Linux sata driver

Byline: Dan Ochiva

The Best Deal in OS X Rendering?

Apple wants to make a deal with current Shake users running the compositing and effects package on Linux, IRIX, or Windows: Move to the new Shake 3 on OS X and, for no additional charge, the Cupertino, Calif.-based company will double the number of your existing Shake render licenses. (Apple stopped development on PC versions of Shake, while pricing the IRIX and Linux versions some $5,000 more than the $4,950 OS X version.)

Shake employs a tree- or node-style compositing model, which busy feature-film effects houses, such as London's The Moving Picture Company, favor for its speed and flexible nonlinear workflow. Version 3 adds audio file support (view and slip audio tracks), Photoshop layer import (preserves original layers), support for 10-bit YUV and DPX formats, and trackable paint and roto tools. www.apple.com/shake

Powerful, Low-Cost Audio NLE

Will Adobe Audition do for audio post what the company's After Effects software did for motion graphics? When Adobe After Effects launched some 10 years ago, the desktop graphics, compositing, and motion effects software delivered high-quality, low-cost results that changed the post industry. (See "Fade to Black," January 2003, for more on the history of After Effects.)

Audition, released in July, delivers realtime audio recording, mixing, and mastering for a low $299 (Windows only). The versatile GUI, which allows quick customization, employs Adobe's standardized interface.

Although a number of lower-cost audio NLE programs exist, Adobe's rep for bulletproof coding - along with Audition's integration with the new, redesigned Premiere Pro NLE - could make many facilities give the software a closer look. Features include a highly flexible timeline layout, extensive mastering and analysis tools, and audio restoration. There's support for sample rates in excess of 192kHz as well as for files with up to 32-bit depth. All internal processing also runs at 32 bits. While more than 45 DSP tools and effects come with the audio NLE, Audition also accepts any of the hundreds of VST-standard plug-ins. www.adobe.com/audition

Brew Your Own Serial ATA RAID

For PCs, Serial ATA (or SATA) connected IDE drives are coming, replacing the long-in-the-tooth parallel ATA hard drive I/O. SATA-based systems offer higher throughput (up to 150MB, instead of 100MB), greater scalability, and smaller connectors with thinner cabling (think fewer skinned knuckles when changing drives).

Longtime connector card maker Adaptec provides a versatile SATA controller, the four-port 2410SA. Plug this card into a PC for a straightforward method to build a RAID array. More good news: SATA drives cost less than SCSI-connected ones. Milpitas, Calif.-based Adaptec automates setup by building in data protection and data availability firmware. According to the company, this enables quick creation of internal and external storage as well as storage area networks. www.adaptec.com

While Wacom's Graphire3 pen tablets don't offer the 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity of its pro Intuous line, the new family of tablets adds a larger 6"x8" working surface to its entry-level 4"x5" model. While the 6"x8" lists at $199, it still offers Wacom's unique wireless pen technology, while adding a redesigned mouse that's smaller and moves much more smoothly than before. www.wacom.com

Motion Graphics by Subscription

In gourmet cooking, to turn out a good meal in a limited amount of time you sometimes need to buy a basic but well-made stock and then tweak it to work in your recipe. In a similar fashion, 12 Inch Design's ProductionBlox offer a royalty-free library of moving and still motion graphics that can serve as the basis of a project. Users then manipulate the stock elements - full-screen animated backgrounds with matching static left, right, and lower thirds - for the desired look.

The Phoenix-based company doesn't just toss together simple designs; the static elements come in five variations (clean, blurred, drop shadow, blurred drop shadow, and gradiated transparency), all with alpha channel, in either SD or HD resolutions. More variety comes from the included CustoMattes, fullscreen animated mattes that combine with other Blox elements to create custom animated elements, such as animated lower thirds.

Now, 12 Inch Design offers an annual subscription plan for SD ($999; both PAL and NTSC) and HD ($2,799; 1080i and 24p). The company sends along new volumes every three months; subscribers receive the new material some three months before the general public. www.12inchdesign.com

ATI Ups the Ante

For animators and graphics creators, the current graphics card market couldn't be better. Fierce competition continues among the big three GPU providers - 3Dlabs, ATI, and Nvidia - to deliver the speediest, most capable, and cost-effective workstation cards.

At Siggraph, Nvidia introduced its new flagship Quadro FX3000 card, which builds around the NV35GL, the first Nvidia GPU to employ a 256-bit memory interface and 256MB of unified frame-buffer RAM.

ATI came back with its own top-of-the-line entry at the show; its FireGL X2-256 also delivers 256MB of speedy DDR RAM via a new 256-bit memory interface. FireGL features include 128 bits of floating-point precision (offers maximum headroom for graphics imaging), dual DVI output (for multimonitor support), core memory running at 378MHz, and eight parallel pixel pipelines.

ATI redoubles its efforts to lead in graphics with the recent establishment of a Santa Clara, Calif.-based design team to supplement its Ontario coders. Already the California team, aimed at developing workstation GPUs, helped address ATI's problematic driver design. Similar to Nvidia's strategy, ATI will now employ a single unified driver architecture for all its cards. www.ati.com

Who knew there were so many ways to light things up? B&H Photo knows. The New York-based retail house now provides the fifth version of The Professional Lighting Sourcebook. The free 824-page manual contains product info on almost every brand of lighting gear (covering tungsten, HMI, fluorescent, strobe), illustrations of lighting rigs, descriptions of batteries, illustrations of grip gear, and more. For a copy, call (800) 947-9927 or visit www.bhphotovideo.com.

FCP 4 Gets the Support It Needs

More than just a simple upgrade, Apple's Final Cut Pro4 offers a long list of very useful chops, including advanced audio scoring tools, professional titling, the ability to cut for film and 24p, and lots of realtime effects.

Realtime, that is, if you have the right hardware. Aurora Video Systems says it delivers on that promise with the release of a new software driver for the RT Extreme engine, the heart of its popular IgniterX family of video capture and editing cards. Tim McMahon, CTO of the Sterling Heights, Mich.-based company, says the driver enables render-free playback of full-screen effects, includes support for up to seven concurrent tracks in realtime, and delivers a "true implementation of 24fps film support." www.auroravideosys.com

Fast and Easy Animation from Your Timeline

StageTools makes simple-to-use graphics plug-ins that speed nonlinear editing because editors deploy the programs directly from the NLE's timeline. The Middleburg, Va.-based company's MovingPicture plug-in, for example, delivers panning and zooming on hi-res images "a la Ken Burns" from almost all of today's popular editing software. This and the company's other programs also come in standalone versions.

Now, StageTools' MovingParts animation plug-in enables editors to overlay animated images directly onto video from the NLE's timeline. Editors can quickly create animatics because it's easy to move, size, and rotate the images. There's support for the image's alpha channel, helpful when animating logos. Because all motion occurs with sub-pixel precision, the results are smooth. MovingParts will move, size, and rotate up to 32 independent images. Need a unique brush? Brush any of the moving images to create effects like blurring and pixelization for highlighting or obscuring parts of the video. www.stagetools.com

Adobe Premiere Plug-in Delivers HD Editing

HD editing doesn't need pricey, specialized workstations. Macs, for example, do it by running Pinnacle's CineWave card. Now, according to Carlsbad, Calif.-based CineForm, today's fast PCs can edit HD in realtime even without hardware-accelerated video cards.

CineForm's Aspect HD Carlsbad technology, a patent-pending video codec and video effects engine, works as a plug-in with Adobe Premiere 6.5 and the latest Premiere Pro. The software requires a 2.8GHz or higher Pentium 4, CPUs that employ Intel's Hyper Threading technology. It's the parallel processing and multi-threaded architecture of these chips that the Carlsbad technology exploits.