BRIGHT SYSTEMS SHOWS HIGH-SPEED DRIVES
Issue: Wednesday, April 18, 2007

BRIGHT SYSTEMS SHOWS HIGH-SPEED DRIVES

LAS VEGAS - Reno, NV's Bright Systems is at NAB with new portable drives designed for high-speed transfer of high-resolution film and video data, such as full-length feature films. The company says with its technology, transfers will be 20x faster than those on USB or FireWire drives and users will be able to transfer media at realtime 2K, or 300 MB per second.

Called BrightDrive Transportable (BD-T), it uses adapted, off-the-shelf hardware with Bright’s existing, but updated, Data Wrangler software. According to Bright’s Peter Lambert, VP of worldwide sales, “BD-T allows transfers of data between creative devices, such as a telecine or color corrector, and lays it out optimally with our own software.”

Data Wrangler offers high-speed transfers, RAID protection and data verification, meaning it will alert the user to corruptions that may have occurred in the transfer. Lambert says it offers a simple GUI and allows you to work in a Windows-like environment, except that it’s designed for the post world and its big sequential data files. It’s available for Mac, Linux and Windows.

“You can get 100 percent performance from the disk drive if you layout the information optimally, which is what we’ve done with our Data Wrangler software,” explains Lambert. “That, combined with the drives we are using, gets us much faster speeds.”

Each BD-T chassis can hold four Transportable drive capsules, each with a 1.5TB capacity, allowing users to ingest or offload up to two full-length motion pictures at a time, or 80 minutes of 2K data. BD-T will be available in early summer. Each pack costs $1,000. The chassis, which holds four of those pack drives, costs about $5,000.

Bright (www.brightsystemsinc.com) is also showing new features and upgrades to its BrightDrive media sharing system, including new Data Wrangler, Data Optimizer and Data Mover software modules — each designed to simplify the management and improve the performance of BrightDrive’s media sharing capabilities by maintaining efficient use of workspaces.

And Data Wrangler now includes a new set of graphical tools available to operate from within a single, easy-to-use interface for browsing, searching and previewing media. The company says that these new graphical tools will also facilitate the management of folders and sequences on the BrightDrive infrastructure. And they are now putting Data Mover and Data Optimizer into Data Wrangler, making it a more robust and easier to use.

Bright is also demonstrating a new universal algorithm for its Data Optimizer and Data Mover modules and they will be launching BDI-SDI, a new interface for ingesting and laying off data in multiple video formats, including HSDL, HD444/422 and SD. BDI-SDI bridges the gap between data-centric workflows and previously existing legacy workflows, providing facilities with increased flexibility and choice. BDI-SDI operates in master or slave mode, allowing editors to use images as if they were interior files in a DDR.