Za'atar Digital: Sahara

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

After a desert trip...

As I was in the South Moroccan Sahara desert for the last ten days to work with the TV production crew of the "Marathon des Sables" race, I had to temporarily pause the GPSKit development. But I found the opportunity to record some GPS NMEA data stream that should prove useful to test GPSKit in a more "real life" way.
I also got some pictures of our roaming technical setup:

4 cameras using the Panasonic P2 cards to record video.
An Avid LANShare video server with 4 TB of storage.
An in & out media station
three video editing "suits"
A Satellite broadcasting station

I will make an entire post about it in a few days.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

What's In The Back Office?

Well, even if we are not completely up and running, we already are working on two in-house projects.

The 'Tapes' list - © Za'atar Digital

The first one is called Dakira. It means 'memory' in Arabic. It is an affordable video and sound archive management system dedicated to small video and cinema production companies that own a lot of video and sound footage and that were never able to archive this stock properly because of the prohibiting cost of the currently available solutions. For this project, we hope to have a first beta release by the end of the summer this year.

The other project is our secret project. It involves the GPS technology and... the Moroccan Sahara Desert! I started it in early 2009, but a couple months later I had to stop it for a while as my job was drawing me away from development stuff. Now, we are taking it back on track... But that's all I can say for now. We hope to have the first beta released around April or May, this year. Don't let the screenshots fools you. Both applications are being developed with Real Studio™ and will be running on Mac OS X obviously, but also on Windows powered platforms, from Windows XP to the latest release available.

While being writing those software, we will made available some of the classes or modules that are part of the framework we are using. So, stay tuned...