Skip links

Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

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

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.

Film Launched

Friday, April 17th, 2009

We’re delighted to be able to show our new promotional film for the project here for the first time. Available to view on the Public Documents page, and hosted on Vimeo, our film introduces the business and technical challenges we’re seeking to address with the project, and technical experts from across the consortium outline the innovations they are bringing to the effort.  We’d like to thank the guys at Milo Creative for their efforts on the film and designing the web site for us too.


Avatar-M Promo film, NAB 2009 from Ant Miller on Vimeo.

We’ll have DVDs of the film available on stand SU7325, and the full HD version showing too (we hope!).

New Web Site launched

Tuesday, April 14th, 2009

Welcome to the brand new Avatar-M website, launched to coincide with our appearance at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, USA. In this website we hope to give you a good overview of the business needs we are addressing, and the technologies we’ve developed to meet the challenges.  There are White Papers and other guides to download, and we’ll soon have a copy of our promotional video available too.

At NAB the project will be displaying our first generation demonstration systems on stand SU7325.  In this first iteration of the demonstrator you’ll be able to see how our systems can ingest and manage large volume data storage over disparate platforms, and we hope to demonstrate integration with broadcast standard editing equipment and workflows.

If you’re interested in exploring the future of large scale A/V archival we’d be delighted to discuss how we can cooperate in the future.