eyeon Software introduced, in a surprise announcement to kick off their participation at NAB 2008 on Monday, the release of eyeon Generation. A truly revolutionary new product, eyeon Generation, is a full-featured collaborative conforming, versioning and editing front-end system.

Established with a clean slate development, eyeon Generation includes an open architecture to provide a data-centric workflow. A rich artist-driven interface is designed for teamwork. Extensive flexibility for studio pipelines and tight integration with eyeon's visual effects products, Fusion, Rotation and Vision, bring new efficiencies to production. EDL and project importing capabilities provide a link between offline editing and finishing. A visual timeline enhances team collaboration, allowing the simultaneous play of multiple versions while experimenting with multiple cuts to compare various projects. Shot refinements, from storyboard through to animatics to finished shots, are all tracked and versioned visually.

"eyeon Generation is delivering a workflow solution that is highly customizable, said eyeon CEO Steve Roberts. "We don't dictate how studios should work; eyeon provides a very flexible open integration policy that will easily fit studio pipelines, big and small. This is the next level in providing the tools needed to collaborate and finish more complex work. It's about the team, as well as the suite."

Following years of research and development, eyeon is proud to deliver a comprehensive visual effects environment that effectively started 20 years ago with Fusion. eyeon Generation was designed to facilitate the needs of supervisors and production leads. The sharing and communication of jobs are rapidly visualized with full respect of production hierarchies, allowing senior artists to oversee and collaborate on all aspects of work. A built-in network rendering control system manages the farm and ensures that all sequences are up to date, wherein the management of missing frames or sequences is visualized in real-time.

Generation's flexible open architecture and extremely high level of collaborative functionality is brought to market after extensive use in production environments. Designed for, and specifically integrated with, eyeon's current highly-integrated VFX applications, eyeon Generation solidifies the demand for an end-to-end vfx environment.

The 64 bit technology has an industry-standard scripting engine for unprecedented integration and access of versatile working environments with multi-core processors and GPU acceleration. While scaling over an array of networked machines, a full floating point deep pixel image system gives high color fidelity and significant processing speeds. Live annotation and paint tools make communication of shot adjustments and fixes to the team easy and precise.

eyeon Generation Key Components:

Visual Timeline:

--Real time playback up to 4k
--Floating point image playback
--Split-view player for comparison of two clips of two projects
--Scratch track audio with waveform display

Advanced Collaboration:

--Real-time annotation
--Live online chat sessions
--Drawing and text commenting

Versioning:

--Navigatable project stages visible at all times
--Complete version history for each shot
--Time stamps and creator ids for all materials
--Automatic incremental versioning

Editing:

--Scrubbing
--Cutting
--Trimming
--Slipping
--EDL and metadata importing

Compositing:

--Fully-integrated, comprehensive production-proven compositing system

Scripting:

--Open ASCII architecture
--Remote controllable
--Customized to integrate with other application and pipelines

Proxy Projects:

--Local editing without server access

--Playback and commenting with workstations/laptops

Productivity:

--Render farm and manager fully integrated
--Gestural artist interface