Category "News"
April 11, 2008
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.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:11 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
April 02, 2008
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?
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:30 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
March 18, 2008
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.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 08:48 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
March 12, 2008
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.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 08:26 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
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.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 02:26 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 22, 2008
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 ...
Posted by Colin McFadden at 04:10 PM | Comments (3) | News
Category "News"
February 14, 2008
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.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 13, 2008
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.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 02:04 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 08, 2008
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?
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:57 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 18, 2007
Quicktime 7.3.1 ruins Christmas for many
So. There were some serious security issues with Flash support in Quicktime. Apple released 7.3.1 to fix them. Unfortunately, they fixed them by disabling Flash support.
Let us step back for a moment. Quicktime plays Flash files? Yup, Quicktime will playback SWF files that are compatible with Flash version 5 or earlier. They can also be embedded as tracks within other quicktime files. Many content producers take advantage of this to add interactivity to Quicktime movies.
Needless to say, an update suddenly removing that capability has created some serious issues for a number of users. No warning, no downgrade path and no comments about workarounds. Sounds like classic Apple to me. Jerks.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:37 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 11, 2007
Get paid to post on Youtube
Youtube has expanded their previously very limited program of cutting content producers in on ad revenue. This is good for folks who are already planning to post their content on Youtube, though it's probably not your path to web2.0 riches.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 02:28 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 04, 2007
Flash with files from Compressor
Ok, first discovery - Flash doesn't seem to support compressed headers on Quicktime H264 files. Just choose 'fast start' and you'll be all set.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:26 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Adobe sends down some love
Adobe released Flash Player 9 Update 3 today, which includes official support for H264 video and AAC audio. That's about the nicest thing I've heard all week. OK world: upgrade now. On2 be damned.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
November 14, 2007
Sony announces a load of new HDV gear
Sony has announced two new HDV cameras and a new HDV deck. StudioDaily has a nice roundup, but it looks like Sony's really got some winners here.
Fully buzzword compliant - 24p, XLR in, record to tape or compact flash, etc. Not a whole ton of other info available right now, but I think Sony is trying hard to win back my heart.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Avid AWOL from Annual Association Activity
If all of my titles were alliterative ... that'd be awesome.
Avid announced yesterday that they're not going to show up at NAB 2008. No booth, no shouty presenters, no pretentious representatives ...
So what's this all about? Avid has had a bad year (sizable losses) and may see the expense of NAB as not worth the return. That's one option. Option two is that this could be a signal that NAB is on the decline. Apple hasn't officially booked a booth yet either. NAB has been growing so much though, it's hard to imagine that's the case. I guess we'll see come April.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:41 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
November 01, 2007
Panasonic gone wacky
Uhh. Panasonic? Dudes? You're making my eyes bleed.
Welcome everyone, to the Panasonic AG-HMC70, by far the ugliest camera I have ever seen. Seriously, I hope there's an aftermarket bodykit for this or something. Maybe with some ground effects and flared wheel arches ...
Oh yeah, it's a three chip, AVCHD camera that records to SD cars with an OIS leica lens. So that's all pretty neat. You get XLR jacks plus both an LCD and a viewfinder. AVCHD is still a bit of a funny format - I've seen very good AVCHD, and very bad AVCHD. Hopefully this tilts towards the former.
No price on this yet, though I'd expect it to come in under the HVX-200. Which really begs the question of why Panasonic, which has thrown all of its weight in the prosumer and professional field behind P2 and DVCProHD/AVC-Intra, would jump into the market with an AVCHD camera recording to SD. So very confusing.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:00 AM | Comments (2) | News
Category "News"
October 16, 2007
Here comes Leopard
Woo.
Update: $116 with the educational discount? Excuse me? Gee thanks Apple, $15 off. What a deal.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 08:57 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
October 09, 2007
Google gives monetizing YouTube yet another go
Maybe I just have a faulty memory, but it sure seems like we've heard a handful of stories since Google bought YouTube about their imminent attempts to monetize the service. But anyways, here's another go, adding non-video ad content around the video content. They're giving the content producer a cut, which is nice, but I imagine for most regular content producers the numbers will be insignificant compared to traditional advertising placement.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:01 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
September 12, 2007
Sony HDV at IBC
Sony has announced a pair of interchangeable-lens cameras at IBC (announced might be too strong a word... previewed?). Take a look at the rundown from some dude's blog.
The little guy is pretty cute. Smallish CMOS chips, but you can swap the lens, including adding SLR lenses with the right adapter. I haven't seen US press releases on these yet, nor model numbers, so I wouldn't expect anything concrete until NAB08.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:42 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Now with 50% more Piratability!
Apple released a new product, Logic Studio, today. It's a package containing an updated version of Logic (Logic 8), a new live music application called MainStage, Soundtrack Pro 2 and a bunch of effects and software instruments. It's all very exciting, particularly MainStage. Mainstage aims to provide a stable, reliable basis for doing live performances with software instruments and effects.
I find it very interesting that one of the eight highly touted features of Logic 8 is that you no longer need a hardware dongle. Just... interesting.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:16 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
September 04, 2007
RED ships
Oh yeah, RED shipped. It does some of the stuff they said it'd do. Check out HDForIndies for the full fanboi rundown.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Sanyo DMX-HD1000
I'm a huge fan of the Xacti line. I think for anyone who just needs to document events, cameras like the Xacti are brilliant. I took an HD1 to Italy and China and used it all the time. So, it's exciting to see that they've introduced a new model, the HD1000.
The featureset is similar to the existing HD2, but it's now got a 1920x1080 imager, giving you true 1080i imaging. It's a bit on the spendy side, with an estimated retail of over $1000, but they tend to drop in price pretty quickly.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:00 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
More info on the HVR-HD1000U
Camcorderinfo has a nice article on the HVR-HD1000U. The real scoop? They took the consumer-grade HDR-HC7 and put it in a bigger box. No XLR, consumer-grade chips, etc. It's still a lot of camera for <$2000, but it's not the be-all and end-all. Oh well.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
August 23, 2007
Sony HVR-HD1000U Shoulder-mount HDV camera
August must be drawing to a close - there's actual news to talk about! IBC is just around the corner, so it's not too surprising.
Sony has formally announced the HVR-HD1000U shoulder-mount HDV camera, which was previewed as "future technology" at NAB this year. Don't let the form factor fool you, the lens isn't interchangeable (that'd compete with XDCam, duh).
Here's the odd part though: it's a 3 CMOS camera with many of the features of the V1U (fake slow-mo), and yet the press release lists the MSRP at $1,900. That's less than half the price of the V1U - about the same price as the diminutive A1U. So, the question must be asked: did Sony make a typo in the press release? Is this really a $19,000 camera? At $1900 it's a ridiculous steal, at $19,000 it's a complete rip-off.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:36 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
August 21, 2007
Adobe bring H.264 to Flash
Woot. Adobe gives On2 a nice boot to the head, announcing support for H.264 video playback within Flash. Dig the beta at Adobe Labs.
Update: Here's more info from a Flash developer.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
July 26, 2007
Sony HDV "video walkman"
There are many folks with fond memories of the Sony DSR-V10, a small clamshell DVCam deck with an integrated monitor. They were great for in-the-field viewing, and also for use with lipstick cams and other devices without integrated recording. Well, there's now an HDV successor, the GV-HD700E. Notice however, that it'll only record to HDV when you feed it a signal over firewire - no component inputs (just like the HVR-1500). Lame, Sony.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 04:57 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
June 15, 2007
Drobo is taking over the world!
If anyone wants to learn how to market a product in the 21st century, look no further than Drobo. First off, a bit about why it's so cool (and why I'm going to buy one) and then I'll explain how amazing their marketing has been.
Drobo is an external storage solution which uses RAID-like technology to protect your data. What makes it cool is that it can be dynamically expanded, without reformatting, and supports mixing and matching of various disk sizes. So the deal is that you connect it over USB2, pop in whatever SATA disks you have lying around, and it creates a single large volume for you. Any one of those disks can fail catastrophically without you losing access to any of your data. When that happens, you just pop in a new disk and it keeps humming along. Similarly, when you start to run low on storage space on the array, it'll turn on a light next to the smallest drive in your array, queueing you that it's time to upgrade. Just pop the smallest disk out and pop a larger disk in. Magically, you've got more space in your volume.
I'm excited about it for two reasons. One, I've got five external disks hooked up to my Powermac at home, along with two internals. Around 1.8tb of space overall. About 1.5tb of that is totally unbacked-up. That's a bit scary. It's also annoying to have data spread across seven different volumes. So, I'm looking to get a Drobo populated with two 500 gig disks and two of my existing 250 gig disks. It'll give me just about a terabyte of usable, redundant storage, which is a pretty good start.
So, it's obviously a pretty cool product. But why the buzz? Because this company is very clever.
Their marketing began (as best as I can tell) with a video on YouTube, demonstrating the ways the array reacts to having a drive removed, replaced, etc. From there, they got samples into the hands of the influential tech bloggers and podcasters - DL.TV, Leo Laporte, Engadget, Scoble, etc. Suddenly every blog I read and podcast I listen to is talking about this device like it's the second coming. This morning I got an email from MacConnection telling me how awesome it is. The marketing must be working because the device is apparently pretty hard to find in stock at the moment.
Bright guys.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Clever Kids at Kodak
Kodak has announced a new sort of filter to go on CMOS or CCD sensors to replace the existing "bayer pattern." For those who don't know, a CCD or CMOS chip is inherently only sensitive to variations in brightness, not to colors themselves. In order to get around that, you either need a three chip camera (with each chip filtered to just received red/green/blue light) or you need a bayer pattern on a single chip. Essentially a bayer pattern is just a grid of very small filters, so each pixel on the sensor is only receiving one of the three primary colors. A true RGB image can later be reconstructed by interpolating the pixels.
The new Kodak filter ads a "clear" filter to the existing bayer pattern, which allows for much greater light sensitivity. In essence, it's like adding a "luma" pixel to the RGB pixels. Pretty clever!
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:10 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
June 05, 2007
New MacBookPros, hoorah
Apple released new 15" and 17" MacBook Pros today. Plenty of upgrades: Santa Rosa chips, 2gigs of ram standard, Geforce 8600M GPUs. The 15" gets LED backlighting, while the 17" gets the option for a higher res screen - 1920x1200, the same as the 23" cinema displays. That's a really huge feature, both for folks working with video (it means you can view 1080i at 1:1 resolution) and for normal users. Personally, I find the 23" has just about enough screen realestate to productively multitask, so I'm excited about that many pixels in a laptop.
I'll be very excited to see LED backlighting in person as well, as it's supposed to be pretty beautiful. The 15" also picks up a little extra runtime thanks to the lower power backlighting, so Apple estimates 6 hours of battery life. Nice.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
May 21, 2007
HDMI cable talk
Yes, I'm on vacation, but RSS feeds never sleep.
I just wanted to link to this article, about HDMI cabling. The stuff about HDMI doesn't really concern me, and I think they miss the real reason for doing HDMI versus HD-SDI in consumer gear (the signal processing is cheaper). I like it because it's a really readable article about impedance and the other factors that go into cable design.
Don't forget the travel blog either.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 08:00 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
May 17, 2007
Final Cut Studio 2 is shipping
Yesterday, copies of FCS2 started going out. It looks like the upgrade versions aren't out yet, just the full retail version. Exciting nonetheless.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 08:52 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
May 03, 2007
Captioning
I'll be doing a bigger post on how this works, but for now, check out my post over at the MM blog about our new captioning support in Media Mill.
As an aside, I hate Flash.
Really hate Flash.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 05:10 PM | Comments (1) | News
Category "News"
April 26, 2007
LCD broadcast monitors
There are still plenty of folks who won't trust anything but a CRT for video monitoring. Studio Daily has an article about all the new LCDs trying to replace CRTs for that purpose. CRTs are getting increasingly rare, as environmental regulations make their production and sale difficult. Frankly, for most people, getting a cheap 23" LCD from Dell or Apple along with an HD-SDI to DVI bridge is good enough for most purposes, and a hell of a lot cheaper.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:57 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
April 20, 2007
XDCam Xplosion
I'm so witty.
Sony announced an overwhelming quantity of new cameras at NAB. Here's my quick rundown, but if you want the full list check out the excellent article from dvuser.co.uk.
Remember when XDCam meant "MXF wrapped MPEG-ish video stored to a rewriteable optical disc"? Yeah... those were the days. Now we get the XDcam EX, a camera which writes to expresscard/34 solid state storage. In reality, it looks like an excellent camera - while the lens isn't removable, it does have proper manual features, with physical aperture adjustment. Nice.
In terms of the disc-based XDCam products, the big news was 4:2:2 HD on dual-layer discs. That's a big deal, as it moves XDCamHD from "HDV on a Disc" to something a bit more professional. There are also two new decks, the F75 and one yet-to-be-named which support the new dual-layer discs. Finally, they brought out the PDW-U1, a firewire-attached drive for use with NLE workstations. Rumor is that it'll street at around $3000, which would make it a pretty nice choice for an xdcam workflow.
Finally, in the HDV space, Sony showed a DSR-250 replacement which supports large-format cassettes to provide up to 276 minutes of HDV record time. I'm sure it'll be nice, but unless you need that kind of runtime there are probably better options on the market for the near-$10k pricetag.
Finally, DVUser.co.uk has the officially Sony powerpoint on all these products. It will be very interesting to see how XDCam HD at 4:2:2 compares to HDCam at 3:1:1 (but with less compression).
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:47 PM | Comments (2) | News
Category "News"
Notes on Episode plugin for Compressor 3
When Apple announced that Compressor 3 would support Telestream's Episode product through a plugin, I got very, very excited. Then I talked to Telestream, and got very, very sad.
Here's the deal - Compressor has a new Episode option within the preset inspector, which allows you to use the presets from episode in your Compressor workflow. The Episode presets themselves much still be managed from within the Episode interface. Then, when a job is submitted, Compressor does the decoding and passes the data off to Episode to do the encoding.
I got various explanations of how the progress is monitored. One person said you can't use Batch Monitor to see the job, one person implied you could. In any case, it sounds like distributed compression isn't supported directly, without purchasing the Episode Engine product with the split and stitch option. It's all a bit fishy really.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:33 PM | Comments (2) | News
Category "News"
Trancoder Roundup
DV.com has a nice roundup of the various software transcoders on the market. I more or less agree with it, though the final section on server use of Compressor is a bit inaccurate. If Episode Engine had proper automation features, it'd be just about perfect.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
In depth look at ProRes 422
Apple has posted a white paper on the ProRes codec. A white paper on a video compression codec? Name one thing more exciting than that, I dare you.
Truth be told, the document doesn't contain a whole lot of new information. ProRes is an I-frame online VBR codec, operating internally at 10bit 4:2:2.
A few interesting details came up though. First off, FCP6 will have a new preference that allows long gop formats to be rendered in ProRes. So you can capture your HDV, apply effects, and render them into ProRes. This is really nice, as it means you don't suffer the generation loss issues of long-gop reencoding, and it should be quite a bit faster as well.
Speaking of generation loss, the white paper shows that there is essentially no drop in PSNR after the first generation of encodes. That is, of course, how a codec should ideally behave - if the decoder matches the encoder, successive reencodes won't suffer generation loss issues. However, that's rarely the case in reality.
We still don't know much about how the codec operates internally, though I'm sort of guessing it's a DCT (rather than DWT) based codec with some fancy intelligent quantization routines and good entropy coding.
I'm looking forward to giving it a try.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
April 16, 2007
NAB should have more sleep
Day one of the expo. Even though I've been in the hall for the last two days, it's still a shock to see all those people and all those booths.
A few highlights from the day. First off, Scopebox had a lot of traffic, which was nice.
The Focus rep basically admitted that I should just throw away my FS4ProHDs and buy FS-Cs. Jerk. Then a bunch of customers came up and started ranting about how bad their support sucks. That was nice.
The new Bogen 501HDV head is really rather nice.
The Sachtler Artemis is as cool as I thought it would be.
The Telestream plugin for Compressor 3 is actually a whole module, not just an export component. Looks like you get job segmenting and everything. Rad.
The AJA Io HD is as nice as you expect it to be.
That's all I can type right now. Time to die.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:40 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
April 15, 2007
Final Cut Studio 2
Had a chance to attend Apple's special event today, in which they announced Final Cut Studio 2, including all sorts of exciting goodness. For the full scoop, check out Apple's site, or the live feed from Engadget. This post is just the stuff that excites me.
First off, Final Cut Pro now does mutli-def, multi-codec in a single timeline. That's really fantastic, especially for novice users that don't want to worry about transcoding media to other formats. Mix HD, SD, 24p, 60i, etc all on one timeline and play back in realtime. That's nifty.
Final Cut 6 also introduces a new codec called ProRes, a 4:2;2 variable bitrate HD codec which claims to give you uncompressed HD quality at uncompressed SD bitrates. The demos they showed looked really impressive, but demos always look impressive. What makes it exciting is that they've teamed up with AJA to build a FW800 based box (the IO HD) which lets you bring HD-SDI into a macbook pro in the field. That's huge! Here's hoping the codec is as good as they say.
Motion has also gained a ridiculous quantity of new features, taking it from a handy-for-titles app to a full fledged After Effects competitor. To name a few, you get a 3d working environment with multiple cameras, and 3d aware behaviors and particle emitors. You can use audio to provide input to any control, so you can now have the soundtrack to your video control the way the effects behave. You also get an object tracking system for doing match moves.
Soundtrack Pro gets surround sound mixing and a spectrum view with editing capabilities (like Audition). There are a number of other cool features to make the editors easier.
Compressor gets a new interface which exposes some functionality that was actually in Compressor 2 (and used heavily by Media Mill) but which was difficult to take advantage of.
Finally, there's an entirely new app called Color, which is just a warmed over version of Silicon Color's tool (which Apple purchased). Cool that it's free now (as part of Studio) but it didn't blow my mind. Just a color finishing app.
There was lots of other cool stuff, like Final Cut Server and loads of cool demos. They were recording the whole event so hopefully they'll be posting a stream. If not, Final Cut Studio 2 ships in a month so we can all start playing.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 07:36 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
April 11, 2007
AACS has not been fixed
I meant to discuss this on yesterday's podcast, but forgot. There's been a new round of news this week about AACS potentially being "fixed", and other stories saying that it's been "rebroken" - in fact, it is neither.
Here's the gist. WinDVD rolled out an update which they said was required in order to play future discs. This of course implies that the device key for WinDVD has been revoked, and that future discs won't be able to be decoded without a new key. That's all well and good - it's exactly what was predicted.
That's it.
That's all.
The AACS group did a stupid press release saying that they'd fixed the problem. Of course, all they've done is made it so the folks looking to crack the discs will have to dig around for another device or processing key.
The Volume ID hack that is somehow being tied up in this whole story is in fact mostly unrelated. Prior to this hack, folks were having to go through a few annoying machinations to obtain a volume ID, as it's not directly readable from the disc through typical means. The volume ID, in combination with the device key or processing key is required to decrypt a disc.
So, when new discs appear which revoke WinDVD's device key, the processing key will stop working as well, and having the volume ID won't do any good. The VID hack is still important, at least until they figure out a way to force a new firmware to the Xbox HDDVD drives, but it doesn't negate the key revocation.
Whew.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:31 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
M2 on a cheapo camera
There's a thread at DVInfo in which a fellow strapped an M2 lens adapter on a Canon HV20. Working with depth of field that shallow can be pretty challenging, but it's neat to see that it worked. Crazy kids.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
April 02, 2007
iTunes goes partially DRM free
At a press conference in London today, EMI along with Steve Jobs announced the availability of DRM free tracks via iTunes. Macrumors has a good roundup of the news. The gist is that for an extra $0.30 per song, or for the same price per album, you'll get 256kbps AAC files without any DRM restrictions. At this point it's just EMI, and perhaps not even the full EMI catalog, but Apple is predicting 2.5 million DRM free tracks by the end of 2007, indicating that they expect other labels to join in the fun.
Is this one of those "tip of the iceberg" moments, where DRM finally crumbles, or will this just prove that people can't be trusted with DRM-free music? Time will tell.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:15 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
March 27, 2007
Adobe Announces CS3 everything (for realz)
As expected, Adobe made their official CS3 announcements today. Check out their press page for the full rundown of press releases.
For most folks, CS3 is exciting because it means native-intel support on the Mac. The Mac also gets the first version of Premiere in a while, along with the new Soundbooth DAW program. The new "Photoshop CS3 Extended" gains some other interesting features, which FXGuide has summarized. As a taste - you can now import a movie into Photoshop and then paint on each frame, sequentially. Nice.
Product rollout starts in April, continuing through third quarter 2007.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:13 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
March 26, 2007
Telestream Pipeline
This is one of those products that gets announced four or five times, but Telestream put out a press release on their new Pipeline product.
Here's the gist - it's an SDI to DV25/50/etc converter, with a twist. Instead of outputting over firewire, they output to ethernet. So, you can move your capture away from your playback. That's pretty neat. There are all kinds of scenarios in which that's a useful ability to have. Plus, any time you can move more data to a standardized infrastructure within a facility, that's nice.
I know some more about this product, but I don't think I'm allowed to say yet. Check back after NAB.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:28 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
March 23, 2007
Apple TV Hacking
I've been avoiding posting the various bits of Apple TV news over the past few days, as it's mostly just "Apple TV is shipping" and "Apple TV reviews are out."
However, there's some big news today. Someone has done some digging into what's on the harddrive in the Apple TV and found that it's an OSX derivative that will run normal intel binaries. Here's the duggmirror copy of the original Something Awful post. I suppose it's possible that this is a fake, but I'm not so sure.
The gist is that they pulled the drive, mounted it on a mac, installed Perian and Dropbear, put it back together, and now are able to playback previously unsupported video file formats. So, the Apple TV runs a stripped down OS X with a functional version of Quicktime. It may be worth picking one up just to play with, even though I don't have a TV ...
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:35 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
March 19, 2007
Adobe Apollo - a netapp SDK
Apparently this was shown at DEMO, but I didn't hear about it until the press releases started spreading today. Adobe has posted a prerelease version of Apollo, a crossplatform runtime for creating standalone apps that are built on HTML, Javascript and Flash. iTunes has shown us how successful a really well crafted netapp can be, so it'll be interesting to see where this goes.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:54 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
March 08, 2007
Photoshop for Film and Video?
Adobe has announced that they're going to be announcing a product called Photoshop CS3 Extended. Among other things, their little blurb implies that it's designed to work with motion graphics and 3d models. I don't really know what that means - just a few extra features, or are they gunning for ZBrush and related products? I guess we'll know on the 27th...
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:43 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
March 07, 2007
My Insides Look Funny
I broke my back on Saturday. I was sledding, then I was airborne, then I was in an ambulance. It was pretty exciting.
While in the ER, I went through the normal round of Xrays and CT scans. Because I needed to go do a followup on said injury, I ended up having to pick up a copy of these Xrays and CT scans to transfer to the appointment. In a very cool twist of modern medicine, instead of picking up films I picked up a CD-R containing all my data. Being an enterprising fellow, I made a copy of said CD. Follow the jump for more of me!
The CD comes with all of my data, along with an eFilm reader. Not only does this allow me to look at the 2d images, it allows you to build a full 3d model of the CT scan data, and then fly around it. You can also animate all of the individual CT scan slides to create a "fly" through your body. I've got videos to demonstrate.
First, here's the Xray, exported from the eFilm reader. This isn't the full resolution version, which is 2000x3000 pixels.
Click for a larger view.
For the aspiring doctors in the audience, the fracture is in the L1 vertebra, which is the fifth one up from the pelvis.
Next, you can fly through my body!
And finally, some screencapture video of me manipulating my spine in 3d.
Note that the aspect ratios on all of these is a little off, as I don't feel like creating special CT scan-sized Flash presets for Media Mill...
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:28 AM | Comments (4) | News
Category "News"
March 05, 2007
Nvidia announced stupidly huge graphics card
Nvidia has announced a 128 core graphics card aimed at high end film and video editors. This seems to lend some credence to the rumor that Apple will be announcing a "Final Cut Extreme" hardware/software solution at NAB. With retail prices ranging from $2000 to more than $3000, you can start to see how such a solution could reach five digits.
Who knows what the impact of this will be, but it's definitely an interesting possibility to consider.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 01:33 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
CS3 coming March 27th
Appleinsider is reporting that Adobe Creative Suite 3 will be released on the 27th of March. This is a big deal, as it will bring native Intel support to the Adobe creative apps. I've been running Photoshop CS3 on my MacPro since the beta was released and it's a definite improvement.
March 27th was a day that had been supposed as a potential Leopard launch date. I wouldn't be surprised to see Apple do some sort of announcement in conjunction with Adobe, but I'd guess they're more likely to do speed-bumped MacPros and Macbook Pros to coincide with CS3. Leopard may not be as close to shipping as many had hoped.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 01:12 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 21, 2007
More video training podcasts
We're posting some more video training podcasts. To get the rss feeds, check out the previous post, or if you'd like to subscribe via iTunes, click below.
iTunes link (small video)
iTunes link (large video)
Thanks go to Mark Heitke, Deb Moe and Tim Nelson for their work on these videos.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 01:48 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 20, 2007
Affordable Studio HD on the Horizon?
It's February, but we're already in the run-up to NAB. Sony had a deluge of press releases today. Among them was one in particular, about the new HDC-1400 studio camera. It looks to be an HDC-1500 that only does 1080i60 and 720p60 and lacks a few other features. Suggested list is $65,000, which is about $30,000 under the list for the HDC-1500.
Along the same lines, Panasonic recently announced the AK-HC3500. Spec-wise, it's right in the same ballpark, though it lacks 720p support. No pricing has been announced, but I'd guess $50k.
It's really exciting to see studio HD cameras coming down to the sub-$100k range. Getting to the point of being able to have a whole camera system (camera, lens, viewfinder, CCU, RCP) for less than $100k will be a big deal. Depending on what retail is on either of these models, it may not be far off.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 02:12 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 15, 2007
Final Cut Update
Apple pushed FCP 5.1.3 today. Looks like a very minor bugfix release, but perhaps it has super secret hidden features!
Posted by Colin McFadden at 05:05 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Free tapes from Sony
I was going to ignore this promotion from Sony, but I did a bit more reading and realized it's actually a pretty sweet deal. If you've purchased any high end HDV camera between August 1, 2006 and now, you can get 5 free HDV Master tapes. That includes the Sony cams (Z1U, A1U) as well as the Canon XH and XL cams and the various JVC models. Sweet! Now, to find those invoices ...
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:31 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Iditarod shot on P2
I'm a bit confused. Panasonic is bragging about P2 being used for the first HD shoot of the Iditarod. But, last year, Sony talked about XDCamHD being used for the same race. Hu?
All that aside, I'm a bit confused. It seems to me that P2 is about the worst possible format for this type of shooting. They shot 140 hours of footage. On a format that can get at best about 25 minutes per 8gig card, that seems like a really painful way to shoot. I understand that the no-moving-parts thing is nice in -40 degree weather, but wow, it seems like that'd be a hard shoot to pull off without a limitless supply of P2 cards.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 14, 2007
Quantum Computing for the Sudoku-Playing-Masses
Engadget has a story up on the quantum computer that we mentioned on this week's podcast. It's really, really cool.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 02:17 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 13, 2007
AACS not cracked (again)
Another day, another round of misleading headlines (gotta love digg) about the destruction of AACS. I spent some time this morning reading to the specs, so I now have a pretty good idea of what's going on.
The reason for this latest round of headlines is that a new hacker over at doom9, arnezami, has been digging deeper into the different keys used by AACS. Up until this point, if you wanted to make a decrypted copy of an HD-DVD or BluRay disc, you used PowerDVD or WinDVD on your Windows computer, did a memory dump, looked through the dump for the title key, and went about your merry way. Folks have even written tools to make this memory dump / hunt process automatic.
In the long term, this isn't a particularly sustainable solution. The AACS folks will just revoke the device keys for PowerDVD and WinDVD, forcing users to download updated versions. The updated versions will take more care to hide the title key, and despair will spread throughout the pirate community.
With this bleak future in mind, arnezami went investigating alternatives. What he found is the Processing Key, which is essentially an AES'd combination of the device key and the appropriate elements of the Media Key Block. Don't worry if I've lost you, this bit isn't all that important. The processing key doesn't inherently reveal which device key it is spawned from.
The processing key is a major chunk of the decryption process. It is a universal decryption key for all titles, with a big caveat that I will mention later. In order to make use of the processing key, you also need the Volume ID. This is essentially a 128bit string that is unique for each HD-DVD or BluRay title. According to the AACS specs, it should be random, though it appears that many replicators haven't been following this quite to the letter - the Volume ID for Serenity for instance is "SERENITY ". Clever.
Unfortunately, recovering volume ids isn't proving to be significantly easier than recovering title keys at the moment. The volume ID is stored on a special part of the disc which can't be read directly via software. In order to recover it, you have to nicely ask the drive to read it and pass it along. For now, that means using a USB sniffer to watch the bus traffic as your software player retrieves the volume ID. The AACS spec actually has this circumstance accounted for as well, with a specification for bus encryption of the volume ID transfer, but nobody has implemented this process yet.
So, what's this mean? Is AACS destroyed? Afraid not. If someone can come up with a clever, self contained mechanism for retrieving Volume IDs, it may make widespread HD-DVD/BluRay ripping easier, as there won't be any need to hunt for an already decrypted title key. Barring that however, you'll still need to find or be told the volume id before the processing key is of any use to you. At that point, why not just find or be told the title key and skip a few steps?
Truth be told, the only circumstance in which having the processing key is useful is if the AACS folks really don't know which player generated the key, and thusly don't know which player to deactivate. However, since the AACS folks do know all of the device keys that they've assigned, it should be pretty easy for them to calculate all the various processing keys and come up with the renegade player. And even if that weren't the case, I don't think they'd have qualms about just revoking all of the device keys for the software players on the market, forcing an update with better security.
Realistically, AACS will only be truly dead if someone comes up with a master list of all of the device keys (leaked from the AACS folks). The encryption itself isn't under threat - AES with 128bit keys isn't going to be brute forced any time soon. However, if talented hackers can keep making trouble by figuring out ways to rip these discs, it may eventually become cost prohibitive to keep deactivating device keys. When folks start sniffing hardware keys from expensive home theater units, it'll get even more interesting. Maybe it's time to just give up on this DRM thing?
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:28 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
3GSM is where the fun is
The big 3GSM trade show is going on right now, so there are tons of fancy new cellular handsets dropping. If you're into that sort of thing, I suggest you take a gander at Engadget Mobile. iPhone or bust!
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:07 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 12, 2007
Rent a High-Speed Camera!
A few months ago, I researched purchasing a high-speed video camera. I stopped researching when I realized that they run $50,000 and up. That's why I'm excited to see that AbelCineTech is now renting Phantom high speed cameras. If only I lived on the coasts...
(via HDforindies)
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:08 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 07, 2007
Podcast 3
Hey All - Podcast 3 is up. Hoorah.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:40 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Canon HV20 Review (In Japanese)
Impress Watch has gotten their hands on a Canon HV20 and has posted a review with lots of sample grabs and videos. I don't really know what it says, but Engadget has a summary.
It's interesting to learn that it supports the xvYCC color space over HDMI, which has a significantly broader spectrum of viewable colors, as compared to sRGB. There are a number of displays hitting the market now that can take advantage of the wider range of colors, so it's nice to see devices capable of outputting it.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
February 06, 2007
Jobs on Music
Apple.com has published an article written by Steve Jobs called "Thoughts on Music," discussing the current state of online music sales, DRM, and the world of copyright. Very interesting - nothing new per se, but very interesting to hear it coming from the head of the biggest online music store.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 03:38 PM | Comments (2) | News
Category "News"
January 31, 2007
Lots of Media Mill updates
Just in case you don't read the other blog routinely, check out the new feature-set I just rolled out for Media Mill.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:34 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Canon HV20 officially announced
News of the HV20 was leaked a few days ago, but now it's official. The Canon HV20 is in the same product line as the HV10 consumer HD camera. The HV20 is a different form factor, looking to be similar to the Panasonic GS line of small consumer cameras, rather than the palmcorder look of the HV10. The primary feature added to the HV20 is 24f support. The HV10 could play back 24f tapes from an XLH1/XHG1/XHA1, but couldn't record in 24f. That makes it a pretty tempting choice for beginning filmmakers who want a higher-end look. I would guess that it'll street for $899, which makes it a pretty nice choice for folks who are serious about their video, but working on a limited budget.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:11 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
January 16, 2007
Apologies and MacWorld roundup
Sorry for going silent for the last few days. Zero hours of sleep at MacWorld, combined with real-world work kind of caught up with me.
MacWorld was a blast, thanks to all those I met there. Aside from the obvious Apple announcements, the big star for me was the Axiotron ModBook. It really is beautifully engineered. I really hope to get a couple to use with ScopeBox. Check the link if you don't know what I'm talking about.
The LAFCPUG meeting was a good time, though all of us were dead tired by that point in the week so it was a bit hazy. We did some renegade ScopeBox promotion, which was a blast, and had good reactions throughout. I bit my tongue and didn't say anything nasty to the folks from Focus Enhancements. Go me!
Now I'm back at the University and the semester is in full swing. NAB is only a few short months away, and there should be some pretty exciting things in the meantime.
CES didn't bring a lot of exciting announcements for the prosumer/professional video production world. Sony released a slew of new consumer-level HDV cameras, recording to all manner of media. Half of them are AVCHD (recording to mini-DVD) and the rest are HDV (recording to mini-DV). Otherwise, there's not a ton of stuff that caught my eye. Aside from the iPhone of course ...
Posted by Colin McFadden at 08:51 AM | Comments (1) | News
Category "News"
January 09, 2007
iPhone!
Ok, I'm a bit sleep deprived, but man-oh-man was that amazing. Steve was giddy! Everyone in the audience was giddy!
Go look at the iPhone. Watch the Keynote. I'm one of the ones cheering every time Steve said anything.
Wow.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 05:13 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
January 08, 2007
I have been to Mecca
We drove down to Cupertino today to do some testing of Scopebox at Apple's developer labs. I'm not sure how much I can say without breaking NDA, but just imagine a room full of one of every machine that Apple has sold in the last decade. They open the door, and say "let us know if you need anything" and that's it. Rad.
Other than that, San Francisco is an amazing place. I love it here. Keynote tomorrow - line up at 4am. I'll be wearing a Scopebox shirt if you're there.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:34 PM | Comments (1) | News
Category "News"
January 07, 2007
Viva MacWorld!
I'm off to the airport, on my way to MacWorld San Francisco. I'll be posting from SanFran, but if you want to keep up on the latest news from this weeks' trade shows, I recommend Engadget for CES coverage and MacRumors for MacWorld coverage.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 06:58 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
January 04, 2007
Blu-Ray and HD-DVD Combo Player?
Engadget claims that LG is going to debut a dual format Blu-Ray / HD-DVD player at CES. This would be a huge step towards resolving this stupid format war, so let's hope that they do. Engadget is a bit skeptical in regards to LG's ability to follow through.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 02:03 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
Premiere comes back to the Mac
It's been rumored for a while, but Adobe is about to officially announce the return of Premiere on the Mac platform. Macworld has the scoop. Looks like I'll get to play with it at Macworld next week (assuming my head hasn't exploded from the joy of the keynote).
This is exciting, not because I'm a huge fan of Premiere, but because it again shows Adobe's faith in the Mac platform, and it provides that much more incentive to bring users over from Windows. That said, Premiere Pro 2.0 is a pretty decent program. It's not quite Final Cut, but it does have the benefit of tight integration with After Effects and the other Adobe applications.
From the look of the single screenshot, it looks like they're not tying it too heavily to the OS, which makes some sense. If you notice, they've got all their palettes situated within a single OS X window, rather than being truly free-floating. I would assume that limited integration holds true on the backend, so it will be interesting to see how codec issues are dealt with. It'll be interesting to see it next week.
Cool stuff.
[Update:] The press release is now available, and in the release Adobe makes it clear that they intend to ship Encore for the Mac as well. That's seriously good news, as Encore nicely fills a space between DVD Studio Pro and iDVD.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:03 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
January 02, 2007
Scopebox is For Realz Yo
I hope you've all been saving your pennies, because after 9 months of work, Scopebox is being released tomorrow, January 3rd. You'll be able to download a trial, find out how rad it is, and then purchase your copy.
If you're not convinced, check out this glowing review at Behind the Frame. Hoorah!
Posted by Colin McFadden at 04:27 PM | Comments (1) | News
Category "News"
Category "Opinions"
December 30, 2006
AACS cracking - here's the deal
Earlier this week, news broke that someone had "cracked" the AACS DRM system used by both HD-DVD and BluRay. At this point, there hasn't been independent verification of any of this, but here's the deal as best as I understand.
A guy named muslix64 on the Doom9 forums figured out a way to extract title keys from HD-DVD discs, very likely using a vulnerability in Power DVD 6.5. He then wrote a decryption tool based on the publicly available AACS specifications. He released the software, including source, but did not release any title keys. He made hints that there is a fundamental flaw in the way title keys are handled, and that player revocation is unimportant. With player revocation, a flawed player (such as Power DVD, if indeed it is vulnerable) can be disabled from playing future discs.
It's interesting, if indeed it's true. There is no evidence that the AACS encryption itself is flawed, and indeed, that seems unlikely as it's essentially an implementation of AES. However, we know that using encryption for DRM on untrusted hardware is likely to have some vulnerability, if you're willing to dig deep enough. That is apparently what's happened here.
What does it mean? Not much right now. Muslix64 has disappeared, and nobody has been able to discover the relevant title keys at this point. If someone does recreate a title key extraction method, it would be an interesting alternative to the world of DVD cracking. Instead of having a DMCA-violating circumvention device in the form of DeCSS or any of the later decryption programs, you could instead have a totally legitimate decoder tool paired with some title keys. The legality of the title keys would be questionable - the court case would be very interesting. In any case, it's likely that you'd get your HD-DVD, check online to get the title key, paste it into your ripper and be done.
Give it 6 weeks and check again. This could be a blip, this could be the death of BluRay and HD-DVD. We'll see.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 06:44 PM | Comments (0) | News | Opinions
Category "News"
December 28, 2006
Sony HVR-1500 deck breaks my heart to little pieces
So first off, I find it shocking that the first mention I get of a new HDV deck is via a DVD mailed to me by Sony. I'm speaking of the HVR-1500, a new half-rack studio HDV deck. No links here, because Sony has no mention of it on their website. It sounds like it was announced in conjunction with the HVR-V1U camera.
So why does it break my heart? Because it's SO close to being what I really want. It's got expandable input and output options. One of those options is HD-SDI output. But input? Oh, I'm sorry, I'm afraid it's limited to SD-SDI. What?!
This is such blatant marketing-driven stupidity on the part of Sony. We can't have folks using HDV as a record format in a professional setting, that'd be crazy! So we best cripple the product.
I'm encoding the video they sent me to post here, so you can marvel at the greatness that Sony almost achieved. I'm going to be doing some shin-kicking at NAB this year ...
[Edit: Video Posted Below]
Posted by Colin McFadden at 05:01 PM | Comments (12) | News
Category "News"
Category "Opinions"
December 21, 2006
HDV is dead, long live HDV
There have been a few articles in the past week stating that the end of HDV is near. This article in particular goes into depth about the emerging intraframe formats which are vying for the low-end professional market.
I agree that AVC-Intra (note: AVC could be either inter- or intra-frame, don't assume!) and JPEG2000 are good options for compression going forward. They're both good steps forward, but I don't think they're HDV competitors. Let me explain.
At this point there are no "professional" HDV cameras on the market. The closest you get are the XDCamHD products from Sony, which are more or less HDV wrapped in MXF going onto an optical disc, with the ability to bump up the bitrate a little bit. All the other HDV cameras on the market are, in my opinion at least, consumer or pro-sumer level. JVC might argue a bit, but they're JVC so who cares?
The products being discussed in the Nordahl article are most closely related to the XDcamHD products. Neither AVC-Intra nor JPEG2000 are particularly well suited to tape based storage, at least miniDV style cassettes. The Panasonic and Grass Valley (respectively) cameras instead make use of different direct-to-disk recording options. AVC-Intra is just an i-frame-only version of H264, which itself is just a further development of the technology from MPEG-2. JPEG2000 uses wavelet compression and could be pretty impressive. I've never used it in production. Both are solid choices for higher-bitrate recording.
I don't think HDV is going anywhere soon. Getting away from LongGOP compression is a good idea in the long run, but for the low end of the market I think it'll have to wait until flash memory becomes much larger and much cheaper. I'm a firm believer that it will be difficult to penetrate the low end of the market without the ability to easily swap media in the field, without lugging along a laptop. That means being able to carry a pocket full of flash cards, preferably of some variety that can be purchased at a local Target or Best Buy when you're shooting in the field. P2 is a start down that path, but I think widespread adoption is still a ways off. Products like the Firestore are just bridging the gap until we can have proper direct-to-memory capture.
From a technical standpoint, I think we're just starting to see what HDV can do. For example, read Steve Mullen's article on smart GOP splicing. If you can avoid the generational issues of reencoding HDV, the remaining issues are based on processing speed. I wouldn't be surprised to see realtime HDV output over firewire in the next version of Final Cut.
Here's my predictions for recording formats in 2007 and 2008. For cameras under $10,000, HDV will remain the dominant force. The HVX-200 and successors will continue to embrace P2, but I think it'll be 2009 or 2010 before P2 is really practical in all situations.
For cameras from $20,000 - $50,000, you'll see a few formats. AVC-Intra will replace DVCProHD, as NLEs add support for that format. AVC-Intra has major benefits over DVCProHD with no downsides. XDCamHD will stick with the current setup through 2007, but in 2008 I'm expecting to see a higher bitrate recording system (XDCamHD2 or some such) which will add a non-GOP recording format. It'd be nice if it was JPEG2000, but I'm guessing it'll be SONY2000 or something stupid and proprietary like that. JVC will continue to push ProHD long past its sell-by date, and the HD100 will become a faded memory.
Above $50,000, I think what we've got today is pretty much where we'll stay, with the exception of DVCProHD being replaced by AVC-Intra. HDCam, HDCam-SR, D5 and the other "big tape" formats are with us for the long haul at this point. Various direct-to-crazy-raid turnkey solutions will probably begin to creep into this market space as well, but it'll be a slow process.
And me? I'll just go back to shooting Hi8.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 02:34 PM | Comments (1) | News | Opinions
Category "News"
December 19, 2006
Panasonic AV-HS300G - Portable HiDef switcher
Panasonic is now shipping the AV-HS300G, a DC powered HD/SD switcher. I don't know much about this product, but I've very interested. It doesn't look like it's as all-in-one as the Anycast, but the MSRP is $7999 which puts it in a whole different price range. This could be an ideal solution for doing field shoots with the canon XL-H1. You still need a separate way to record the video,
This demands more investigation.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 10:20 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 18, 2006
The Life of a Travelling Freelancer
Stefan Sargent has written a good article for DV.com about his life as a traveling producer. He's a one man shooter-editor, and writes about his experience flying with gear, lighting on location with limited options and limited time. This gives a really good taste of one type of lifestyle in this business. Check it out.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:06 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 16, 2006
The $13 dimmer
FresHDV has a little blurb about portable dimmers for field lighting. Turns out, Harbor Freight (they of the $20 miter saw) has a router speed control which can handle up to 15 amps. Perhaps for most lighting equipment that you'd be plugging into a home circuit. $12.49 is a heck of a lot better than the $100-$150 that a lighting supply house will charge.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 03:27 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 14, 2006
Alex Lindsey has been Antiqued (Sony releases new 4:4:4 camera)
(If you don't get the title, you don't listen to enough podcasts)
Sony has announced a new 4:4:4 1080p camera, the F23. It's essentially a modified F950 which adds the ability to dock with an HDCam-SR deck, and also support more camera attachments. The F950 and F23 live in the same market space as the Arriflex D-20, Grass-Valley/Thompson Viper and Panavision Genesis. Essentially, if you don't have at least a half million dollars, don't bother asking.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:42 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 12, 2006
HDV Camera Rundown
Creativemac has a nice little overview of the current HDV cameras on the market. They don't really draw any conclusions, but they've got nice pictures. So, that's something I guess.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 04:29 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 08, 2006
Youtube allows web-based recording
Wow. This is huge. Arstechnica has an article about the addition of a tool called Quick Capture to YouTube. Quick Capture allows you to record video directly within your webbrowser, storing it to youtube. No more capture->edit->upload steps, just record and go.
Frankly, I was always impressed that so many people were willing to go through the various steps needed to post a video on YouTube. This is going to be a huge addition to YouTube, especially for video bloggers.
They're making use of the various media abilities of Flash 9 in a pretty serious manner. I've seen similar apps for web conferencing (Breeze, etc) but this is a huge deployment. I wonder how they're dealing with media server licensing...
If only it would let me log in ...
Posted by Colin McFadden at 04:44 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
December 01, 2006
Panasonic HPX2000 Camera announced
The Panasonic AJ-HPX2000 has been re-announced (sorry, can't find the official press posting). It's a 2/3" HD camera in an ENG body. It makes use of P2 cards, so it's sort of a big brother to the HVX-200. 24p is included as expected. There's one interesting item, which is that it can be switched between DVCProHD (their normal, 100mbps HD codec) and AVC-Intra, a codec of which I have no prior knowledge. It sounds like it's an H264 based intraframe codec which can achieve half the bitrate of DVCProHD at the same quality level. That's important for Panasonic, as the P2 card format puts a real limit on recording times. Note that AVC-Intra and AVCHD are not the same formats. Helpful!
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:49 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
November 17, 2006
First look at the Sony V1U
DV.com has a preview of the Sony HVR-V1U online. I'm very interested in this camera, as it seems like a pretty solid player in a part of the market that has long by dominated by "subpar" options. I'll be eager to get a chance to play with one. The DV.com article makes mention of the new CMOS chip setup in this camera. I think it will be interesting to see how the indie-film types adapt to the minor differences inherent in CMOS imaging. Curious.
By the way, I've got a bunch of reviews coming next week, including the Zoom H4, Sanyo Xacti HD1A, Presonus Firepod, Microsoft Zune and a few other cool toys.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
November 15, 2006
The Fastest Editor ... in the WORLD
</clarkson>
Everyone's favorite throwback company, NewTek has launched SpeedEdit, "the world's fastest video editor." It's got a "Next-Gen Workflow" and other features of much importance!
So what's the deal? Despite my sarcasm, it actually has some interesting features. Or at least, the marketing speak talks of some nice features. They claim to edit natively in any codec, without transcoding, and without worrying about mixed resolutions. So, instead of picking a resolution for your project before you start cutting, you just start cutting. If they can actually do it (we'll see) it's a pretty neat idea. Resolution independence is something that I'd love to see in Final Cut Pro sooner rather than later. Cutting natively with all the crazy formats that come off the internets is a bit more questionable - it seems like a recipe for glitches.
They've also got a fancy interface which appears to consist of the worst elements of Avid, mixed with a dash of Video Toaster and a pinch of TriCaster. Ugly.
Still, it's a curious product. Nothing they're doing is technically impossible, but it's the sort of thing that's really hard to do well, especially in a brand new piece of software. We'll see...
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
November 10, 2006
Tripod Reviews
Tripods are one of those things that can be very difficult to judge objectively using just published information. Unlike a camera whose specs you can read and understand, finding a good tripod is much more subjective.
With that in mind, I was really happy to see that DV.com has published a large tripod review. They're looking at primarily high-end tripod systems, but there's still a lot of good information there. You might need to log in to access the article.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 11:07 AM | Comments (1) | News
Category "News"
Category "Opinions"
November 08, 2006
... "Why I don't care about AVCHD but maybe you should" ...
Panasonic has released a couple of new AVCHD-based camcorders, the HDC-SD1 and the HDC-DX1. The SD1 shoots to SD card, the DX1 shoots to 8mm DVDs.
Both of these cameras record in AVCHD, a format which appears to be gaining some traction in the consumer space. What is it? Essentially it's an H264-based recording format targeted at folks who don't have any intention of serious post production. Because H264 is not only long-GOP but also bi-directionally predicted, cutting it in an NLE is relatively problematic. But then, how many soccer-moms or nascar-dads are cutting their video of little Jimmy's baseball game? Not that many.
Anyways, I haven't paid much attention to these devices because I'm not convinced they're worth the trouble. For most people, digital cameras are quickly replacing separate camcorder devices, because the 640x480x30fps video that most digicams shoot is "good enough." For those who need a little more, something like the Sanyo Xacti HD1A is probably a more convenient device than a traditional camcorder form factor. I'll have one of those in for review in a few days, so we'll see.
In any case, I think AVCHD is an interesting format which I don't really care about. But perhaps you do.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:49 AM | Comments (1) | News | Opinions
Category "News"
Core2Duo Macbooks announced
Booo! Hisss! They antiqued my laptop. (It's like pimping my ride, but different)
Apple has announced Core2Duo based Macbooks, combining juicy Merom chips with ... well actually, it was really just a chip upgrade. The upper tier models ship with 1gb of ram now as well, which is a nice addition Additionally, the superdrive is dual-layer now.
This is a bit of a surprise to me, as we're getting awfully close to Christmas. I had expected Apple to hold off on any more product line updates until Macworld.
Despite what the specs might have you believe, these are actually quite capable laptops for video editing. Motion certainly isn't thrilled about running on mine, but if you're just working in your NLE, there isn't a ton of reason to jump up to the more expensive MacbookPro.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
October 30, 2006
Apple 24hr Film Fest
For the students out there, check out the Apple 24hour Film Fest. Rock on with the coolness.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 05:21 PM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
October 26, 2006
Oooooh SNAP, Adobe drops Soundbooth
Adobe has announced a public beta of a new product called SoundBooth. The idea is to take a big helping of Audition, along with a dash of Soundtrack Pro, and end up with an easy to use audio production tool for Video/Flash professionals.
It seems like it has potential. The interface follows Adobe's new palette design, and much of the rest of the look and feel reminds me of Audition or its ancestor, Cool Edit Pro. I'm not sure it's even fair to call it beta at this point, as it's obviously far from feature complete. At this point I can't see anything that would make it worth a second glance when compared to Soundtrack Pro, but I imagine there's a lot left to be added.
Interestingly, this product will ship for the Mac and for Windows. Even more interestingly, it's going to be Intel only on the Mac. Sorry PPC users, but that ship has sailed. Or at least, it will have by the time Soundbooth ships in (late) 2007.
It's very good to see someone, especially Adobe, choosing to compete directly with Apple on Apple's playground. Oftentimes if feels like Adobe is ceding the Mac market at the slightest hint of competition. As I believe we've seen with the Lightroom versus Aperture competition, both products are stronger because neither developer can get away with selling crap.
It'll be very interesting to watch where this goes. I've heard a faint rumor that Adobe may reemerge in the Mac video editing market down the line as well. Hmm.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 09:04 AM | Comments (0) | News
Category "News"
October 25, 2006
Panasonic is (nearly) shipping 1080p plasmas
This is big news. Panasonic is now (almost) ready to ship their 50" and 65" plasmas capable of displaying a full 1920x1080 image. This is really important for HD monitoring. Now you'll be able to see every single pixel at a 1:1 resolution. There isn't a significant price premium for these, which makes them especially exciting.
But hey, it's just a plasma. Why so excited?
One of the things that causes me great pain on a daily basis is the death of high quality CRT monitors for studio use. Sure, you can still drop $43,000 on a Sony, but that's just a bit much, thank you.
LCDs are great, but they don't get very large at a realistic price.
I've often considered getting something like a Miranda Kaleido-Quad box, to combine a number of SDI/HDSDI signals into a single feed, and then using one large plasma for both program and preview monitoring. However, the relatively low resolutions of large plasmas had always put me off.
Now however, with decently priced 1080p plasmas a reality, this option is much more realistic. Since the Miranda box can jump between different layouts, you can setup a standard Program/Preview layout for production use, but press a button to jump to a single, full screen, pixel-for-pixel display of your 1080p video.
Delicious.
Posted by Colin McFadden at 02:43 PM | Comments (0) |