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 …

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!

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.

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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…

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.

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.

For the students out there, check out the Apple 24hour Film Fest. Rock on with the coolness.

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.

This is big news. Panasonic is now (almost) ready to ship their 50″ and 65″ plasmas capable of displaying a full 1920×1080 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.