AVID TO DELIVER DS 10 IN SEPTEMBER
Burbank, CA’s FotoKen (www.fotokem.com) served as a beta test site for the new release and director of creative editorial Gus Comegys says the studio put the system through a range of projects. “We are very impressed with the performance improvements, color management capabilities and the addition of the advanced color correction tools with secondaries,” says Comegys. “Having all those effects in realtime in 4:4:4 is a tremendous timesaver.”
The DS offers multi-stream, 10-bit uncompressed HD, the Avid DNxHD codec, and SD finishing and mastering, as well as HD-RGB and 2K/4K file-based editing with realtime playback up to 2K.
The platform for the new release is an HP xw8600 with dual-quad 3.0GHz CPUs with 8GB RAM, along with an Nvidia QuadroFX 3700 (G92 GPU) and a dual-link I/O card with a rack-mountable breakout box.
A new realtime processing framework allows the GPU to handle a majority of the processes and effects in realtime. There is also now the option to output to SDI in native 720p/23.98 or cross convert to 1080p/23.98, giving customers realtime capability to handle two of the industry’s more popular HD formats.
Relating to its color management tool, Avid has enhanced it to allow customers to preserve color definitions and define and manage Look-up Tables. The system now offers support for the most commonly-used LUTs, including 3D LUTs with the Thomson Luther, Kodak KDM, Iridas .itx formats and extended 1D LUT support to tape-based capture.
Format support has been extended to include a wide array of new HD YUV 4:2:2 formats, including 1080p/50, 1080p/59.94 and 1080p/60.
Avid will ship DS 10 in September, and pricing will start at $59,995 for a turnkey solution, which includes a 30-inch monitor, 8TB of SAS storage, and a Wacom tablet.