Archive for the “Pro Video” Category

This week I sold my old G5 along with a 23″ Cinema Wide Display, a BlackMagic card, Sonnet Tempo eSata card, and a Sonnet Fusion 500P populated with 5 x 500GB hard drives. It was a complete edit system including lots of fast storage, but as part of my “out with the old – in with the new” theme, it all had to go.

Hindsight certainly is 20/20 and I like to review technology after the fact to reflect on how well it worked. Overall my G5 was a great machine and it was difficult to let it go. But a couple of the components were very hard to let go: the monitor, and the storage…
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Back when I first started this blog I had the theme of “out with the old and in with the new” and it started with the upgrade of my old G5 to a new Intel 8-core PowerMac. In that early post I mentioned the Dell Ultrasharp 2408WFP because it has loads of inputs including the new DisplayPort connector Apple has sort-of recently embraced. I believe that the writing is on the wall that DVI will eventually be on the outs and any monitor I invest in these days needs be ‘future proof.’ So during the black days after Thanksgiving I ordered one and it arrived today!

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Red leader Jim Jannard has been trickling updates all day to his big November 13th announcement. This time the information first comes in the form of more upgrade options for current Red One owners.  I’m sure by now they’ve all read the announcement and are trying to figure out how they’re going to come up with the probable $22,500 to upgrade. In a way it’s like finding out their wife is pregnant, at least they’ve got 9 months to raise the cash to support their expected new baby.

For the rest of us the information to focus on is surrounding the new Scarlet and Epic products what all they’ll do and what they’ll mean to our pocket book.

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Has anyone else noticed lately that the industry hasn’t quite figured out the whole 4:3 vs 16:9 thing? This is one of many ads I saw last night during Chuck that completely ignored the fact that the majority of american televisions are still 4:3.  I have an original HD DirecTV Tivo and an HD projector. I don’t get local channels in HD yet and was watching the 4:3 NTSC feed of Chuck.  I don’t know if DirecTV is just taking the HD feed and cropping the sides off or what.  But either way, it is the responsibility of the people making the ads to protect any important information inside of 4:3 title safe.  (By that I mean the Editor or the Producer or the Ad Agency or the dude at Microsoft who said “sure that looks awesome”)  In this case (see photo) the Windows ad “Life Without Walls” the “S” is completely cut off and on most TV’s the word “WALL” would also be cut off due to the 10% action safe. In another major ad last night the on the screen talent was half outside of 4:3 safe – literally one eye on screen and one off.  Again on an older TV that probably means you can only see his arm flapping around.

Here’s a message to the dude (or chick) at Microsoft who paid millions of dollars for that mess… if the majority of people watching the ad can’t see the last half of your tag line, how is your message getting across?  Surely the tag line “Windows – LIFE WITHOUT” is not what you were hoping to communicate.  But that is the message that 80% of viewers saw Monday night.  Maybe you need a new editor/producer/ad agency to give millions of dollars to. Call my people and we’ll talk.

It’s been a few weeks since I talked about storage solutions.  I’m getting closer to purchasing a solution for my home/office, which will undoubtedly be a raid hanging off of eSata.  I’ve used a few different eSata towers and will eventually talk about each of these solutions.  Today I’m going to cover one of the better ones – the G-SPEED eS from G-Technology.

The G-SPEED eS is a mini-tower with 4 removable drive modules. With current drives it provides an unformatted capacity of 4 TB.  It attaches to a Mac or PC via one eSata cable. The typical package comes with an PCIe eSata raid controller, which is the host adaptor and handles the raid management.  This particular raid card has 4 eSata ports, meaning that it can handle 4 G-SPEED’s.  It is therefore possible to raid 16 TB drives together providing a reported 600 MB/sec.  (Although I have not invested the 6 grand to verify this speed – and you know how much I hate just repeating advertised bandwidth – so YMMV).

Once it’s set up as a RAID 5, your local system sees it as one volume and a single drive failure should not cause data loss. The bad drive module can be replaced and the RAID will rebuild itself.  I’ve not dissected this particular model, but generally a module is just a tray that the raw eSata drive screws onto, which makes for easy replacement and upgrade. Read… »

I’ve been so busy lately that I almost forgot that today is November 13th – the day of the big RED Digital Cinema announcement regarding the new Scarlet and Epic cameras. Not to be too much of a fan boy, but I have been waiting for this for a while. Scarlet had been very high on my list since I “saw it” at NAB. When you look at what’s out there, you can’t beat a 3k camera for $3k. Then mid September they announced that Scarlet was basically going to be scrapped and redesigned. While no one knew exactly what that meant, I’ve been holding out hope that the specs will be even better.  I wanted to get in on the first batch of orders. But this announcement changes everything! It’s bigger than anyone imagined.

A few hours before the announcement Jim Jannard “leaked” a few renders of the new design. In case you haven’t been following, Jim had been in the press lately raving about how huge this announcement is going to be – taking some jabs for his enthusiasm along the way. However, from the early pictures I could tell that his level of excitement was totally warranted.  Now that I’ve seen the announcement (a few hours early) – I know what he was so excited about… Read… »

You may have noticed this ad on my sidebar for the Sony HD-RTG1.  I hand picked that ad because it seemed like a great semi-pro video camera.  It is reasonably priced, records HD video to a memory stick, and is small enough to fit in your pocket.  It might not be as professional as a higher end camera, but it seems like a good backup camera or b-camera.  Rob Kelly used it on a recent realty shoot to get extra footage.  The size and convenience makes it perfect to get shots that would otherwise be missed.

The video file format is AVCHD. How does that fit into a pro video producer/editor’s workflow?  It seems to be becoming the consumer format of choice for all the new cameras.  How do we deal with this footage?

On a recent outing Rob shot some footage for me with his HD-RTG1. The clips created have a .MTS extension.  With other video cameras you end up with a folder full of .AVI or .mpg clips.  But with AVCHD cameras you get an entire BDMV folder structure that looks suspiciously similar to that of a BluRay disc.  Just in case I needed it, I copied the whole directory structure to my drive. (well, mostly)

Lets define the rules of the game: Read… »