Industry Press Releases

Company 3’s Stephen Nakamura Colors Four Major Upcoming Feature Films

SANTA MONICA, Calif. — February 16, 2010 — Stephen Nakamura of Company 3 has provided his color grading prowess to three major motion pictures slated for release later this year: “Scott Pilgrim vs. The World,” “The Conspirator,” “The Town,” and “Robin Hood.”

For more information on these projects or to schedule an interview with Stephen, please contact:

Jon Silberg
PR/Marketing Consultant, Ascent Media
jsilberg@company3.com
310.454.3934

Gail Laguna
Director, Global PR, Ascent Media
glaguna@ascentmedia.com
818.260.6229

# # #

About Company 3:
Company 3 revolutionized the postproduction industry a decade ago when it took the art and craft of color correction into a boutique environment. Today, focused on high-quality creative results, Company 3 is synonymous with many of today’s award-winning commercials, music videos and feature films. Currently, Company 3 is translating its finely tuned expertise in feature film DI (digital intermediate), color correction, and final finishing to commercials and advertising.

In addition to Stefan Sonnenfeld, Company 3’s incredible talent roster includes John Bonta, Sean Coleman, Siggy Ferstl, Billy Gabor, Dave Hussey, Tim Masick, Victor Mulholland, Stephen Nakamura, Mike Pethel, Tom Poole, Rob Sciarratta and Matt Turner. Recent commercial projects are campaigns for Apple, BMW, Heineken, Nike and Travelers Insurance. Recent feature film credits include “A Single Man,” “High School,” “Collapse,” “Public Enemies,” “Star Trek,” “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three,” and “Watchmen.” Company 3 www.company3.com is an Ascent Media www.ascentmedia.com company.

Industry Press Releases

Matrox Enables State-of-the-Art HD Workflow for Quick News Delivery Using Matrox MXO2 Family of I/O Devices

London – Broadcast Video Expo –February 16, 2010 – Matrox® Video Products Group today announced Matrox Vetura Playback, a new application on the Mac for convenient playback of H.264 and .mov files using any of the Matrox MXO2 I/O devices. Field journalists equipped with a Matrox MXO2 device that includes the Matrox MAX H.264 encoding accelerator can shoot and edit their stories, then quickly encode to a very high quality H.264 file faster then realtime. Via any internet connection, the small H.264 file can be efficiently uploaded to headquarters then ingested to a video server or played directly to air using another MXO2 device and the Matrox Vetura Playback application.

“The new Matrox Vetura Playback application lets broadcasters leverage the power of Matrox MAX H.264 encoding acceleration to deliver breaking news stories to air in HD faster than ever before,” said Wayne Andrews, Matrox product manager. “Matrox gives them the tools they need to scoop their competition.”

The Matrox MXO2 products will be demonstrated on stand D66 at Broadcast Video Expo being held February 16-18, Earls Court 2, London.

Key features of the Matrox MXO2 family for Mac

* Convenient form factors for use in studio, on set, in the field, and in OB vans
* Works with Intel-based MacBook Pros, Mac Pros, and Apple Xserve systems
* Broadcast-quality HD/SD video and audio input/output
* Flexible support for leading codecs, file formats, cameras, and workflows
* Extensive application support including Final Cut Pro, Apple Color, Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, and many more
* 10-bit HDMI input, output, and monitoring with calibration controls including blue-only
* 10-bit realtime hardware up/down/cross conversion on capture and output
* Hardware acceleration of Final Cut Pro Dynamic RT segments, HDV, and DVCPRO
* Matrox Vetura Playback application for convenient playback of H.264 and .mov files
* Also available with Matrox MAX for faster than realtime H.264 encoding
* Three-year hardware warranty and complimentary telephone support

Price and availability

Matrox MXO2 products are available through a worldwide network of authorized dealers. The 1.9 release, which includes the Matrox Vetura Playback application, will be available free of charge within 10 days from the Matrox website for registered owners of Matrox MXO2 Mini, Matrox MXO2 LE, Matrox MXO2 and Matrox MXO2 Rack. Other features of the 1.9 release include Active Format Description (AFD) support in the SDI video signal using the patent-pending Matrox 4VANC method, support for 16 channels of embedded SDI audio, and support for Apple’s Core Audio.

About Matrox

Matrox Video Products Group is a technology and market leader in the field of HD and SD digital video hardware and software for accelerated H.264 encoding, realtime editing, audio/video input/output, DVD/Blu-ray authoring, scan conversion, capture/playout servers, clip/still stores, and CGs. Matrox’s Emmy award-winning technology powers a full range of content creation and delivery platforms used by broadcasters, post-production facilities, project studios, corporate communicators, and videographers worldwide. Founded in 1976, Matrox is a privately held company headquartered in Montreal, Canada.

Janet Matey

Marketing Communications Director

Matrox Video Products Group

tel: (514) 822-6037

fax: (514) 685-2853

janet.matey@matrox.com

www.matrox.com/video

Industry Press Releases

Digital Vision Selected to Return to HPA Tech Retreat Demo Room

Next Generation of Grain Tool Makes Debut

February 12, 2010 (Stockholm) Digital Vision has again been selected to participate in the Demo Room events surrounding the 16th Hollywood Post Alliance Tech Retreat, set for February 16th -19th in Rancho Mirage, CA. The Tech Retreat is a premiere event in the broadcast and post production industries, attracting leading thinkers, companies, and experts to four days of presentations and demonstrations by forward-looking industry experts and companies. Participation in demo room must be approved by a technical standards review committee and requires a presentation of new technologies.

Digital Vision will be presenting Nucoda Film Master and Phoenix 2009.1 in the Demo Room, but the focus is on the next generation of grain tool and open EXR grading. This fifth generation grain reducer features completely new algorithms including grain characteristics analysis for automated grain reduction, new motion estimation engine and a new, innovative aptio-temporal filter. This next generation tool provides stunning images, virtually artifact free, that retain original sharpness.

Bruno Munger of Digital Vision commented, “The HPA Tech Retreat is an outstanding place to meet our colleagues in an atmosphere focused on quality information sharing. We are extremely proud of next generation grain tool as well as the Open EXR floating point grading. We believe that they will be powerful resources for our customers as they serve their clients. The Demo Room is a perfect place to show it off and we look forward to participating again.”

Digital Vision AB was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with three wholly owned subsidiaries, Digital Vision (US) in Los Angeles, California; Digital Vision UK in London, England; and Digital Vision in Hong Kong, China. The company maintains its global presence through a network of qualified distributors. Digital Vision is listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. For further information, go to www.digitalvision.se.

All trademarks used herein, whether recognized or not, are the properties of their respective companies.

# # #
Media Contacts:

Digital Vision Contact:
Alexa Chollet
Email: alexa.chollet@digitalvision.se
Tel: +1 818 769-8111

USA PR Contact:
Christine Purse
ignite
Email: chris@ignite.bz
Tel: +1 818 508 0450
Mob: +1 323 806 9696

ARTICLES

RED Hosts DCS Members at RED Studios Hollywood

February 13, 2010 Igor Ridanovic

RED Digital Cinema opened the doors of their brand new RED Studios facility in Hollywood exclusively for the Los Angeles chapter of Digital Cinema Society members on February 13, 2010.

Jim Jannard the founder of RED Digital Cinema welcomed the visitors to new studios and took the stage for the first hour to introduce the new RED developments like .RLK and .RMD files and bust some old RED myths.

Jannard demonstrated the footage shot with the new Mysterium X sensor on a Sony SRX-T420 projector. The stunning 4k projection was almost completely noise free in the shadows. According to Jannard the Mysterium X sensor delivers two extra stops over the Mysterium sensor used in legacy RED ONE cameras.

The RED reel was played back from soon-to-be-renamed RED RAY at 15Mbit/s. The picture was surprisingly free of artifacts even at this very low bitrate (Blu-ray bitrate is 36MBit/s).

The 4k projector was also instrumental in seeing the side-by-side resolution comparison of Canon 5D, Sony F35 and RED ONE with an MX sensor. A three-way split of a zone plate shot showed that even when delivering 1080 sized masters a 4k acquisition and post workflow maintain a picture free of Moire pattern. The resolving power of RED ONE was significantly better than that of the two other camera models used in the test.

Jannard also introduced the new RED metadata format. The third party application friendly .RMD files will reside alongside .R3D files in the RED ONE generated directories. The .RMD files will contain non-photography specific information currently not stored in the RED metadata such as circled takes. The files similar in format to .XML files will be easily read and generated by various production and post production software.

Michael Cioni of Light Iron took over from Jannard and demonstrated the new features of REDCINE-X. Although the free software application is still under development it already promises to be a worthy replacement for the indispensable RED Alert, RED Rushes, and Redcine.

When equipped with a RED ROCKET board REDCINE-X is capable of real time SDI playback from the RED .R3D files. Other new features include lift/gamma/gain control, editable timeline, simple conform through EDL scripting support, broadcast wave file autosync, support for Tangent Wave and Euphonix tactile surfaces and more.

A very interesting feature of REDCINE-X is the ability to generate and save a “look” which is basically a specific color and gamma setting. The look file can be loaded in a RED ONE camera.

Cioni quickly created a hi-con black and white look and exported it from REDCINE-X as an .RLK file. As soon as he loaded the look file in the RED ONE the camera’s video output provided an instant hi-con black and white picture.

REDCINE-X also supports the new REDGamma curve. This new setting provides a visual feedback similar to Rec709 with visually pleasing distribution of values but it also maintains the full dynamic range of the legacy REDlog gamma.

Outside of part of the stage with the projection screen the visitors were invited to view additional demo pods.

Assimilate showed a Scratch system with two RED ROCKET boards capable of real time stereoscopic playback from .R3D files. The new Scratch is capable of using multiple RED ROCKET boards for unprecedented hardware acceleration.

Hollywood-DI demonstrated their Apple Color workflow.

At a dark corner of the sound stage RED set up a small scene lit with candles only and provided two Mysterium X RED ONE cameras for the attending cinematographers to try out.

Jim Jannard along with a small group of RED engineers took questions from the audience for the entire last hour of the morning.

Industry Press Releases

Digital Vision Congratulates Independent Filmmakers

Film Master Helps Facilities Deliver Some of the Hottest Films

Unspooled At Sundance

February 1, 2010 (Stockholm, Sweden) Digital Vision, whose highly regarded color grading and enhancement products are part of the workflow at leading facilities around the world, congratulates the filmmakers and films that screened and competed at the Sundance Film Festival, just wrapped in Park City, Utah.

“Our customers are the facilities and artists that support the creativity of storytellers. Our focus is directly on them, and we are proud to have contributed to the work of the filmmakers whose projects premier, screen or compete at Sundance,” noted Alexa Chollet, Director of Marketing, Digital Vision.

Projects at Sundance that were supported by Digital Vision products include:

Final Frame, New York
Bass Awards (NEXT)
The Tillman Story (US Documentary Competition)
My Perestroika (US Documentary Competition)
Joan Rivers (US Documentary Competition)

Lit Post, Hollywood
Frozen (US Dramatic Competition)
The Perfect Host (Park City at Midnight)

Tunnel, Santa Monica
The Dry land (US Dramatic Competition)

Will Cox, Final Frame Co-Founder and Colorist noted that, “Over the past decade, we have had the amazing opportunity to work with some of the most talented independent filmmakers on the scene today. We help them execute their technical requirements, but our job is ultimately to empower their creative voice. Digital Vision helps us to do that, time and again.”

Kyle Jackson, Owner of Tunnel Post in Santa Monica, commented that, “We are fortunate to have the opportunity to work with talented filmmakers doing exceptional work and support the indie community as we did with ‘The Dry Land.’ Those collaborations are everything to us, and Digital Vision supports us every step of the way.”

All trademarks used herein, whether recognized or not, are the properties of their respective companies.

# # #

Media Contacts:

Digital Vision Contact:
Alexa Chollet
Email: alexa.chollet@digitalvision.se
Tel: +1 818 769-8111

USA PR Contact:
Christine Purse
ignite
Email: chris@ignite.bz
Tel: +1 818 508 0450
Mob: +1 323 806 9696

Industry Press Releases

Matrox Commences “Shoot, Edit, Deliver 2010 Road Tour” in Collaboration with Apple and Leading Camera Manufacturers

Montreal, Canada – January 29, 2010 – Matrox® Video Products Group today announced an eleven-city U.S. road tour where representatives from Matrox, Apple, and leading camera manufacturers will share tips and tricks to improve all aspects of attendees’ video production workflow – from shooting, through editing, to final delivery in today’s most popular formats.

“Creative professionals are being asked by their clients to produce projects in a variety of formats for the web, Blu-ray, and mobile devices which can be very time consuming,” said Francesco Scartozzi, Matrox director of sales for the Americas. “The collaboration between Matrox and Apple on this road tour offers attendees a unique chance to discover the workflow advantages of combining Final Cut Studio with Matrox MAX technology to deliver video content faster than ever before.”

The Shoot, Edit, Deliver 2010 Road Tour kicks off in Burbank on February 2 then visits New York, Orlando, Dallas, Austin, Miami, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Boston, and St. Louis, before winding up in San Francisco on March 9. This event is offered free of charge through registration at http://www.matrox.com/video/en/events/united_states/. Attendees will have a chance to win a Matrox CompressHD H.264 accelerator card valued at $495.

About Matrox

Janet Matey

Marketing Communications Director

Matrox Video Products Group

tel: (514) 822-6037

fax: (514) 685-2853

janet.matey@matrox.com

www.matrox.com/video

Industry Press Releases

Digital Vision and CineForm Partner to Support Silicon Imaging Si-2k Camera

January 26, 2010 (London, UK) Digital Vision is today announcing its partnership with CineForm as a key element of its forthcoming Nucoda 2009.1 release. The new software, which will be unveiled at next month’s Broadcast Video Expo show in London, will include native support for the CineForm RAW format used by Silicon Imaging’s highly-acclaimed SI-2k camera.

“Following a popular industry trend and feedback from our customers, we have introduced native support for SI-2K material. This is a highly attractive proposition for film makers who were impressed by the success of the camera’s use on Oscar winning movie Slumdog Millionaire”, explains Bruno Munger, Digital Vision Product Manager. He adds, “Digital Vision is one hundred per cent committed to its customers and as such we are supporting one of the industry’s most popular digital camera formats to enable customers to provide clients with the choice, flexibility and quality that they expect.”

“CineForm RAW has earned the reputation in the industry as the compressed raw format of choice for pristine image quality,” added David Taylor, CEO and co-founder of CineForm. “Extending CineForm RAW to the Digital Vision workflow is a natural fit that will result in significant value-add for Digital Vision’s customers. Our two companies share the same commitment of extremely high image quality throughout the workflow, from camera to post production to finished product.”

Digital Vision will be exhibiting at Broadcast Video Expo, February 16th – 18th 2010, on stand L30.

About CineForm
CineForm Inc. develops compression-based workflow solutions for the post production marketplace. Offering the industry’s highest fidelity compression technology, CineForm is trusted among Hollywood filmmakers, television producers, videographers and digital media artists who rely on high image quality, high performance and innovative compression-based workflow solutions with up to 4k spatial resolutions for their online content creation projects. Available on both Windows and Mac platforms, CineForm workflow solutions are optimized for direct-to-disk camera recording, high-resolution post production and long-term content archives. For more information, visit www.cineform.com.

About Digital Vision
Digital Vision provides innovative image restoration, enhancement, color correction and data conforming systems that major movie studios, television networks and post-production facilities use to master and deliver feature films, TV programs and commercials. The company’s Nucoda product line provides a strong suite of products for tapeless and non linear grading for HD broadcast and 2k/4k digital intermediate productions. The company’s award-winning products are a standard of the media and entertainment industry and are deployed at top facilities and broadcasters around the world.

Digital Vision AB was founded in 1988 and is headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, with three wholly owned subsidiaries, Digital Vision (US) in Los Angeles, California; Digital Vision UK in London, England; and Digital Vision in Hong Kong, China. The company maintains its global presence through a network of qualified distributors. Digital Vision is listed on the Stockholm stock exchange. For further information, go to www.digitalvision.se.

All trademarks used herein, whether recognized or not, are the properties of their respective companies.

# # #

Media Contacts:

Digital Vision Contact:
Alexa Chollet
Email: alexa.chollet@digitalvision.se
Tel: +1 818 769-8111

EMEA & Asia PR Contact: USA PR Contact:
Kate Ford Christine Purse
Jump PR ignite
Email: kate@jumppr.tv Email: chris@ignite.bz
Tel: +44 (0)1932 253624 Tel: +1 818 508 0450
Mob: +44 (0)7740 948065 Mob: +1 323 806 9696

Equipment

Canon DSLRs

Good enough for some.

A recent series of Canon Digital SLRs is capable of shooting high quality HD video at 1920×1080 size and various frame rates. The cameras like EOS 1D Mark IV, EOS 5D Mark II and EOS 7D 18 offer great low light sensitivity but also suffer from minor image quality issues.

All of these Canon cameras produce H.264 encoded content which is not suitable for editing and must be first converted to an intermediate format.

Production

Dailies and Rushes

Everything shot in a day.

All material shot in one day of productions is called “dailies.” This term is used predominantly in the U.S.

The British term “rushes” means the same thing. The term comes from “rush processing” which is a lab term for quick material turnaround.

Traditionally dailes are dropped off at the lab at the end of day and are available for screening the next morning. Contemporary digital cinema formats like RED require little or no processing and allow near immediate playbak on set.

Post Production

Uprezing/Upresing

Getting the material in.

Uprezing, a.k.a. upresing is the process of bringing tape based material into an NLE. The term was implies that the original material was captured at a resolution lower than required for the final product which is not always the case. The more accurate term “capturing” is preferred.

Uprezing also reffers to upscaling of picture information as in upconversions to HD and similar processes.