-NABNNAB SPECIAL COVERAGE, APRIL 2000-

It's a Mac Show!
Stay tuned and visit back often! We're also providing QuickTime coverage of the show with lots of interviews and demonstrations!

VST To Release 100 GB Portable FireWire Array
APRIL 12—SmartDisk, the parent company of VST, is launching a new 100 GB FireWire-based RAID array, adding to its line of FireWire RAIDs that previously topped out at 72 GB. The new model is expected to ship in June for $4,999.95. The VST FireWire RAID array is a compact, portable tower that supports up to four VST FireWire hard drives. It also includes a built-in battery backup, cable, AC adapter, battery, VST formatting software and FireRAID software.

3dfx To Bring New Voodoo, Good Juju to the Mac Platform
APRIL 12—O.K. This isn't NAB news, but it should be. So here it is. 3dfx says it will release its first Mac 2D/3D graphics accelerators. The Voodoo4 4500 and the Voodoo5 5500 offer support for Glide and OpenGL and, for the first time, QuickDraw 3D Rave. 3dfx also says the cards will be ready for Mac OS X when it ships this summer. The Voodoo5 5500 features 64 MB RAM for $329. The Voodoo4 4500 offers 32 MB RAM and is expected to cost $200.

SGI Bundles Flat Panel with ProFormance 3 for Mac
APRIL 12—Silicon Graphics has started shipping its 1600SW flat-panel display for the Mac bundled with the ProFormance 3 graphics accelerator card. The card offers acceleration for QuarkXPress, Adobe Photoshop and OpenGL, among other applications. The 1600SW display is the only LCD monitor available with adjustable backlight color temperature capability, which enables users to optimize their displays to output the truer image quality for Web graphics, print and video production. The display offers a 17.3", wide-format screen at a resolution of 1,600 x 1,024.

DVDit! Comes to the Mac in the Fourth Quarter
APRIL 12—Sonic Solutions has announced the impending Mac release of DVDit!, a DVD authoring package. The software is compatible with QuickTime video and audio files, supporting everything from DV to D-1 formats. QuickTime files can be dragged and dropped for conversion. DVDit! automatically builds buttons and interactivity, transcodes video to MPEG-2, multiplexes and formats content and writes it to CD-R or DVD-RAM for playback.

Medea To Ship New Disk Arrays in Fibre, SCSI
APRIL 11—Medea has announed new arrays in its VideoRAID line and a new AudioRaid disk aray optimized for 24-bit audio. The VideoRaid fc and VideoRack fc are SAN-Ready Fibre Channel RAID 0 solutions for digital content creation and Internet streaming media applications. The six-drive VideoRaid fc (a compact desktop model) and VideoRack fc (a 19" rack-mount configuration with removable drive modules) offer sustained data transfer rates of 60 MB per second and capacities up to 450 GB per module. Prices go as low as $19 per GB.

Media 100 Invests in beatnik, Adds SDI to MediaPress
APRIL 11—Media 100 has started including the serial digital interface in MediaPress Pro, a real-time MPEG encoder for Macintosh from Media 100 subsidiary Wired. The MediaPress encoder captures and compresses video and audio signals into fully compatible MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 bitstreams for media network transmissions and DVD authoring. The company has also invested in Beatnik to give customers access to the Beatnik Production Music destination.

Avid To Release XPress 4.0 This Summer with Special Upgrade Pricing
APRIL 11—Avid says it will ship Windows and Mac versions of Avid XPress 4.0 simultaneously this summer. The new version will add enhanced support for Web and DVD content creation. The company is also offering a limited-duration upgrade pricing promotion for current owners of Avid Meridien hardware-based Avid XPress Plus and Deluxe software.

Pinnacle Powers Uncompressed HD on the Mac
APRIL 10—When we speculated about the announcement Apple, Matrox and Pinnacle would make, we had no clue we'd see uncompressed HD on the desktop. But that's just what Pinnacle promised to deliver by the end of summer for the Mac and Final Cut Pro. The new PCI card, the Targa Ciné, will deliver a fully configured SD system for less than $10,000 and an HD system for less than $30,000.

Matrox Brings Real-Time, Dual-Stream Uncompressed to the Mac for Less Than $1,000
APRIL 10—We guessed it. We called it on the nose. It's real-time DVEs and uncompressed dual-stream video capture on the Mac, courtesy of Matrox. What we didn't guess is that the solution would come in at less than $1,000 and reside on a single PCI card. We saw a pre-release version in action today, and it's impressive.

Apple Offers Free Final Cut Pro Upgrade
APRIL 10—Apple today announced a free upgrade to Final Cut Pro. The new version, 1.2.5, supports the 16:9 widescreen format, YUV processing and reference movies (to conserve disk space). FCP's 16:9 support extends to capture, editing and output.

Short News: Apple Acquires Astarte
APRIL 10—Apple toaday announced (to everyone's surprise) that it has acquired Astarte GmbH, a developer of DVD authoring tools. As part of the acquisition, Astarte's engineers will join the Apple team.

Puffin Adds Compositing to Commotion 3.0
APRIL 10—Puffin Designs, which was acquired by Pinnacle Systems last month, today announced a major revision to its Commotion product, bringing it into the realm of compositing. The new version, 3.0, will ship in both DV and pro configurations. The company says the paint component has been rewritten from the ground up, with support for unlimited layers with more than 75 effects filters built in, including plug-in sets from Primatte Keyer, Composite Wizard and Image Lounge.

Discreet Launches Combustion* for Mac
APRIL 10—Discreet today boosted its support for the Mac platform significantly with the launch of combustion*, a paint, animation and 3D compositing application for the Macintosh and Windows NT platforms. The software includes technology from the company's inferno* product. It features keying, motion tracking, color correction, non-destructive (vector-based) paint animation, 3D compositing and network rendering, as well as support for Adobe After Effects and Photoshop plugins.

Echo Fire 1.1 To Ship in May
APRIL 7—Synthetic Aperture will give a sneak preview of its forthcoming Echo Fire 1.1 at the NAB convention in Las Vegas next week. Echo Fire provides video previews for Photoshop and After Effects. The new version, expected to ship in May, offers real-time previews in After Effects with support for NTSC/PAL video monitor previews and previewing from disk.

Life Forms Studio 3.9 To Ship in June
APRIL 7—Credo Interactive says it will ship version 3.9 of Life Forms Studio, a character animation application for Windows and Macintosh. The company will preview the software next week at the NAB show in Las Vegas. The full release is expected to ship in June.

Digital Voodoo Ships Three D1 Video Cards for Mac
APRIL 6—Digital Voodoo Inc. has started shipping three new D1 video cards for the Mac, each with 4:4:4:4 video output, six channels of AES/EBU digital audio and a 64-bit PCI interface. The new line includes the D1 Desktop 64, D1 Desktop 64 Lite and D1 Desktop 64AV uncompressed 10 bit SMPTE 259M SDI QuickTime video cards. The D1 Desktop 64 series become the only QuickTime cards on the Mac platform to include full 10-bit capture to disk.

JVC Introduces new D-9 Camcorder
APRIL 6—JVC is introducing a new D-9 camcorder at the NAB show in Las Vegas next week. The camera, the DY-70, combines JVC's 14-bit DSP camera technology with with all-digital 4:2:2 camcorder technology. The camera comes in at $12,000, not including the lens.

Sonic DVD Authoring Coming to Avid
APRIL 6—Avid Technology Inc. will include DVD authoring software from Sonic Solutions in future releases of it editing and finishing systems. The technology, AuthorScript, outputs video and audio content directly to the DVD video format. It also has a transparent print to DVD function that automatically formats Avid content for DVD. The two companies say the first implementation will come in Symphony, Media Composer and Avid Xpress systems, with the technology to be added to other systems in the future.

Is Real-Time, Dual-Stream DV Coming to the Mac?
APRIL 5—Is dual stream coming to the Mac? Real-time DVEs? More graphics card options? You put three companies together like Apple, Pinnacle Systems and Matrox, and something good's going to come of it for the Macintosh platform—and that's just what's happening at NAB next week. We thought a little speculation going into the show might be healthy.

Cult Effects Gets 8 New Filters in 1.5, Free Upgrade for Current Users
APRIL 5—Cycore, based in Uppsala, Sweden, will soon ship version 1.5 of Cult Effects, a suite of plugins for Adobe After Effects. Current users will receive the upgrade free. Others who preorder the product at the NAB show in Las Vegas next week will receive a "substantial discount," according to the company.

Pixelan To Demo New SpiceMaster for Final Cut Pro at NAB
APRIL 5—Pixelan Software has launched a new 2D effects package, SpiceMaster. The software is currently only available for Windows, but the company says it will demonstrate a version for Apple Final Cut Pro next week at the NAB show in Las Vegas at the Adobe Partners Pavilion.

Videonics Ships ComandPost Multimedia Controller for Mac
APRIL 4—Videonics Inc., Cambell, Calif., has started shipping CommandPost, a multimedia application controller. CommandPost is a USB-based controller that adds controls like pushbuttons, jog/shuttle, joystick and a T-Bar to multimedia applications. The device includes interface software, customizable to any application, and a hardware control panel that is connected to a computer via a Universal Serial Bus.

Tuesday, February 06, 2001 13:03:20