Avid:
- Decent announcements for DS nitris, mostly hardware-related. Not much software difference there. How much do we want to spend on 64bit?
- 64bit on AMD looked much faster
- Not much presence(sp?) for DS. Mostly about composer.
da Vinci:
- neat system. One of those impenetrable UIs, with the bonus of having a special console in addition to a keyboard.
- They demoed something called “Splice” which made it non-linear. He made a big deal about zipping around the timeline
- Cool feature that lets you reorder a show by source timecode, so same shots go together. Correct all, reorder back the way it was, everything is corrected
- Cool “reconform” feature that can import a new EDL and correct everything it can, then note which shots are new.
- _extremely_ fast correction of black/white levels
- amazing auto-tracker (picking up the face)
Facilistech:
- 2.0 “not out yet”
- RAID5 is there, finally
- “spanning,” which is like mirroring “only better!”, allows them to do 2-stream uncompressed.
- We could span our two arrays if we wanted.
Apple:
- Their big announcement was a laptop. nuf said.
- well, it did run shake pretty fast.
- nothing else new
- I still like Shake a lot. It’s a very simple, unixy concept of taking little pieces and mashing them together until they do what they want. One UI to rule them all. Bought some books, gonna focus on this.
Autodesk:
- kings of the impenetrable UI. Thankfully it seems to be pretty much the same between all of their 10000 compositing apps.
- Flame, Smoke, and now Toxik — why so many?
- Smoke has some great features we could use, like a much better keyer, much better tracking
- Linux!!!! running on redhat4 on the show floor.
- I really think they just have too many products with poor differentiation, and their UIs are a mess of buttons, many with single letters. barf.
Adobe:
- Premiere Pro 2 also has the pane-based UI. Nice.
- Color corrector is better, but still the sort of lame “whites, grays, blacks” thing.
Panasonic:
- 103 inches makes for a very large plasma screen.