Yes, I’m on vacation, but RSS feeds never sleep.

I just wanted to link to this article, about HDMI cabling. The stuff about HDMI doesn’t really concern me, and I think they miss the real reason for doing HDMI versus HD-SDI in consumer gear (the signal processing is cheaper). I like it because it’s a really readable article about impedance and the other factors that go into cable design.

Don’t forget the travel blog either.

Yesterday, copies of FCS2 started going out. It looks like the upgrade versions aren’t out yet, just the full retail version. Exciting nonetheless.

I’ll be doing a bigger post on how this works, but for now, check out my post over at the MM blog about our new captioning support in Media Mill.

As an aside, I hate Flash.

Really hate Flash.

There are still plenty of folks who won’t trust anything but a CRT for video monitoring. Studio Daily has an article about all the new LCDs trying to replace CRTs for that purpose. CRTs are getting increasingly rare, as environmental regulations make their production and sale difficult. Frankly, for most people, getting a cheap 23″ LCD from Dell or Apple along with an HD-SDI to DVI bridge is good enough for most purposes, and a hell of a lot cheaper.

I’m so witty.

Sony announced an overwhelming quantity of new cameras at NAB. Here’s my quick rundown, but if you want the full list check out the excellent article from dvuser.co.uk.

Remember when XDCam meant “MXF wrapped MPEG-ish video stored to a rewriteable optical disc”? Yeah… those were the days. Now we get the XDcam EX, a camera which writes to expresscard/34 solid state storage. In reality, it looks like an excellent camera – while the lens isn’t removable, it does have proper manual features, with physical aperture adjustment. Nice.

In terms of the disc-based XDCam products, the big news was 4:2:2 HD on dual-layer discs. That’s a big deal, as it moves XDCamHD from “HDV on a Disc” to something a bit more professional. There are also two new decks, the F75 and one yet-to-be-named which support the new dual-layer discs. Finally, they brought out the PDW-U1, a firewire-attached drive for use with NLE workstations. Rumor is that it’ll street at around $3000, which would make it a pretty nice choice for an xdcam workflow.

Finally, in the HDV space, Sony showed a DSR-250 replacement which supports large-format cassettes to provide up to 276 minutes of HDV record time. I’m sure it’ll be nice, but unless you need that kind of runtime there are probably better options on the market for the near-$10k pricetag.

Finally, DVUser.co.uk has the officially Sony powerpoint on all these products. It will be very interesting to see how XDCam HD at 4:2:2 compares to HDCam at 3:1:1 (but with less compression).

When Apple announced that Compressor 3 would support Telestream’s Episode product through a plugin, I got very, very excited. Then I talked to Telestream, and got very, very sad.

Here’s the deal – Compressor has a new Episode option within the preset inspector, which allows you to use the presets from episode in your Compressor workflow. The Episode presets themselves much still be managed from within the Episode interface. Then, when a job is submitted, Compressor does the decoding and passes the data off to Episode to do the encoding.

I got various explanations of how the progress is monitored. One person said you can’t use Batch Monitor to see the job, one person implied you could. In any case, it sounds like distributed compression isn’t supported directly, without purchasing the Episode Engine product with the split and stitch option. It’s all a bit fishy really.

DV.com has a nice roundup of the various software transcoders on the market. I more or less agree with it, though the final section on server use of Compressor is a bit inaccurate. If Episode Engine had proper automation features, it’d be just about perfect.

Apple has posted a white paper on the ProRes codec. A white paper on a video compression codec? Name one thing more exciting than that, I dare you.

Truth be told, the document doesn’t contain a whole lot of new information. ProRes is an I-frame online VBR codec, operating internally at 10bit 4:2:2.

A few interesting details came up though. First off, FCP6 will have a new preference that allows long gop formats to be rendered in ProRes. So you can capture your HDV, apply effects, and render them into ProRes. This is really nice, as it means you don’t suffer the generation loss issues of long-gop reencoding, and it should be quite a bit faster as well.

Speaking of generation loss, the white paper shows that there is essentially no drop in PSNR after the first generation of encodes. That is, of course, how a codec should ideally behave – if the decoder matches the encoder, successive reencodes won’t suffer generation loss issues. However, that’s rarely the case in reality.

We still don’t know much about how the codec operates internally, though I’m sort of guessing it’s a DCT (rather than DWT) based codec with some fancy intelligent quantization routines and good entropy coding.

I’m looking forward to giving it a try.

Day one of the expo. Even though I’ve been in the hall for the last two days, it’s still a shock to see all those people and all those booths.

A few highlights from the day. First off, Scopebox had a lot of traffic, which was nice.

The Focus rep basically admitted that I should just throw away my FS4ProHDs and buy FS-Cs. Jerk. Then a bunch of customers came up and started ranting about how bad their support sucks. That was nice.

The new Bogen 501HDV head is really rather nice.

The Sachtler Artemis is as cool as I thought it would be.

The Telestream plugin for Compressor 3 is actually a whole module, not just an export component. Looks like you get job segmenting and everything. Rad.

The AJA Io HD is as nice as you expect it to be.

That’s all I can type right now. Time to die.

Had a chance to attend Apple’s special event today, in which they announced Final Cut Studio 2, including all sorts of exciting goodness. For the full scoop, check out Apple’s site, or the live feed from Engadget. This post is just the stuff that excites me.

First off, Final Cut Pro now does mutli-def, multi-codec in a single timeline. That’s really fantastic, especially for novice users that don’t want to worry about transcoding media to other formats. Mix HD, SD, 24p, 60i, etc all on one timeline and play back in realtime. That’s nifty.

Final Cut 6 also introduces a new codec called ProRes, a 4:2;2 variable bitrate HD codec which claims to give you uncompressed HD quality at uncompressed SD bitrates. The demos they showed looked really impressive, but demos always look impressive. What makes it exciting is that they’ve teamed up with AJA to build a FW800 based box (the IO HD) which lets you bring HD-SDI into a macbook pro in the field. That’s huge! Here’s hoping the codec is as good as they say.

Motion has also gained a ridiculous quantity of new features, taking it from a handy-for-titles app to a full fledged After Effects competitor. To name a few, you get a 3d working environment with multiple cameras, and 3d aware behaviors and particle emitors. You can use audio to provide input to any control, so you can now have the soundtrack to your video control the way the effects behave. You also get an object tracking system for doing match moves.

Soundtrack Pro gets surround sound mixing and a spectrum view with editing capabilities (like Audition). There are a number of other cool features to make the editors easier.

Compressor gets a new interface which exposes some functionality that was actually in Compressor 2 (and used heavily by Media Mill) but which was difficult to take advantage of.

Finally, there’s an entirely new app called Color, which is just a warmed over version of Silicon Color’s tool (which Apple purchased). Cool that it’s free now (as part of Studio) but it didn’t blow my mind. Just a color finishing app.

There was lots of other cool stuff, like Final Cut Server and loads of cool demos. They were recording the whole event so hopefully they’ll be posting a stream. If not, Final Cut Studio 2 ships in a month so we can all start playing.