Discrete Cosine

Sony XDCam EX news

Sony has made a number of exciting announcements about the Sony XDCam EX product line in the leadup to NAB. DVUser.co.uk has the full roundup, but the big news is three new pieces of hardware.

The first is the Sony XDCam EX3, which is essentially an EX1 with the lens made interchangeable. The second is the EX30 deck, with two SxS slots and a full range of input and output options. Finally, and perhaps most exciting, is the PH-60K SxS harddrive, a self contained, battery powered harddisk which will dump SxS cards with no need for a laptop.

Cool stuff indeed.

BBC HD Delivery Specs

I found this pretty interesting - the spec sheet of do's and don'ts for producing HD content for the BBC. They're pretty hardcore - shoot DVCProHD or better, post in ProRes or DNxHD, deliver on HDCam SR.

Canon Announces two new cameras ... apparently?

Canon has just announced two new cameras, the XL-H1S and XL-H1A. The XL-H1A loses the HD-SDI and genlock connections, and both cameras get a new lens. Beyond that, I can't see a ton of differentiation between these and the XL-H1. Perhaps more will be revealed at NAB.

A bit chilly in hell - Final Cut Server ships

You'd be forgiven for thinking it was never coming, but Apple has announced that Final Cut Server is now shipping. Hopefully they've taken this time to make it ... you know... work.

RedBox?

The NAB hype is in full swing. The most recent spam blast was from a company called Pixellexis, pimping a new product called RedBox. What does it do? Well, it makes your rendering faster. Via magic. Or something?

Angry Man Tilts at at Windmills

StudioDaily is hosting a rant from Scott Simmons about all those darned kids and their Final Cut Pro. He's upset that us young punks don't respect the old ways of doing things. While there is surely some truth in that, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

It's a common criticism in many technical fields - essentially, it's gotten too easy/affordable to do something that was once a protected trade. The influx of new users brings folks of all skill levels, and with all kinds of attitudes about the way the world should work. Final Cut makes it "too easy" to be an editor, so existing editors that have had to work hard for their skills feel threatened.

It's worth a read, if only to get a rise out of people.

EX1 versus Red versus F23

Cute!

Avid knifes Xpress Pro, drops the price on Media Composer

Avid announced today that they're discontinuing the Xpress Pro line of editing software, and cutting the price on Media Composer to $2495 from $4995. Students can purchase it for just $295.

Very interesting news. This means the least expensive Avid editing platform is double the cost of the Final Cut Studio bundle. Presumably for most folks in the business, $1200 isn't a huge deciding factor one way or another, but it may be a sign that Avid doesn't see as much value in the lowest end customers as they'd hoped.

Nice video on the HDMI cable scam

The CBC did a nice little piece on the scam of high priced HDMI cables. Keep in mind they're Canadian, so $260 for a cable is like, $5000 US.

I've been quite happy pushing 1080p over the $5-$10 cables I got through Amazon.

DR60 and FCP - followup

Apparently the URL hasn't been working to get the plugin for FCP to support the Sony DR60.

Here's a link that works.

YouTube API is a whole bowl of awesome

YouTube has announced a really extensive API which lets you upload videos, add/update metadata, and do pretty much everything else you'd hope to find in a YouTube API.

Exciting.

Sony releases FCP plugin to handle M2T files

The Sony DR60 and the new "Memory Recording Unit" (as part of the HVR-Z7U) return standard M2T files in HDV mode. That's a problem if you want to use them with Final Cut.

Or, it used to be. Today they've released their plugin to rewrap M2T files in Quicktime to work with Final Cut. This was mentioned in the Final Cut 6.0.2 release notes, but was previously unavailable.

Get it here, and enjoy your tapeless workflow. So long Focus, so long ...

Screenflow - screencasting with zazz!

Vara software has just released a new screencasting application called ScreenFlow. It combines the features of a typical screencasting like SnapzPro or iShowU, with the ability to bring in onscreen video from a camera, as well as some neat 3d transitions and all.

Screencasting is becoming increasingly popular as a teaching tool, and this looks set to make the process simple and very attractive. Cool.

DNxHD approved as a standard

I wasn't aware Avid was trying to push this as a standard, but Engadget has the news that SMPTE has approved DNxHD as a standard, called VC-3. DNxHD is similar to Apple's ProRes422, though many folks consider it to be slightly higher quality. It'll be interesting to see how this gets adopted - having a high quality, cross platform interchange format sure would be nice.

Apple pulls out of NAB - what the heck?

Just plain strange. Apple has now confirmed that they won't be attending NAB this year, after having recently upgraded to a larger booth to fill the spot vacated by Avid. Recession fears? NAB dying? Who knows. Will Adobe be the next to pull out?