Well, it was yet another 5 days of bits, pixels, and color space. But was there anything more than marketing hype at play this September?

The real buzz of the show was “4k”. Sure, 4k is old hat in theoretical terms, but there was a real sense of 4k becoming the new trend, rather than just for special occasions. At a talk by E-Film, they annonunced that the number of DI jobs had increased since last year, and the number of 4k jobs had roughly doubled. On the show floor, there was talk of 4k storage, 4k pipelines, real-time 4k, you name it. In fact I don’t think I heard anyone mention 2k. And it didn’t end there of course: Autodesk’s Toxik demo artist made reference to a 16k image he was working with in real-time, and NHK set up an 8k demo theatre experience dubbed “Ultra HD” (in 22.2 multichannel surround sound, no less)…

Apple was demoing its Final Cut Suite post-production line on their new Mac Pro system, kitted out with impressive offline editing, effects, and audio mixing capabilities. They also demoed version 4.1 of the (now defunct?) Shake visual effects and compositing system, though they cryptically referred to it somewhat as a “plugin” for Final Cut Pro. And speaking of effects, there was an interesting plugin called “chim chim” for Motion for doing smoke-type effects that was shown, though sadly it was third-party with no signs of it being available off-the-shelf.

Sony updated its Vegas line of editing and DVD Studio software, but the lack of decent input/output via XML renders them both still inferior to Apple’s equivalents.

Very interesting, but perhaps of questionable usefulness, was a new product called Muse from Abaltat. Muse allows the user to generate music tracks based upon patterns and colours of a movie. Undoubtedly a great way to generate royalty-free music very quickly, but if you want something that sounds a bit less synthesized, you’re better off using real music. Still one to watch.

More to follow…