News Roundup

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?

Heading to Austin

I’m off to Austin for a few days to help a friend move. Everyone says Austin has an abnormally large population of hipster video folks, so I’m looking forward to being immersed.

If Apple releases the Macbook on Tuesday, I’ll surely blog it. Otherwise, I’ll check back in next week.

Quicktime 7.1 – But I want more!

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.

REDdy freddy?

Here’s what I considered the possibilities for what RED is all about:

1) It’s a total scam, just for fun. (unlikely)

2) They’re serious, but will miss their goal time.

3) They’re serious, but will under-deliver.

4) They’re doing this in the hopes of being bought out dotcom-style.

One need only pause for a second to get a sense of the scale of their problem. At 4k, 12bit, 4:4:4, 60p, your data rate is in excess of 2gigabytes (BYTES!) per second. A duallink, 4gig fiberchannel connection tops out around 1gigabyte/sec. The fastest RAID array I saw at the show, which had 42 drives in it, could sustain 750 megabytes/sec.

So, they’d need an interface that could push that much, and an array that could write that much. Even Infiniband can’t do it in a single link connection (I don’t know if infiniband does dual link).

They also claim that the sensor will be upgradable to higher resolutions in the future. That would imply that the backplane and everything else internally can handle even HIGHER datarates. I’m just not convinced – though I always leave open the possibility that I’ll be proven wrong…

Evertz makes me happy too!

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.

Yamaha makes me fall in love all over

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?

More NAB

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.

More thoughts from day one

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…