Compressor Repair, a new application from Digital Rebellion, automates the steps for giving Compressor a boot to the head. Someday I’ll get ambitious and post the shell scripts I use for doing this all from the command line on the Media Mill cluster.

Saw it on FreshDV.

Wow, ProApps update 2008-4 just came out, with, among other things, an update for Shake. The last release was June 2006. Apparently they still have a copy of the source code around though …

<rant>

HDCameraGuide.com, a site that I mentioned a couple weeks back, put out a press release today in which they brag about having a good google ranking.

Wow. Here’s hoping in the future they spend more time updating their camera guides, and less time on press releases (like, adding the Sony HDW-650).

It’d bad enough that my RSS feeds get filled with “such and such company has hired a new editor,” but c’mon guys…

</rant>

The other day, I set up three cheap cameras (and one expensive camera) in the studio, stood a distance away, and rambled. Every camera was using all the default settings, and fully zoomed out. The goal was to see how the onboard mics compared, without any post processing or anything fancy.

The contenders are the Sanyo HD1000, Kodak Zi6, Pure Digital Flip Ultra and the Sony XDCam EX1. The last one was just for fun.

To start with, you can watch the video, where I cut between the various cams. I won’t speak to the video quality right now, as I want to do some more extensive tests once I get my replacement Zi6, and the results weren’t particularly shocking – the XDcam wins soundly, particularly when looking at dynamic range, and the rest are various levels of crappy.

If you listen to the audio though, you’ll hear a pretty wide range of results. The Sanyo is by far the loudest, the Zi6 is in the middle, with the Flip and the XDCam being the quietest. The XDcam is also far less noisy than the others – accurately reproducing the hiss in the room, without introducing its own noise – as you’d expect. The Flip also does a nice job, particularly with a bit of normalization.

The Zi6 picks up the audio well enough, but introduces horrible compression artifacts. I’ll withhold final judgement until the replacement comes, just in case it’s just another issue with my example, but i doubt it.

If you had to pick a camera from this bunch for audio that wouldn’t get the benefit of any post-processing, it’d have to be the Sanyo. If you were going to do a normalization pass, it’d be the Flip.

But, my ears suck, so lets look at the charts.

Amplitutde, no normalization

Frequency response

It’s a bit tough to see in the unnormalized charts, but the Sanyo doesn’t pass any audio above 18khz, the Zi6 above 15khz. The Flip and the XDcam pass all the way up to Nyquist.

Our Zi6 arrived yesterday. I’ve got a larger review, comparing it against the Flip Ultra, Sanyo HD1000, and others, on the way. But, while the video is quite nice, given enough light, I couldn’t help but notice that the audio was making my ears bleed.

The cause? DC Offset on both the left and right channels. Easy enough to fix after the fact, but not acceptable. I’ve gotten some source files from a few other Zi6s and haven’t seen similar issues, so I’m hoping I’ve just got a bad one. Which will lead to a fun conversation with some poor outsourced tech support rep on Monday.

I wanted to get a post up, in case anyone else is having similar issues. The issue manifests itself as an out-of-phase sound, like the audio isn’t placed quite right in the stereo field. Or just open it in a waveform viewer and look for the offset.

Bad Audio

Fix it with magic software

Waveform now centered at zero, hoorah!

The Unofficial Apple Webblog has a nice piece about the range of iPhone apps out there to turn the iPhone/iPodTouch into a control surface for AV software like Logic, Max/MSP, etc.

I did a post a while back showing the possibilities to control Motion with some basic MIDI software, but the available applications have come a long way since then.

Check out the massive jpeg announcement, or just head to red.com for the full deal.

While I’m sure I’ll return to my usual cynical self soon, I must say I like the modular camera idea they’re really promoting with this new batch of announcements. Buy the block, then add on all the accessories necessary, and later swap the block.

Oh, and it wouldn’t be a RED announcement without a bit of “WTF?” insanity, so here you go – 28k camera that shoots 260 megapixel stills, coming in 2010. Word.

The AG-HPG20 is a portable deck which takes HD-SDI input and lays it down to P2 cards in either DVCProHD or AVCIntra formats. Unless you’re Convergent Design, this is in the category of Hella Cool. They don’t explicitly say whether it’ll run on batteries, but hopefully if they call it “portable,” it will.

AVCIntra is my Compressed HD Format Of Choice, if all else was equal (vendor support, etc). My dream would be a device like this that went to SXS instead of P2, but we can’t have everything all at once. 4:2:2, full raster i-frame only compression at 100mbit? Hotness.

Apparently Apple’s SVP of Enterprise Sales is leaving, and there are no plans to replace him. Wonder what that means for all the enteprisey stuff … I guess we’ll have to wait and see.