EYEON SHOWS 'GENERATION' CONFORMING, VERSIONING & EDITING SYSTEM

LAS VEGAS - Eyeon is aggressively positioning a new post system aimed at high-end collaborative workflows for films and other visual-effects-heavy jobs. Generation was developed in secret over the past 18 months by Steve Roberts and company, and promises full-featured collaborative conforming, versioning and editing.

The Generation solution offers an open architecture and data-centric workflow backbone, as well as an "artist-driven interface" that allows instantaneous movement through image files and versions with the touch of a mouse or pen-and-tablet. Eyeon (www.eyeonline.com) promises that Generation will provide extensive flexibility for studio pipelines and tight integration with the company's visual effects product line: Fusion, Rotation and Vision.
 
Generation promotes team collaboration via a visual timeline and its own set of easy-to-use tools for playing multiple versions; trying different cuts; and comparing different projects simultaneously. Shot refinements, from storyboard through animatics to finished shots, are all tracked and versioned visually. Generation also logs supervisory annotations made during production for eventual verification. A paint tool - not unlike NFL games' Telestrator - allows textual and hand-drawn imagery and comments on frames of work in progress. The ease of communication over Generation projects will seem to users like "instant messaging," the company says, except the system retains the comments for future review. 
 
Eyeon says the new system will cost somewhat more than the newest version of Fusion, while offering all the functionality of Fusion along with the new toolset that puts Generation on a level with other full-featured competitors at only about one tenth of the price. A system being demonstrated at the Eyon booth ran swiftly on a Boxx 84 dual SCSI eight-core computer. Eyeon stresses that Generation will usher in a new workflow with "no bottlenecks anywhere."