December 20, 2002, St. Louis, Missouri:  The new Digital Dailies solution provided by HEURIS and Cohen Communications has a fan in James McQuaide, Head of Post Production at Lakeshore Entertainment. Mr. McQuaide recently recommended the Cohen Communications HD Dailies for a third straight film project. The new solution was a joint collaboration between Cohen Communications and HEURIS introducing the international launch of RushPlay™ recently used on the Lakeshore Entertainment film, "Underworld"—a hip new vampire movie to be released by Screens Gems. HEURIS and Cohen Communications in partnership with ARRIFILM deployed the system on location in Budapest, Hungary and at ARRIFILM in Munich, Germany.

This new digital disk-based solution including the updated RushPlay™ software has several exciting new features including improved subclipping and new clip sorting capabilities. The system also offers significantly greater capacity and real-time recording directly to removable USB and Firewire 120 GB hard drives. This increases capacity for HD storage from minutes in the DVD-RAM version to up to 10 hours per disk with the new system.

"I have used DVHS, D-5, and the first-generation iDVR [DVD-RAM] as sources for dailies projection on past pictures and--without question--the random-access capabilities of the RUSHPLAY HD playback PC are nothing short of revolutionary," states Lakeshore's James McQuaide. "We would skip from take-to-take, camera-to-camera, sometimes day-to-day, selecting the pieces necessary to rough-out a scene, turning the dailies screening into something more akin to an Avid session. Without question, I look forward to the day when these choices can just as easily be entered into the Playback PC, the scene assembled on-the-fly, and played back instantly at HD resolution."

"Mr. McQuaide is more than a mere customer," said Steven Cohen, CEO of Cohen Communications. "We see him as a technology partner. He has helped us refine our Digital Dailies system to more precisely meet the needs of today’s filmmaker."

Much of the recent success on the location of "Underworld" is due to a highly effective team effort including HEURIS, Cohen Communications, McQuaide and ARRIFILM. "We couldn’t have done this without the help and cooperation of the talented people at ARRIFILM," said HEURIS President, Brian Quandt. "ARRI served as our eyes and hands in Europe and helped us to provide significant improvements to the technology for the client. I look forward to continuing this successful and mutually beneficial working relationship."

ARRIFILM ‘s Tom Henderson comments, "As a person with a long film background, I was amazed at the quality of the image, considering the amount of electronic compression involved and the minimal amount of artifacts using a single setting on the Tandberg MPEG2 Encoder. The components are very portable and have the ability to show a full dailies-size picture, with the added functionality of instantly assembling scenes and camera rolls in any order make it a very viable option for production rush screenings."

 "If it looks as good as this in the cinema, I will be well-pleased," adds cinematographer Tony Pierce-Roberts (Oscar-nominated for his work on Howard's End and Room With a View) after viewing 70-plus days of dailies in a location HD screening room set-up by engineers from ARRIFilm and Cohen Communications/HEURIS.

About the Digital Dailies System

HEURIS and Cohen Communications’ new digital disk-based solution offers cost savings and unique flexibility and functionality over traditional methods for producing and viewing dailies. The new process creates dailies in High Definition video format and displays them via a turnkey, nonlinear playback system with either Panasonic plasma screens or JVC DILA projectors.

Because 35mm work prints and mag tracks and are not required, the new digital dailies process offers significant cost savings—estimated to be as much as $300,000 for a typical movie. Yet it offers a high-resolution image and audio track comparable to film—allowing directors, producers as well as the Director of Photography to clearly assess the day's shoot.

The system is available for weekly rental in several configurations from HEURIS and Cohen Communications. For more information, please contact Steven Cohen at 323.464.1805.

About HEURIS

Headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri, HEURIS has served as a leading manufacturer of video compression and processing tools and applications for over a decade. From the Internet, to DVD, to HDTV to Hollywood Movies--HEURIS has developed an impressive group of award-winning tools for video production and post production applications.

Perhaps best known for its award-winning MPEG Power Professional Line of software products, HEURIS has recently released two new products for the Hollywood Market: a Digital Dailies solution developed in conjunction with partner Cohen Communications and MPEG Power Professional—D-Cinema used to encode High Definition pictures for display in movie theaters.

In addition to such major motion picture studios as MGM, HEURIS proudly includes the following as its customers: NASA, Walt Disney, Sea World, Apple Computers, The Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, Taco Bell Corporation, The Home Depot, AT & T Labs, IBM, Boeing, Vanderbilt University, Boston Museum of Science and the U.S. Military. More information about HEURIS Logic is available at www.heuris.com.