At this year’s NAB show, IRIDAS will debut a new user interface for the 2010 SpeedGrade and FrameCycler products. The new design is the first incarnation of the Merula UI engine. The Merula project was initiated at IRIDAS internally to come up with a visual design for SpeedGrade and FrameCycler that combined visual simplicity and ease of use.

“Over the years we collected a lot of feedback from our users. With Merula, we have distilled our knowledge about functionality and user interaction into an elegant interface for SpeedGrade and FrameCycler”, said Michael Gallo, CTO of IRIDAS.

The new main grading interface for SpeedGrade features redesigned color wheels and sliders which are toned down when not in use to avoid distracting users from their images. The new sliders feature direct numerical read outs and a new infinite-range feature. All UI elements where designed with tablet users as well as control panel users in mind.

For the new DualStream NX toolset, IRIDAS completely revamped the interface for stereo work: “It became clear to us that the previous Stereo 3D interfaces we had, while getting the job done, were too technical and made the feature set seem daunting to a fresh user. We started with a blank canvas and evaluated typical S3D workflows. We looked at the logical steps that we wanted to guide users through when setting up their stereo projects. The result is a clean user interface that is organized logically and uses the terminology that people are familiar with.”

Merula will debut in the 2010 R1 versions of SpeedGrade DI, SpeedGrade XR and FrameCycler DI, which will be introduced at NAB in April.

www.iridas.com