At a pre-NAB press briefing, Quantel announced Quattro, a new software upgrade shipping later this month that will make Quantel's eQ, iQ and Pablo friendlier to Final Cut Pro projects and enable 1080p60 and 1080p50 post workflows on the iQ and Pablo.
With the Quattro upgrade, Quantel products will support AAF-based conform of Final Cut Pro offline projects, maintaining transitions, text, layer opacity, and DVE effects. Sweetening the pot, Quantel just struck a deal with Automatic Duck to give all eQ, iQ and Pablo Quattro owners a free copy of the Duck's Pro-Export plug-in for Final Cut Pro, which provides AAF output.
Also part of the Quattro software upgrade — no new hardware is required — is support for 1080p60 and 1080p50 workflows, providing new post options to match the 1080p60-capable cameras now on the market.
Quattro also introduces what Quantel calls a “resolution co-existent multilayer timeline.” According to Director of Marketing Steve Owen, that means owners can work with SD, HD, and 2K files all on the same timeline, in the same or different layers, in real time with no rendering.
Quantel also introduced the new Neo control panel for Pablo, which stresses simplicity (menus are no longer buried in a complicated tree, but are accessible through single button-pushes) and ease of use (40 different LED displays provide user feedback). The system is easily switchable between right-handed and left-handed operation.
Quantel has also helped implement double-speed transfer from HDCAM SR in a partnership with Sony and TV Globo in Brazil, which produces HDCAM SR telenovelas on an extremely short schedule, sometimes shooting and transmitting on the same day. Support for the double-speed playback option on Sony's SRW-5800 deck is now standard on the iQ and Pablo 2K and 4K.
Owen addressed the 3D market with enthusiasm, declaring, “It's really, really happening now.” More than 6000 people have attended a Quantel road show on 3D, and more than 1000 made reservations for the company's 3D theater demo at NAB this week. New at NAB is support for simultaneous left-eye and right-eye ingest, which cuts the load time for 3D footage effectively in half. Quantel has installed 17 stereo-capable systems in Europe, Japan and the U.S., Owen said, including three at Fotokem, which worked on the recent Hannah Montana concert film.
Also new at the show are some refinements to the Genetic Engineering shared-storage system, including the ability to archive via the system's Sam data server, LUT burn-in and an additional option for 2K infrastructure instead of just HD and 4K.
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