Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/137897
products Technicolor updates color grading tool HOLLYWOOD — Technicolor has a new version of Color Assist, its video color correction and grading package. V.1.5 now offers support for AVCHD video and still images. Available for Mac and PC, Color Assist supports a growing list of video production suites, including Final Cut Pro 7 & X, Premiere Pro CS5.5 and higher, and now After Effects. Technicolor is working with partners to ensure that it will support popular editing platforms as they continue to evolve on the desktop and in the cloud. Pricing is $99 at www.technicolorcinestyle.com. Existing users can get a free update including After Effects support and all the new enhancements. New users can download a free, fully functional 14-day trial. Field 2 storage solution targets location work B OSTON — EditShare (www.editshare.com) is now shipping Field 2, a portable shared storage solution with integrated asset management. The turnkey platform includes file ingest, advanced project sharing/bin locking and archiving capabilities in a rugged chassis. Field 2 is well suited for on-location shoots and ENG trucks, and meets airline carry-on regulations. Pricing starts at $10K, and the solution can be configured in a range of set-ups. With an optional Flow SDI ingest card, users can record up to two channels of HD in codecs such as XDCAM-EX35, DNxHD and DVCProHD. Flow's edit-while-capture capability lets users start editing the moment they begin recording. With an optional lightweight expansion unit, a single Field 2 can scale to 32TBs. And using the integrated EditShare Sync Tool, users can send data from a remote location back to home base over an Internet VPN. Field 2 is available with several different 3.5- or 2.5-inch hard drive options, including 10K SAS and SSD. Each four-drive set of 3.5-inch drives can support a baseline performance of eight streams of ProRes HQ or DNxHD 220, or 24 streams of 25Mb video such as DV25 or XDCAM-EX 25. An eight-drive Field 2 with 2.5-inch 10K SAS drives provides about a 2x increase in performance over the baseline. An eight-drive Field with 2.5-inch SSD drives provides about a 6x increase. The system uses hardware RAID-5 or RAID-6 protection and the chassis allows easy upgrades and maintenance. There is 10-Gig E card option as well. Imagineer's FCP X masking plug-in V-Ray 1.6 for SketchUp in open beta S OFIA, BULGARIA — Chaos Group's V-Ray 1.6 for SketchUp open beta offers a series of new feature introductions designed to enhance visualization workflow and render quality (V-Ray RT, V-Ray Dome Light) and streamline scene complexity (V-Ray Proxy). With V-Ray Proxies, users can achieve high levels of detail and modeling complexity while efficiently rendering massive amounts of geometry quickly. Proxies can also be shared between V-Ray versions, allowing artists to share models between 3DS Max, Maya, Softimage and Rhino. Features include V-Ray RT, a CPUsupported rendering engine, and Dome Light, which creates simple, artifact-free image-based lighting using importance sampling of HDR images. V-Ray lights can now be part of a SketchUp component, making the process of changing the design and settings of multiple lights at once easier. The Sphere Light features allows users to create spherically shaped area lights easily. And V-Ray Proxy helps manage scene memory, as well as efficiently render large amounts of geometry to increase detail and complexity. The free open beta of V-Ray 1.6 for SketchUp is available for SketchUp 8 on both the Windows and OS X platforms (32-bit only). It can be downloaded by applying for the public beta program online (www.chaosgroup.com). Pricing for V-Ray 1.6 for SketchUp will remain $800. The upgrade price from V-Ray 1.49 for SketchUp or lower is $320. Bluefish444 supports Premiere CC on Mac S OUTH MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA — Bluefish444 (www.bluefish444.com), which manufactures uncompressed 4K, 2K, HD and SD SDI video cards, has developed support for Adobe Premiere Pro CC on Mac OS X, enabling up to 2K SDI I/O via its Epoch and Create SDI video cards. Until now, the quality and features of Bluefish444's plug-in for Adobe Mercury Transmit have been limited to the Windows platform. Bluefish444 has developed an all new plugin to Adobe Premiere Pro CC on Mac OS X 10.8 supporting the Epoch and Create range of video cards. The cards offer 2K/HD/SD 4:2:2 YUV 8-/10-bit HD-SDI input and output, and hardware scaling technology allows for accelerated half- and quarter-resolution HD-SDI previews. The cards also provide hardware scaling technology for up/down/cross conversion. The Mac OS X 10.8 driver supporting 2K SDI I/O for Premiere Pro CC will be available from the Bluefish444 home page for free of charge in Q2 2013. 40 Post • June 2013 www.postmagazine.com GUILDFORD, UK — Imagineer Systems (www.imagineersystems.com) has released a new Final Cut Pro X masking plug-in called SliceX Powered by Mocha ($149). This new version previewed at NAB and is the result of a strategic partnership between Imagineer and CoreMelt. The result is the integration of Imagineer's planar tracker into CoreMelt's shape masking tool. SliceX lets users create instant shape masks to cut out layers or isolate effects directly in FCP X without having to go into Motion or create the masks with an external program. With this version, Mocha planar tracking allows artists to easily track roto shapes for accurate masking with less manual keyframing. SliceX includes nine motion templates for common tasks. Pros can also use the shape masks with built-in effects, color corrector or third-party plug-ins.