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Michaele Ford
Big Pic Media
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PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Pandora bring new apps for Pluto and more to NAB 2012
London: March 20, 2012… Widely recognized for its industry-leading line of colour processing systems, Pandora International will be showing the latest apps available for the Pluto Image Processor at NAB 2011, April 16-19 in Las Vegas. Pandora has spent the past year applying real effort and investment to a new product philosophy based on over 25 years of colour processing knowledge and a desire to apply the best software, firmware techniques and ally them to hardware specifically designed for the purpose.
“The new products and developments re-iterate the Pandora philosophy for image processing and colour management workflows in real time or faster,” said Adam Welsh, Sales Director for Pandora.
Pandora has adopted an architecture that enables them to utilize the latest image processing hardware that far surpasses the performance of the latest CPU/GPU hardware. This architecture allows Pandora to tackle the problems in today’s Post Production and Production workflows that are still causing the creative process to stall.
With image quality improving so fast and with higher resolutions and bit depth file sizes are getting bigger and more difficult to handle as well as the expectation that these images need to be instantly viewed and manipulated and Pandora are addressing this with hardware that keeps pace with these demands.
The first product borne from this new technology is PLUTO
PLUTO – Image Processing
Based on the Pandora Reconfigurable Processing Unit [RPU] originally developed for the Revolution colour corrector, Pluto technology provides an incredible amount of processing power in a cost effective and compact package.
Currently a number of image processing applications that are designed to be easy to operate and real time can be hosted on a single Pluto RPU node.
These include On-Set Look management with the application of 1D/3D/1D Look Up table chains as well as ASC-CDL and soon to be Primary and Secondary Grading capability.
LUT’s and CDL’s can be exported as part of an ALE to allow integration in standard dailies and post production work flows.
PLUTO can also be used as a display calibration tool for Profile Generation as well as calibration LUT hosting.
Other PLUTO applications include 3D Stereoscopic processing to combine formats with dual 3D LUT’s, Cursor and Blanking Generation and many more to come.
New to Pluto at NAB is PLUTO RUGGED, with the system in a small rugged casing for On-Set and non rack mount use.
Future developments for this technology include faster than real time, multi camera de-bayering [de-mosaicing] of High Resolution images from new technology cameras, colour management and faster than real time transcoding and high quality compression algorithms.
Prototype designs [beta testing at the moment] include multi-node processor cards with PCIexpress Gen 3 and multi-10Gbs interconnect capabilities.
Pluto technology is also offered to other OEM’s as a hardware and or software design service.
Pandora would like anyone interested in partnering with them for beta testing of this technology to visit their booth at NAB to discuss the roadmap.
Revolution – Real time data and video grading
“Pandora’s Revolution colour corrector is the choice of the high-end post facilities such as the Mill, Framestore, Glassworks and Prime Focus, amongst many others. The Revolution, still has unsurpassed speed for Arri Alexa RAW, Sony F65 and Red R3D as well a film workflows with the most advanced and accurate colour correction available.
Because of Revolutions undoubted efficiency we can still apply this for linear video workflows if that is what is required for example archive or restoration workflows or tape to tape requirements.
PSi – Breathing new life into old Spirits
The PSi Spirit interface that can be installed in any Spirit Classic or Shadow telecine enabling dramatically faster scanning to 2K DPX files. The system provides users with full video monitoring, as well as simultaneous video and file transcoding capability for SD/HD or offline versioning. PSi can be added to an SD machine providing an instant upgrade to 2K and HD capability.
“The PSi is a simple upgrade that does not require any internal modifications to the Spirit or Shadow,” explained Welsh. “The speed of the system easily provides you with processing that meets the rates that can be achieved for video in 2k data ”
More and more people are turning to the Spirit Classic for low cost, high efficiency film scanning with PSi.
PILOT – Controller for Telecine, VTRs and Image Processors
PILOT is designed to give post houses a professional system controller for telecine, VTR and image processors with reliable edit control and an intuitive GUI. The system controls all parameters of the machine from a professional high-grade T3 control panel.
“PILOT is designed to allow customers to grow with Pandora’s award-winning colour correction technology as their business grows,” said Welsh.
Pandora will be exhibiting (booth# SL11508) at the Las Vegas Convention Center, April 16-19. For more information, please contact Adam Welsh at +44 1279 758285 or adam_welsh@pandora-int.com
About Pandora
Pandora International Limited is a pioneer in the design and manufacture of high speed image processing and colour management for the worldwide postproduction and production industries. . Pandora has been pushing the boundaries of technology for over 25 years and is dedicated to creating technologies crafted from the wish list of the engineers, artists and producers. Pandora is a privately held company based in London. For more information, visit http://www.pandora-int.com/
