Since I know a lot of folks are interested in various levels of podcast recording, you might be interested in podcastgearguy.com. Just stumbled upon it, but it seems to have some decent information.

I’m still interested in the XDCamHD product line, and have been doing a bit of investigation regarding lens choices. Both Canon and Fujinon have a few lenses available to work with the 1/2″ chips used by the XDCam.

Half-inch is a bit of an odd size for a CCD sensor, so I didn’t have a good sense of how to compare focal lengths on the lenses. Most of them have a wide angle of 5.5mm-6.7mm, and I wanted to know if that would be “wide enough.”

Read on to follow my exciting adventure!

Continue reading →

Oh man. Puns.

DVGuru has a great little post about some freebie fonts for movie credits, as well as box templates for DVD cases. They’re a bit tricky to download on the Mac though – control click the links, do “save linked file to desktop,” then rename the file to be just .rar, instead of .rar.txt. Then you can double click it and all is well. See, I added value to the post, instead of just shamelessly copying DVGuru. +1 for me.

So, every day I read through the press releases from a bunch of the companies in this field – Sony, Canon, Panasonic, etc. So, today I came across the Canon PC170 personal copier. There may be similar things out there, but this is just so cool.

So here’s my plan: I’m going to get some sunglasses, a nice suit and a PC170. Then I’ll sneak into the base of the evil supervillian and escape with the plans for the moon rocket. Muahahaha.

Step one: sunglasses.

IBC is in a few weeks, and it seems like everyone is in silent mode leading up to that. There really hasn’t been anything worth discussing in the last few days. Shrug…

I’m still gathering up the footage – I may have found a way to get some of my variable bitrate XDCamHD stuff into a format I can use, but it’ll take another day to sort that out. Similarly, it’ll be about a week until the 16mm is back from the lab. In the meantime, here’s some photos and some thoughts.

Overall, each HD camera showed strengths and weaknesses. I think that the Sony F350 (XDCamHD) really does belong in this group, because it’s essentially a bulked up HDV camera. You get larger chips and better processing, but it’s still 4:2:0 at 25mbps. Frankly, if someone is willing to consider the F350 a “professional” camera, they should consider the Canon XL-H1 just as professional.

We were using the Fujinon 17x lens, and I found it to be remarkably terrible. I’m not sure if we just had a bad example, but the chromatic aberration was even worse than the XL-H1. I need to investigate this further, if I’m going to give any consideration to purchasing one of these cameras. Because they use 1/2″ CCDs, there is a much smaller group of native lenses available. You can get an adapter to go to 2/3″, but I’m not sure what drawbacks that might have.

I’ll post more thoughts and video tomorrow.

I just updated our Synergy 2MD to the version 5 software. One of the major upgrades from version 5 is that you can add images to the still store via WebDAV, and you no longer need to deal with XML files and database updates. Just throw the file on the frame and it works.

Because of this, I wanted to post an update to Synergizer which supports the new revision. I still find this tool useful, as I don’t like having to manually convert my images to the proper TGA format before uploading them. With Synergizer, it’s just drag and drop. If you’re running the older software revision, visit this post for a version that will work. As always, let me know if there are features you’d like.

SynergizerMac-1.zip Synergizer for the Mac

SynergizerWin-1.zip Synergizer for Windows

I wanted to plug a couple bits of media related media that I find interesting. If you’re looking to learn more about the field, there are some great podcasts out there that will keep you informed and offer you tips from industry professionals.

First off, This Week in Media, from Alex Lindsay of the PixelCorps. This is a weekly discussion show about news from the industry. It’s fairly non-technical in nature, and is a good resource for keeping up on broader trends.

Next, the VFX Show, also from Alex Lindsay. This is a weekly indepth look at the visual effects work on recently release movies. This is a great one if you’re interested in the post-production workflow.

Finally the Television Broadcast Two Minute Drill (upper right hand corner) is a daily show which covers recent press releases and other industry news.

I’ve also been enjoying watching the Clerks II “Train Wreck” videos, which chronicle the creation of Clerks II. Not Safe For Work though.

Stealing from HD4Indies on this one – Canon has announced two new HDV cameras, the XHG1 and XHA1.

The XHG1 is essentially an XL-H1 without an interchangeable lens, but with a few updated features. The XLA1 also strips out the “jackpack” features.

Check out dvinfo’s FAQ and summary as

well.

This is very exciting as a complement to the XL-H1. The form factor looks good, you get all the quality of the XL-H1, and you save a few bucks. Sure makes the Z1U look a lot less tempting.

Since I know you can’t get enough of my semi-gramatical ramblings, I’ve launched another new blog, dedicated to news and updates about the Media Mill project. Check it out:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/mcfa0086/mediamill/