Intergraph Computer Systems Corp will be teaming up with new partners and enhancing its multimedia products and capabilities, in a bid to achieve total media production from a single open architecture system. The Huntsville, Alabama company said it is joining forces with Truevision Inc, Avid Technology Inc and D- Vision Systems Inc to package together video hardware and software configurations for combined turnkey Intel Corp and Windows NT-based desktop video systems. It has also announced that its Intel-Windows NT-based StudioZ media production systems (CI No 3,078) have been given greater performance capabilities when used with Abode Systems Inc’s After Effects compositing software. The company says these announcements and new partnerships show its commitment to Windows NT, which it first turned to back in 1992 (CI No 1972). Intergraph will also be implementing a direct interface between the Toonz two dimensional cell animation software and its ANA Tech 2D animation scanner. The turnkey desktop video systems are pre-configured with plug- and-play connections, while the StudioZ workstations are said to enable users to perform every stage involved in the media production process. The company’s marketing manager in the UK, Steve Burr says Intergraph is becoming increasingly popular as the digital media market continues to grow, and pointed to the company’s growth from a virtually unknown organization a couple of years ago. Burr said media users and developers were increasingly turning to NT as people start realizing NT is a valuable alternative to the operating system they are used to. Intergraph believes StudioZ will achieve greater status when ‘total’ digital media software, Softimage Digital Studio, is released at the beginning of next year.
