Every year, post production is where the excitement is at the Las Vegas NAB Show, since that’s the arena in which all the new technological production innovations come together. The nonlinear editing field has been culled down, with one major player not even deeming it necessary to sprout its own booth this year; however, there will still be plenty of innovations for post pros to revel in.
EDITING
As usual, Adobe Systems is reserving its biggest announcements until closer to show time, but the company has confirmed that it will be showing off its professional editing systems, including Premiere Pro, and its blazingly fast Mercury Playback Engine along with other Creative Suite Production Premium point products.
As it did last year, Autodesk is naming its new software offerings a year in advance as in its new Smoke 2012 software for the Mac. Smoke 2012 will be seen with new stereoscopic 3D finishing tools including the capability for mastering in two-channel stereo and left/right eye convergence adjustment capabilities. Autodesk’s Smoke 2012 will also feature a native finishing workflow with Apple’s Final Cut Pro.
V5.5 of Avid Media Composer supports AJA’s Io ExpressAvid will present a whole range of new software for its flagship editing systems, including v5.5 of Media Composer, NewsCutter v9.5 and v5.5 of Symphony. These now give Avid editors support for AJA’s Io Express input/output interface, and a nifty new search capability called PhraseFind which, empowered with Nexidia phonetic searching, can find individual groups of words even in non-scripted productions like documentaries or news packages.
The new owners of the red shark-powered Lightworks system, EditShare, will demonstrate the EditShare HD Production Platform, a seamless integration of its five product lines that provide an end-to-end production workflow. Also look for EditShare’s Tiered Storage with enhanced archiving capabilities, as well as EditShare Ark, which offers superior media protection for broadcast/post applications and provides hard disk and tape-based options for backup and archiving. Booth visitors should also check out Lightworks’s advanced stereoscopic 3D capabilities. We’ll also get a glimpse at EditShare’s phase one release from the Lightworks Open Source initiative, the industry’s first large-scale, open source development initiative for a nonlinear editing platform.
Boris FX will arrive with v2.0 of Media 100 Suite, providing even faster editing and compositing on Mac OS X. This release introduces support for 4K and 2K video, RedCode media, and the Red Rocket board along with a new motion editor for pan-and-scan and picture-in-picture effects. Also check out the new Boris AAF Transfer v2, which provides a set of two Final Cut Pro plug-ins for transferring sequences between Final Cut Pro and Avid editing and finishing systems.
Grass Valley EDIUS 6 The latest version of Grass Valley’s Edius NLE software, Edius 6, works with any video standard up to 1080p50/60 or even 4K digital cinema resolution. Edius 6 supports all major codecs used in the production industry natively without transcoding, and can mix them together on the same timeline.
Harris will introduce Velocity PRX, a proxy editor based on the intuitive Velocity user interface. As part of the NEXIO global proxy system, Velocity PRX allows frame-accurate proxy editing of mirrored high-resolution content residing on the NEXIO SAN. Browsing and editing can take place even during ingest. Velocity PRX connects to the NEXIO Browse system through a standard house LAN, allowing up to 100 editors to operate simultaneously.
For the first time, Quantel will release a software-only product, Pablo PA, to help optimize the workflow of their high end eQ, iQ or Pablo post production suites by handling conforms and preparation away from the client-focused main edit bay. For post houses that don’t currently own Quantel systems, Pablo PA also offers a low cost way to benefit from Quantel’s high quality post tools as a standalone system.
GRAPHICS
Quantel Pablo PA For graphics applications, Autodesk’s Maya 2012 has new toolsets for previsualization and game prototyping enabling improved pipeline integration. Enhancements to its Viewport 2.0 feature include full screen effects, motion blur, depth-of-field and ambient occlusion for 3D work, and editable motion trails, letting you edit animation directly in the Viewport without the need to switch context to the graph editor.
Epoch|2K’s multichannel capabilities for stereoscopic 3D projects from Bluefish444 Technologies now feature a 12-bit video processing pipeline with 3G/SDI and a 2X Jetstream hardware scaling module for up/down/cross conversion.
The Lyric PRO 8 graphics creation software from graphics pioneer Chyron features a new continuous graphics rendering engine to enable delivery of enhanced quality real time 3D animations. Chyron will also be touting its Axis cloud-based graphics platform, designed specifically for broadcasters as well as its Quintette newsroom graphics production and playback system.
The Inscriber G7 system from Harris offers a full suite of broadcast graphics tools combined with professional-grade hardware components with features including the Altitude Express graphics board, Nvidia GPU’s, and the latest processor technology. NAB attendees will see Inscriber G7 in action with Harris’s Inscriber G-Scribe creation and playout software, Intelligent Interface and MOS support, Connectus integration, RTX NET API and the Inscriber G-3D design option optimize user workflow.
Chyron Lyric PRO 8 V12 of Maxon Computer’s Cinema 4D cornerstone 3D software application, will be seen with dozens of new productivity enhancing features including improved rendering, enhanced dynamics, new deformers and supe rior character animation capabilities to allow digital artists to intuitively create the most sophisticated 3D images and animations.
With a new user interface, the power to see changes to lights, textures and volumetrics, in real time, along with data interchange tools that enhance pipeline integration, NewTek’s LightWave 10 graphics software lets artists interact directly in the Viewport to see updates to their stereoscopic work as they are created and to deliver realistic environment walkthroughs in ways never before possible.
The innovative Automated Transition Logic in v9.5 of Pixel Power’s core software brings enhanced intelligence to template changes to simplify operations and reduce the possibility of graphical playout errors. V9.5 also includes full support for stereoscopic 3D graphics across all Pixel Power graphics systems.
Ross Video will introduce XPression Prime, a lower cost version of XPression Studio offering a streamlined feature set designed for tight budgets. XPression VS, Ross’ virtual set edition, powered by a high-quality vector chroma keyer, will be showcased at NAB with a live green screen presentation on the booth.
Ross Xpression Also new from Ross is the XPression Remote Sequencer, which controls multiple XPression systems from a single location; XPression Project Server, which provides a collaborative creation environment for project sharing and media distribution; and an XPression NLE plug-in, allowing editors to use the same graphics in editorial that are used in the control room. And, XPression’s expanded MOS workflow now includes support for OCTOPUS Newsroom systems in addition to the current Avid iNews and AP ENPS support. Both the NLE and MOS plug-ins are powered by the new XPression Offline Engine, a headless graphic engine providing high-quality previews and rendered graphics without the expensive hardware.
Vizrt will introduce Viz Mobilize, a complete platform for online video publishing, as well as the Escenic Content Engine, a high-performance content management system for text, images, audio files, video clips and all the other digital assets used on websites. Escenic Content Engine stores content and provides delivery to multiple channels, and also provides the APIs and back-end functionality for applications such as Escenic Content Studio.
