Play Incorporated today began shipping its highly anticipated Trinity NLE system to customers worldwide. Trinity NLE is a nonlinear editing system that provides real-time functionality and advanced post-production tools for professional videographers.
While most nonlinear systems depend heavily on software to generate final footage, Trinity NLE has a unique custom hardware architecture that allows for online editing with real-time performance. Trinity NLE’s architecture also enables new capabilities like 3D Video Tracing, which allows editors to create 3D graphic animations with live reflections, refractions, shadows and lighting from multiple video sources simultaneously.
“Our goal was to create a post-production solution that would match the performance of high-end edit suites, but at a significantly lower cost,” said Ken Turcotte, Play vice president of software development. “In many ways we’ve exceeded our goal because Trinity NLE provides previously unattainable real-time capabilities. We believe it is the most powerful post-production system available for the price.”
Other important Trinity NLE features include random disk access for true nonlinear performance with no time-consuming “defragmentation” or “print-to-video” delays, as well as the ability to playback video clips with slower, faster or reverse play, all without rendering. This means post-production video editors can try many creative options without every alteration forcing another long wait for changed frames to render.
Trinity NLE can perform true color correction, simultaneous 2D and 3D digital video effects, warp geometry effects and chrominance, luminance and linear keying – all in real time. Trinity NLE also uses next-generation wavelet variable compression technology, which outperforms MJPEG systems and offers visually superior results at any given data rate.
Trinity NLE also marks the first integration of Play’s professional Electric Image technology into Trinity. The new Electric Image: Universe rendering engine has been built into Trinity NLE’s Personal FX application to allow editors to create stunning 3D effects and 3D Video Tracing, which can then be played back in real-time.
The system’s dual-stream nonlinear editing enables true frame-accurate video recording and playback while never dropping frames. The user interface integrates clips, effects, graphics, titles and other content with picture-based bins. The interface can also support one, two or four real-time video monitors for fast visual editing. Non-destructive editing capabilities include trim, slip, lift, extract, split, merge, splice and overwrite.
The heart of Trinity NLE’s graphics capabilities are the Panamation, Titlewave and Personal FX applications that are integrated to work seamlessly with Trinity NLE’s editing power. Panamation offers object-oriented, non-destructive paint, animation and compositing tools. Titlewave, Trinity NLE’s character generator, is built for fast creation of anti-aliased text with sub-nanosecond effective broadcast resolution.
Trinity NLE is based on a new version of Play’s Trinity system, Trinity 2.0, and the addition of Play’s Time Machine nonlinear hardware. Ready-to-edit Trinity NLE NTSC systems start at around $15,000 U.S. and current Trinity owners can upgrade their NTSC Trinity to Trinity NLE for $4,995.
Play Incorporated was founded in 1994 by computer and video industry pioneers with the goal of melding high-end video and graphics capabilities to personal computers for distribution over the Internet. Among its award winning products are Snappy Video Snapshot, the all time best-selling computer video add-on; Trinity, which revolutionized TV production and graphics throughout the world; and GlobeCaster, the world’s first Internet TV station-in-a-box. For more information call 800.306.PLAY or visit www.play.com.
