Steve Roberts is an Australian with vision - and sensibility. Just listen as he explains how to survive in the film and video post-production industry: "Caffeine and pizza." Bring up the current state of the industry with respect to computer technology, and suddenly the issue becomes one of hype.
The "hype" Roberts refers to is the Darwinian approach of the established software and hardware giants to dominate their market share by making their platforms the defacto standard in their respective markets with an arrogant display of confidence in their own invincibility. But in this time of "David and Goliath" episodes between the market share giants and small-but-with-great-ideas companies, the sidelines seem to be rooting for the Davids. Witness the surprise appearance by Netscape as a serious contender in the online communications field, or by the emergence of Digital Renaissance as a content-creation hub for the multimedia industry.
Walk around the halls of eyeon Software, Roberts' Toronto, Canada and Sydney, Australia based company, partnered with Digital Processing Systems Inc., and you'll find the same feisty sentiment. "Generally speaking, people are ticked at these high-end companies that really took them to the cleaners," says Jane Perratt, eyeon's Marketing Coordinator.
eyeon Software's flagship product, Digital Fusion, is an advanced resolution-independent, compositing, image processing and special effects environment for film and video image post-production. Developed by a team of professional special effects artists and editors that resemble The Justice League of America more than a group of computer geeks, the system was designed to be a set of tools to meet the needs of the film and video industry. Integrated into a comprehensive, easy-to-use program, the system now meets the demanding production requirements of high-end broadcast video, feature films, multimedia and other moving image media applications. The program itself runs on a Pentium Pro running Windows NT and DEC Alpha CPU's. Version 1.0 of the program was released in August 1996 to a wealth of praise from their industry. eyeon is now ready to roll out version 2.0 of Digital Fusion in September 1997, and ready to rock the established players along the way.
"This is a high-end solution at a low cost," says Perratt. "Formerly, studios would put in $500,000 systems that could do compositing and special effects on one station, but which required a staff of ten on rotating schedules. With our solution you can have 10-15 workstations running software as efficiently as the one high-end system. It's really a revolutionary product, which will shake up the big boys who have been monopolizing the market."
Indeed, the history of eyeon makes it clear that viable products of long-term life-spans can come out of small operations. Roberts, a veteran of the special effects field for 17 years, developed the first version of Digital Fusion as an adjunct to the systems he was already working on in his Australian-based small effects and editing company, New York Production and Design (NYPD). Running on a 386 under DOS, eyeon vice-president of operations Robert McGee explains that NYPD's intent was to get into high-end film work, but that the type of equipment with which they were working made it "a hard sell." The quality of NYPD's work was there, and they had the knowledge and the savvy to handle the big jobs, but they consistently dealt with the frustration of not having an SGI to convince the clients to hire them. At the same time, the revolution of hardware on the PC was changing the digital landscape, and Roberts, along with former NYPD partners, would continuously develop tools for whatever hardware was available. Says McGee, "You've got to give credit to those guys in terms of where their vision was in digital technology."
The job of taking Digital Fusion from DOS over to Windows NT was more of a complete rewrite than a typical port, explains Peter Loveday, Director of Product Development. "It's a very different interface, different design." Loveday, who was also key in developing the original DOS version, says is took about one year to develop version 1.0 for NT, with most code rewritten from ground up.
Toronto-based Digital Processing Systems (DPS) recognized the excellent fit between Digital Fusion and its own hardware and software. In mid-1996, DPS merged with NYPD and named the new entity "eyeon Software". Suddenly eyeon became an international company, with a Toronto office to serve the North American and worldwide markets in order fulfillment, technical and marketing support; and a Sydney office for program development and technical support for Asia-Pacific. It also positioned Digital Fusion and DPS' complimentary hardware as a potentially serious contender in the post-production markets previously dominated by SGI, Avid, and Adobe.
"In six months we succeeded in taking [Digital Fusion] from a very few productions houses to just about every mainstream production house presently in the market," says Brick Ekston, DPS Director of Product Development. "Our marketing effort has been a kind of one-on-one evangelism. What we're looking for is that high-end association so that we can [later] sell to a much broader market that has the same price point as Adobe After Effects." Ekston adds that DPS' partnership with eyeon is a perfect combination of hardware and software development that other proprietary companies could only dream about. "There is no one else out there that has both halves of the equation under one roof. Everybody else has got to be out there trying to support somebody else's application software."
Certainly, the key to eyeon's continued success is its ability to respond to the needs of its customers. Version 2.0 of Digital Fusion integrates many major and minor enhancements, approximately 75% of the new enhancements came as a result of customer feedback. But designing an interface that can handle the complex work of a professional film special effects editor was no easy task. eyeon product specialist, Shai Hinitz, agrees. "You have to find the magic balance between the complexity of the work that we do and [having it become] a conduit to creative work," he says with regards to the interface. "Even when things are really complex, you still want to maintain something that not only gives you creative freedom, but that motivates you creatively. And I think our [interface] does exactly that. It can handle the complexity of the work, yet it doesn't make it look like some scary kind of computer thing that most artists are afraid of. It keeps it very simple, logical - it's a very robust interface."
Version 2.0 of Digital Fusion showcased at SIGGRAPH 97, with some major additions to the product, including what eyeon is calling a "timeline environment", a traditional non-linear editing type of environment, where editors can see the layers of their work as a stack of bars, one on top of the other. Beyond that, version 2.0 brings a 64-bit colour space, which will allow for double the bandwidth for colour processing, an important feature for film work.
And don't think they're not prepared for competition. Recognizing that most other established players are in the process of porting their software over to the cost-effective Windows NT platform, Roberts points out that Digital Fusion is in it fourth generation of design. The experience of developing it from its previous incarnations gave its team a solid base to totally redesign the product from the ground up for Version 2.0. "We have designed the product to be very powerful, object-oriented, and multi-threaded. The expansion of this core technology will continue, enabling us to distill other products. It is a very solid design. Every aspect of the program is plugable, which makes it easy to add functionality and new ideas in the future."
They've also stuck alliances with powerful partners, including Ultimatte and 5D Ltd. Ultimatte, the industry leader in matting technology for hardware and software used in blue screen compositing, has bundled their matting technology ship as a standard feature on the 64-bit Digital Fusion Film version and as an optional plugin for Digital Fusion for Video. 5D, the industry leader in plugins for post-production effects, also chose Digital Fusion as a partner. Roberts was elated, saying, "This is yet another industry tick of approval. Digital Fusion along with Ultimatte and 5D Ltd. plugins is now offering everything high end systems have at a fraction of the cost." Perratt agrees, "This once again re-enforces the fact that our product is just as technologically progressive and accepted in the industry as the original high-cost, high-end systems."
With all these factors playing into eyeon's ongoing success, the computer graphics industry could be witnessing another new player challenge the established giants. According to Roberts, eyeon's goal is to make the best post-production system, encompassing all aspects of the post-production process, all of it existing on the desktop, with raw material in and finished product out. As Ekston eloquently puts it, "I want you to come to think of us as the Corel of video."
