NAB Day 2: Premiere 7 Shown to NAB Crowd
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Following that was a look at the latest iteration of Media 100’s monster compositor, 844Xi, which is now sporting the ability to create four real time blurs at the same time. The most compute-intensive filter in its arsenal, 844Xi cuts through these blurry effects like butter. Sheesh, this thing is powerful -- and although Avid’s new behemoths are far better editing machines, they will be hard-pressed to be able to match this kind of real time effects processing power. This battle for the muscle-car crown of the DV world is certainly getting more interesting by the minute.[an error occurred while processing this directive]
The last demo of the day was another eye-opener. A company called DALSA showed a packed room full of Hollywood-types Origin, a new 4K digital cinema camera that can capture higher resolution images (4046 x 2048 pixels, otherwise known as “4K”) than have ever been shot before. Origin is a work in progress, but what I saw shows me that film’s heyday in the high-end arena is drawing to a close. Able to nearly match film’s contrast ration at 11 stops, to let you see way into the blacks, and shoot with higher resolution than film can record (well, unless you think film’s resolution really is equivalent to 8K), this unit will be setting the film world on its ear when it ships in early 2004. This is the real thing, folks. The demo was met with rousing enthusiasm from nearly all in attendance, with loads of crystal clear footage that looked every bit as good as film, and without all that pesky gate jitter. Remember when still photogs all insisted that digital stills would never be used professionally? They turned out to be wrong. And the filmsters who cling to celluloid will also see their notion that film will always be better than video proven to be mistaken as well. This Origin camera showed us that that day will be sooner than we thought. But there are still numerous problems to be worked out, like, uh, how do we edit these huge files? It certainly won’t be convenient, but they’re working on it. Should be interesting to say the least!More tomorrow -- time to get back out there!
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