ECONOMICS

Discreet, a division of Autodesk, today announced that Dave Smith, formerly creative director at The Mill, London, and owner of the new post-production facility Absolute Post, has purchased two Discreet flame 8.5 visual effects systems running on SGI's high-performance Tezro visual workstation, as well as four of Discreet's burn rendering solution. Absolute Post has opened in Soho, London, the epicentre of high-end post production in the UK. The company will deploy its flame systems to service clients in the UK and US advertising production markets. Absolute Post's flame systems are networked with four burn background renderers to increase speed and productivity, and to enable its digital artists to express new ideas quickly in client sessions. Smith, a flame artist for over 10 years, has a string of international credits for leading brands including Nescafé, Honda, Nissan, Ford and Perfect Day, and regularly works with renowned directors such as Gerard de Thame, Gregory Rood and Paul Street. Whilst he will continue to drive flame on major projects, Absolute Post will nurture a new generation of visual effects talent, eager to develop and express their creativity using Discreet technology. "flame is the ultimate effects and compositing system, and the only choice for a creatively driven facility like ours," said Dave Smith. "New features in flame 8.5, like Master Keyer and Batch processing, combined with the speed advantages delivered by Tezro and burn rendering, mean that we can turn jobs round faster than ever before. With this set-up our artists also have the power to visualise new ideas really fast in sessions with clients." Discreet's flame is one of the most popular online visual effects systems in the post-production industry, offering customers outstanding performance and Academy Award(R)-winning compositing tools. flame 8.5 on Tezro provides data processing rates that are up to 60 percent faster than on the Silicon Graphics Octane2(TM) workstation. Along with the leap in processing performance delivered by Tezro, flame 8.5 builds on the advanced media player, monitor calibration and film tools, extended I/O, conform and archiving tools delivered in version 8 with a range of new features. New in flame 8.5 are Discreet's Master Keyer; 10-bit RGB media support and real-time 2K and 3K playback (on the Tezro); an improved Colour Warper; advanced GMask Gradients added to Discreet Keyer; new Logic Ops options (for transparency, blend and divide); additional burn-in capabilities added to Burn-In Tool; EDL Editor enhancements and expanded conform tools including EDL conversion; multi-tape archiving capabilities and archiving to 720P tape. As with previous versions, flame 8.5 supports Discreet's burn(TM) background processing solution. Discreet's Master Keyer is based on powerful new algorithms that enable artists to interact more directly with the image yet provide the intelligence to guide the keying process with greater sophistication and precision. burn delivers no less than double the offline rendering performance of complex visual effects, allowing post production artists to stay focused on the creative process while concurrently augmenting their productivity.