News

Autodesk Launches New Extension Releases for Its Film and Television Solutions (5/4/2007)

Autodesk, Inc. will be participating in the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Convention in Las Vegas, Nevada from 16 - 19 April 2007. Autodesk will showcase its latest visual effects, editing/finishing, colour grading and animation solutions for film, television and commercial post-production. NAB is the largest electronic media convention in the world. Each year it hosts more than 1,500 exhibitors and 100,000 media professionals from around the globe.

Product Announcements

This year at NAB, Autodesk will launch a series of extensions for its 2007 visual effects, editing/finishing and colour grading products. These extensions are only available to subscription customers. The Systems Subscription model is designed to provide customers with more features and enhancements, more often, and with less disruption than traditional upgrade models.

In addition, the company will present Autodesk Incinerator 2007 clustering technology for the Autodesk Lustre digital colour grading system. All new extensions, as well as Autodesk Maya 8.5 and Autodesk 3ds Max 9 3D animation, modelling and rendering software products, will be demonstrated at the Autodesk stand SL1420.

Autodesk will also launch Lustre Colour Management, an integrated, out-of-the-box solution that provides greater fidelity in colour reproduction between Autodesk systems products. With custom-built look up tables (LUTs), this toolset accurately and consistently emulates how a digital image will appear when printed to film. It also brings various image input formats into a common frame of reference so they can be previewed and converted to the necessary output format.

The Lustre Colour Management feature will be included in the new extension releases for Autodesk Inferno, Autodesk Flame and Autodesk Toxik visual effects systems, Autodesk Fire and Autodesk Smoke editing/finishing system, Autodesk Backdraft Conform background media management and I/O software, and Autodesk Lustre digital colour grading system.

Extension 1 for Inferno, Flame, Flint, Fire and Smoke, offer numerous workflow enhancements, including Quicktime support for the Linux platform, enhanced timeline editing, and Autodesk Burn network processing solution embedded within modules. The extensions also provide new color calibration capabilities with Lustre Colour Management, major improvements to conform, and new features such as a redesigned Automatic 3D Tracker and Lens Distortion.

Toxik Extension 2 provides new creative tools for film visual effects and enhances features introduced in Toxik 2007. New features include Retimer, which allows artists to change the speed of a clip, and Grain Management, which enables artist to add and remove grain characteristics from live and computer-generated footage. With two extensions since the release of the Lustre 2007 system, Autodesk continues to build on the solution's graphics processing unit (GPU) feature set. Features in Lustre 2007 extension 1 and 2 include: VTR emulation for playback control, GPU-acceleration with all Secondary layers, and additional GPU accelerated grading functions such as RGB curves, gamma, and shape softness.

Workflow Demonstrations

A series of concurrent workflow demonstrations will be showcased daily at the Autodesk stand. These workflows will include the Flame, Smoke and Lustre systems, along with Autodesk Backdraft Conform, and Autodesk Wiretap application programming interface.

www.autodesk.com/nab2007

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