American Cinema Editors (ACE) Board Honors Avid Media Composer
With It’s First Ever “ACE Technical Excellence Award” – Distinguishing It As The Preferred Choice Of Acclaimed Editors

Universal City, Calif., July 7, 2009 –– American Cinema Editors (ACE) today announced that the ACE Board of Directors has recognized Avid® Media Composer® software with the Board’s first-ever “ACE Technical Excellence Award” – recognizing it as the preferred choice of the industry’s most acclaimed editors. This distinguished honor hails Avid’s unparalleled innovation, the company’s commitment to working hand-in-hand with editors, and its role in evolving the art of cinematic storytelling. The honorary award will be presented to Avid at the 60th Annual ACE Eddie Awards in February 2010.

“Editors know that the art of filmmaking is as much about storytelling as it is sharing a mutually-beneficial dialogue with other members in the industry. Avid shares our passion and vision for nurturing the motion picture community and the integral role that editors play in bringing entertainment to life,” said ACE President Randy Roberts, A.C.E. “One of Avid’s unique characteristics is the fact that many of its employees are also experienced artists themselves, and so like us, they are obsessive about solving real challenges that actually make a difference in the editing room.  We appreciate the company’s ongoing commitment to talk with us and to understand how we want to improve the way we tell stories.  The Board is pleased to distinguish Avid – and Media Composer – with this first-ever mark of distinction.”

ACE Board member and Technology Committee Chair, Harry B. Miller III, A.C.E., added, “Avid has improved and adapted its editing software and hardware beyond any competitor to meet the creative and practical needs of busy television and motion picture editors. This includes creating a complete picture workflow with Media Composer to Symphony™ and Avid DS; a post production sound workflow from Media Composer to Pro Tools to the mix stage; FilmScribe™, which translates an edited movie into its finished product;  ScriptSync® which is a unique tool linking a script with film dailies; Avid FX;  AudioSuite™; the best collaborative tools that link multiple editors on a single project; and the continually improving, most user friendly, and adaptable interface in the industry.”

“We’re honored to receive this recognition from ACE, whose members are among the best storytellers in the business, and never cease to amaze audiences with some of the most watched and most loved media in the world,” said Kirk Arnold, EVP Customer Operations at Avid. “One of our long-standing principles is to deliver products and solutions that help our customers achieve their creative vision, however they define it. We are proud of our close relationship with ACE and will continue striving to earn the ongoing trust and support of this important community.”

For more information about ACE, please visit:  WWW.AMERICANCINEMAEDITORS.COM.  For more information about the award-winning Avid Media Composer, please visit:  WWW.AVID.COM/MEDIACOMPOSER.

ABOUT AMERICAN CINEMA EDITORS
AMERICAN CINEMA EDITORS (ACE) is an honorary society of motion picture editors founded in 1950.  Film editors are voted into membership on the basis of their professional achievements, their dedication to the education of others and their commitment to the craft of editing.

The objectives and purposes of the AMERICAN CINEMA EDITORS are to advance the art and science of the editing profession; to increase the entertainment value of motion pictures by attaining artistic pre-eminence and scientific achievement in the creative art of editing; to bring into close alliance those editors who desire to advance the prestige and dignity of the editing profession.

ACE produces several annual events including EditFest (a weekend editing festival in the summer), Invisible Art/Visible Artists (annual panel of Oscar® nominated editors), and the ACE Eddie Awards, now in its 60th year, recognizing outstanding editing in nine categories of film, television and documentaries. The organization publishes a quarterly magazine, CinemaEditor, highlighting the art, craft and business of editing and editors.

ABOUT AVID
Avid creates the digital audio and video technology used to make the most listened to, most watched and most loved media in the world – from the most prestigious and award-winning feature films, music recordings, television shows, live concert tours and news broadcasts, to music and movies made at home.  Some of Avid’s most influential and pioneering solutions include Media Composer®, Pro Tools®, Avid Unity™, Interplay®, Oxygen 8, Sibelius® and Pinnacle Studio™. For more information about Avid solutions and services, visit www.avid.com, del.icio.us, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube; connect with Avid on Facebook; or subscribe to Avid Industry Buzz.

From Appleinsider

Apple in recent weeks has reached out to members of its professional video editing communities to help test a couple of updates to its Final Cut suite of video production tools: one major and one incremental.

The first is Final Cut Studio 3.0, the Cupertino-based firm’s second major overhaul to its professional video and audio production suite for Mac OS X bundling component applications Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack, DVD Studio Pro, Color, and Compressor…

Read the rest of the story at Appleinsider.com

Jim Jannard, founder of the RED Digital Cinema Camera Company and community appointed leader of the RED revolution has announced a new product which, once again, looks like it has the potential to shake the very foundations of both the production and post production industries.

As promised, at 12:01 AM, Jannard posted information about RED Rocket, a PCI-Express card for Mac, PC and Linux workstations. RED Rocket will enable those working with native RED R3D files to decode, debayer and playback high quality, 4K (at 30fps) and 5K (at 25fps) files in realtime. RED Rocket will also accelerate Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Assimilate Scratch, RED Alert! REDCINE, RED Rushes and any application using the REDCODE SDK. The card will sport Quad-DVI and Quad-HD-SDI and will sell for under $5,000.

Jannard and RED decided to skip the NAB conference in Las Vegas this year, opting to deliver this news about the company’s latest product directly to the faithful via the RED user community boards at REDUSER.net.

Filling a void for a true professional video card on the Mac platform, NVIDIA on Monday announced plans to begin shipping its Quadro FX 4800 ultra-high-end solution for the Mac Pro next month.

From Appleinsider

The $1800 card boasts 192 parallel processor cores and a massive 1.5GB frame buffer with memory bandwidth of up to 76.8 GB/sec. NVIDIA says this architecture delivers high throughput for interactive visualization of large models, high-performance for real time processing of large textures and frames, and the highest quality and resolution with full-scene antialiasing.

Each Quadro FX 4800 also features a standard 3-pin stereo connector for true 3D stereoscopic imaging in modeling applications requiring 3D glasses, as well two dual-link DVI digital connectors capable of driving a pair of 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays.

“With its sophisticated GPU architecture and industry leading features, the Quadro FX 4800 delivers a substantial boost in graphics performance and capabilities, allowing users to continue to push the boundaries of realism and performance in markets such as: architecture, content creation, science and medicine,” NVIDIA said.

Read the rest of the article at Appleinsider.com

Cine-tal announces the Cinemage B Series products and the full NAB product lineup

From Flameop via Twitter

New Cinemage B Series is offered in 42 inch, 23 inch and 19 inch configurations with
10 bit wide gamut display systems.

Cine-tal Systems, a developer of image monitoring and color management solutions, announces an expansion of its award winning Cinemage product line. The Cinemage B series expands the Cinemage product line with a 42 inch, 23 inch and 19 inch offering. The B series also provides true 10 bit display with wide color gamuts to support both HD and DCI standards.

Integrated into the Cinemage B series product line is the company’s cineSpace color management and calibration software. “By integrating our cineSpace technology into Cinemage we provide precision control of the wide gamut color
primaries creating a perfect reference for DCI, HD and SD monitoring. Cinemage is the only monitoring system utilizing an optimized combination of 3D LUTs 1D LUTs and 21 bit color matrices to provide….

Read more at the Cine-tal website.

Autodesk Introduces Smoke 2010, Flint 2010 and Lustre 2009 Extension

Autodesk Press Release

LAS VEGAS, April 20 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — NAB Show — Autodesk, Inc. (Nasdaq: ADSK) has announced the 2010 releases of Autodesk Smoke and Autodesk Flint software for editorial finishing and visual effects. The company also unveiled the 2009 Extension 1 releases of Autodesk Lustre and Autodesk Incinerator color grading software. In addition, the company launched Autodesk Flare software, a creative companion to the 2010 releases of Autodesk Flame and Autodesk Inferno visual effects systems (announced separately). The new releases are being showcased in the Autodesk booth SL2120 at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show in Las Vegas which runs from April 20-23, 2009.

Avid Qualifies Final Cut Pro to Run on Avid Unity MediaNetwork and ISIS Shared Storage Systems

Avid Press Release

LAS VEGAS, April 20, 2009 – As part of its continuing efforts to provide customers with flexible and open solutions, Avid® (NASDAQ: AVID) today announced that it has qualified Apple Final Cut Pro editing solutions to run on Avid Unity™ MediaNetwork and ISIS® shared storage systems.  Post facilities, broadcasters and other media content creation organizations using Final Cut Pro can now take advantage of the industry-leading shared storage and collaborative workflow capabilities of Avid Unity and ISIS, and benefit from simultaneously running Avid and Final Cut Pro….

Check out the entire press release here

The final installment of my interview with journalist, author and new media aficionado Scott Kirsner. In it, I ask him about his site, Cinematech.com and what motivated him to start blogging about cinema technology. Then, we talk about his new book,  Fans Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age. Some of the things he writes about in it are; ways to connect with your audience, the Internet as a distribution channel, coming up with new business models and monetizing your work. We go on to speak about Boxee and some of the stumbling blocks that are delaying the ability to play media from the Internet on your TV. And finally, I mistakenly let Scott do the wrap-up, in which he bestows all too much praise upon the work we do at HDFilmtools.com in a sinister effort to get your humble interviewer to blush.

There is a lot of misinformation, confusion and debate on the best way to proceed when posting material shot with the RED One Digital Camera. As of this writing, there are several options, with no one definitive way taking precedent. So it’s our good fortune that Oliver Peters over at Digitalfilms.com just cut and finished a package of television spots shot on RED and finished in Final Cut Studio. In his latest post, he walks us through the steps he took to get the work accomplished as efficiently as possible, with a minimal amount of headaches. At the end of the article he also links to a bunch of excellent RED workflow resources.

From Digitalfilms.com

Ever since the RED Digital Cinema Camera Company started to ship its innovative RED One camera, producers have been challenged with the best way to post produce its footage. Detractors have slammed RED for a supposed lack of post workflows. This is in wrong, since there are a number of solid ways to post RED footage. The trouble is…

Scott Simmons over at Studio Daily blows off some steam about what he sees as a deteriorating set of standards as a result of the explosion of desktop editing tools, Final Cut Pro in particular.

Many folks learned FCP and then began to call themselves and market themselves as an editor. But what I am consistently seeing from a lot of editors, “younger generation,” “next generation,” “sons” whatever you want to call them, is a real lack of some basic post production knowledge. There’s almost a total lack of knowledge about the offline/online workflow and almost an aversion to doing an online at all.

It’s an insightful commentary on the brave new world of digital post production. However, I must agree with some of the reader comments stating that we can’t just point fingers at “younger” editors. Sloppy post production work habits come in all ages and sizes. As strange as it might sound, some of the most talented editors out there have no interest in the technical side of the equation, but they’re smart enought to supplant this shortcoming by surrounding themselves with people who do.

Scott Simmons of Studio Daily, The EditBlog and Pro Video Coalition (man is this guy busy or what?) has posted a comprehensive 2-part article on Avid’s new Media Access Architecture a new feature in Media Composer 3.5. For those not familiar with it, AMA is Avid’s new plug-in type architecture for instant access to tapeless media with no time wasted copying, rewapping or transcoding. This initial release supports formats such as XDCAM, XDCAM-EX and P2, but as Scott details in the article it doesn’t have to stop there. Because of Avid’s design there is no reason to think that this type of seemless access couldn’t or wont be applied to formats such as RED R3Ds, AVCHD, AVC-Intra in the future.

AMA is an entirely new protocol for getting media into Avid. It has been described as a “plug-in” type architecture. As of the initial release in Media Composer 3.5 (as well as Symphony) AMA currently supports Panasonic P2 media and Sony XDCAM, including XDCAM EX. To sweeten the pot Avid can now write XDCAM media as well, in a number of different bit rates. To sweeten the pot even more is the promise of what Avid Media Access might offer. RED R3Ds, AVCHD, AVC-Intra, Canon 5D Mark II H.264 files … the possibilities seem endless.

Read the rest of the 2-part series over at Pro Video Coalition.

Frank Capria has been at the forefront of digital content creation technologies since its earliest beginnings. New England based Capria was one of the first adopters of digital editing on the Avid Media Composer upon the systems release in 1989. His credits include work on landmark PBS series including, Eyes on the Prize, Frontline, Nova and American Experience. In 2001 Frank went on to found Kingpin Interactive, a New Media services company, which created award winning programming, websites, and motion graphics for fortune 500 companies, start-ups and non-profits.

Along the way Frank has become a widely known teacher, writer, and evangelist regarding the developments in technology which have revolutionized the way post-production creatives accomplish their work. For nearly a decade he wrote about the rapidly changing landscape of his profession in the pages of DV Magazine and has taught classes at the Maine Media Workshops. So it seemed a natural seque when late last year he accepted an offer from Avid Technology to join their team as a Senior Product Designer.

On a recent trip back east I had an opportunity to sit down with Frank and ask him a few things about the state of digital editing and what’s happening in his new digs at Avid.

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