LAS VEGAS — In a series of announcements addressing the post market, led by Steve Owen, Quantel marketing director during the company’s press conference at NAB 2014, Quantel (www.quantel.com) is showing the latest software release for its Pablo Rio color and finishing system. This is the fifth new feature release since IBC 2013.
The new software ensures that Pablo Rio continues to maintain its position in file-based post production pipelines with support for more file formats, including 4K XAVC export and DCP import as well as the latest Red SDK. The new software also supports conform of Avid effects. This new facility greatly speeds the transition from Avid offline to Pablo Rio 4K finishing and color correction. For example, if the Avid editor has used a DVE to resize a clip, the metadata for the DVE move comes across to Pablo Rio with the media, so the clip is automatically resized when it is conformed in Pablo Rio using the 4K media.
The Pablo Rio toolset also gets a major boost with Optical Flow slow motion. Optical Flow uses advanced motion estimation techniques to produce smoother, higher quality slow or fast motion. The new software also features many additional improvements that increase flexibility and performance. These include: audio in MLT, AVCHD softmount, tracker homography, better text handling, faster shape creation, wireframe updates and better subtitling tools.
“The momentum continues to build for Pablo Rio. This raft of new developments will maintain Pablo Rio’s pre-eminent position as the color and finishing system of choice for 4K and beyond,” says Owen.
In related news, NAB 2014 marks the debut of Genetic Engineering 2 from Quantel. GE2 is Quantel’s new shared-storage solution for post that delivers new levels of flexibility, performance and productivity for Quantel Pablo Rio color and finishing system users. GE2 uses COTS hardware and is already transforming the efficiency of post houses in today’s multi-resolution post world.
GE2 optimizes post workflow. It brings total scheduling flexibility to the post process, allowing high-resolution jobs to be instantly switched or shared between suites so post houses can meet tight deadlines or take on short-notice work. Up to four Pablo Rio systems can share the same GenePool storage, with guaranteed realtime performance on every connected system no matter what each is doing — even when working at 4K. GE2 also goes beyond 4K, offering 6K 16-bit operation on multiple clients to cater for the new generation of ultra-high resolution cameras.
New for NAB, the Pablo PA workflow assist station can now be directly connected to the GenePool. This enables conform, prep and workflow tasks to be undertaken on lower cost equipment so that the Pablo Rios can deliver maximum value for client-attended creative sessions.
There is a huge range of potential GE2 configurations, so GE2 systems can be tailored to meet every individual facility’s workflow requirements. For example, GenePool shared storage can range from 18TBs to support a two-suite HD production environment to almost 400TBs — more than enough for even multiple simultaneous 4K or 6K Red Dragon jobs. Quantel has published a configurator on its Website so that customers can dial in different requirements for numbers of suites, resolution and storage, and the configurator interactively ‘builds’ the system for them and produces a bill of materials.
“I cannot stress enough how important the GE2 infrastructure and workflow is to success in the DI business,” says Michael Cioni, CEO of New York post house Light Iron. “With GE2, media can be edited and color corrected and input and output and beautified all at the same time and there is no rendering, transcoding or media moving. GE2 means everything is shared dynamically so it’s truly a collaborative environment. We just did our fourth client-supervised 6K DI session; with 4K and 6K projects becoming more routine, we needed a total game changer. GE2 has done just that."