Features - Storage Innovations:

ACCOM EXPANDS DISK RECORDER FAMILY WITH WSD/HDe

Accom, an industry leader in digital disk recording technology for over 15 years, announced WSD/HDe, the latest in its series of universal format multi-definition digital disk recorders. Based on Accom's WSD platform, WSD/HDe is targeted at long-form applications such as telecine, digital film, DVD encoding, post production, broadcast playout, stage presentation and scientific visualization.

Like its partner WSD/HDi, Accom's WSD/HDe captures both Standard Definition (SD) and High Definition (HD) uncompressed video content, provides real-time playback for rendered material, and offers plug-and-play operation. WSD/HDe has 2.5 hours of built-in recording capacity at 24p format, and RAID-3 parity protection for video with redundant mirrored disks for audio.

Designed for multiple roles in a variety of production environments, WSD/HDe has a full and versatile feature set. Interfacing easily with networked graphics computers and film printers, tape machines and edit controllers, WSD/HDe imports and exports in all major file formats, eliminating the need for custom transfer scripting or proprietary file wrappers. WSD/HDe automatically creates and names new clip files when the first frame arrives in any of up to five user-defined directories, adding subsequent frames to the clip as they arrive. During recording, WSD/HDe can perform simultaneous transfer of frames from any clip to any computer, disk drive or film printer on the computer network.

For digital encoding and remote delivery of dailies, creation of DVD content or video streaming direct to the Web, WSD/HDe includes built-in Windows Media Encoder 9 Series capability. Customizable encoding profiles allow clips to be delivered in a range of file sizes -- from compact VHS-quality up to 19Mbps (megabits per second) high-definition clips for high-quality production review, Web-trailers or DVD.

Equally at home in any mixed environment of networked Windows, Linux, Irix or Macintosh OS X equipment, WSD/HDe can be controlled by any number of users over the network via the browser-based NetPanel interface. NetPanel is an OS-independent HTML/Java2 applet that runs from Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape browsers on any Windows, Macintosh, Irix or Linux networked computer. NetPanel provides simple and easy machine control, clip management, and system configuration. With an additional VGA monitor, NetPanel will also run on the WSD/HD platform itself for stand-alone operation. WSD/HDe can also be controlled from within Adobe After Effects, with an optional plug-in from Diaquest.

WSD/HDe also includes an application programming interface (API) through the standard gigabit Ethernet port, for customized control applications. This API provides the ability to control all attributes of the WSD/HD disk recorder via remote shell and remote login commands, and provides image transfer capabilities via remote copy commands. WSD/HD platform users and third-party vendors with programming skills can create user-defined applications to control all aspects of the WSD/HDi or WSD/HDe, including image transfer with externalr compute graphics equipment.