It’s difficult not to get seduced by the bright lights of TinselTown, especially if, like Evans & Sutherland Computer Corp, you live in Salt Lake City, Utah. Exploiting its three- dimensional graphics technology, the company has formed a new Digital Studio business unit with a mission to provide affordable real-time systems for digital content production in the television, film, video, corporate training and multimedia markets. The company reckons it is pushing at an open door it judges that television and film audiences worldwide are increasingly drawn towards innovative visual techniques such as three-dimensional rendering, digital special effects and animation that enhance the viewing experience. There’s not too much to do in Salt Lake City apart from develop stunning graphics and watch television, and after plenty of the latter activity, Evans & Sutherland reports that such innovations are now regularly used in nightly news and weather reports, video magazine formats, corporate training, sports events and animated feature films. And if television and movie directors are looking for faster processing, real-time capability and easier production of content with vivid imagery and advanced special effects, Evans & Sutherland believes its new Digital Studio unit can do them a big favor. The Digital Studio products incorporate Evans’s new Universal 3D Architecture (CI No 3,056), combining high-end graphics with open standards and high-volume hardware using Windows NT on standard iAPX-86-based workstations. The company is proudest of its recently introduced MindSet Virtual Set, first in a family of virtual set offerings that enable bare television studios occupied only by a presenter to be magically transformed into anything from a futuristic high-tech news room to a Tunisian souk. MindSet Virtual Set costs under $100,000 – which still sounds pretty pricey, but the company puts that price forward as an earnest that Digital Studio’s strategy will be to offer high performance, low-cost systems to be affordable for a much wider range of productions.
