Pixspan shipped its PixMover software package, which it says uses Pixspan's lossless compression technology to reduce storage and bandwidth requirements for 4K DI and camera raw files by between 50% and 80%.

First announced at NAB 2016, PixMover is designed to enable 4K workflow on systems originally designed to meet specs for working in HD or 2K. The newest version is GPU-enabled for use with a dual-processor server and Nvidia M6000 hardware, which should increase speed by two to four times compared to CPU-only processing, the company said. 

Storage Savings with Pixspan Compression

Source: Pixspan

PixMover works by storing 4K DI (DPX, OpenEXR, TIFF, Cineon) and camera raw files (Canon C500 Raw, ARRIRaw) on NAS or SAN in highly compressed versions that are restored to full quality as part of a real-time 4K workflow. PixMover automatically creates proxies that can be viewed without extra processing, so that file content can be previewed without being opened in full resolution.

Pixspan claims that its images hold up through multiple generations of compression and decompression, with the results being bit-for-bit replicas of the originals. The company's compression does not use discrete cosine transforms or wavelets in order to reduce the processing requirements and gain a significant speed advantage over more processor-intensive codecs, Pixspan said. 

PixMover, which runs on off-the-shelf hardware, is availabile on a subscription basis through resellers including ALT Systems and Alliance IT in L.A., XTFX in London, Post Logic in Paris and VGI in Tokyo. The system is being demonstrated this week at the HPA Tech Retreat UK.