I’m afraid your shiny new Macbook Pro is now an antique. Might as well toss it to the curb and whip out the Visa.
That’s right, new Macbook Pros have arrived! They’re… slightly faster! Hoorah!
This is a fairly incremental upgrade. For buyers of the 15″, the biggest upgrades are Firewire800 and a dual-layer DVD burner. I definitely approve of two out of the three models coming standard with 2 gigs of ram though.
Ok, this is getting silly. I know it’s almost the holiday gift buying season, but what’s with all these corporate acquisitions in the video realm? YouTube, Silicon Color, Serious Magic …
In any case, Adobe bought Serious Magic, makers of DVRack. Which begs the question – have you looked at Scopebox lately?
In somewhat interesting news, Apple has acquired Silicon Color. I really respect the FinalTouch product, and have always found the Silicon Color guys to be helpful. I hope this bodes well for them, and for users of Final Cut Pro or some future high-end correction suite.
There’s a growing trend towrads using really large single-chip imaging solutions for HD cameras. Everything from our teeny-tiny Sony HVR-A1Us up to the RED make use of one really big chip with a Bayer pattern.
Silicon Imaging, a camera company which is sort of like RED without all the pretentiousness, has a really good description of Bayer filtering on their website.
We received our Firestore FS4ProHD 2.0 firmware update disc today. Installation was straightforward, and it seems to work as promised. I captured 1080i60 HDV off the Canon XL-H1 with no trouble, and it happily opened in Quicktime. I’ll post more once I’ve had a chance to play with some of the other new features. For now, it’s all a boy could want (save for 24f support …).
I wasn’t going to post this as it seems kind of boring, but everyone else is posting it so I might as well too… There’s footage up from the Canon XH-G1. This is the baby brother (along with the XH-A1) to the XL-H1 camera. Ooo and Aaah away…
DV.com has a nice review of the Artemis DV Pro camera stabilizer (not a SteadiCam™). I’m not familiar with this setup, but it looks very interesting. In particular, I like the integrated monitor and power cabling. The high quality screen is another major plus. It looks like it’s good for cameras up to around 20lbs, which is pretty reasonable. Not as affordable as some of the lesser Glidecam systems, but still pretty snazzy.
Quick! Rock your Software Update! Final Cut Pro 5.1.2! 24p! Hoorah!
This is an interesting little product that showed up at IBC: the Blackmagic Intensity.
It’s an HDMI ingest board. They’re targeting at folks with newer HDV cameras with HDMI outs – the HDR-HC3 for example. The theory is that you get uncompressed video out the HDMI port, which is somehow higher quality.
This is… interesting.
I can only imagine this making a visual difference if you’re recording directly into the computer, not recording to tape and then ingesting later. So, I suppose if you want to haul your MacPro around with you, chained to your handycam, you’ll potentially get higher image quality. Assuming that the HDMI outs on these cameras come before all the subsampling and whatnot.
Otherwise, all this gives you is a way to get very high bandwidth data out of a very low bandwidth source. This would be the same as capturing the video in HDV and then doing a file->export to Uncompressed. Again, it’s nice that this saves the step, but it can’t magically improve the quality of the image that was compressed to tape. Just like capturing uncompressed 4:2:2 SDI off a DVCam tape. You may want to work in the larger color space for your post work, but the capture process itself won’t improve your image quality.
Furthermore (yes, I know this is turning into a rant), I must take issue with the Intensity Quality page. It’s primarily completely bogus. For example, they claim how much better it is to get the native 1920×1080 image instead of the 1440×1080 of HDV, and they assert that the reason HDV uses that resolution is because of the size of the tape and the speed of firewire. Hu? HDCam is 1440×1080 as well, and I’m pretty sure they’re not limited by their cassette size. Furthermore, I highly doubt that the CMOS sensor on the HC3 is natively 1920×1080 like they claim. I can’t find definitive CMOS specs one way or another, but seeing as nobody else is using native 1920 sensors, I doubt they are as well.
Their 4:2:2 versus 4:1:1 gradients are also a bit laughable. Somehow sampling the colors less often makes them look dull? The banding I might agree to, but come on.
Ok, enough ranting. I really like Blackmagic in general. I think they have great products. Which is why this is especially annoying. Sell it as a board to monitor your timeline on an HDMI monitor. It’s cheap ($249) so for that reason along I think it’d be worth it to most people. But don’t trump it up as if you’re going to make that $1200 HDV camcorder look like a CineAlta.
Well, things are definitely back in swing here at the University of Minnesota. Students are back on campus, wandering around with doe-eyed faces, while the rest of us complain about how much easier it was to park last week.
In the rest of the world as well, things are heating up. August is traditionally a very slow news month in this industry, and this August was no exception. Hence the lack of posts here. There was literally nothing to talk about.
August is gone now, and September is here. And with it comes news!
First off, Apple released new iMacs and Mac Minis today. The iMac gets the upgraded Merom processor, with 64bit support. They’ve also added a monster 24″ iMac to the line, which even includes Firewire 800. The Mac Mini gets an all-dual lineup, at the same price points.
While this by itself would be good news, even better is what it foretells for next week’s Special Event. Obviously there’s something Hollywoodish going on with the “It’s Showtime” invitation. The fact that they released the new macs today instead of using them as filler for next Tuesday is a good sign that Apple is pretty excited about whatever they have to show off.
Even more interesting is a trademark filing Apple recently made about their iMovie trademark. They’ve added a few new classes to the trademark, indicating that they’re likely going to move the iMovie trademark into some new markets. The new classes deal with online transactions, electronic sales and other items. While this may be purely coincidental, it sure seems that the name iMovie is going to end up being associated with their new movie distribution push.
Exciting Times!
Furthermore, IBC starts this weekend. Anyone want to fly me to Amsterdam? We can expect more announcements from across the industry.