I was walking by Post's booth at the show on Monday afternoon when our own Marc Loftus pointed out a company in an adjoining space and noted its interesting new products.
That company, Solana Beach, Calif.-based CineForm, creates high-fidelity compression-based workflow solutions and its staff came to NAB 2009 more than ready: it unveiled two technology enhancements this year.
Had a great chat with the company's PR dude, Kevin Bourke of Bourke PR in Boston (I wonder why there aren't more post houses there?), who told me about the industry’s first 3D editorial workflow solution for Apple Final Cut Pro (FCP), Neo3D. It improves 3D post production workflows by enabling FCP users to edit 3D projects in real time, with full frame rate playback, to an external 3D monitor.
That's key because, traditionally, 3D projects are edited in 2D as independent left and right eyes, with a final 3D conform after the entire editorial process is complete; Neo3D simplifies the process by enabling editors to experience the 3D story-telling process by viewing in full 3D while editing.
The company also announced a new real-time, renderless color correction tool, CineForm First Light. First Light uses the company's Active Metadata architecture to add or adjust color information, such as white balance, saturation controls and 3D LUTs (look-up tables), as metadata “layers” on top of the base image without flattening or rendering the file.
I'm glad to send this info along, not just to edify our readership, but because Kevin also stressed the importance of PR folks promoting interesting news for our audience (as opposed to not-very-interesting information no one learns anything from that only serves the PR person). It's all about credibility.
As an editor myself (for a business newspaper in Maryland), I appreciate that. And for that, as you can see, he just got a good blogging. Good on him.