CompuServe Messages

Mike, I just got back from the Third International Avid User's Group Conference in Florida. The Avid is the most popular nonlinear editing system used in the high-end production industry (the Harrison Ford movie _Clear and Present Danger_ was cut on it, for instance, and Lucas's ILM uses it for a lot of stuff as well). The Avid comes in various implementations for editing film and video. My largest client has an Avid system which it uses for editing large-scale industrials for commercial clients. At the moment I'm trying to come up with a good way to import Imagine animations into the Avid system. The Avid will import and export sequences of Mac .PICT files, so it would seem that the best way is to use Adpro to convert Imagine output from either rbg8 or iff24 files into pict files, write them to a mac formatted photo optical drive and port them across that way. The Avid will also read and use an alpha channel; evidentally the Mac .PICT format is a full 32-bit file format that includes the alpha channel data with each image file. In the next version of Imagine, what are the chances that there will be alpha channel data that I can supply to the Avid? It would be EXTREMELY cool (for want of a better term) to be able to do this, as it would mean staying in the digital realm throughout each stage of production (after the initial capture). Any thoughts would be appreciated. BTW, Avid Technology and several other vendors have created yet another file format called "OMF" (Open Media Framework) which is intended for the import/export of video, audio and sequence data at a very high level (e.g., network television, features, etc). If you're interested I can send you some data and get you in touch with the right people at Avid; let me know. OMF is public domain; there are no licensing fees although they do charge a one-time $500 fee for the toolkit, including sourcecode for various platforms. They don't require purchase of the toolkit, though obviously it makes things easier. Pete