March 17, 2009
New Digital PowerHouse Provides RED Raw Access, Grading, and Recording Direct From Shared Storage.
Coral Springs, FL — da Vinci Systems, LLC announced the release of a landmark solution designed to support color grading of native RED Raw files with the company's R-series color enhancement systems. da Vinci's new Digital PowerHouse provides direct access to RED .r3d files, saving time and ensuring maximum output quality by enabling colorists to utilize the full dynamic color and density range of the original camera files.
The integration of Digital PowerHouse with da Vinci's existing technologies now allows colorists to read RED Raw files directly from shared storage and then decode, debayer, grade, and record to tape without rendering. This eliminates the need for an interim DPX conversion step, low-quality non-debayered workflows, or time-consuming selective debayering.
"da Vinci's Digital PowerHouse is a significant leap forward for digital motion picture grading," said Dean Lyon, da Vinci Systems' vice president of marketing. "Our digital film camera solution enables colorists to work with 4k and other resolutions natively and interactively to achieve the premium quality demanded by commercial and motion picture directors. Direct interaction with camera raw files is the future of the digital film workflow, and Digital PowerHouse introduces this capability at an excellent price-performance point."
Digital PowerHouse is available in three different software-and-hardware configurations based on da Vinci's R-200, R-300, and stereoscopic R-3D and R-4K color grading systems. The bundled technologies allow colorists to scale their workflows to use any quality setting from the best (4096 x 2048 native "premium" resolution at 24fps debayered) to the quickest (quarter-resolution at 24fps non-debayered). A software-only option (Option DP0) is available to all Resolve and R-series customers with active support agreements. The single-server configuration (Option DP1) provides faster decode speeds on R-200 through R-350 series systems, while the dual-server configuration (Option DP2) supports near instantaneous decoding and real-time performance on the R-4K system.
"The elegant simplicity of the da Vinci digital film solution enables colorists to take RED files directly from the camera's hard drive, load them on a SAN, and immediately begin grading," Lyon said. "Whether they grade in full- or partial-resolution and at a certain frame rate depends on their hardware configuration. Regardless of this configuration, Digital PowerHouse allows colorists to access the RED Raw files interactively, leveraging the entire dynamic range of the image data. Alternative technologies leave a portion of color behind during conversion, limiting grading to a more narrow range of color and density."
Additional benefits of the Digital PowerHouse system include the ability to:
• Leverage Resolve's direct-to-SAN interface for simplified file management, versioning, and disk storage requirements.
• Obtain real-time performance with the best quality possible by using the native RED Raw format and da Vinci's legendary Transformer technology.
• Conform directly from RED files using absolute or edge timecode.
• Read Avid or Final Cut Pro EDLs with long reel names for conforming and selects grading.
• Convert file formats from RED Raw to DPX, as well as several other formats.
More information on Digital PowerHouse and da Vinci's full line of color grading systems is available at www.davsys.com.
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