Avid Shows 24-Frame Film &Digital Video-native Editing &Re-mastering Solutions at Sundance 2000.Entertainment Editors PARK CITY, Utah--(ENTERTAINMENT WIRE)--Jan. 28, 2000 -- All-Digital Production Technologies, Digital Premieres on Tap for First Festival of New Millennium Avid Offline/Online Systems Help Ready Films for Digital Screenings -- At the 2000 Sundance Film Festival, January 20-30, 2000, Avid Technology "Avid" redirects here. For the "Advancement Via Individual Determination" educational program, see AVID. Avid Technology, Inc NASDAQ: AVID is an American company specializing in video and audio production technology; specifically, digital non-linear media editing (NLE) , Inc. (NASDAQ NASDAQ in full National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations U.S. market for over-the-counter securities. Established in 1971 by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD), NASDAQ is an automated quotation system that reports on : AVID) is showing the company's acclaimed 24-frame film and new digital-video (DV) native digital nonlinear editing See nonlinear video editing. , mastering and re-mastering systems for aspiring digital storytellers. At the inaugural festival of the new millennium, Avid is providing independent filmmakers a glimpse at the aspects that have made Avid systems standard to 24-frame feature film production today, and a look at the features and techniques that will let them optimize projects for the future's wider range of shooting, re-purposing and delivery choices. Several films taking part in Sundance's first-ever digital screenings, including Marc Levin's Twilight: L.A., which was onlined by Moving Pictures in New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of , have benefited from these offline and online evolutionary tools. On hand in Avid's demonstration suites will be the Oscar(R) award winning Film Composer(R) film editing system and the Avid Xpress(R) system with FilmScribe(TM) Bundle for cost-effective, film-based editing. Making Sundance debuts this year will be the Avid Symphony(TM) Universal system for re-purposing film-based projects for final video and television distribution; Avid Xpress(R) DV software on IBM IntelliStation M Pro workstation for filmmakers working in electronic cinema who use digital video to shoot and finish, and Digidesign(R) FilmFrame, which allows feature film sound editors and mixers to work with true 24-fps integrated picture on a Pro Tools(R) digital audio workstation A digital audio workstation (DAW) is a system designed to record, edit and play back digital audio. A key feature of DAWs is the ability to freely manipulate recorded sounds, much like a word processor manipulates typed words. . Greater Flexibility in 24 Frames As in past years, a high percentage of films seen at Sundance were edited electronically using Avid's 24 frames-per-second (fps) digital nonlinear systems. This year, several innovations from Avid offer filmmakers even greater flexibility for projects originating in 24-frame formats - from editing and mixing audio synced to 24-frame digital picture to generating multiple masters for varying film and television formats. Digidesign FilmFrame is a software module for enhancing the benefits of working natively at 24 fps in a Pro Tools audio system, with frame-accurate picture elements created on an Avid Film Composer nonlinear video editing Editing video in the computer. Also called "nonlinear editing" (NLE), digital nonlinear systems provide high-quality post-production editing on a desktop computer. However, some detail may be lost if lossy compression is used to store the images (see lossy compression). workstation. With its revolutionary 24P Universal Editing and Mastering technology for editing 24 frame progressive content in its native format, Avid's Symphony Universal system ensures peace of mind for outputting projects with its ability to handle multiple aspect ratios and deliver NTSC (National TV Standards Committee) The committee that developed the television standards for the U.S, which are also used in Canada, Japan, South Korea and several Central and South American countries. Both the committee and the standard are called "NTSC. , PAL, 4:3, 16:9, and letterbox The effect of displaying a wide screen movie on a standard TV set the way it was originally shot in full panoramic format. On the TV, the image frame spans the full width of the screen, but because of the difference in aspect ratios of the two formats (wide screen movie vs. formats from a single master. Prepping for Digital Projection &HD with an Avid Symphony With many directors already anticipating digital delivery of their films, Sundance has for the first time begun offering to screen selections electronically in high definition using state-of-the-art digital projectors and Sony HDCAM Sony's high-definition digital videotape format. It was introduced in 1997 using 8-bit DCT compression and 3:1:1 sampling (see 3:1:1). HDCAM SR (HDCAM Superior Resolution) came out in 2003 supporting 10 bits, MPEG-4 and 4:4:4 sampling (no additional color reduction). decks. One of several Sundance films screening digitally this year is Twilight: L.A. by Marc Levin, the director whose film Slam won the Grand Jury Prize in 1998. Voyaging in and out of the violent events and emotions surrounding the 1992 Rodney King trial in Los Angeles, Anna Deavere Smith For other persons of the same name, see Anna Smith. Anna Deavere Smith (born September 18, 1950, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an African American actress, playwright, and professor in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. stars in this 85-minute narrative feature produced by Deavere Smith with Ezra Swerdlow and edited by Robert Eisenhardt. Because the film was shot on Super 16 at an aspect ratio of 1:66 and needed to go up to the high-definition ratio of 16:9 for HD, Moving Pictures in New York was brought on to online the project as uncompressed video, complete the sound mix and prepare it to be upconverted to fit specs for the Sundance electronic screening. Alan Miller, vice president of post-production and a principal at Moving Pictures, brought in Eisenhardt's offline cut from a Macintosh-based Avid system, together with sound effects and music tracks from the Avid offline, into an Avid Symphony system for finishing, and then over to Digidesign Pro Tools for the final audio mix. &uot;Using Symphony brought amazingly powerful, incredibly accurate new capabilities for digital color-correction,&uot; Miller says. &uot;Working closely with the film's cinematographer, Maryse Alberti, we could tweak a shot until it looked just right and then apply those same principles and properties across other shots automatically, thereby cutting color-correction time by two thirds. What's more, our results with scene-to-scene source correction went way beyond the filmmakers' expectations -- they never thought material such as stock footage, old VHS (Video Home System) A half-inch, analog videocassette recorder (VCR) format introduced by JVC in 1976 to compete with Sony's Betamax, introduced a year earlier. copies and live video shot by people on the streets, could be made to look so good.&uot; A 16:9 mask was used over the whole show to unify the 1:66 and 4:3 footage. The facility also did an effects pass to reposition shots inside the 16:9 mask and used expert render to reduce the rendering process. Everything was then output serial digitally directly from the Symphony system to Digital Betacam and then upconverted off-site to a projection-ready, high-definition digital master. An Avid Expressly for DV-Native Projects -- Enabling Easy Output to the Web, DVD DVD: see digital versatile disc. DVD in full digital video disc or digital versatile disc Type of optical disc. The DVD represents the second generation of compact-disc (CD) technology. &Other Media! For independent filmmakers who want to make the best of To improve to the utmost; to use or dispose of to the greatest advantage. To reduce to the least possible inconvenience; as, to make the best of ill fortune or a bad bargain. - Bacon. See also: Best Best limited production resources - and unlimited digital distribution opportunities - Avid is offering Avid Xpress DV on IBM IntelliStation M Pro, an Avid editing system for DV-native projects with the award-winning Avid interface and distribution capabilities for the Web and for DVD. Avid Xpress DV ensures lossless See lossless compression. (algorithm, compression) lossless - A term describing a data compression algorithm which retains all the information in the data, allowing it to be recovered perfectly by decompression. Unix compress and GNU gzip perform lossless compression. images via a DV-native editing environment and provides filmmakers with integrated compositing, effects and audio tools, such as real-time mixing and EQ among multiple audio tracks. Among the system's digital distribution options are Web streaming formats such as RealMedia G2, Microsoft Windows Media and QuickTime(R)/Sorrenson; MPEG (Moving Pictures Experts Group) An ISO/ITU standard for compressing digital video. Pronounced "em-peg," it is the universal standard for digital terrestrial, cable and satellite TV, DVDs and digital video recorders (DVRs). 1, 2, AVI (Audio Video Interleaved) A Windows multimedia video format from Microsoft. It interleaves standard waveform audio and digital video frames (bitmaps) to provide reduced animation at 15 fps at 160x120x8 resolution. Audio is 11,025Hz, 8-bit samples. , and QuickTime(R) for use in CD, DVD, Internet, intranet streaming applications and presentation tools like PowerPoint; and a native IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, New York, www.ieee.org) A membership organization that includes engineers, scientists and students in electronics and allied fields. 1394 connection for creating digital videotapes. The system also comes bundled with Sonic Solutions DVDit!, an easy to use DVD authoring software. For more information, please visit http://www.avid.com/avidxpressdv or http://www.pc.ibm (International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY, www.ibm.com) The world's largest computer company. IBM's product lines include the S/390 mainframes (zSeries), AS/400 midrange business systems (iSeries), RS/6000 workstations and servers (pSeries), Intel-based servers (xSeries) .com/us/intellistation/avid.html. About Avid Technology Avid Technology, Inc. is an international, industry-leading provider of digital audio and video tools for information and entertainment applications. The company's products are used by a variety of customers worldwide including film, television and interactive content producers, TV news broadcasters, corporate communicators and consumers. For more information, visit Avid's Web site at www.avid.com. (c) 2000 Avid Technology, Inc. All rights reserved. Avid, Digidesign, Film Composer, Avid Xpress and Pro Tools are registered trademarks and FilmScribe and Symphony are trademarks of Avid Technology, Inc. Quicktime and Macintosh are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc. Oscar is a trademark and service mark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. All other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners. |
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