Artists get new freedom to choose portability, design and scalability of OS and hardware configurations of SCRATCH products

April 11, Las Vegas NV, USA - NAB 2011: ASSIMILATE (www.assimilateinc.com), the leading provider of powerful post-production tools for digital workflows, announced today that is bringing its next generation of SCRATCH high-performance, data-centric, dailies and DI products to Mac OS® X.
 
ASSIMILATE’s next-generation SCRATCH products for Mac OS® X and Windows 7 include:

• SCRATCH® version 6 – the next generation of the industry-leading high-performance, digital cinema and broadcast finishing tool for RED and other digital workflows
• SCRATCH Lab™ – the industry’s first comprehensive Digital Lab tool for the review, versioning, color correction, conform and deliverables for on-set and VFX dailies ecosystems

 
Sitting side-by-side in the product line-up, the Mac OS X and Windows 7 versions of each SCRATCH application will have near feature parity (ProRes encoding is available on the Mac OS X version only) and will be offered at the exact same price.
 
The new SCRATCH products are built on the newly-enhanced SCRATCH platform – an open data pipeline for integration and automation, superior metadata handling, integrated 3D stereo tools, and high-performance graphics. They also meet industry demand for faster, more cost-effective capabilities from on-set through to full DI finishing for resolution-independent 2D/3D stereo projects.
 
“ASSIMILATE has always been about listening to our customers and responding,” said Steve Bannerman, VP of Marketing, ASSIMILATE. “Extending our new SCRATCH family to support the Mac gives artists the freedom to use the OS and hardware of their choice for portability, design and scalability -- whichever makes the most sense for them. As important, we’re committed to eliminating the “platform tax” that artists have to pay if they choose to move from one OS to another. All our SCRATCH applications are always the same price, Mac or Windows.”
 
The move to support the Mac not only removes platform restrictions from artists, it also allows SCRATCH to natively support the encoding and output of Apple’s popular ProRes format.
 
“I couldn't be more excited,” says Ted Schilowitz of RED, Inc. “As a guy who has never really worked on anything but the Mac platform, I'm all about running the software I like on the platform I like. Now I and all the legions of people in our industry that only work on a Mac are good to go to using SCRATCH. They get the ProRes benefit, the FCP linking benefit, the ability to ichat with their buddies while running a SCRATCH DI session on the same machine, all the good stuff! Nice job ASSIMILATE!”
 
Pricing & Availability for SCRATCH Lab & SCRATCH ASSIMILATE is advancing its position of price-performance leadership with SCRATCH Lab at $4,995 USD, and SCRATCH is $17,995 USD. Both products will ship in Q2 2011.