Focus says that the Quicktime HDV update for the FS-4Pro could ship in mid-June. Better late than never I suppose, and better than the answer their phone support gave me (“It’ll be in the newspaper when it comes out” – ???).

Unfortunately I can’t do https over GPRS, so there wasn’t any posting happening while I was gone. Here’s a roundup:

Macbook! Mine is black with a gig of ram and 100 gig drive. It left China today. Love me.

Final Cut Express Universal. Good news for a lot of folks buying iMacs and Macbooks. Still no word on the 24f Final Cut Pro update.

And … that’s it. Boring week eh?

Quicktime 7.1 shipped yesterday. Overall, it’s a nice little point release – improved performance, more control over export settings (deinterlacing, hoorah!) and a few other odds and ends.

First off, I’d really like to see FCP5.1.24 ship – or whatever version number they give the “technology demo” they were showing at NAB (and promising to ship that week). If they were very clever it’d be .24 though.

Second off, I’d really love to see Quicktime support HDV natively. Now, I know that Quicktime has always had an uneasy relationship with most things MPEGy in nature. I suspect that more than anything, it’s been an ideological stance on the quicktime team’s part – they believe that muxing all your content together is fundamentally wrong, and have just decided not to support it. I can’t really think of any other reason why, after 15 years, Quicktime can’t internally demux an mpeg transport stream.

In any case, Quicktime as it stands right now, knows nothing of playing back or capturing HDV content stored in a transport stream (which is also the way the content comes down firewire from your camera). This means that you can’t capture HDV in quicktime, nor can you play back the video from a Firestore FS-4ProHD. Which makes me sad.

I’m pretty convinced that this is also the reason FCP has such jenky HDV support for capturing. If you’ve spent time working with it, you’ve noticed that you get an entirely different “Log and Capture” window when using HDV. Also, if you shark the process, you’ll see that they’re making calls in to TSDemuxer and some other components of the FirewireSDK. As best I can tell, the FCP team has had to write a whole separate capture/demux/decode chain in order to support HDV, because Quicktime isn’t handling it for them. It just seems like The Wrong Way ™, and it’s especially obnoxious if you’re trying to write an application which needs to decode HDV. *Cough*

Ok, enough rambling. I’m just so far behind on the blogging – my head has been filled with REALBasic code and end-of-semester nastiness.

I’ve been hunting for a good sync generator that can give me standard NTSC black, along with Trilevel sync for feeding HD. Videotek doesn’t have anything in that realm, Tektronix can do it for around $10k, but today I found Evertz. They make the 5600MSC, which does everything I need, plus can be synced against GPS and then feed an NTP signal out to the rest of your network. I’m waiting for a quote, but I believe it’s about half the cost of the Tektronix solution.

Made an exciting discovery at Yamaha today. The My8 AES/EBU input/output card for the DM1000/DM2000 line, along with the O2R96, allows you to time your audio console against your house black burst. Even better, it’ll then pipe out properly timed wordclock, so you can actually have synced digital audio.

This makes life about a million times easier for people doing digital audio in video facilities. I could throw out a whole half rack of AES/EBU retiming units!

So, anyone want to get me a couple DM1000s?

Actually, it wasn’t a terribly exciting day at NAB – wandered through the central hall to look at all the grip gear, poked around a bit.

The coolest demo I saw today was Silicon Color‘s FinalTouch. Absolutely amazing color correction software to do realtime correction up to 2k with roundtripping to Final Cut Pro.

I’ll post some more thoughts later, right now I need some crazy food.

Got to play with the new Macbook Pro 17″ machines today. They’re absolutely killer. The price is amazing – for only $200 more than the 15″, you get more ram, more disk a bigger screen and firewire 800. Now, just give me a 13.3″!

Haven’t been able to find anyone at Sony who knows anything about their new HDV decks, but I’d like to find out if they support 24f.

Haven’t found Tektronix yet either. Anyone know where they’re at?

Haven’t seen much that has totally blown my mind, but I’m also a very jaded little boy. I’ll journey to the central and north halls tomorrow, so I can drool on dollys and cranes…

According to camcorderinfo.com, Sony is working on a new budget HDV camera, the HC3. Since the HC1 is retailing for around $1500 right now, while the HC3 doesn’t seem to be much lower in spec than the HC1, if it came in at $1299 it might be, psychologically at least, a more reasonable camera for home movies. Of course the big news will be when one of these pushes below $1000. Then we can start throwing them off cliffs without worry …

I somehow missed this in all the hubbub surrounding Macworld SF. Focus is going to be offering an upgrade to the Firestore FS-4pro in April (so… June) that will allow it to record HDV footage in a format that Final Cut Pro can deal with natively.
This is very excellent news!