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 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… »
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)
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 hacintoshDell 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.
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… »
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