1 Beyond News Flash: SMPTE Meeting Jan 19

1 Beyond, Inc., together with partner Sanbolic Inc., was recently selected by Hearst-Argyle Television and WCVB Boston for a pilot installation of new graphics workflow technology updating their WCVB Channel 5 Boston facility. The new graphics department workflow, proposed by 1 Beyond, replaces WCVB’s previous equipment and includes the 1 Beyond Harmony SAN™ and Redline Render Farm™ combined with fiber-attached 1 Beyond Artist Pro™ workstations powered by BlueFish444 capture cards.

The breakthrough approach to graphics workflow brings together the established strengths of render farms and high performance graphics workstations for the first time with SAN technology into a unified environment. All workstations and render engines can now simultaneously access the same assets in the central 1 Beyond Harmony SAN, controlled by the Sanbolic SAN software, as though they were on a local disk on each system. This is completely transparently to the user. Assets can be ingested once or those newly developed can be immediately accessed by all workstations eliminating the previous slow copying from one to another. This is especially relevant to solving the problems of large HD files. The complete graphics workflow including graphics development and rendering of Adobe After Effects and Alias Maya projects is performed without ever moving a file from one workstation to another or to the render engines, speeding the whole process significantly.

In addition, this 1 Beyond breakthrough results in a substantial productivity boost for the artists, as they no longer have to wait for rendering. They can now be continuously productive because the rendering is completely off-loaded to multiple render engines, resulting in much faster renders. This not only improves quality because fast turnaround allows additional refinement, but also means faster time to “Air”. Finally, the exclusive 1 Beyond 1 Touch Render™ software allows the artist to submit render jobs or check status with one click of the mouse, greatly simplifying and speeding up the submission process.

WCVB also chose the new 1 Beyond Silent Partner™ option which allows the high powered workstations to be rack mounted in an equipment closet with the SAN leaving the artist’s work environment noise free. The only things remaining on the artist’s desk are the tablet, CD/DVD burner, keyboard, mouse, USB Hub, and monitors.

To see this new technology in action, visit this years SMPTE NLE Update meeting on Jan 19th, 2005, hosted by WCVB Channel 5 Boston. WCVB will be giving tours of their new Graphics department complete with demonstrations allowing SMPTE members and guests to witness the newest graphics workflow technology from 1 Beyond first hand.

To find out more, call 1 Beyond, Inc. at 877-OneBeyond.

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