– Clairmont Camera

‘We’ve outgrown Hollywood and Vancouver so we’re coming to Toronto,’ says Clairmont Camera head Terry Clairmont regarding the expansion into Toronto of the Vancouver-based company, which supplies 16mm and 35mm and Vistavision cameras to motion picture studios.

Clairmont is in the process of renovating a 16,000-square-foot space in Toronto and plans to open the facility in late May with around 10 to 12 staff and 30 to 40 camera packages.

– A crane of mythical proportions

Toronto’s Grip House Films is offering filmmakers the services of a Pegasus Crane, the first in Canada. Pegasus, made in Germany by Panther, allows a camera and two technicians a maximum lens height of about 31 feet and can crane down to approximately seven feet below ground level, with a radius swing of 26 feet.

The Pegasus can also be reconfigured to adapt to tighter spaces, providing alternative maximum heights of 20, 17 or 13 feet.

– Magnetic goes tapeless

Toronto’s Magnetic Music recently completed its first tapeless delivery. The score for Nelvana’s new animated series Blazing Dragons, composed by Amin Bhatia, was output from Magnetic’s Avid AudioStation as a Pro Tools III Session File for delivery to the client.

Magnetic acquired the Audio Station in 1994, and director of music David Greene says increased incorporation of non-linear audio technology can be expected in the future.

– SchoolNet

Telesat Canada, Stentor, Industry Canada and provincial governments have formed an alliance for SchoolNet, a project to connect Canadian schools to the Internet.

Telesat’s DirecPC Turbo Internet link will initially allow about 600 schools and community groups equipped with a Direcpc satellite dish, pc receiver card and Windows software access to the Net at up to 400 kilobits per second.

– Media 100 bundles

Edipix, a Toronto-based dealer of Data Translation’s Media 100 non-linear video systems has announced it will bundle authoring, animation and design software with Media 100 qx hardware, aimed at the multimedia industry.

Edipix will bundle mTropolis, interactive authoring software from mFactory, for an interactive video design environment for around $13,000, as well as Strata products such as Studio 3D, Media Paint and Painter.

– Silicon standard

Silicon Graphics’ Moving Worlds has been selected by the Virtual Reality Modelling Language community as the VRML 2.0 specification. Moving Worlds was the winner of the vrml polling process and was confirmed as VRML 2.0 by the VRML Architecture Group.

Silicon Graphics’ Cosmo Player, a VRML 2.0 plug-in for the Netscape browser, Cosmo Create and Cosmo Code will use the VRML 2.0 standard.

– New Avid Cheese

Tewksbury, Massachusetts-based Avid Technology has appointed William J. Miller chairman and ceo of the company. Miller, formerly ceo of mass storage company Quantum Corporation, will replace William S. Kaiser as chairman of Avid’s board of directors.

– Software partnership

Television software companies Peter Storer & Associates, based in Mequon, Wis., tapscan, based in Birmingham, Ala., and Video Communications (vci), based outside Boston, Mass., will jointly develop and market integrated computer software systems for tv broadcasters and cable networks.

The three companies are designing the new software releases with a common platform to share databases and general interconnectivity. Products being integrated into the alliance include tapscan’s Tvscan, Qualitap, Salesscan, a ratings analysis system and an online service for industry-wide media communications; vci will contribute its Stars ii traffic management package, and Peter Storer & Associates will contribute its Program Manager System, which provides complete program schedule preparation, inventory control, financial management and reporting capabilities.

– DVD Briefs

‘DVD Briefing: Implications and Applications,’ a cross-industry conference on content development for dvd, is being held June 2-4 in San Jose, California.

The conference will bring together over 1,000 professionals from the fields of production, post-production, film, replication, software development, mastering, multimedia, and research and development to discuss digital versatile disk technology and its impact on the industry.

Issues such as standards, specifications and producing content for DVD-Video and dvd-rom will be addressed in panel discussions, conference sessions and demonstrations.

For additional information call 1-800-800-5474.

– Update

In Playback’s post-production special report (April 8), in the story ‘Maker. Rainmaker’ (p. 18) credits for Bliss should have included digital compositing artists Christine Petrov and Bruce Woloshyn.