– Fox has DKP under Seige

Toronto-based Dan Krech Productions was recently awarded a new feature assignment, Fox’s The Siege, to be handled out of the shop’s Santa Monica, California office.

dkp will be responsible for opening titles and credits as well as seven effects sequences for the Ed Zwick-directed feature, which deals with terrorism and stars Denzel Washington and Bruce Willis.

On the design side, dkp is also handling some new work out of Sears with designer Jennifer Chang, who recently joined the shop.

– More Finale

Gearing up for the demand for film services, Vancouver’s Finale Editworks is currently constructing a number of new suites, including a new telecine room to house an as-yet-unnamed piece of film equipment. The shop expects to have its first telecine setup in place in the next 60 days.

As part of the 6,000-square-foot expansion, Finale is also building additional post rooms, including more Avid offline space.

– More reason to celebrate…

While the folks at Gajdecki Visual Effects festooned for their explosive house-warming party in their newish Vancouver digs, the shop was also agrin over its recent Emmy nomination for its special effects work on mgm series Stargate. John Gajdecki, Bob Habros and Ted Rae were named as nominees for the honor.

The competition consisted of a couple of Star Trek episodes and The Sound of the Caceri from Rhombus Media’s Yo Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach series of tv specials, with effects work from Buzz.

– Synchro-launch

The people behind sound recording facility Synchronicity Digital Audio, Emil and Kirsten Jany, held an open house recently to fete the new Toronto shop.

The facility, designed by Martin Pilchner of Pilchner/ Schoustal, offers full audio post for tv, film and radio. The equipment setup provides 64 tracks of Pro Tools digital recording and full surround mixing with non-destructive editing for flexibility in dialogue, effects and music editing.

In addition to stock music and sound effects libraries, the shop also offers in-house composition services.

– ITS bean-counter bash

The International Teleproduction Society is assembling a conference for the benefit of cfos and operations people, to be held Oct. 1-4 at the Westin Mission Hills Resort Rancho Mirage in Palm Springs, California.

The conference consists of seminars, speakers and roundtables addressing the financial aspects of the industry including employee stock ownership programs, strategic alliances, the cfo and technology, and the valuation of a company.

For more info contact the its at (703) 319-0800.

– AES fab at 105

The 105th Audio Engineering Society Convention is being held Sept. 26-29 in San Francisco. The lineup includes 14 workshops, 129 technical papers, tours of major audio companies, the society’s awards on Sept. 26, a keynote speech by producer and recording artist Alan Parsons, and a number of other special events.

Workshops include Internet Audio Systems, Internet Audio Production, Audio for hdtv and Audio on dvd.

The mobile portion of the show includes tours of facilities like Skywalker Ranch, DigiDesign, dvd maker Sonic Solutions and Dolby Labs. Information and registration can be handled at www.aes.org.

On the exhibit side, making its debut at the aes show this fall will be the Dolby Digital 5.1 channel reference encoder, listed at a low us$5,000.

The company says the new DP569 has more features than its larger pc-based predecessor while priced nearly 75% less. The product is intended for dvd and laser disc authoring, digital tv, cable and satellite applications.

– New ICEy Shipment

ICE has begun shipping its Avid-based products which promise time and productivity advantages in the creation of special effects within Avid.

icefx for Media Composer/Avid Xpress and ice’d Cinelook Broadcast for Avid leverage the new Blueice hardware, which provides a 5-30 times acceleration of rendering time of ice effects.

icefx for Avid Media Composer and Xpress, including Blueice hardware, is priced at us$6,990. ice’d Cinelook Broadcast software, which provides a film look to video, is priced at us$1,995.

– Higher Profile at Tektronix

Tektronix has announced the availability of the latest addition to its Profile line of server products, the PDR300.

The new product has 4:2:2 MPEG-2 implementation, which the company says increases storage capacity while lowering costs and introduces new fiber-channel streaming technology for quick accessibility to material.

The PDR300 is suited for broadcast applications, including commercial insertion, program playout, spot caching for video cart machines, near video-on-demand and time delay.

– People

Acura Technology Group has appointed Kurt Ramcharan to sales rep for the Montreal area. The company says it has expanded its sales force in response to a growing market for broadcast and desktop digital video solutions.