MIDDLEWARE

Discreet, a division of Autodesk, Inc., today announced that Universal Images, a leading post-production company based in Southfield, Michigan, has signed a multi-million dollar agreement to standardize its entire facility on Discreet's state-of-the-art visual effects, editing and finishing solutions. "We are extremely impressed with Discreet's vision and direction. Few manufacturers understand the needs of both the artist and the facility owner so completely, and only Discreet creates the innovative post-production solutions that give our artists unsurpassed creative outlets, while providing a powerful workflow that differentiates our business," said Chris Laport, President of Universal Images. "No other systems come close to Discreet in terms of the sheer performance, workflow, creative capabilities, and therefore productivity. For this reason we decided to upgrade to smoke from our Avid DS|HD systems and remove our Quantel Edit boxes from our facility -- and become a business with a complete Discreet workflow." The purchase was concluded after an extensive review of the latest solutions from a range of manufacturers at the International Broadcasting Conference (IBC) trade show last month that resulted in the elimination of all non-Discreet editing and effects solutions. "We are delighted that Universal Images is standardizing on Discreet products," said Paul Lypaczewski, general manager of Discreet and executive vice-president of Autodesk, Inc. "Our innovative and cost-effective solutions will help them to benefit rapidly from the growing need for high-definition content. Once again, this contract supports our vision of Discreet as the standard for delivering creativity and productivity to post-production facilities around the world." Universal Images' High-Definition (HD) and Standard Definition (SD) production capabilities will be given a significant boost with the addition of six new smoke(R) HD finishing systems, while also benefiting from facility-wide upgrades to its existing two smoke systems, inferno(R) and four flame(R) visual effects design systems. By also adding backdraft(R), Discreet's media management application, Universal Images will be able to implement leading edge networking, background I/O, archiving, and file sharing in an uncompressed media environment. Universal Images is also expanding its productivity in visual effects design with the addition of burn(R), Discreet's new background rendering solution. Finally, Universal Images will be upgrading their existing SGI(R) platforms with the purchase of 13 Silicon Graphics(R) Tezro(TM) visual workstations. Combined with the smoke, flame and backdraft solutions, Universal Images will be able to deliver to their clients unprecedented levels of performance at any resolution. Universal Images was particularly impressed by the powerful new creative tools of smoke 6, unveiled at IBC, and the performance of the new Silicon Graphics Tezro visual workstation. The smoke 6 system includes Discreet's next-generation Master Keyer and Total Resolution Freedom: new capabilities that enable media of any resolution, aspect ratio and frame rate to be edited together in a single timeline and mastered in any format. smoke 6 on the Tezro workstation ensures that clients like Universal Images have a forward-looking solution for the increasingly growing number of High-Definition assignments.