DVS also announced that their video board the Atomix will be supported as third-party Avid video interface which can be used in conjunction with Avid Media Composer, Symphony, or NewsCutter. The cards have great capabilities, the Atomix LT offers two multi-rate SDI ports that support SD, HD and 3.0 Gbps modes and can be configured as independent channels or as dual-link. Up to two independent channels are available with 2K RGB 4:4:4 in 3.0 Gbps mode. The Atomix HDMI features four HDMI ports, one of which supports the latest HDMI 1.4a standard. 4K material can be displayed via HDMI ports (DVI ports with adapters) – this provides a cost-efficient interfacing to most high-resolution projectors and displays. Atomix HDMI also supports Full HD 3D and 4K via one HDMI port. Resolution wise, the Avid software is the limiting factor here!

The Venice system has been integrated into a very neat Avid Workflow, providing fast file and video ingest into Avid Interplay using ISIS. The Venice can capture 4 interdependent video channels in a DNx format, these are then checked into the Interplay database allowing the Media Composer user to locate the clips in a familiar way. This clips can be played & edited during capture as the clips grow, providing frame chase editing. As you can imagine this is a great workflow for live events and jobs with quick turn around requirements. DVS now offer this great workflow for facilities which may not have invested in an Avid Interplay system.

http://www.dvs.de

XenData have announced support for LTFS across their product range. It will enable LTFS tapes written outside of the XenData environment to be read by a XenData archive system. You will also be able to choose to write in either the traditional TAR format or in LTFS as required. A great update from XenData which I can see being very valuable to many workflows.

Small Tree announced Intel’s 10 Gigabit Copper Ethernet Adapter of Mac. Small Tree have finished developing the OS X  driver for this next generation card which is based on the Intel Ethernet Controller 10 Gigabit X540.

Archion introduced their latest addition to their Avid storage range with the Synergy IS Expansion Storage for Avid ISIS 5000. After the successful Synergy XTR which integrates  into Unity MediaNetworks providing high capacity & high bandwidth storage at a fraction of the cost of Avid storage. The Synergy IS can be used as an additional storage engine, offering Archion’s standard RAID 5 4+1 configuration, which Avid use within the ISIS 5000 environment.

http://archion.com/press-synergyIS-more.php 

ATTO where showing the additions to their Thunderbolt range, ThunderStream & ThunderLink. ThunderLink and ThunderStream products utilise Intel’s Thunderbolt technology and enable storage and network connectivity for SAS, SATA, Fibre Channel or Ethernet devices for Thunderbolt enabled hosts.

http://www.attotech.com

Isilon are continuing to develop their OneFS distributed filesystem, in future releases we will see an advanced file system searching algorithm. Native Hadoop Support will be introduced enabling ‘google’ style file contents searching. File de-duplication is in the pipeline but a little further down the road.

StorageDNA announced version 2.0 of DNA Evolution. Introducing LTFS  with LTO-5  for archive and retrieval. Additional camera formats, Thunderbolt & Avid Interplay support has been introduced. Enhanced workflows tailored towards Broadcasters have been added covering more playout server such as Avid Airspeed, Omneon Spectrum etc. StorageDNA has always been at the front with the evolution of file-based workflows.

http://www.storagedna.com/

Aspera launched their direct to S3 (Amazon cloud) software for seamless, high-speed and secure transfer of file-based content. Faspex verison 3.0 adds support for Apple iOS devices and further enhancements to Microsoft Outlook.

http://cloud.asperasoft.com                                         http://www.asperasoft.com

BlueFish444 where showing there latest Avid certified 12bit video card Create3d|Ultra & Epoch2K|Ultra along with their Symmetry or Fluid software. The card features 3G-SDI, 3D Stereoscopic, a 12 bit video processor, hardware based scaling, DVI/HDMI output with 3 x 1D LUTs for 2K Preview and uncompressed 2K dual link!

http://www.bluefish444.com/avid/

In conjunction with Marquis Project Parking software running on a XenData SX-10 LTO-5
Archive Appliance it creates a LTO-5 server for archiving and restoring Avid Media Composer projects & media. The Project Parking software enables users to move entire projects from their editing storage to LTO.

In addition to this it keeps track of the project’s, if they have been previously archived it will update the archive and move across only new media or changed project files.

Restoring couldn’t be simpler, all Avid Projects are listed in the Archive with a description of when the archive was made, versioning and along with user comments. The user chooses which version and the restore destination.

A powerful cost effective solution for archiving Avid Media Composer projects & media.

marquisbroadcast.com

xendata.com

The Black Magic Stand seems to expand by a several square meters every year. This year their ‘surprise’ was their 2.5K cinema camera priced at just under $3000. The device shoots Cinema DNG RAW, DNX-HD and Pro Res, supports EF mounts, and has built in monitoring. With the market in so called ‘lower end stills’ (sub 5K dollars) cameras used for pro video production still growing at a spectacular rate, BMD saw opportunity in the market, and they may well be onto something; Given their experience in this field you can expect workflow advantages over other similarly priced devices possibly-
Further BMD have bundled DaVinci Resolve and Ultrascope as software packages to complete the offering.

Also new, were image processing devices shown on the stand as a result of the recent  BMD purchase of Teranex.

The Teranex up/down/cross converter boxes are pretty well respected in their price range and again plugged a gap that existed in BMD’s quest to democratise all aspects of video production.

Moving on down the hall, it was impossible to miss all the light and heat being created on the Adobe stand with their CS6 preview. Given the shock that FCP-X issued to the pro video community last summer, several vendors have sensed an opportunity to move into the space once comfortably straddled by FCP. Adobe, particularly the Premier team, are pushing this very hard. As a rule I try and keep off the big stands on the first day as they are typically overcrowded, overhyped and overdriven. Thus we will be bringing you some in depth looks on CS6 and the other hot news item at the show Smoke 2013 from Autodesk in a day or so when things have just calmed down a little. At first glance though, both look very very interesting.

The topic of 4K here at NAB this year is on every ones mind. Many modestly priced cameras are punting 4K acquisition and there is again a lot of talk about it. This is fraught with issues on may fronts. At the outset, the 4K standard itself remains somewhat undefined. Further, a simple reality is that very very few people shooting 4K (in whatever form) will ever see that image in a pixel for pixel representation on a 4K capable display. Finally most of this material (but for a small niche portion of this acquired content) is compressed.
So why are people excited by it?
Well an alignment of different technology factors has allowed users to acquire in 4K resolution at a very affordable price, but scale down to 2K or HD for final delivery. The efficiency of modern RAW codecs means that data rates are modest, quality is high and the smaller, scaled down image result is of superior quality. We will go and have a more in depth look at the cameras later today and offer some feedback on this for you.

As a wrap up item the standout of the show for me today was the autostereoscopic (glasses free) monitor and tablets and mobile showing on the Dolby stand.

The monitor and tablet display technology is a product of collaboration between Dolby and Phillips, and the results are stunning. Glasses free 3D is the way of the future, and this is the first time I have seen a offering that has great quality (and surprisingly) a very wide viewing angle relative to the display.
In brief, they have developed a lenticular film technology for the display and this is coupled with a proprietary Dolby processing technology which delivers depth accurate 3D video and also includes real time conversion for 2D to 3D in some applications.The results on the tablet and mobile devices was equally good also- We will do our best to get an interview and do a dedicated article on this…

Any feedback or questions, hit us up with comments on the blog.

LTO Space interface

LTO Space mini offers a single LTO 5 (1.5TB) drive in-conjunction with their well known Space storage (2TB). The mini can be used as a backup / archive of Space projects. The LTO Space Mini is capable of writing data at the tape’s native speed of 140MB/s. In addition to tape spanning, its supported as the tapelesss contents is written in open TAR format. This allows the tapes content to be read outside of the Space products if required.

LTO Space Mini

LTO Space is a four drive LTO 5 system which offers the same as the Mini does but with the addition of being able to handle replication across multiple tapes and a higher level of throughput.

LTO Space

Space SSD for workgroups was also launched at this years NAB,  SSD for workgroups offers a rack-mountable high performance unit with fast read & write speeds supporting demanding workflows & resolutions such as, HD, 3D, 2K, & 4K,.

In addition to these new products  from GB Labs, they announced performance increases across the Space range.

http://www.gblabs.com/

24 ISIS chassis x 16 Storage Blades per chassis =  384 Storage Blades

384 Storage Blades x 4 TB capacity per Storage Blade = 1536 TBs in total  (or 1.5 Petabytes!)

These numbers are for raw storage and do not take into consideration formatting overhead and storage capacity lost to data protection.

- For a fully mirrored configuration, the maximum usable storage capacity (before loss due to formatting and the mandatory requirement to maintain unused capacity for re-distribution) would be 768 TB (the Avid ISIS mirroring scheme delivers a good compromise of data protection with real-time storage performance at all media usage resolutions for up 330 clients).

- For a system configured with fully RAID 6 protected storage (before loss due to formatting etc) the maximum usable storage capacity would be 1152 TB (RAID 6 protected storage delivers more efficient storage usage than mirroring, along with real-time storage performance at media resolutions up to 50 Mbits per second).

The above two examples are perhaps the configuration “extremes”; of course, the beauty of the ISIS 7000 file system is that you can configure your storage to be protected as you require it depending on your workflow and the resolutions of the media you (or your clients) will be working with. For example you might choose to maintain a proportion of your ISIS as RAID 6 protected storage (perhaps for Nearline usage or for storage of proxy media files) while the remainder is protected using the traditional Avid block Mirroring scheme (for the bulk of the editing work).

It gives you the option to populate the two PCIe 2.0 slots (powered from the single inclosed power supply) for a variety of purposes: a full size video capture card, 8Gb Fibre Channel card, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, RAID controller cards, plus many more!

xMac mini Server offers two Thunderbolt ports, one to connect the PCIe board to the Mac Mini, the second for daisy chaining other Thunderbolt devices to the xMac mini Server. A USB port is broken out to the front with the reaming USB’s. The HDMI and Firewire 800 are all broken out to the rear to utilise all the connectivity of the Mac Mini. A front mounted power button allows operation of the system without requiring access to the back of the Mac Mini.

xMac mini Server expands a Mac mini’s potential allowing it to be used in even more situations.

Sonnet also produce some great Thunderbolt media readers allowing you to read Sony SxS memory cards at full speed.

http://www.sonnettech.com/

So consider then that Chris Gahagan (SVP Product Development at Avid) and his team have delivered new products across the ISIS, Interplay, Airspeed, News and Graphics platforms, as well as a  Media Composer 6.1 update with ASO2 and JPEG2000 support. They also announced the new “Multi Platform Distribution” environment- something we intend to dig deeply into over the next few days. That is a heck of a lot of new stuff, each worthy of their own article alone, so forgive the brief overview.

The standouts of this bunch of new products have to be Interplay Sphere, and ISIS2000 and we will look at those first.

Interplay Sphere is a solution based on technology Avid acquired from MaxT a few years ago. Its aim is to deliver a cloud based editing and content access experience for field editors away from the Interplay mother ship. The great thing is that the remote editor can access, play, search and edit all the same content that their colleagues would also be seeing back at base. All changes to the interplay database are transparently updated to the remote editor and visa-versa. Although Avids’ focus on the product is news oriented at present, it will also be of interest to post folks that need greater flexibility in their avid environments.

The Avid presentation slide spares us a thousand words. Here the remote user on the left is shown as an interplay Sphere client, interacting with the interplay database from a remote location, the interplay storage is of course ISIS based, and the rest of the Avid environment hums away is classic fashion. iNews is shown as a required component.This is a very  interesting, and for some avid clients a vital new addition to their workflows.
My understanding at present is that Interplay Sphere requires an existing Interplay environment, Avid qualified storage and i-News components. This may for some appear to be a massive outlay in order to achieve remote editing- and if you were building it from scratch it would be. However this capability will become increasingly interesting to existing Interplay users who need to get to content, work collaboratively and contribute to their team from remote locations. (Avid have over a 1000 Interplay installations world wide)

Turning to ISIS2000 this was one of the most hinted at  developments prior to the show.Finally acknowledging that near line storage indeed does have a place in the Avid Interplay workflow and shared storage workflow, the ISIS2000 is plugged straight into an unashamedly non real time role. The box itself contains 84 dual connected 3TB SAS drives which slide out in two separate trays, allowing physical maintenance while the box is running. A system director runs the storage which is based on the very capable ISIS family file system, and will support up to 10 million files on the device, and is underpinned by software RAID6 redundancy with two hot spares. You will find the spec sheet .pdf here. The solution is scalable, supporting up to two chassis initially at release to market- but this will grow over time in the same way the other ISIS offerings have (Avid also announced support for up to 24 chassis with v4 on the ISIS 7000 series for example.)

To include the ISIS2000 into your Interplay environment and make use of its workflow capabilities you would need other Interplay components; namely a Media-Services Host, a DMS broker and an interplay move or copy server component which would effectively allow you to traffic material seamlessly from your primary Interplay storage to your secondary near line interplay storage.

At 240 TB for $255 thousand dollars ( and $235K for the additional add-on chassis) I must confess I find this a disappointingly eye watering price point- especially in light of the fact that the other components that you will require for Interplay workgroup collaboration are not cheap either. While this brings a welcome addition to the interplay world the pricing needs work- More on the UK pricing when we know it.

In other news Avid also publicly announced the Avid Motion Graphics product platform
In essence the range of products (there are three tiers of Avid Motion Graphics offerings) is designed to replace its aging DEKO estate that Avid scooped up as part of its Pinnacle acquisition, and is an on air platform for broadcasters and newsrooms. It integrates seamlessly into Avid newsroom solution offerings.

Avid also announced an update to Interplay with Interplay 2.6. The attention grabbing part of this update is that Interplay 2.6 can now support up to three ‘storage instances’. This means that users are not limited to a single pool of storage with interplay and can begin to deploy and migrate their storage solutions and workflows to other options. There is also new end-to-end ProRes, JPEG 2000, and 3D format support.

Finally, wrapping up Avid unveiled Avid Multi Platform Distribution or MPD. All of our users are facing the difficulties of managing delivery to multi screen destinations, and Avid have addressed this  (cue a cut and paste off the press release) “by intelligently orchestrating the flow of assets and metadata through creation, transcode, and then delivery to web content management systems, online video platforms, and social media.”
While this task has often tackled by our clients building  custom CMS solutions we will dig into this over the next few days to bring you more information on this.

Ki Pro Quad

One of and maybe the biggest was this addition to the Ki Pro family, the Ki Pro quad.

It's a Ki Pro with the ability to capture 4K!

AJA have been working with Canon who have just announced the EOS C500 which shoots in raw 4K. The C500 doesn’t have the ability to store the media locally but via 4 x SDI outputs into the Ki Pro quad it can capture the raw 4K onto a Solid State disk.
The Ki Pro quad also allows you to take the Thunderbolt output from the Ki Pro quad directly into Mac as the Ki Pro quad offers Realtime pass-through of the RAW data -  Uncompressed and debayered.

HD monitoring in parallel, via SDI and/ or HDMI

Streamlined 4K workflows.

Ki Pro Rack

The other addition to the  Ki Pro family is the Ki Pro in a 1U rack format. Providing the features and options which the other Ki Pro’s do but in a tidy and convenient rack format. Fully redundant, will this move people towards a fully tapeless environment…

The power of Ki Pro in a 1RU format, the perfect fit for broadcasters transitioning away from tape.

KiPro Firmware

Lastly on the Ki Pro front, Ki Pro Software version 4.0 is now released which gives the heavily anticipated , long awaited Avid DNxHD codec’s to the Ki Pro family.

T-TAPT

The all new T-TAP provides an inexpensive, compact device that harbors the power of Thunderbolt to deliver, 10-bit SD, HD and 2K video with embedded audio from any compatible Mac.
HD/SD SDI and HDMI outputs are available. The SDI output can be used to feed monitors or a recording device, while the HDMI output is able to be fed directly into a HDMI monitor. Both HDMI and SDI are active at all times, so you can simultaneously capture & monitor with this compact device.

ThunderboltTM-powered SDI and HDMI output.

More when I get my hands on them!

(See the KiPro Family product page to find out more)

Smoke is a mature product, starting out from Discreet which was founded in 1991, it transformed in 2005 when Autodesk dropped the Discreet brand after acquiring Discreet back in 1998.
Smoke’s been very much the high end compositing software only available to those who are happy to operate on Linux (along with having ample funds).

Back in 2009 Autodesk made a bold step and offered Smoke (software only) on Mac OS X (nicknamed SMAC) at a reduced price. This was a great vision to get Smoke in front of operators who may of struggled with Linux or the ample funds part.
From my understanding over the last 3 years there’s been a steady update of SMAC but not as many as you may of thought / Autodesk hoped.

The overall target market isn’t that huge but large factors didn’t help in it’s uptake:

• System requirements, a high end Mac was required.

• Complexity, the software wasn’t easy to learn then use.

• Cost of entry, the SMAC price had been reduced but was still out of reach for a lot of users when added to the hardware costs.

Autodesk listened to the market and responded to each of the points releasing Smoke 2013 at NAB 2012.

The All New Smoke iMac with Promise Storage & AJA IO XT

• Lower system requirements, it now run’s on the most recent generation of iMac and MacBook Pro. It supports using high-bandwidth storage via Thunderbolt as well as IO devices like the AJA IO XT.

An intuitive all-in-one creative workflow that combines track-based editorial, industry- standard editing conventions and proven Autodesk creative tools

• Smoke User Interface , the  Complexity has been taken away with the all new user interface, an intuitive all-in-one workspace, now very similar with traditional non-linear editing software, this will allow operates to learn and use Smoke with ease.

In the new Autodesk Smoke, editing and effects are connected like never before - in a single application that works the way editors think. Powerful node-based compositing inside the timeline connects high-end effects and advanced compositing inside the editorial environment.

The pricing is now very aggressive, $3,495 /£2,207 which makes it one of the cheapest pieces of compositing software on the market.

I think it’s safe to say that “Smoke is changing.  Everything.

Autodesk’s virtual NAB 

More info  on Smoke for Mac 2013 avaiable here

Did you also know that Autodesk Flame is 20 this year? Quite an achievement!

http://area.autodesk.com/flame20