuts for faster, keyboard-driven editing, Link & Locate to quickly relink media and an expanded set of supported media formats. We also learned that Adobe SpeedGrade is getting an updated user interface and new one-click Shot Matcher feature.
Since announcing a radical redesign of its Smoke NLE last year, Autodesk brought out Smoke 2013 with Service Pack (SP) 2 along with announcements of integrating Blackmagic Design technology into its post-production products. They also showed off Flame 2013 20th Anniversary Edition SP 3 for Extension 2.
Media Composer 7 software from Avid offers accelerated file-based workflows, optimized HD delivery from high-resolution sources and Interplay Sphere for Mac support. Best of all, Media Composer 7 is priced at just $999, and is a key component of Avid Everywhere cloudbased collaboration.
Boris FX has given their new Media 100 Suite 2.12 the ability to work with Apple’s Mountain Lion OS and QuickTime 7.8, a multiple frame buffer, a Catch Frame window with a Pixel Accurate option and support for 2K and 4K files while working with AJA, Blackmagic Design and Matrox technologies.
At the Rohde & Schwarz booth, DVS demonstrated enhancements in high-fame-rate DCI mastering on their Clipster workstation that now also supports the IMF (Interoperable Master Format) mezzanine format.
The new Mac version of Lightworks NLE was announced by EditShare, which will make this the only edit system available on all three major operating systems— Windows, Linux and Mac. Like its siblings, the OS X version will be available as a free download We saw Edius 6.5 again at the Grass Valley exhibit, with Edius 7 promised for later this year. Edius now offers tighter integration with the GV Stratus distribution platform. Edius XS enables proxy editing from Stratus, and Edius Elite combines the functions of Edius 6.5 and Edius XS into a fully functional NLE.
Steve Jaeb of Grass Valley gives a presentation on newsroom production using the Grass Valley Stratus with Edius integration. Matrox Video announced support with the Matrox MXO2 family of I/O devices and the Matrox Mojito 4K monitoring card for the upcoming release of Adobe professional video editing tools, including Adobe Mercury Transmit for Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe SpeedGrade.
Heralding their new support for the AJA Corvid Ultra video card, Quantel showed how their Pablo Rio color and finishing system easily handles workflows at 4K and beyond, and its ability to deliver content to the Enterprise sQ broadcast system using Quantel’s Qtube transformer.
Sony Creative Software’s Vegas Pro 12 Edit features the same video and audio toolset as the Vegas Pro 12 collection, but saves the cost of the complete suite’s discauthoring component. Vegas Pro 12 Edit can now ingest Panasonic P2 and features a new expanded edit mode that splits two transitioned events into A and B rolls with a simple double-click.
BROADCAST GRAPHICS
Broadcast and post-production graphics systems have become so sophisticated they have risen beyond adding eye candy enhancements to digital images to becoming an inherent part of the storytelling tool set.
Avid brought out their latest release of Avid Motion Graphics 2.5 production platform with a new dual-channel configuration option and a standalone playout engine.
Bernie Rayno (L) and Valerie Smock demonstrate applications for AccuWeather’s Storyteller. For the first time in the United States, Brainstorm presented the new Aston 3D, its realtime 3D graphics creation system intended to be the center of any design department for use from CG through playout thanks to the power of its eStudio render engine.
ChyronHego’s new ChyronIP is a real-time HD/SD 2D and 3D character and graphics generator specifically designed for the NewTek TriCaster by streaming two HD or SD full-motion channels of Chyron graphics over a network connection. The company also introduced the Graffiti broadcast graphics platform, with two models available: Graffiti SDI, a 1RU system fully loaded with Lyric PRO graphics creation software, and Graffiti SDI Flex, a portable backpack-ready character generator boasting all the features of Graffiti SDI.
Also new was Mosaic, a high-performance, 1080p-capable broadcast graphics platform for use in traditional or automated production workflows and CAMIO-DR, a new data recovery system designed for the CAMIO3 graphics asset management server.
Showcasing their latest VFX software addition, the HIERO 1.7 shot manager, The Foundry also showed off new features on their NUKE and NUKEX 6.3 v7 compositing systems along with the OCULA toolset for stereoscopic workflows.
The LightWave 3D Group, a division of NewTek brought LightWave 11.5, now including the Genoma character rigging system with modular presets, predator and prey Flocking capabilities. LightWave 11.5 features Interchange Tools supporting Adobe After Effects cameras.
Nvidia had its new GPU-based GRID Visual Computing Appliance (VCA) on display, enabling workgroups of up to 16 users to get the full benefits of Nvidia’s Quadro GPU performance on their Windows, Mac and Linux graphics systems.
Orad demonstrated new features on its Maestro graphics system including new graphics MAM support, connection to social networks, 3D transitions, support for MOS 2.8, videoEngine control and Scene- Edit2 to edit graphics during playout.
A new file-based rendering system from Pixel Power called Pixel Factory, made its public debut delivering a new core graphics engine in a software-only version that runs on standard IT hardware. Pixel Factory is designed for producing graphics overlays for QC, Web delivery or post production.
The Viz Engine from Vizrt was seen handling 4K resolution rendering and IP media streaming in real time, and they released v13of their Viz Curious Maps, now rebranded to Viz World Classic.
WEATHER GRAPHICS
AccuWeather’s StoryTeller interactive touchscreen system was seen with seven new software apps to expand coverage of news, sports and weather stories through social media, now featuring integration of INRIX real-time traffic information.
VizWeather from Vizrt is now a full part of both the MOS newsroom pipeline and Vizrt’s template-based graphics workflows. Vizrt demonstrated a live weather broadcast every half-hour at the show.
The Fusion Studio weather presentation system from Weather Central now has expanded 3D graphics capability and socialmedia connectivity with iFactor delivering lifestyle-based weather ratings.
