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Perhaps even more impressive than the new Symphony Nitris is Avid?s new iNews Instinct ($3995 per seat, available ?later this year.?). Working as part of Avid?s Unity system, its unique user interface allows those who are not necessarily nonlinear editing experts to put together video packages for newscasts using an interface that looks more like text editing than video editing (see graphic below). In this radical new concept, Avid has decided to turn the monitor on its side so that it?s in a portrait mode. On the right side of the screen is an area where producers can enter text. Alongside that on the left margin is an area where thumbnails of video clips are placed. On the upper left side of the screen are simple tape transport controls where in and out points can be easily added by dragging the mouse, along with a rudimentary audio controls were nat sound, voiceover and sound-on can be adjusted. Below that is a simple file manager system, with which by now all producers are familiar. Above the tape transport controls is a monitor showing the video. As you hover your mouse over that, an overlay gives you a choice of whether you?d like to use this clip as a SOT, or voiceover. By simply clicking on one of these overlay choices, the clip is added to the script on the right side of the screen along with the appropriate commands. Once all of the text and shots are edited, the resulting story can be added to or refined on any other Avid editing system or playout server on the Unity system. It is certainly an impressive breakthrough in editing interface design, bringing precise, flexible and easy to use script-based editing to those who aren?t rocket scientists. Bravo.
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| (Click graphic for enlargement) Avid's iNews Instinct features an innovative and easy-to-use vertical timeline with script alongside. |
By the way, find out more about Avid, its products and its future with an exclusive one-on-one interview with Avid CEO David Krall, coming up next week right here on Digital Media Net.
Also showing HDV support at NAB this year was Leitch, with its Velocity HD 9.1 editing system. This high powered hardware-assisted nonlinear editor can combine 8-bit HDV files along with 10-bit compressed or uncompressed HD footage on its timeline. Velocity 9.1 is extraordinarily responsive, with its hardware underneath that?s especially made to play back two channels of high definition footage. On top of that is its excellent user interface, which can keep playing back effects while you?re making changes to them. It?s a tremendous interactivity that?s lacking in lots of other nonlinear editing software packages. Another favorite feature is its ability to mute tracks on the timeline, or mute specific effects to see the result with or without. Another new feature is multicam, which gives you the ability to edit full-rez HD clips on the timeline in an easy-to-use format. Best of all, these new features will be available later this spring as a free upgrade. Velocity is certainly an edit system that warrants a thorough look-see before any decisions are made in favor of some of its more widely known competitors.
In another extraordinary demo, Assimilate showed its Scratch digital intermediate system, which moves a mountain of data in no time flat. Priced at around $55,000 including workstation and storage, this full-featured digital intermediate production system lowers the cost of entry while allowing gigantic film-scanned DPX and Cineon files to play back in real time. Using off-the-shelf workstations and generally available storage systems, Scratch accommodates custom lookup tables, and allows sophisticated color correction and much more to be applied to DPX files used in digital intermediate production for feature films. The application has a unique way of presenting timelines so that various versions can be substituted with the flick of a mouse (see graphic below). Also a big plus is Scratch?s ability to accept a variety of third-party plug-ins. The newest announcement here at NAB was the new Scratch Zone-1, which extends the real-time review and playback capabilities of Scratch to allow filmmakers to collaborate with each other over a high-speed network. That?s got to be a very high speed network, though. The neat trick is this playback is using 2K or 4K files, something that would?ve been considered science fiction just a few years ago. Expect an in-depth report coming up soon here on Digital Media Net.
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| (Click graphic for enlargement) Assimilate Scratch has a superior way of dealing with versions. |
While we?re on the subject of digital intermediate production, there was also an impressive demo aimed at the low end of this budding digital intermediate market. The product is Prospect 2K from CineForm, the company that first introduced the ability to edit high-definition video in real time two years ago with its HDV plug-in for early versions of the new format. In this technology demo, CineForm?s Prospect 2K was using Premiere Pro 1.5 as its GUI. With its workflow, instead of scanning film onto DPX files, the images are scanned directly into proprietary Prospect 2K files. Using its lightly-compressed wavelet format, the quality of this compression was extraordinary, even to trained eyes in the NAB demo. As a result of this compression, using a three-drive SATA array it was possible to view 2 sustained streams of this 2K footage plus color correction and titles on top. This, folks, was real-time 2K, and it was visually lossless, too. It works by emphasizing constant quality, but not constant bit rate. This variable bit rate scheme facilitates real-time editing, and then when it?s time to print to film, the file can be dragged and dropped in to Adobe After Effects and then saved as a DPX file. In the demo, CineForm technicians showed footage that was extraordinarily difficult to compress, and the results were of extremely high quality. CineForm hasn?t announced their product?s price or release date yet but said to expect shipment of this new technology perhaps in late summer or early fall.
These NAB notables are by no means all or even a majority of the technology that was worth mentioning. As is the custom, the show floor at the vast Las Vegas Convention Center was overflowing with innovative technology and a crowd of over 104,000 visitors. One thing is certain; HDV is the new format of choice for all kinds of lower-end production. Another trend on the show floor was the dawning of high definition newscasts, something that wasn?t being seriously considered until recently, as the FUD factor (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) was planted in the minds of news directors all across America. One question raced across the show floor: ?What if my competitors have a high-definition newscast?? High definition is so sticky that channel-surfing viewers will stay with a newscast broadcast in HD rather than with one in standard definition. Even though we?ve all heard the phrase ?This is the Year of HD? many times before, this time it?s starting to sound like the truth.
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