Information overload, that is the concept of NAB. NAB is a great place to shop for ideas, concepts, and solutions, and is where Pixel Power’s COLLAGE made its American debut in 1994- a high-end graphics workstation offering a solution to the everyday problems of many video professionals for a most reasonable cost.

Pixel Power, an English company based in Cambridge- began manufacturing video production equipment eight years ago utilizing PC boards to process video and to provide titling. By paying attention to users’ comments and requests, Pixel realized the PC platform is not efficient enough because of basic design limitations to achieve the needs of the video end user. So the company started from scratch and designed hardware and software that would provide creative solutions to the user while at the same time maintaining the integrity of the video signal. The creation of COLLAGE was the total sum of those efforts.

Collage is best described as a graphics workstation, which combines a very powerful character generator, with an excellent still store, as well as a paint system. The fundamental operation of the system is based upon foreground and background layers. There is one background layer that is static and cannot be moved, and an unlimited number of foreground layers made up of text, shapes or pictures that can be rolled, crawled or "crolled" over the background. An excellent feature is that once stored as a job, you can come back at any time and revise, edit, add to or delete ANY of the foreground layers.

There is also a RAMcorder which facilitates animation creations. The standard configuration provides 6 frames, but there is an option available providing 66 frames. The system electronics are housed in a cage only three rack units high and support a small keyboard with dedicated keys plus a Wacom Tablet. Most functions- except some in the "Paint" mode- can be accessed from either the keyboard or the tablet pen, depending upon the users preference. There is a 3 1/2" PC floppy disk drive, and a SCSI port that supports peripherals- such as scanners, CD-ROM drives, Magneto-Optical, Syquest, and other basic hard drives. The picture file stores up to about 800 pictures, which can be searched either by title or a feature called "Browse"- which shows a snapshot of 8 pictures per page. The CG uses PC Postscript Type-1 fonts with a 16.7 million color 32-bit palette, so your library of fonts is just about endless. Text is vector-based and fully anti-aliased, and can be sized in real time with all attributes from tiny to huge. There are infinitely variable effects of shadow, extrude, border, highlights and shading on both the text and shapes functions. Incidentally, the "Browse" function can also be used for searching fonts, which shows a selected word displayed in each font style. This full integration of the various functions under one operating structure is the real power of Collage- making it a friendly machine in which to navigate. Pixel Power has gone farther than the standard PC-based systems available, utilizing the internal D-1 architecture of a RISC-based processor to create, size, and layer graphics elements in real time in a way that makes editing a project fun!

Collage is fast in most every operation, whether you are sizing fonts or painting a picture. However, when you are re-sizing or re-positioning a large picture with lots of video information, the processor will take some time to recalculate the image- but we’re talking seconds, not minutes. Also, since Collage is a British-made product, its only outputs are RGB, YUV, or D-1. If you want an NTSC output you must use an encoder. The unit does support an alpha channel output with 256 gray levels, so use with a linear keyer is extremely clean.

Collage is supported by Pixel Power with software upgrades on a regular basis based upon user feedback. Overall, Collage is a quality product in its price range, providing the user a visual edge in today’s competitive video market.