Our 2003 showcase moved back to WCVB-TV's main studio - New England's largest soundstage! We had more exhibits than ever before, including some new products that had never been seen at this event before.

This was a unique opportunity to see some of the most sophisticated editing, effects, animation and compositing systems on the market. These include specialized systems for news production, HDTV, film and web-streaming. All systems were be available for hands-on use with technical personnel from the manufacturers to explain and answer questions.

Among the products there:

• Discreet Smoke and Flint
• Avid Unity LANshare, a cost effective, Ethernet-based shared storage system
• Avid Xpress DV - Software based, editing on a laptop (connected to LANshare)
• Avid NewsCutter XP mobile, Software based news editing on a laptop (connected to LANshare)
• Apple Final Cut Pro on OS X with Cinema Tools and CineWave (uncompressed)
• Accom Affinity uncompressed realtime NLE with realtime RGB color correction and hardware control panel
• HDTV editing with Pinnacle CineWave HD
• Pinnacle Liquid Blue, Silver and Purple networked to Thunder
• DPS Velocity with realtime 3D effects and web streaming
• Eyeon Digital Fusion advanced flow-based compositing software
• 1 Beyond system and laptop
• Newtek Video Toaster 2
• Two Grass Valley/Vibrint/Thomson NewsEdit laptop systems networked together
• Canopus
• Media 100's new system!
• New!: Hitachi broadcast-spec dockable DVD Camcorder with Premiere ingest/edit station
• New!: Quantel Qeditpro, Qcut and sQserver!
• New!: Envivio MPEG-4 authoring, streaming and broadcasting tools!

A special highlight: The folks from WCVB-TV showed off their new HDTV editing suite! This Avid DS|HD Editor room is used to assemble uncompressed HD Chronicle episodes. Chronicle editor Art Donahue showed his latest project and explain the challenges of HD post-production.

I should end this description with a note of special thanks to WCVB-TV for allowing us to use their studio for this event. And to Paul Beck, Master of Ceremonies, who provided the excellent eats!