Cheltenham Festival Preview

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If you want two weeks of great music with some extremely thoughtful programming, the Cheltenham Music Festival (29th June-10th July) could be just the ticket. Aficionados of new music will find plenty to attract them.

Top billing, given that it comes hot-on-the-heels of the critical and popular success of Anna Nicole, goes to a welcome revival of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s first opera Greek. The piece, a translation of the Oedipus myth into Thatcherite East London, will be given by Music Theatre Wales as part of their wider tour of the work. There are also premières aplenty.

Some of these fit nicely into the festival’s ‘Music and Maths’ theme. The world première of Charlotte Bray’s Replay (June 30th), for example, was inspired by spherical geometry and will be played alongside an established work by Robert Saxton, A Yardstick to the Stars. The two composers will also give one of a number of talks during the festival exploring the ‘Maths and Music’ theme.  The mathematics of metre permeates much of the surface of another well-represented composer at the festival: Steve Reich. Cheltenham provides the opportunity to hear his seminal work Drumming (3rd July) as well as UK premières of new arrangements of Electric Counterpoint, Six Marimbas Counterpoint and Vermont Counterpoint (also 3rd July). Celebrated percussionist Evelyn Glennie performs in a concert that contains two, as yet unnamed, world premières from Joseph Phibbs and Hannah Kendall (1st July) whilst Arlene Sierra’s new work inspired by scientific studies of insect behaviour, Insects in Amber, will receive its European première by the Carducci Quartet (8th July).

Other premières fall less obviously into the festival’s overall themes, but are no less to be recommended. These include Ian Venables’ Remember This, based upon Andrew Motion’s elegy on the death of the Queen Mother (29th June); Edward Rushton’s Pandora, Organic Machine (10th July); Michael Berkeley’s Ode–In Memoriam (1st July) and, in a special event that will take place on September 11th, Richard Blackford’s substantial new work Not in our Time will mark 10 years since the 9/11 attacks in New York.

My source inside the festival tells me that tickets for the new music events are going quickly. Get yours soon…

For more details about these and other festival concerts visit: http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/music.

NAB 2011: DSC Labs Announces New Extreme Dynamic Range 1,000,000:1 Camera Evaluation Test System

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The self-illuminated Xyla 15™ (14 f-stop) and Xyla 21™ (20 f-stop) are designed to provide greater accuracy and flexibility when measuring dynamic range

Toronto, Canada – DSC Labs, an eco-friendly developer of innovative products for image quality improvement, is pleased to announce the latest addition to its current line of high dynamic range charts – the Xyla 15™ and Xyla 21™. While the Xylas are sophisticated tools that feature spectrophotometrically neutral grayscales and built-in regulated power supplies, they are remarkably intuitive and easy to use. Xylas attach to any ⅝ inch spigot light stand and provide built-in leveling. Xyla’s grayscale steps may be viewed as a full staircase, in groups or individually. This can be invaluable when comparing lens flare or other optical flares in a system.

“When testing a camera’s ability to capture minute amounts of light, in the case of Xyla 21 (more…)

Ramar Communications Taps Video Technics for MOS-Enabled HD News Production and Playout

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newsflow_600×310.jpgAtlanta, GA (April 12, 2011) – Video Technics Inc., a leading provider of IT-based broadcast solutions, today announced Ramar Communications selected the NewsFlow™ solution to initiate the next-generation digital transition for their stations based out of Lubbock, Texas. RAMAR is the parent company of FOX 34, FOX 34 NewsNOW, the FOX AccuWeather Channel, My Lubbock TV, the Lubbock CW, and Telemundo Lubbock.

When their older broadcast equipment began to fail, Ramar Communications asked Video Technics to ship a demo Apella server to their facility, have it remotely configured and get them up and running in record time. Exceptionally pleased with the responsiveness of the organization and how well the NewsFlow solution met their needs, Ramar purchased an end-to-end solution from Video Technics. With this new solution, the team at Ramar can now use their existing Avid and Adobe NLEs with the VT (more…)

NAB News: Internap Speeds Delivery of Web and Mobile Content across its CDN with XIP Acceleration

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This morning, Internap, a global provider of CDN and cloud services to a wide range of broadcast and media and entertainment companies, including Digital Sports Video, Rhapsody and GamersGate, announced that its Accelerated IP (XIP™) service will be incorporated into its global Content Delivery Network (CDN) to accelerate content delivery all the way to the end user device and across a greater number of network layers than traditional CDNs, resulting in a notable and immediate performance improvement for customers (without having to deploy any additional hardware/software to achieve this speedy delivery). The integration will significantly improve the delivery of video streaming and web content to a wide range of user devices, including mobile phones, tablets and PCs, resulting in 400% faster streaming and downloads.

For more info, click here to see the press release. Also, Internap is showing a (more…)

AmberFin and Matrox Deliver Integrated ProRes Ingest and Transcode Workflow – New development simplifies mezzanine format deployments

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AmberFin and Matrox Video Products Group today announced that support for the Apple ProRes codec has been integrated into the award-winning AmberFin iCR range, allowing iCR users to encode to ProRes during ingest and transcode to ProRes for delivery. This allows users of Final Cut Pro to benefit from the comprehensive range of iCR’s ingest, transcoding, review, QC, format conversion, and standards conversion toolset. AmberFin iCR products are powered by the Matrox Xmio2 card, part of the Matrox DSX family of developer products.“We are really excited that working with Matrox we have been able to bring something unique to the market,” AmberFin CTO, Bruce Devlin, commented. “iCR users can now automatically ingest all of the tapes in a Flexicart, provide mark up and quality control for ProRes assets, and transcode them with full 10-bit quality including up, down, and cross conversion.”

New Matrox DSX Developer Products to be Demonstrated at NAB 2011

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NAB 2011 – Las Vegas – April 10, 2011 –Matrox® Video Products Group today announced that two new cards and significant new software features have been added to the Matrox DSX™ Developer Products family. The new X.264io card is a PCIe card that offers an SDI input with an onboard H.264 hardware encoder and a single program transport stream ASI output. The new XMIO2/12/8K/D card features Matrox’s advanced motion adaptive deinterlacing technology and multi-directional anti-aliasing filtering which yields perfect progressive representations of interlaced fields. New software features include the following:

• Avid DNxHD support in the Matrox Flex Reader

• Native GXF file support in the Matrox Flex Reader

• TDIR support for MOV files (DV, XDCAM, MPEG2 IBP, ProRes)

• AAC support for proxy MOV files

• Timecode support for native and proxy H.264 MOV files

• Multi-stream, multi-bitrate WMV proxy generation for Intelligent Streaming

• 16-channel (more…)

MOTIVE WELCOMES BRIAN MCSWEENEY AS TECHNICAL DIRECTOR

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motive_brian-mcsweeney_email_cropped.jpgMcSweeney’s Expertise to Help Increase MOTIVE’s Services with Cutting-Edge Offerings Including Augmented Reality and QRC Code Development

NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 11, 2011 – MOTIVE, a transmedia company specializing in identity, branding, interactive, creative development and live action production for television, online, radio and print that transcends multiple media platforms, is pleased to announce the appointment of Brian McSweeney as technical director. McSweeney will spearhead the development of products based on such next-generation offerings as smart phone, iPad and Web apps and augmented reality, enabling MOTIVE clients to leverage technology breakthroughs to increase revenue and further grow their brands.

McSweeney brings with him a decade of experience designing and developing software for companies in the Internet, telecommunications and financial sectors, with a background in running development teams at major multinational companies and software startups. He will draw on this knowledge to (more…)

SSL Adds Functionality to C10 HD Compact Broadcast Console with New V3 Software

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New Feature Set Demonstrates Ongoing Development Strategy

LAS VEGAS – Solid State Logic is proud to announce new V3 Software for the innovative and industry-leading C10 HD Compact Broadcast Console at the 2011 NAB Show (Booth C3310). The new V3 software release introduces a range of new features and options that significantly expand the capability of the C10 HD, demonstrating the company’s ongoing development strategy. The C10 HD turned the industry upside down by delivering exceptional power at an attractive price point, and the legacy continues with the V3 software. (more…)

Matrox Announces Thunderbolt Enabled MXO2 Devices at NAB 2011

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NAB 2011 – Las Vegas – April 11, 2011–Matrox® Video Products Group today announced Matrox MXO2 devices featuring the all-new Thunderbolt™ technology developed by Intel® and brought to market with collaboration from Apple. Thunderbolt technology is a high-speed I/O technology running at 10 gigabits per second that brings together high-speed data transfer and high-definition (HD) display on to a single cable. It is currently available on the Apple MacBook Pro line. The Matrox MXO2 devices provide broadcast-quality video and audio capture, monitoring, output, and H.264 encoding for use with leading editing and content creation applications.

“Our original vision for the Matrox MXO2 product line was to bring audio/video connectivity and encoding functionality outside the computer to provide video professionals with portable, future-proof solutions,” said Alberto Cieri, senior director of sales and marketing at Matrox. “Thunderbolt technology builds on that vision, giving our customers (more…)

Matrox Announces Support for Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 Production Premium Software

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NAB 2011 – Las Vegas – April 11, 2011 – Matrox® Video Products Group today announced support for Adobe® Creative Suite® 5.5 Production Premium software with the Matrox MXO2 family of I/O devices. The award-winning Matrox MXO2 devices provide cross-platform Mac and Windows support and can be easily moved among desktop systems in a facility, installed in an OB van, or taken on the road with a laptop. Key features include: full-resolution, full frame rate, multi-layer, realtime video editing via Matrox RT™ technology; lightning fast H.264 file creation for smart phones, iPad, the web, and Blu-ray via Matrox MAX™ technology; and professional audio and video input and output with 10-bit hardware up/down/cross conversion. In addition, the Matrox MXO2 devices ship with a variety of productivity enhancing applications: Matrox A/V Tools (PC) for fast capture/ playback of audio, video, and still frames, Matrox (more…)