Fuji Photo Film says Eterna500 (top) offers a consistent gray balance over a broad range of exposures and stable reproduction of skin tones.

What: Maxell DVD-R BQ

What it does: Extremely scratch- and dust-resistant 16X DVD recordable media designed for professional postproduction. Archival life is said to be twice that of standard disc-based media. Each DVD-R BQ disc is packaged in a secure library case.

New storage technologies and the tools for sharing metadata will continue to encourage workgroup workflows. Companies like Automatic Duck will expand media and metadata connectivity with new Timeline Integration tools for third-party applications, such as Digidesign ProTools.

The AAF Interchange booth is worth stopping by to see how far the standard has advanced. The November Engineering meetings got a lot accomplished, and they meet again in the end of February, so I am hopeful that there will be major advances announced at NAB.

As to workgroup storage solutions, I plan to check out what's new at 1 Beyond, Apple, Avid, Ciprico, EditShare, Facilis Technology, FalconStor Software, Globalstor, Linux Media Arts, MassTech, Maximum Throughput, Nexsan, Omneon, Promax, Rorke, Studio Network Solutions, and Tiger Technologies, among others, as well as backup and archiving solutions. For those interested in Linux-based DI storage technology, I recommend checking out SpectSoft RaveHD and Linux Media Arts Ensantra 2.0.

Media asset management solutions are growing in importance just as the technology is blooming. Solutions I want to check out are: Seimens Business Services Media (formerly BBC Technology) and Snell & Wilcox — the hottest products last year — but also Artesia, Blackball, DAX, Harris, IBIS Technology, Imagine Products, MetaGlue, MOG Solutions, Pharos, Proximity, and SGL US.

There also will be a great emphasis on distribution alternatives and the associated compression schemes. Because these offer new distribution possibilities for your work (and possible additional sources of income), it might be worth taking a closer look if you have the time.

The Mill in Soho, London, used GenArts Sapphire Glow and Glint effects for this Kylie Minogue music video.

One of the biggest questions will be the acceptance of the OpenFX standard.

“I would like to take this opportunity and reassure everybody that OpenFX will be one of ‘the next big things’ in the VFX industry,” says Frank Hellmann, DI supervisor, Optical Art GmbH. “Participation on behalf of the software writers [both plug-in and effects software developers] will be vital to get a thoroughly usable standard that everybody can rely their business on and be willing to invest time and money in.

“OpenFX is not a nice little idea anymore; it is in use in the real world today. We as an effects house have, with the greatly appreciated help of The Foundry and FilmLight, completed a full-length feature film that has at least half of the entire footage (HD/2K) run through OFX plug-ins. It was a hair-raising venture for us in the beginning, but after seeing everything coming together in December a very good one in the end.”

I found such enthusiasm surprising because my unscientific poll found the clear majority of plug-in developers questioning the benefit of OpenFX. Although no one would go on the record, I heard comments such as: “The Adobe AE API is all we need. It is a de facto standard;” “I only write plug-ins for Apple, so I do not need anything but XML;” or “AVX API is all we write for.”

“OpenFX is a huge success both as an emerging standard and as a revenue stream for us at The Foundry”, says The Foundry's Jonathan Barson. “The number of plug-ins and host systems is growing all the time. Tinder plug-in visual effects and Furnace tools can be downloaded today. In February we plan to release Keylight, the Academy Award-winning blue- and greenscreen keyer that has been used on hundreds of films and recently at Wimbledon. At NAB we will have added another nine plug-ins to the Furnace toolset for OFX and will be showing our product line running on FilmMaster, BaseLight, and Nuke on our booth. By IBC more Tinder plug-ins will become available.

“The following list of host manufacturers have incorporated or are incorporating OFX plug-in support into their products: Nucoda FilmMaster, FilmLight BaseLight, D2 Software Nuke, Thomson Bones, Assimilate Scratch, Interactivefx Piranha, and Eyeon Digital Fusion. In addition to this, there are several very large postproduction facilities who are using OFX as the plug-in standard for their own in-house compositing systems, and this has effectively opened up a market that was previously closed to all plug-in vendors.

“We are currently talking to other host manufacturers and hope to be able to make some big announcements soon. As large manufacturers come on board and sales of these systems increase, I expect other plug-in manufacturers to start porting to OFX.”

The Plug-In Pavilion is back, and Avid has a second booth for the Avid Developer Community. Plug-in developers will also be found at Discreet, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and several other booths. Expect new products and upgrade announcements, but realize that many of the smaller plug-in manufacturers will not display at this show.
— Bob Turner

Doremi Labs Orca Capture Station.

What it does: This 64-bit clustered file system for Mac OS X consolidates storage resources into one shared environment to give multiple computers read/write access to shared volumes in a Fibre Channel SAN.

What: Apple Xserve server upgrade

What it does: Xserve G5 now uses dual-processor 2.3GHz CPUs with storage boosted to 1.2TB.

What: Atto Diamond firmware upgrade

What it does: New version 6.4 allows access to storage that goes beyond the traditional 2TB storage limits, providing more efficient use of storage capacity.

What: Atto Mac iSCSI software initiator

What it does: When paired with Atto's iPBridge host bus adapters, it allows Apple users to leverage their current Ethernet network by attaching existing SCSI storage to an Ethernet IP-based network.

What: Ciprico 4Gbps RAID

What it does: Ciprico claims “entry-level” pricing for this next-generation Fibre Channel networked storage. Booth demos will include playout of single- and dual-stream HD content (uncompressed 10-bit 1080i).

What: Ciprico DiMeda 10G

What it does: Employs 10 Gigabit Ethernet to distribute shared files with client workstations at speeds exceeding 3000Mbps.

What: Doremi Orca CS (Capture Station)

What it does: Realtime HD MPEG-2 record and playback deck encodes SDI or HD-SDI at compression rates up to 160Mbps.

Exanet's ExaStore 2.0 NAS storage.

What it does: Unlike standard NAS storage, the ExaStore's proprietary storage architecture consolidates all data into a single pool, which increases throughput while simplifying management.

What: Fast Forward Video FieldPro DVR

What it does: Mini DVR measures 5.2"×0.8"×.3.7". The internal 2.5in. hard drive features video capture and playback at 60fps and resolution greater than 550 lines at 4:1 compression.

What: Fast Forward Video Mini DVR Pro On-Body DVR (Compact Flash Media)

What it does: Standalone DVR fits in the palm of a hand and features scalable MJPEG compression and a 720×486 pixel image resolution.

Studio Network Solutions GlobalSAN X-16 iSCSI SAN supports both Macintosh and Windows workstations.

What it does: Extremely scratch- and dust-resistant 16X DVD recordable media designed for professional postproduction, with an archival life said to be twice that of standard disc-based media.

What: Medéa VideoRaid FCR2 RAID array

What it does: FCR2 includes a single-channel 2Gb Fibre Channel interface, which provides sustained data transfer rates of 180MBps, built-in four-port Fibre Channel hub, and up to 1.6TB of storage on five removable disk drives.

What: SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 storage system

What it does: SGI says that it has optimized the RM660 for high-end production, including hi-res scanner and telecine capture at 4K and digital film mastering.