NAB Roundup
Page 6 of 9
Since I was in Mac editing acceleration mode, I accelerated myself over to the AJA booth to see the company's newest box called Io. Designed to look like a sleek silver Apple XServe rack-mounted computer system, it'll look right at home on the same rack. It works closely with Final Cut Pro 4, acting as a bridge between the analog world of Digi-Betacam and such, and turning that into 8-bit or even 10-bit video and pouring that into your Mac through FireWire 400. FireWire 400 is plenty fast for this purpose, with the D1 signal taking up only 270 megabits per second (mbps) compared to FireWire 400's 400mbps. This box will be great, too, for those who want to move from the DV world into the realm of the uncompressed, 10-bit high end of SD video. And, at $2290, it's about a tenth of the price of its nearest competitor (there's that word again – "competition," where the winners are you and me). With Io, the key word here is simplicity. It's the embodiment of all that's great about FireWire, and the Mac, too, for that matter: You plug it in, and it works. There's something special about that. You look at the front of this beauteous unit and say, "Hey, where are the buttons?" Well, there aren't any. I like AJA's marketing slogan for Io, and it rings true: "In. Out. Simple." Neat.
After that, my fast-moving NAB train pulled into the Ulead station, where the newly released Studio Quartet was the order of the day. A bargain at $795 for the first 90 days after its June 1 ship date, you get everything you need to put together video, 3D text and graphics and then author a DVD. The Office-like suite includes PhotoImpact 8 (Ulead's image editor), Cool 3D Studio for easy-to-use 3D text animations, MediaStudio Pro 7 for editing and DVD Workshop AC3 for DVD output. I was most impressed with the also-new (shipped in March) MediaStudio Pro 7 (MSP7), which lets you preview multi-layered comps and see your results on an NTSC or PAL monitor. In a impromptu test, the software was able to smoothly preview six layers of DVEs, text and graphics, with lots of color correction applied, in real time. Wow. I like this software, and plan to take a closer look at it in the near future. And now, after the show, Ulead tells me that they didn't have a certain switch selected in the software, and that it really can preview 10 layers in real time. I will certainly check out this extraordinary claim right here on DMN, so stay tuned.
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The last stop in my whirlwind tour for this third day at NAB was Matrox, where one of my favorite NLE hardware and software packages has undergone a facelift. The new RT.X100 Xtreme, set to ship May 30, has added some highly useful new features, and best of all, it's a free upgrade for current RT.X100 owners. The company has also bundled a more professional DVD authoring app into the package, Sonic's ReelDVD Studio, bring the price of the package to $1299, or $1099 if you don't want ReelDVD Studio (you still get Sonic's DVDit! either way). New features include additional, extremely powerful real time monitoring capabilities, and a real time waveform monitor, vectorscope, luminance and chrominance viewing, and even an RGB parade (see graphic). I like the way you can tear off the window containing these scopes, re-size it, and place it anywhere you want. It's a nice, professional enhancement to an already-great package. Another big plus is the feature set added to the keyframing dialog box. Called Xtreme Preview, it lets you see and edit more layers than you could before. In the demo, I was able to preview a 10-layer composition, albeit at about 10 frames per second. It's a great workflow enhancer. I also like the way Matrox has further cleaned up its slow motion capabilities in RT.X100, eliminating that annoying jitter at the top and bottom of the frame and smoothing out the motion even more than before, which was already pretty nice. Another excellent addition I noticed is a "Solo" button, where you can isolate one particular layer in a composition, making it much easier to see what's going on underneath those other layers. Overall, it's a significant enhancement that must be used to be fully appreciated.Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Next
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