Easiest user interface
Softimage DS has the easiest user interface of any product in its class. One of the common complaints that producers and directors have often voiced about high-end compositing systems is the complete lack of clarity in the user interface. While trying to be cute in emulating a film strip, such interfaces fail to give the non-expert user a clear idea of the layering steps and processes involved. This makes it much more difficult for such creative people to properly direct the compositing process to achieve what they are looking for.
In contrast, the Softimage DS uses the Avid model of timeline where each layer is visually shown over the other layer and where the actual effect applied to the layer can be understood quite easily by non-technical people. As a result of this simple layout and user interface, the productivity of the Softimage DS is vastly higher than that of competing systems. And users who experience this power coupled with this simplicity simply refuse to work on other obscure interfaces.
Adherence to the OMF open standard.
Another significant advantage of Softimage DS is its adherence to the OMF open standard. A vastly superior alternative to the basic EDL, OMF has now been adopted by Microsoft as the basis of the Advanced Authoring Format.
It is undoubtedly true that the vast majority of television commercials today are edited on Avid systems. When an offline Avid edit is to be upgraded, producers must suffer the pain and wasted time of having to re-create every layer, every effect that was done offline in the online suite before they can get down to the really creative work. With OMF, this time-consuming step is completely eliminated! Softimage DS reads all the layers from an Avid offline edit, sets the correct parameters for a number of common effects including all wipes and dissolves, chroma and luma keys, 2D DVE moves, picture re-sizes and re-positions, titles, etc. Thus, the producer start his online with productive work.
Incredible Flexibility
Apart from the above advantages, even in pure technical parameters, the Softimage DS truly excels. It has an infinite number of layers, each with any number of effects. Any number of effects can be stacked on each video clip and on each video layer as well as on the final composite. With all this flexibility, the producer still has his choices open as the Softimage DS does not force you to render composites into a new clip for further processing as you would be forced to do on less capable systems with a limited number of layers. Even after compositing 30 layers and a hundred effects, one could go in and change the bottom-most layer and just re-render the final composite. No other system offers this incredible level of flexibility.
No compromise on Speed
And all this flexibility is certainly not at the cost of speed. The powerful dual 500MHz Pentium III processors in the current model make rendering times surprising small for even complex effects. Wipes, dissolves, basic chroma keys, SMPTE wipes and colour corrections all operate in real-time and as processor speeds increase in coming years, the architecture is designed to enable even more simultaneous effects in real-time.
The choice of Windows NT as the operating system on powerful Intergraph computers is the factor that has made Softimage DS so powerful and yet so economical. With this choice of operating system one is assured that in the years to come, the system will continue to evolve and grow without the danger of obsolescence that a proprietary system would have.
Proven Worldwide
Finally, the number of systems sold worldwide in the short time since its introduction is a tribute to the price-performance ratio of the DS. In just the first year after its introduction, over 500 Softimage DS systems were sold. The system has quickly been proven in the field and numerous facilities have gone on to buy more and more systems.
