Stephen Price has officially left his position as executive producer at Toronto’s C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures to join partner Chris Wallace in Red Giant, the pair’s television development company.

* TAG out

Toronto new media technology and communications company Digital Renaissance has announced the availability of its TAG 1.0 media-linking system for networked media like audio, video and animation.

tag allows multimedia developers to create tags within an application that link users to additional media sources. The system is comprised of the TAG Player, which allows users to interact with tag-ged material; the TAG Editor, used by producers to add links to content; and the TAG Server, which allows producers to track use of the links.

The TAG Player can be downloaded free from the Digital Renaissance Website (//tag.digital-ren.com); the Editor and Server can be had for $225 and $700, respectively.

* Henry and Lee at Soho

Toronto’s Soho Post and Graphics has upgraded its high-end visual effects capabilities with the addition of a Quantel Henry V6. In addition to the new gear the shop has added Henry artist Lee Maund, formerly of Command Post/Toy Box, to work on the system.

The facility also recently upgraded its Hal video suite with the Transform fx package which allows more creative control over brushes and tools used within the system.

The new purchase was precipitated by a changing client base, says Soho’s Doug Morris, ‘to deliver the best services and best product to high-end clients.’

* Money talks at ITS

The International Teleproduction Society is sponsoring a bean-counter confab Oct. 30 to Nov. 2 in Phoenix, Arizona. The event will feature seminars, roundtables and speakers, and is directed at chief financial officers, chief operating officers and anyone else involved in the financial side of the post business.

Seminar topics include how to build the market value of a company, funding sources and the Karrass Negotiating Seminar; roundtables will include compensation, insurance issues, business banking, the Internet and women in post.

More info is available by calling the its at (703) 641-8770.

* Java anonymous

At siggraph, Quantel announced the launch of its Quantel Developers Program to support the Java on Quantel initiative announced at nab in April and set to be released next year. The Developers Program will support users producing Java applications on Quantel’s application-specific hardware.

Developers will have access to technical information, a dedicated Website and specialist training.

Quantel has also launched Quicksilver, a system which allows the company’s Domino film compositor to join a digital film network or work with other digital film systems. Dealing with the problems of image transfer bottlenecks and differing file format conversion, Quicksilver provides a transparent interchange medium.

* Ciprico adds to its array

Disc array maker Ciprico will debut its new RAID Recorder and its Halo Fibre Channel disc array for Sun systems at ibc in Amsterdam Sept. 12-16. An open system, Ciprico combines Silicon Graphics workstations with its raid systems and software, providing a network digital disc recorder that can store about 40 minutes of uncompressed video.

Halo is a new bundled RAID Fibre Channel storage system for Sun platforms which combines the Series 7000 array with a full-speed Fibre Channel host bus adapter as well as Ciprico’s gui software utilities for installation and administrative maintenance directly from a Sun workstation.

Ciprico will also showcase its 6900 Series Ultrascsi disc array on the nt platform. The 6900 is a five-drive disk array for users in need of realtime speeds but not the capacity of the nine-drive disc array.

* Out of the Gate

Mountain Gate has announced the release of its Stampede ii disc arrays for sgi, Sun and nt server applications.

* AES news

Organizers of the 103rd Audio Engineering Society Convention, Sept. 26-29 in New York, have announced the availability of online registration for the event. Using the secure server at the aes Website (www.aes.org), those wishing to register can do so and pay by credit card (us$225 for the full program for members) online.

A new studio management software will be shown at the aes courtesy of Georgia’s AlterMedia. The company’s Studio Suite is aimed at professional audio studios, project studios, video studios and production companies to manage multi-room facilities.

The software includes a ‘click-n-book’ calendar, and capacity to handle production orders, sessions, invoices, recording budgets, track sheets, tape library and equipment inventory, and features built-in cross-platform (Mac/pc) network capabilities. The software is priced at us$349 and information can be accessed at www.studiosuite.com.

Also at aes, Dolby is showcasing its big-deal development in soundtrack production, the Dolby Drive. Set for release this fall, the Dolby Drive is a digital magnetic disc-based replacement for 35mm mag film dubber. The drive consists of eight-track record/play and 16-track playback-only units that use removable one gigabyte magnetic discs capable of storing more than 45 minutes of eight-track audio at 20-bit resolution.

* Moves

Toronto animation company Beevision Productions has moved to a new and expanded location at 366 Adelaide Street East.

Cindy Cosenzo, member of the board of the Toronto Animated Image Society, has joined Palo Alto’s Pacific Data Images as senior animation producer. Prior to pdi, Cosenzo was a producer at u.k.-based Pizazz Pictures and had been an executive producer at Toronto’s Calibre Digital Design as well as other commercial and long-form companies in the city.

* Discreet suit settlement

Montreal-based Discreet Logic has announced it has reached an agreement to settle the three u.s. shareholder class action suits alleging violations of securities laws by the company. Pending final approval, the $10.8 million settlement will see Discreet Logic pay $7.4 million to plaintiffs, with insurance covering the rest.