Sanyo has done a minor version bump to the Xacti HD1000, creating the HD1010. It appears to have improved compression, slow motion mode and some new bundled accessories. My favorite sub-$1000 HD camera just got better. Hizzah!
I found this pretty interesting – the spec sheet of do’s and don’ts for producing HD content for the BBC. They’re pretty hardcore – shoot DVCProHD or better, post in ProRes or DNxHD, deliver on HDCam SR.
The NAB hype is in full swing. The most recent spam blast was from a company called Pixellexis, pimping a new product called RedBox. What does it do? Well, it makes your rendering faster. Via magic. Or something?
Avid announced today that they’re discontinuing the Xpress Pro line of editing software, and cutting the price on Media Composer to $2495 from $4995. Students can purchase it for just $295.
Very interesting news. This means the least expensive Avid editing platform is double the cost of the Final Cut Studio bundle. Presumably for most folks in the business, $1200 isn’t a huge deciding factor one way or another, but it may be a sign that Avid doesn’t see as much value in the lowest end customers as they’d hoped.
Apparently the URL hasn’t been working to get the plugin for FCP to support the Sony DR60.
Here’s a link that works.
YouTube has announced a really extensive API which lets you upload videos, add/update metadata, and do pretty much everything else you’d hope to find in a YouTube API.
Exciting.
The Sony DR60 and the new “Memory Recording Unit” (as part of the HVR-Z7U) return standard M2T files in HDV mode. That’s a problem if you want to use them with Final Cut.
Or, it used to be. Today they’ve released their plugin to rewrap M2T files in Quicktime to work with Final Cut. This was mentioned in the Final Cut 6.0.2 release notes, but was previously unavailable.
Get it here, and enjoy your tapeless workflow. So long Focus, so long …
Vara software has just released a new screencasting application called ScreenFlow. It combines the features of a typical screencasting like SnapzPro or iShowU, with the ability to bring in onscreen video from a camera, as well as some neat 3d transitions and all.
Screencasting is becoming increasingly popular as a teaching tool, and this looks set to make the process simple and very attractive. Cool.
I wasn’t aware Avid was trying to push this as a standard, but Engadget has the news that SMPTE has approved DNxHD as a standard, called VC-3. DNxHD is similar to Apple’s ProRes422, though many folks consider it to be slightly higher quality. It’ll be interesting to see how this gets adopted – having a high quality, cross platform interchange format sure would be nice.
Just plain strange. Apple has now confirmed that they won’t be attending NAB this year, after having recently upgraded to a larger booth to fill the spot vacated by Avid. Recession fears? NAB dying? Who knows. Will Adobe be the next to pull out?