Issue: Show Daily - Apr 10, 2003

The Buzz . . . for Wednesday April 9, 2003

  • Microsoft is at NAB, showing its new Windows Media 9 Series media platform. The company's booth features an assortment of partners showing broadcast solutions for electronic news gathering, broadcast production and playout, and realtime hardware-based encoding. Windows Media 9 promises the potential to deliver SD and HD content. It also offers digital rights management capabilities.

  • SGI announced that E-Film in Hollywood plans to install an SGI SAN Server 1000 with the CXFS shared file system.

  • Following a lead regarding the development of ProControl 2, Post stopped by the Digidesign booth, where senior product manager Scott Wood confirmed that while the company is working on a new mixing surface, it will not ship this year. Wood noted that the next generation control surface will use the same Ethernet and D-Sub 25 pin connections as the existing ProControl and Control*24 consoles, allowing users to easily swap out existing systems for the new one.

  • France's RealViz has raised the price of its MatchMover tool to $7,499, up from $5K.

  • Softimage/Behavior, the Montreal-based company's standalone behavioral animation tool, has been upgraded to V.1.1. It was recently used by post house Hybride to create crowd and battle scenes for "Napoleon," which aired on A&E earlier this week. The tool adds intelligence to two- and four-legged characters, is priced as $14,995, and works with Softimage's XSI tool, as well as with Alias*Wavefront Maya and Discreet 3DS Max.

  • Apple's (www.apple.com) Shake compositing software is being used on the next versions of "Lord of the Rings," "Harry Potter" and "Matrix 2."