Digital Cinematography

NAB2008: The Return of Stereoscopic 3-D
By Bill Desowitz
Apr 27, 2008, 09:58

Avid and Apple may have been conspicuously absent from NAB earlier this month, and attendance may have dipped from 111,028 to 105,259, but the 2008 edition of the Las Vegas confab was a lot more interesting to cover in many ways.

First, there were a few exciting new tools introduced that generated a lot of buzz, including eyeon Software's Generation, a new collaboration app for conforming, editing, compositing, annotation, versioning and render management, and the HP DreamColor Technology computer display, which was previewed during a keynote address featuring DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg (via video feed), DreamWorks Animation Chairman Roger Enrico and HP's EVP Todd Bradley.

Touting an open architecture, Generation is designed to ease vfx workflow collaboration between supervisors and production leads and allows senior artists to share in the process as well. Fully compatible with eyeon's products, Fusion, Rotation and Vision, Generation provides the simultaneous play of multiple versions while experimenting with multiple cuts to compare various projects. Shot refinements, from storyboard through to animatics to finished shots, are all tracked and versioned visually with realtime playback and commenting with workstation/laptops. Generation will be available this summer.

The HP DreamColor display "provides accurate, predictable color and a simple color management process to assure vision-to-production color consistency in a widescreen liquid crystal display (LCD). The display generates the industry's first combination of true 30-bit color - enabling a range of 1 billion colors -- in an LED-backlit LCD at a fraction of the cost of most high-end, studio-quality LCD displays.

"For decades, storytellers have struggled to manage color in an accurate and consistent manner," said Katzenberg. "Quite simply, when we make a movie about a big, green ogre, our concern is that our ogre is the same color of green throughout the film. HP has truly changed the game with its new display, giving DreamWorks Animation full visual fidelity across the board for the first time."

More details about DreamColor to come…

Plus, there was the usual excitement surrounding new digital cameras, including Sony's professional F35 and smaller X3 as well as the new RED 5K Epic, 4K Red Ray and 3K Scarlett.

Speaking of which, Boxx Technologies offered redBoxx, a new solution that allows film directors, colorists and vfx experts to view 4K footage shot with the RED ONE digital cinema camera at full quality 2K resolution in realtime with full debayering, without having to use expensive and time consuming scanning and transcoding. redBoxx is based on a specially engineered version of the 3DBoxx workstation and includes Assimilate's new SCRATCH CINE software package for Digital Intermediate work. redBoxx is designed to work only with REDCODE .R3D files.

Click www.vfxworld.com for the complete story.

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