Is it just me, or are all of McCain’s ads standard def, and all of Obama’s high def?
Should we read into that?
Olympic Political ads
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Monthly Archives: August 2008
What ever happened to the Shake replacement?
Last we heard, Apple was planning to ship their replacement for Shake sometime in 2008. I was kind of expecting that we’d hear something at Siggraph, but Siggraph is underway and there’s not even a peep from apple. I wonder if we’ll still hear anything this year, or if Apple is going another direction with that project.
Coming Soon: ClipWrap
Mike has put up a blog post about a new application he’s working on called ClipWrap.
Essentially, it takes an M2T file from an HDV camera and turns it into a Final Cut Pro compatible Quicktime, without transcoding. So, instead of taking forever and costing you a generation, it takes a few seconds and preserves all the quality.
I’ve been bugging Mike to create this application for years, because the support for Quicktime on devices like the firestore has been so lackluster. This also allows cross-platform editing of HDV. Woo!
The website for clipwrap will be www.clipwrap.com. Mike is obsessed with the animation…
Fireworks in Olympic Ceremony Faked
Beijing Olympic Broadcasting has acknowledged that some of the fireworks in the opening ceremony were digitally created and were inserted into the feed live.
I’m sure a bunch of folks will get all self righteous and use it as an excuse for more anti-Chinese rhetoric, but I can’t see much reason to get upset…
Canon HF11, HG20 and HG21 hit the states
Electronista says that the new Canon AVCHD cameras are hitting our shores now, bringing with them the first implementation I know of that records AVCHD at the max bitrate of the specification (24mbps).
Up until now, the AVCHD cameras I’ve used have been rather lackluster compared to HDV cameras, mostly due to far too aggressive compression schemes. AVCHD has the potential to be far superior to HDV at similar bitrates, so It will be exciting to see the video produced by these canon cameras. The HF11, which records to 32gig of internal flash, or external SDHC memory cards is particularly interesting. The other models record to harddrives, which is a bit meh.
One little item to complain about: the 24p mode records to 60i files. Excuse me? 24p in 60i (with a pulldown) made a little sense with DV since DV was only ever designed for 60/50i interlaced video. 24p in 60i with HDV made a little less sense, since it was a new spec, but since it was a physical tape you could make a claim about tape speeds and whatnot.
But throwing 24p inside a 60i container on a file based camera? Wow. That’s some pretty serious artificial market segmentation! The AVCHD spec allows for 1080p24, so why make it hard?
In any case, look at how many badges it has! It’s gotta be good! And the truth is, I’m excited to try this camera.
Sample footage from the Zi6
Andy Ihnatko has posted a sample clip from the Kodak Zi6 pocket camera I mentioned a few days ago.
It’s not Xdcam EX1, but it makes the Flip look like a sad little relic.
Note – when I went, the Vimeo built in player wasn’t working, but if you login to vimeo you can download the original quicktime by following the link in the lower right. Very nice.
VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 is better than a room full of puppies
VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 came out last week.
Features? Run OS X Server as a guest OS. Multiple snapshots. What does that mean? Observe:
Ever wanted to test under two versions of Quicktime without maintaining a machine just to trash for that purpose? Make a snap shot at once version, update to the new version, and then jump back and forth.
I lack the words to describe just how awesome this is.