Posts Tagged “pro video”

While the world waits for Apple to release official news about their new tablet computer, a few smaller (and lesser known) companies are releasing their own touch screen tablets.  Archos has a few models out, there’s the viliv, and then there’s the whole CrunchPad thing which is now called the JooJoo.  And I’ve never played with any of them.  I have however been (for some reason) drooling for an iSlate for the past year or so.  And in my impatience I prematurely ordered a Camangi WebStation and am ready to report the bad news…

Read the rest of this entry »

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…
Read the rest of this entry »

[digg=http://digg.com/movies/Cloverfield_BD_and_DVD_Bonus_field_issues]

While I rarely go out to the movies (because of my awesome home theatre setup), I did see Cloverfield in the theatre. Like many others, I wasn’t a fan of the extreme shaky-cam which literally left me nauseous. I need to start with my opinion on the camera shake choice – because it’s relevant to what’s happening with the bonus features: I feel that they could have toned down the amateur-home-video-shake and still conveyed the cinéma-vérité “real found footage” feeling. I loved the idea of the movie and was impressed with the execution, but hated the over the top shaky-camera work. It made the movie very difficult to watch and therefore less fun. However, it was an artistic choice on the part of the filmmakers.  Whether or not I agree with it’s necessity and/or effectiveness – it was technically correct.  It was their choice.  And even though I found that choice very annoying, I still looked forward to getting the movie on Blu-ray to get more info about the cloverfield mythology and see all the bonus features.

Well, the bonus features are harder to watch than the movie – and this time it was NOT an artistic choice…

Read the rest of this entry »

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!

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

[digg=http://digg.com/gadgets/RED_Announcement_is_actually_better_than_anyone_imagined]

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 the rest of this entry »

The other day I discussed Apple’s move to DisplayPort on the new MacBooks.  Their other big news was that they completely dropped firewire on the MacBook, and only have firewire 800 on MacBook Pros. In blogger terms this is old news (over a week ago) and has already been discussed to death by many other sites. Yet for me it is still something that has to be considered at a practical level. Like it or not firewire is on the way out and I have a lot of firewire drives.  On the other hand, my brand new mac pro still has firewire and I’ll be able to use these drives for years to come.  So the wheels are turning and I’m studying different solutions.

Every few years that old Moore’s Law kicks in and new hard drives come out that double or more the capacity of the old ones.  My MOA is that whan I worry a drive is about to die, I typically copy the entire contents of the old drive into a folder on the new one.  By now I’ve done this several times over and inside a 1TB drive I might have a folder which contains a old 250GB drive and inside that I have a folder that contains an old 100GB drive, inside which I have a folder with contents from several powerbooks ago. But now it’s time to organize things better and upgrade to some serious storage.

But what storage solutions are right for my home system? What will give me the most speed, the highest capacity, and reasonable data protection for the best price?  Of course these questions can’t be completely answered without first knowing what the various applications for the storage are.  Over the next few posts I want to show some different options that I’m considering.  I also want to talk some history and review the various drives that I have now and use at home and at work.  This discussion will take several days. Read the rest of this entry »

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 the rest of this entry »

In keeping with the current theme, here’s a video of me installing a new hard drive in a G4 Powerbook. At the start of the video all the screws had already been taken out.

This was my wife’s couch computer.  I sold it to a buddy for almost enough to completely pay for it’s replacement: a hacintosh Dell mini 9.  It’s ordered and should be here middle of November.  Not sure why it takes so long – something to do with it being built to order.  But more on that when it comes in.