All posts by Like Tangents In The Rain

Digital Hollywood: Credit Market Starting to Recover

Celluloid Junkie LogoA group of 3D industry leaders shared varying opinions on the future of 3D—as well as their latest impressions of the credit market–during a panel yesterday at the Digital Hollywood confab in Los Angeles. “The market has recovered a little since December,” said James Dix, analyst at Wedbush Morgan Securities. “The credit market is clearly loosening […]

 

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Met Opera MegaData

There is a downloadable pdf file of these slides at the HPA Site.

You can also see and hear Mark giving a very similar presentation to the Toronto SMPTE section in December: Arias and Acquisition – a two-part evening with Mark Schubin.

If you are an EDCF member, you can pull a copy of the Alternative Content Guide in pdf format from the members section. This is the link for the EDCF Site

As well as being a television engineer and historian, Mark has a number of well regarded writings available on the internet. The Schubin Chronicles were written observations from a perspective of a New Yorker after the towers fell in November of 2001. You can see his IMDB.com listing here. There is a 2005 HDTV Magazine Interview that holds up real well.

A number of decades ago your author was privileged to work in a studio with a trés drôle and class act recording producer named John Boylan. As people are wont to do, he had stolen the front receptionists desk to take a phone call, and there he doodled a ToDo List:

  • Go to Studio
  • Make Hit Record
  • Go Home for Lunch
  • Noodle the ol’ lady
  • Go back to studio 
  • Make another hit record
  • Repeat and Fade

 Mark Schbin, equally clever, generous and a class act, shared his ToDo list from one of his weeks during an opera:

  • 16 transponders on 13 satellites as well as three transoceanic fiber cables
  • multiple motion-compensating HD frame-rate converters
  • one-hour HD delays to compensate for the different starts of Summer Time in North America and Europe
  • 14 HD cameras and 30 recorders
  • five robotic mounts, including two extendable towers and a track, all of which had to be deployed in minutes
  • a 600-foot live, backwards Steadicam move (ending at a live burro)
  • shooting multicamera live in the control room itself (one intermission was shot live in five different venues)
  • live subtitling in multiple languages
  • stereo, 5.1, and LT/RT sound, discrete and encoded
  • coordinating live commercial U.S. radio, non-commercial U.S. radio, global  radio, and the HD cinemacasts, all of which sometimes share and sometimes use different production elements
  • coordinating the parking of production vehicles on three Manhattan blocks with the fire department, the police, and local security
  • Wheeee!

And, as Mark always seems to close, TTFN

Daily Cinema Roundup – Friday 1 May

– UK exhibitor Vue has bold expansion plans for London, announced as part of the tie up with retail property group Westfield and build a total of eight sites by 2011, with two ‘crown jewel’ sites in London. From THR.com, “Vue Entertainment CEO Tim Richards said the site at London’s Westfield shopping center aims to […]

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Celluloid Junkie has several more news items in this story – Read More here…

Dolby and Arqiva Partner to Provide Electronic Delivery to Cinemas

Dolby Laboratories, Inc. (NYSE:DLB) today launched Dolby® Direct Distribution Services—a pan-European satellite content delivery network for digital cinemas. The service is provided in association with leading digital network solutions provider Arqiva and uses their international satellite infrastructure to distribute feature movies, trailers, and advertising content direct to their participating exhibitors and cinemas throughout Europe.

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State-Of-The-Art Christie Network Operations Center Facility Now Open

Christie announced the completion and official opening of the new Christie Managed Services state-of-the-art Network Operations Center (NOC) facility in Cypress, California.  Addressing the growth of digital cinema and on-screen advertising, the NOC features have expanded and upgraded capacity to monitor, maintain and service tens of thousands of digital projectors and related devices across the U.S. and Canada on a 24/7, year-round basis.  It also offers greater capability to handle devices from post-production to large group training centers and control rooms.

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JVC Turns Heads With 3D Conversion Technology

JVC unveiled a potentially disruptive 3D technology at NAB this week.
The company is showing an early prototype of a 2D/3D conversion box that it is looking to further develop as a basic conversion system and, get this, sell for $10,000.
Today more elaborate methods of converting 2D imagery to 3D can run anywhere from $50,000 per […]

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Daily Cinema Roundup – Sat 18th April

– Cinemas in the UK are anticipating a bumper box office this summer and the Film Distributors Association has put together a trailer (see above) and website for SummerOfCinema, reports the BBC; – UK actors Meera Syal and Tony Robinson are amongst those campaigning to save London’s historic EMD cinema in Walthmastow where a young Alfred […]

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Editshare Joins Forces with Digital Vision

The next generation EditShare XStream DI shared storage solutions have been engineered to deliver multiple concurrent streams of 2k and HD DPX as well Quicktime and MXF with codecs such as uncompressed 10 bit, Avid DNxHD and Apple ProRes . Coupled with almost limitless storage capability, EditShare XStream DI has been chosen as the shared storage for the Digital Vision Turbine processing grid at NAB, enabling real-time premium RED decode and realtime motion compensated noise reduction. EditShare XStream series provides a single point of management for the storage range, allowing an entire facility to be connected from ingest to delivery of the final cut.

The newly integrated solution will be demonstrated at NAB 2009 (April 20 to 23 in Las Vegas, NV) on the EditShare stand (SL6420). 

“With EditShare XStream, we are bringing the same great media sharing capabilities that Apple and Avid editors have enjoyed over the past years to Digital Vision artists working in Digital Intermediate environments,” comments Andy Liebman, CEO and founder, EditShare. “The flexibility of our technology accommodates both DI and other file based  workflows from the same XStream system with tremendous performance and unmatched scalability. Film Master artists will be able to grade in realtime off the XStream. The integration with Turbine ensures that throughput and processing can be scaled to any production requirement. ” 

“Digital Vision is always looking at new storage solutions that enable creatives to have more interactivity. What impressed us the most with this product is the way it could handle 20 simultaneous read and write requests from our Turbine grid processor without a single dropped frame on the main workstation,” comments company President, Simon Cuff. 

About Digital Vision Solutions

Digital Vision has been the ground breaker and driving force for high end shared storage workflows both in film and broadcast production. All Digital Vision software is delivered SAN ready and can be configured to work with multiple file systems simultaneously, including a mix of realtime and nearline volumes. Caching, proxy creation and render management can all be automated to ensure that operators are focused on creative tasks rather than data management. 

EditShare Complete Collaboration 

The Storage and XStream Series are part of the EditShare Complete Collaboration line of products which provide shared media and collaborative workflows – from ingest through production to archive. In addition to the Storage Series and XStream Series, the Complete Collaboration line includes EditShare FLOW and EditShare Ark.

Designed for the industry’s leading editing and compositing products from Adobe, Apple, Assimilate, Autodesk, Avid, Digidesign, Digital Vision, and Sony, EditShare storage servers, including the ultra-performance XStream series, allow all connected workstations to capture, access and share in real time a common pool of media files. Regardless of application or platform, source material, work in progress and finished packages are shared and instantly available to all users on the EditShare network. EditShare is also the only solution that provides full Project Sharing among both Apple and Avid editing workgroups. EditShare servers connect via Gigabit or 10 Gigabit ethernet.

FLOW Ingest captures up to four channels of media and associated metadata, storing each channel in up to three formats simultaneously and outputting a proxy for fast retrieval. No background transcoding is required and files are available immediately for editing. EditShare’s unique Universal Media File technology allows ingested media to be shared and used by editors working on both Avid and Apple editing applications.

FLOW Browse simplifies media cataloging, search and retrieval within EditShare shared storage environments. Users can quickly locate media among hundreds of thousands of clips on the EditShare media spaces. From FLOW Browse, users can update metadata, log clips, and drag and drop media to Avid and FCP bins.

FLOW Ingest and Browse are fully integrated with EditShare’s Storage Series as well as the ultra-performance XStream Series for high-volume, high-demand environments.

EditShare Ark provides a full range of very cost effective, disk-based solutions for backup, mirroring and archiving needs. While Ark systems are not generally usable for realtime editing, in a crisis situation where something has happened to a facility’s main EditShare storage, Ark Disk Based Storage can be “activated” and used to complete mission critical work while the primary storage is repaired.

 

Press Contact

Janice Dolan 

Zazil Media Group

Email [email protected]

Tel:  +1 (617) 817-6595.