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Archive for April, 2009

End of the Show- See you at IBC?

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

It’s been a fantastic week at NAB in Las Vegas.  Not only did we get a brilliant range of visitors to our stand, but pretty much everyone took the time to find out all about our project.  Though the show was down oin visitor numbers, those who were there, were there to do business.  We’ve come away with lot’s to catch up on in terms of development of the software and exploring the exploitation and productisation phase of the project, and there’s a real urgency behind delivering systems and services for user to put into action.

Of course, NAB was only really a warm up show for us!  It’s been our intention to show off the full finished research project at IBC for some years now, so stay tuned for updates on that show.  We’re looking into potential stand partners there, and defining what our presence should be exactly, but do stay in touch and we’ll see you in September!

P.S.  Email is now working well so if you have emailed us via the site earlier, and not had a response, do please try again.

Talk to us! (again, sorry!)

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

Thanks so much to all of you to have come by the stand, got in touch via twitter, or emailed us. Unfortunately we’ve had a glitch with our email service, so if you’ve dropped us an email in the last couple of days could we ask you to try again?

Our email (now fully functional) is enquiries@avatar-m.org.uk.

AVATAR-m in Conference

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

If AVATAR-m and archiving in general of interest then we strongly recommend you come along to the session today in which Dr Matthew Addis is presenting our latest white paper: A Service Oriented Approach to Online Digital Audiovisual Archive.

The session is being held in Las Vegas Convention Center: S226/227, and runs from 1pm to 4.30pm.

Our white paper will be available for download later today.

Last chance to see!

Thursday, April 23rd, 2009

We’re rolling into the final day of what has been a tremendously exciting and worthwhile NAB09 for us.  For the next five hours you can still come along to SU7235 and see the demonstration of our groundbreaking archive managment software, and discuss with the developers and researchers themselves how we might potentially cooperate in the future.  If you think this might be of use to you, please do come along today- we do have colleagues based in the US, but we’ll not be bringing these demonstrations over again, and unless you’ll be at IBC 09 in september, this really could be the last chance to see.

Day 2- The Wide World of Archive

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

According to many of the people we’ve spoken too the NAB show this year is less busy than in times past- unsurprisingly.  However, it’s really only in terms of numbers.  We’ve been non-stop on the AVATAR-m stand, talking to people interested in archiving from across the whole spectrum of A/V interest.  It seems that everyone, from digital cinema, to broadcast, to scientific data curation is facing the problems we’re trying to solve, and all of them are coming to see us!

When we get the chance, we’re meeting with other exhibitors too- both to understand better where other components of themedia infrastructure ecology are headed, and to see where our research and innovation can make a real difference.  Plus, there’s a helicopter in the next hall- cool!

Day 2- Rebuilds!

Tuesday, April 21st, 2009

We’d always accommodated to potential to upgrade the software after the big demo rigs were shipped to the US, and this morning we took advantage of the lull caused by the breakdown of the Vegas monorail to rebuild the aStor machines.  Picture below shows Richard and Mark hard at work rebuilding the storage stacks as Stuart diverts attention.

day2-set-up

First Impressions of NAB

Monday, April 20th, 2009

It’s lunchtime on day one of our NAB adventure, and worth taking a moment to reflect on how it’s going.  We’ve had a few very interested visitors to our stand, mostly from people who are facing the archiving challenges that led to us starting this project.  That’s really encouraging, and we’ve been really gratified to see how our technologies are recognised as being so potentially useful. In fact as the morning has gone on we’ve had more and more visitor, and most have stayed for quite a while- a good sign we think!

However, the mission here has also been about how we can find potential future exploitation partners, so we need to start making those connections.   Exibitors and visitors who are looking at the next generation of their products and how they can meet this growing need are being hunted down as I type this, by gret shirt wearing ‘Avartites’.

Of course, we’re still halfway through an R&D project too.  Thanks to Jim and Bryan on the Frontporch/Samma stand too for the pointer to the AXF work of SMPTE, we’ll be following up that lead this week.  We’ll also be investigating how we can optimise integration with productiuon environments large and small (including the much rumoured, but as yet un-announced, new version of Final Cut Pro).

NAB Opens Today

Monday, April 20th, 2009

We’re really looking forward to meeting people at NAB this week, which opens in just under four hours. We’ll be in the South Upper hall, on stand SU 7235, and we’ll also be tweeting as ‘avatarm’. See you at the show- and remember, you can follow NAB tweets with the following three hashtags: #NAB, #NAB09, and #NABSHOW.  (No, we don’t know why there are three tags either).

Touch Down

Sunday, April 19th, 2009

Right, if all has gone to plan the entire team will now be in Vegas. Ant and Rajitha from the BBC, Greg, Andy and Lee from ODS have just flown in, and Tim, Stuart, Mark and Anne from Xyratex, and Richard from ITInnovations have been setting up on SU7235 for the last few days. So, if you’re in the hall and finishing your set up too, good luck, and if you’re comming along to the show tomorrow we hope to see you soon.

Film now in Vimeo HD

Saturday, April 18th, 2009

By popular request we’ve now uploaded a version of our film in HD on the Public Documents page.  As many people have pointed out, the animation is really only done justice at higher def- thankfully we’re taking Bluray to show on the Stand- come see at SU7235.