News

Codex Digital Delivers Hub for Tapeless Workflow with new Codex Lab (28/10/2008)

Codex Digital, specialist in high-resolution media recording and workflow systems, today announced the extension of its product family with the Codex Lab - a digital-film-lab-in-a-box that forms the hub of fast and efficient tapeless workflows for broadcast and motion picture productions. The new Lab is modular, offers enormous recording capacity, and provides all of the deliverables needed for production, post and archive processes. It can create a complete set deliverables in less time than traditional systems take to make a single copy.

The Lab ingests digital production material from Codex recorders and also from tape, telecine and other digital systems. It can be expanded to store over 500 hours of digital cinema footage, or 1,000 hours of high-end broadcast material, plus audio. When used in Standard Definition applications the Lab can contain 3,600 hours (around five months) of recordings.

All material stored in the Lab is immediately available, at any time, for on-demand daily deliverables and reprints. When an offline the edit is complete, the Lab automatically generates the required finishing-files from the EDL - in minutes or hours, rather than days. It will also play-out to multiple channels of video (HD or SD), wiith automatic processing of shot-lists or EDLs.

Ultimately the Lab is the hub of a completely tapeless workflow. It can manage a wide range of broadcast productions (multi-camera episodic TV, drama, light entertainment) or digital motion pictures. Multiple productions can be handled on a single unit. It is designed for easy integration into the MCR of an editing/VFX facility, and it can also be directly connected on set or location.

The Codex Lab converts original HD material - or any format from SD to 4K - into editing files for Avid, Apple or Adobe, into VFX, finishing and archive tapes, as well as viewing files. Output file formats include DPX, MXF, DNxHD, QuickTime, AVI, JPEG, BMP and BWF (WAV) with full metadata, resizing, colourspace conversion and LUTs for look management.

Codex has designed the Lab so that it can be configured and upgraded in a variety of ways according to the changing needs of users. It can be ordered with one or two dual bays for Codex Portable diskpacks, and a dual bay for Codex Recorder diskpacks. The Lab will also hold up to four internal LTO4 tapedrives, or can control external LTO4 robots.

High-speed RAID6 storage is expandable to over 100TB in removable blocks of 12 or 24TB. This provides 500 hours of HD 4:4:4/24fps cinema-quality compressed, or 125 hrs uncompressed, 1,000 hours of HD 4:2:2/24fps (high broadcast-quality), or 3,600 hrs of SD PAL/25fps.

The Lab offloads HD footage up to ten times faster than realtime, with SD over twenty times faster, and it can produce multiple deliverables in parallel - underlining the ability of all Codex workflows to deliver unrivalled efficiency, productivity and creativity.

Paul Bamborough, co-founder of Codex Digital, said, "We now have a family of products that deliver a unified, tapeless workflow from camera-to-post, that let people work way they want to work - whether it's broadcast TV or cinema. Codex workflows remove traditional delays and bottlenecks making production faster, easier and more efficient than ever before."

Pricing & Availability: Codex Digital expects to ship the first production-ready units in the first quarter of 2009, and will publish pricing accordingly.

www.codexdigital.com 

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