A Report from Dan Ochiva, senior editor of Millimeter and Video Systems

The aisles aren't as crowded, with little buzz drawing folks to anyone booth, but Siggraph remains the place to see the latest andgreatest product intros for graphics, animation, and generalcomputer-oriented fun...IBM's push for the Penquin delivered anend-to-end Linux creation system. While the front end employed anIntellistation M Pro running Maya under Red Hat Linux, the big news hada 4' tall roll-away render rack stocked with seven Eserver X Series 330render nodes, each a dual-processor Xeon unit ($3,000 each) along withtwo Z Pro Intellistations, which held the storage...DSMComputer, out of Germany, produced what it described as the firstdedicated animation controller, the Neomotion. This outboard hardwaredevice, consisting of a couple of jog wheels, buttons, sliders, and LCDread-out, is entirely programmable, and starts at $1,500 for a versionthat works with 3ds max 4...Cebas Computer, also out of Germany,presented Final Render, an amazingly fast global illumination renderingsolution. Besides its highl-realistic output, global illuminationrendering normally exacts extreme amounts of CPU cycles. However, Cebas(a developer of 3ds max plug-ins) is now delivering what seems like thefirst solution to reduce that penalty.

Day Two (Wednesday, August 15, 2001)

Portable 3D scanning, anyone? Eyetronics demo’d aportable setup enabling the user to take a scan in the field, builtaround a rig holding a digital still camera and flash. It’s asimple matter to take a few shots with the requisite grid display(it’s integrated into the flash’s snap-on filter).There’s no release date as yet. Right now, the ShapeSnatchersoftware uses a slide projector and the specially etched ShapeSnatcherSlide…Digital Voodoo received Final Cut Pro 2certification for its D1 Desktop 64AV. It’s the only such 8 &10-bit capture card available for the Mac which syncs both video andaudio. Digital Voodoo’s $12,000 HD capture card ships afterSeptember’s IBC convention. In response to requests, companyofficials say they may release a playback-only version, which wouldprobably price about 1/3 less…One unexpected player,Japan’s giant national telco, NTT, pushed for higher resdigital video projection. NTT’s curtained-in booth displayed thefirst public demo of JVC’s new hi-res (3840 X 2048) LCDprojection system…

Day Three (Thursday, August 16, 2001)

Medea, which built its rep offering sturdy, lower-cost RAID 0storage, announced the purchase of Storage Concepts, which makeshigher-end products for medical and corporate use, as well as video.Medea is now offering its first series of RAID 3 redundant storageproducts, basing around RAID controller technology from SC. EmployingMultiStream Technology (a type of adaptive caching), the VideoRack RTRcan now playout up to 3 simultaneous streams of uncompressed 601 videoat up to 130 MB/s…BOXX demo’d a new capability forits HDBOXX NLE: integrated hardware control for Adobe AfterEffects. Rainbow Studios, for example, now uses the setup forcapturing RGB off of HD material for graphics work. Also, since theHDBOXX now includes a Quicktime codec, the facility’sartists can now playback the RGB images without having to first make QTfiles out of them, speeding the feedback process…Avidpresented Version 5.0 of Avid DS. Due to release this November, Avidtouts the software release as incorporating many user requests foradded functionality, much as Alias positioned its Maya 4 release. Theinterface incorporates many ease-of-use improvements, including theability to zoom & pan on the process tree to bring up operations,fast ways to open the process tree to insert additional nodes, are-shaper tool for a more intuitive method of pulling an outline for amatte, and more.

Read the October issue of Millimeter for details on these andother Siggraph 2001 announcements.