The other week I posted about the some of the possibilities of the Thunderbolt port in Apple’s MacBook Pro line.

At the National Association of Broadcasters, we’re now starting to see some of the possibilities come to fruition as Promise Technology yesterday announced SANLink – which is a Thunderbolt Fibre Channel Adapter.

It’s coming in the US Summer so it’s still a few months off, but this means we’ll be able to use dual fibre channel ports in a laptop – allowing these laptops to join a Fibre Channel Xsan, StorNext, or Rorke/HyperFS Storage solution – as per the diagram from the previous post.

It’ll be interesting to see how this changes the workflow dynamic in video edit suites – where previously laptops had to use Edit Proxies or similar, then use Final Cut Server or similar systems to check out media. The role of a laptop could now start to be seen as inexpensive Edit Suites, editing HD, 2K and 3D footage directly from the SAN.  Eventually, the editor will still need to be “checking out” with Edit Proxy media toward the end of the day to keep working on it from home- but with the copy of that data taking a fraction of the time it used to.  The lower-power consumption of laptops could also see benefits in “green edit suites”.

Of course this assumes you also have devices to capture video from and playback to –  and Matrox, and Black Magic Design have also come to the party there.  Matrox have announced their MXO2 range of Input and Output devices will be expanded to Thunderbolt-enabled devices in July 2011, and Black Magic Design have announced their Ultra Studio 3D Product – facilitating HD, 2K and 3D editing, on a laptop using Thunderbolt.  This will provide the streams of video for both the left eye and right eye that are required for 3D editing, down a Thunderbolt Connector at full HD and greater resolutions.

Just scratching the surface of the new stuff at NAB, with more news coming tonight after the Final Cut Pro Users Supermeet..

Written by: David Colville on April 13, 2011.