More major motion pictures and commercials were finished with the use of Digital Intermediates this year than ever before. It’s a step in the production process that, as Billy Baldwin, president of PostWorks, NY explains, is becoming more and more essential as the use of final high def formats continues to increase. PostWorks, NY recently built the first Digital Intermediate Theater on the East Coast and we caught up with Baldwin to find out a little bit more about the process and how it relates specifically to HD production. His expertise and in-depth answers in the following Q&A help shed a bright and dare we say, high resolution, light on the DI process and beyond.

No one can say that Greg Stevens lacks vision. This struggling independent filmmaker has devised a gutsy plan to revitalize San Francisco's film economy by creating an organization called Save Our Theaters that will support independent film production, single screen theater preservation and the evolution of cutting edge film technology all in one stroke.

Since its inception in 2000, the High Definition National News Consortium (HD-NNC) has worked hard to bring HD resources to its members in an effort to make newsgathering in HD less expensive and to disseminate major events in HD to a larger audience. Membership is free and enables broadcasters to coordinate and exchange ever-evolving HD information and receive live feed of major historical, political and news events—from the 2000 presidential election to the dedication of the World War II Memorial.

In order to help facilitate this education process, the 2004 HD EXPO comes to the Peterson Auto Museum in Los Angeles on November 4^th. This exciting expo brings together experts, manufacturers and individuals in the HD community to explore the many burgeoning, controversial and ground-breaking aspects of high definition. This particular show been described by past attendees as manageable because of its smaller size, yet comprehensive because of the number of major players in the industry, such as Panasonic, Sony and Grass Valley, among many others, who gather to share their knowledge and new technologies. This year’s High Def EXPO mission statement: “To create a High Def EXPO community where the worlds of film and video production/post production converge to encourage and facilitate education, networking communication and commerce.”

DVD Producer HD Workstation

Ready to ship on December 1st, 2004, the world's first authoring system for creating HD titles on DVD using Microsoft's WMV HD-DVD format, the DVD Producer HD Workstation integrates Sonic's HD-series real-time hardware encoder with DVD Producer's fast and flexible authoring to create a seamless workflow that allows professional authors to build interactive titles with stunning HD video content. WMV HD-DVD titles are playable using the Windows Media 10 Series player on Microsoft Windows XP computers.

For more information, please email producerHD@sonic.com.