To lease or buy: Rental houses, resellers and system integrators can help guide you through the world of evolving technology

Post, April, 2002 by Edmond M. Rosenthal

In the ensuing 10 years, the evolution of the editing room has made technical support even more vital. Margolis notes that today's editing systems can do more (which means they need to talk to other platforms), they can hold more material (which means networking and organizing storage) and the migration to HD means a new workflow and a new way to finish.

Runway has responded by adding a higher level of service: the technical advisor. "A technical advisor is part of our package," says Margolis. "Our consultant works closely with clients to ascertain how much and what kind of media is coming in, how it will be shared, time for turn around and delivery requirements. We help clients with media management, broadband connections and the workflow for HD. Our technical advisor, in away, becomes part of the 'editing team, filling in the knowledge gaps. In the end we make sure our clients get the right tools for the job."

Getting into your customer's business

SOMERVILLE, MA -- For 1 Beyond (www.1beyond.com), it was no longer enough to service customers by manufacturing and integrating PC-based multimedia and digital video editing systems and associated products. It had to get into its customers' business as well.

According to president Terry Cullen, the new production and post operation is essentially a means of seeing things from the customer's point of view. Its projects, more heavily in post, are taken on with the thought of "helping us to design better systems and to guide us in counseling our customers," he explains.

What the company is seeing is a changing state-of-the-art for post professionals, broadcasters and filmmakers. One demand that needs to be serviced, Cullen says, is the ability to do such things as color correction, exposure control and titling in realtime. Another is to do realtime rendering in full resolution, full color depth and full frames per second, something that wasn't possible less than a year ago. Lossless editing in native DV is another demand. Cullen notes many systems are still working in M-JPEG, a lossy codec.

Part of 1 Beyond's job is making clients aware of the improvements in these areas. And, of course, delivering the appropriate product is part of its business. It is offering systems for as little as $4,000 that perform all of these functions.

A recent development at 1 Beyond is the integration of dual Intel Xeon Pentium 4 processors into its line of native-DV nonlinear editing systems. These can be configured with such realtime editing systems as Avid, Canopus, Matrox and Pinnacle. Cullen says the systems support high computational demand tasks such as animation and a higher level of realtime effects. A complete turnkey system of this type ranges from $8,645 to $11,495.