Apparently it was a long winter in Canada, as Matrox has just announced two relatively awesome products.

The first is the Matrox MXO2 Mini, a stripped down version of their MXO2 PCI-E/expresscard capture box. The MXO2 provides input and output for HDMI, analog component, plus svideo and composite. So, for all the folks who want to capture the 4:2:2 HDMI output for their cheap consumer cameras, this box makes that a reality for less than $500. That’s a pretty amazing deal.

At the same time, Matrox has announced the CompressHD. It’s a PCI-Express card which offers hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding. Unlike other solutions, it appears to directly integrate into transcoding products like Compressor, so it can plug into existing workflows.

Priced at less than $500, the CompressHD could become a no-brainer addition to many edit suites, assuming it does what it claims. Matrox just jumped a few slots on my “must visit booths” list.

Panasonic has just announced the AG-HMC40, a small form factor “AVCCAM” camcorder. You get XLR inputs, 1080p recording, and a touch interface.

Think of it as a baby brother to the HMC-150, about which I hear many good things. I’ll definitely be checking it out at NAB tomorrow.

I’m a few days late in posting this, but it’s exciting none-the-less. Sony, recognizing that budgets aren’t likely to grow any time soon, has released a pair of low-end HD studio cameras, with one model breaking the $50,000 barrier.

The HXC-100 and HSC-300 are both triax-based “industrial” style cameras, which can accept existing large lens kits. They’re switchable between SD and HD, and support both 1080i and 720p.

Basically, these are no frills HD studio cameras, which have been lacking in the Sony line. We’ve used the D35, D50 and D55 cameras in our studios, and have been very happy with the quality and mostly happy with the reliability.

There’s very little additional information available about these cameras, but hopefully more will appear at NAB. The prices ($69k for the HSC-300, $45k for the HCX-100) are supposed for a “basic system,” though it’s not clear what that includes. I’m going to assume that it’s camera+CCU, sans lens.

I just unpacked some new iMacs which ship with iLife ’09. When trying to install iMovie 06 on these machines, I was prompted to install iLife 08 first. Solution?

Open a terminal and type “touch /Library/Preferences/com.apple.iLife08.plist”

Done.

Scopebox 2.1 has just been released, bringing a wide range of changes, including better HDV and QT performance, interface tweaks and a number of usability enhancements (bugfixes). A free download for Scopebox license holders, so go grab your copy.

Stumbled upon this article regarding a lawsuit filed against Promise Technology. It seems that online backup firm Carbonite was using Promise gear to store their data (mistake number one). They were relying strictly on RAID to keep the data safe (mistake number two). An alleged firmware bug caused the arrays to get trashed. So customers lost data, and Carbonite is suing Promise.

Just a good reminder that RAID Is Not Backup.

I was rather surprised to learn that Cisco has acquired Pure Digital, creators of the Flip Video line of cameras. These cameras have been hugely successful, but it’s surprising to see Cisco getting into that field.

The $590 million dollar purchase price is also pretty surprising. Obviously Cisco thinks there’s a lot more value to be found in the Flip line. I’ve been more inclined to consider them a nice transition product on our way to properly video enabled cell phones.

Was that a pig that just went by my window?



Ben Waggoner from Microsoft made a post on the quicktime-users mailing list yesterday announcing that Silverlight 3 (currently in beta) will support H.264. This extremely exciting, as previously Silverlight was Windows Media only.

Take a look at this post from Ben, detailing some of the media-related changes. This means it’ll now be possible to deliver the exact same file in Flash, Silverlight and a podcast.

MacRumors is reporting that some dude in Germany thinks there’ll be a proapps oriented press conference on March 24th. Normally these rumors are pretty “meh,” but lots of people are itching to see an update to Final Cut Studio, or some sort of statement from Apple about their long term feelings on the proapp sector.

If you want an example of just how bad rolling shutter can be, take a look at this video shot on a Canon 5D Mark II. Wow, that’s some craziness.!