Apple released a new product, Logic Studio, today. It’s a package containing an updated version of Logic (Logic 8), a new live music application called MainStage, Soundtrack Pro 2 and a bunch of effects and software instruments. It’s all very exciting, particularly MainStage. Mainstage aims to provide a stable, reliable basis for doing live performances with software instruments and effects.

I find it very interesting that one of the eight highly touted features of Logic 8 is that you no longer need a hardware dongle. Just… interesting.

Oh yeah, RED shipped. It does some of the stuff they said it’d do. Check out HDForIndies for the full fanboi rundown.

I’m a huge fan of the Xacti line. I think for anyone who just needs to document events, cameras like the Xacti are brilliant. I took an HD1 to Italy and China and used it all the time. So, it’s exciting to see that they’ve introduced a new model, the HD1000.

The featureset is similar to the existing HD2, but it’s now got a 1920×1080 imager, giving you true 1080i imaging. It’s a bit on the spendy side, with an estimated retail of over $1000, but they tend to drop in price pretty quickly.

Camcorderinfo has a nice article on the HVR-HD1000U. The real scoop? They took the consumer-grade HDR-HC7 and put it in a bigger box. No XLR, consumer-grade chips, etc. It’s still a lot of camera for <$2000, but it’s not the be-all and end-all. Oh well.

August must be drawing to a close – there’s actual news to talk about! IBC is just around the corner, so it’s not too surprising.

Sony has formally announced the HVR-HD1000U shoulder-mount HDV camera, which was previewed as “future technology” at NAB this year. Don’t let the form factor fool you, the lens isn’t interchangeable (that’d compete with XDCam, duh).

Here’s the odd part though: it’s a 3 CMOS camera with many of the features of the V1U (fake slow-mo), and yet the press release lists the MSRP at $1,900. That’s less than half the price of the V1U – about the same price as the diminutive A1U. So, the question must be asked: did Sony make a typo in the press release? Is this really a $19,000 camera? At $1900 it’s a ridiculous steal, at $19,000 it’s a complete rip-off.

Woot. Adobe gives On2 a nice boot to the head, announcing support for H.264 video playback within Flash. Dig the beta at Adobe Labs.

Update: Here’s more info from a Flash developer.

There are many folks with fond memories of the Sony DSR-V10, a small clamshell DVCam deck with an integrated monitor. They were great for in-the-field viewing, and also for use with lipstick cams and other devices without integrated recording. Well, there’s now an HDV successor, the GV-HD700E. Notice however, that it’ll only record to HDV when you feed it a signal over firewire – no component inputs (just like the HVR-1500). Lame, Sony.

If anyone wants to learn how to market a product in the 21st century, look no further than Drobo. First off, a bit about why it’s so cool (and why I’m going to buy one) and then I’ll explain how amazing their marketing has been.

Drobo is an external storage solution which uses RAID-like technology to protect your data. What makes it cool is that it can be dynamically expanded, without reformatting, and supports mixing and matching of various disk sizes. So the deal is that you connect it over USB2, pop in whatever SATA disks you have lying around, and it creates a single large volume for you. Any one of those disks can fail catastrophically without you losing access to any of your data. When that happens, you just pop in a new disk and it keeps humming along. Similarly, when you start to run low on storage space on the array, it’ll turn on a light next to the smallest drive in your array, queueing you that it’s time to upgrade. Just pop the smallest disk out and pop a larger disk in. Magically, you’ve got more space in your volume.

I’m excited about it for two reasons. One, I’ve got five external disks hooked up to my Powermac at home, along with two internals. Around 1.8tb of space overall. About 1.5tb of that is totally unbacked-up. That’s a bit scary. It’s also annoying to have data spread across seven different volumes. So, I’m looking to get a Drobo populated with two 500 gig disks and two of my existing 250 gig disks. It’ll give me just about a terabyte of usable, redundant storage, which is a pretty good start.

So, it’s obviously a pretty cool product. But why the buzz? Because this company is very clever.

Their marketing began (as best as I can tell) with a video on YouTube, demonstrating the ways the array reacts to having a drive removed, replaced, etc. From there, they got samples into the hands of the influential tech bloggers and podcasters – DL.TV, Leo Laporte, Engadget, Scoble, etc. Suddenly every blog I read and podcast I listen to is talking about this device like it’s the second coming. This morning I got an email from MacConnection telling me how awesome it is. The marketing must be working because the device is apparently pretty hard to find in stock at the moment.

Bright guys.

Kodak has announced a new sort of filter to go on CMOS or CCD sensors to replace the existing “bayer pattern.” For those who don’t know, a CCD or CMOS chip is inherently only sensitive to variations in brightness, not to colors themselves. In order to get around that, you either need a three chip camera (with each chip filtered to just received red/green/blue light) or you need a bayer pattern on a single chip. Essentially a bayer pattern is just a grid of very small filters, so each pixel on the sensor is only receiving one of the three primary colors. A true RGB image can later be reconstructed by interpolating the pixels.

The new Kodak filter ads a “clear” filter to the existing bayer pattern, which allows for much greater light sensitivity. In essence, it’s like adding a “luma” pixel to the RGB pixels. Pretty clever!

Apple released new 15″ and 17″ MacBook Pros today. Plenty of upgrades: Santa Rosa chips, 2gigs of ram standard, Geforce 8600M GPUs. The 15″ gets LED backlighting, while the 17″ gets the option for a higher res screen – 1920×1200, the same as the 23″ cinema displays. That’s a really huge feature, both for folks working with video (it means you can view 1080i at 1:1 resolution) and for normal users. Personally, I find the 23″ has just about enough screen realestate to productively multitask, so I’m excited about that many pixels in a laptop.

I’ll be very excited to see LED backlighting in person as well, as it’s supposed to be pretty beautiful. The 15″ also picks up a little extra runtime thanks to the lower power backlighting, so Apple estimates 6 hours of battery life. Nice.