A commenter on PVRBlog has posted some details about the way the Daily Show handles recording loads of video content each day. Essentially, a stack of TiVos and a PA. Which is kind of what I expected…

Beijing Olympic Broadcasting has acknowledged that some of the fireworks in the opening ceremony were digitally created and were inserted into the feed live.

I’m sure a bunch of folks will get all self righteous and use it as an excuse for more anti-Chinese rhetoric, but I can’t see much reason to get upset…

Electronista says that the new Canon AVCHD cameras are hitting our shores now, bringing with them the first implementation I know of that records AVCHD at the max bitrate of the specification (24mbps).

Up until now, the AVCHD cameras I’ve used have been rather lackluster compared to HDV cameras, mostly due to far too aggressive compression schemes. AVCHD has the potential to be far superior to HDV at similar bitrates, so It will be exciting to see the video produced by these canon cameras. The HF11, which records to 32gig of internal flash, or external SDHC memory cards is particularly interesting. The other models record to harddrives, which is a bit meh.

One little item to complain about: the 24p mode records to 60i files. Excuse me? 24p in 60i (with a pulldown) made a little sense with DV since DV was only ever designed for 60/50i interlaced video. 24p in 60i with HDV made a little less sense, since it was a new spec, but since it was a physical tape you could make a claim about tape speeds and whatnot.

But throwing 24p inside a 60i container on a file based camera? Wow. That’s some pretty serious artificial market segmentation! The AVCHD spec allows for 1080p24, so why make it hard?

In any case, look at how many badges it has! It’s gotta be good! And the truth is, I’m excited to try this camera.

Andy Ihnatko has posted a sample clip from the Kodak Zi6 pocket camera I mentioned a few days ago.

It’s not Xdcam EX1, but it makes the Flip look like a sad little relic.

Note – when I went, the Vimeo built in player wasn’t working, but if you login to vimeo you can download the original quicktime by following the link in the lower right. Very nice.

VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 came out last week.

Features? Run OS X Server as a guest OS. Multiple snapshots. What does that mean? Observe:

Ever wanted to test under two versions of Quicktime without maintaining a machine just to trash for that purpose? Make a snap shot at once version, update to the new version, and then jump back and forth.

I lack the words to describe just how awesome this is.

There’s an article up at the Beijing Olympics site with some pictures of the master control room for the upcoming olympics. I’m a sucker for stuff like this.

I see P2 VTRs and XDcamHD VTRs. I’m looking forward to tuning in.

I haven’t had a chance to see ‘The Dark Knight’ yet, but StudioDaily has three really excellent articles about the post process that the movie went through.

For those that don’t know, large chunks of the movie were shot on IMAX and in fact in an IMAX theater the film switches between 35mm and IMAX shots. This was the first hollywood film to integrate significant IMAX, and the post workflow is pretty incredible – my favorite quote:

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“Filmmakers increasingly want us to work in 4K, and that used to be a big deal,

Sony has posted a collection of guides to using their XDcam products with various non-linear editing applications.

I didn’t see any amazing secrets revealed in the Final Cut guide, but it’s a nice document to have.

Sony has announced a new multicodec HD encoder for BluRay authoring. Starting at $55k, it’s a bit of a splurge for the hobbyist, but I bet it comes in a very attractive box.

High end compression tools do some amazing stuff though, like the ability to customize compression parameters on a frame-by-frame basis, after the encode, without re-encoding the rest of the stream. Sexy.

Just a plug for some friends – Pond5 has officially gone live. They’re a stock video site, where any videographer can sell their content at prices set by the videographer. You get 50% of the profits, customers can get great footage at HD resolutions, with even higher end formats coming soon.

If someone with an EX1 were looking to make some money without too much extra effort, it’s not a bad option.