Nice Shoes purchase 10 Panasonic D-5 HD mastering systems

Nice Shoes, a prominent Manhattan facility specialising in film and video post-production for commercial work, recently purchased 10 AJ-HD3700A D-5 HD mastering systems to add to its existing D-5 HD recorders.
The company also bought five AJ-HD150 DVCPRO HD studio VTRs to meet the increased demand for DVCPRO HD production.
The AJ-HD3700 series D-5 HD recorders are designed for challenging program mastering, high definition telecine, television commercial, and multi-format DTV and HDTV program production tasks. Panasonic's D-5 and D-5 HD recorders have established an unprecedented reputation for image quality and have been selected as the HDTV delivery format of choice by ABC, CBS and NBC television networks, HBO and others.
With work from European and U.S. advertising agencies, Nice Shoes decided to replace its existing D-1 format standard definition recorders with Panasonic AJ-HD3700A recorders, capable of 525/625 line (NTSC/PAL) standard definition recording as well as 720P/60, 1080i/50/60 and 1080P/24 high definition formats.
Joe Bottazzi, Nice Shoes' principal/vice-president of engineering, said, "We stake our reputation on delivering the highest quality pictures to our clients, which today means the ability to handle uncompressed 601 video. With the AJ-HD3700A, we get non-compressed standard-definition video – NTSC and PAL -- as well as HD studio quality. Beyond this flexibility, the D-5 HD deck is low maintenance, has excellent head life, and is reasonably priced.
I expect the AJ-HD3700A to be the machine of choice for commercial mastering for the next 7 to 10 years."
He added, "We use the AJ-HD3700As for virtually all our jobs, film-to-tape work, finishing and mastering. We made the additional purchase of the AJ-HD150s as more and more people are shooting DVCPRO HD. It's another machine that covers multiple formats from the same device, making sense space-wise and cost-wise."
The AJ-HD3700A, a true universal international mastering recorder, which can record, edit and playback both 625 PAL and 525 NTSC D-5 cassettes as well as D-5 tapes from all previous versions of this widely-adopted production machine. The AJ-HD3700A can record, edit and play back 1080/23.98p and 1080/24p HD formats. Its progressive image recording of 24-fps film sources without frame-rate conversion enhances artistic image expression and allows high-quality digital mastering of film content, such as movies and commercials, into formats suitable for broadcasting and DVD packaging.
Continuing the tradition of enhanced and cost-efficient capabilities found in all AJ-HD3700 VTRs, both analogue audio input/output and metadata record and playback functions are built-in with no option cards necessary.
Upconversion and downconversion are possible with an optional format converter card.
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