NAB 2001 WARMED TO DISCREET 'HEATWAVE'

AS SUMMER arrived in Las Vegas and temperatures soared, Discreet unveiled several new packages, but the hot package was their new workflow environment, ‘heatwave’.
As well as reaching out to third party applications, heatwave aims to bring together Discreet's editing, effects and animation solutions to offer facilities a unified option for both infrastructure and workflow streamlining.
In a two-fold strategy heatwave represents both a brand of infrastructure solutions as well as a unique workflow environment. Based on Discreet's core infrastructure products such as ‘stone’, ‘wire’, ‘mountstone’, ‘backdraft’ and ‘jobnet’, - heatwave integrates Discreet products and third party applications across various networks, operating systems and platforms.
Discreet UK Country Manager Patrick Jocelyn said that facilities had led a demand for increased productivity. He said that as Discreet's powerful interactive workflow solution, heatwave would enable broadcast, post-production and content creation companies to capture, manage, share, distribute and archive media assets for all resolutions including HDTV and film.
Jocelyn said: "Discreet's product developments around heatwave have been well-received with tighter cross-product integration and steady expansion in our broadcast, post, games, animation and web. This year, we are focused on providing customers with solutions that are productive, perform well and will offer a cost-effective return on the investment.”
He added that as not all facilities were all-Discreet product based, Discreet would continue to work towards further developments aimed at enhancing third-party integration.
As part of the heatwave launch, Discreet announced a partnership with da Vinci Systems to create Discreet ‘revival’, an interactive and automated film cleaning and image fixing software.
Discreet's template-based 3D on-air graphics creation and delivery system ‘frost 2.5’ now offers streamlined integration with Discreet's ‘3ds max’ animation, modelling and rendering software. Following the launch of 3ds max in January this year, Discreet announced strategic partner announcements with Microsoft Xbox development and Macromedia, plus a new physics suite for 3ds max called ‘reactor’.
Also announced at NAB were a new platform and pricing for Discreet’s smoke and flint online editing and effects systems with SGI's new Octane2 DMediaPro DM2. Offering Multi-Master Editing smoke supports both 601 and HD editing with award-winning effects on a unified platform, while fire and inferno on the Onyx3000 series support real-time HD and film resolution with DMediaPro DM3.
Discreet's NT-based NLE system, ‘edit 6’ was showcased with new features including the ‘slipstream’ module for authoring, encoding and publishing, as well as vertical editing and multi-cam support.
The Discreet booth, famous for its unique both designs, was clearly identifiable at NAB by its cool blue colour and a welcome chill out area at the heart of the stand. (SP)