#DraCo & VLAB at NAB
4 messages in this thread
Did anyone have the opportunity to see Macrosystems new DraCo video and
graphics workstation at NAB? I read that they were going to present their
system using VLAB Motion.
Sure thing Bryan. The DraCo was at NAB (in Jim Plant's VTU World) and
it does work. They had Workbench, Adpro, Image FX and PageStream
running and it was more stable (and much faster) than my A4000. It is
68060 based, although they hadn't totally finished the caches or FPU
support. Considering the project started from scratch in December,
the prototype was finished two weeks ago and the emulation code
(10,000 + lines) was finished two days before the show, it ran
extremely well. Might see it on the market by summer. For more info,
I'm pulling writing duty at TV Technology and I covered all the
Amiga/Video Toaster news for our post-NAB issue (going to press real
soon now.) We'll also cover the box in depth in Computer Video
sometime around SIGGRAPH.
PS If you contact Eric Kloor at NoahJi's (MacroSystems' U.S.
distributor) at 303-499-1975 he has some literature he's made up..
That sounds very good. Does this mean there may be some future for the Amiga
or perhaps an Amiga clone. I'm considering purchasing VLAB motion for the
Amiga, and I would like to think that I'm investing into something with a
future.
Whether there is a viable future for a revived Amiga remains an open
question. And I am as big an Amiga fan as anyone. As one Video
Toaster dealer told me though, you can't take a year off from the
computer business. Amiga animators seem very interested in Alpha
machines. The DraCo has a 32-bit slot for a future Alpha
co-processor. Video Toaster folks might gravitate towards NewTek's
new VT for Windows (although at $9995 it isn't the Toaster we knew).
But as a portable digital field recorder, essentially a Flyer system
which runs in batteries, it is a industry first.
As for the VLab Motion: The Draco is designed to run that system, and
it uses good old AmigaDOS. You won't have to buy 32 MB of RAM just to
multitask on NT! Hard to say in this industry, but it looks like it
could be around for a while. Apparently a lot of companies who used
to make expensive black box systems which had Amigas hidden inside
have approached MacroSystems wanting to buy its Amiga-clone
processing card as an OEM part. This could help finance the DraCo
standalone. I've been promised one of the five prototypes to play with
this summer, at that point we'll know more.
John Spofford
Computer Video
PS: The Play Inc. folks in California (ex-NewTek, Digital Creations
and Progressive Image) are trying to make a Pentium as video friendly
as the Amiga. My best guess it will take them a year. But what
they've shown so far is very impressive. They scared the pants off a
lot of large video companies at NAB. I'll be visiting in a couple of
weeks, should be interesting.