Andy Ihnatko has a review comparing the Kodak Zi6 and Flip Mino HD. It’s very thorough, though I’m not sure I agree with the conclusions.

In truth, comparing image quality on these is almost pointless, as they’re all kind of crummy. They both have terrible rolling shutter effects, way too much sharpening and strange tonal reproduction. I think it’s more about ease of use, feature sets, etc.

The things I like about the Zi6 are the ability to switch to SD mode, the ability to take stills, and the support for memory cards. The macro switch is rad as well. Things I don’t like? The lack of a “recording time left” indicator, the strange battery life and the horrid audio on my example.

Follow the jump for my chart of how things stack up. Ugh! I’m including the Sanyo, because it records in QT-Native files, unlike the other cameras in its price range, which record AVCHD. Otherwise, I’d throw the Canon Vixia series in as well, as a very strong contender.

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Seriously – go to Sony’s HDV product page and try to figure out some distinguishing features between the Z5U, Z1U and V1U. Is the Z5U better than the Z1U? It’s cheaper, so it shouldn’t be right? At least they could fill in the ‘compare’ info…

Sure, if one puts in the effort, you can sort it out, but ugh. What a mess. Luckily for Sony, everyone else is just as bad.

Wired has a great blog post looking back at 10 years of DMCA, arguing that while the anti-circumvention parts of the DMCA really suck, as a whole it’s been a good thing.

Essentially, they argue that the DMCA, by spelling out takedown procedures and defining the “safe harbor,” has allowed for a variety of services that would have otherwise been too risky, namely YouTube. It’s a fair point, and an interesting read. The safe harbor provisions definitely give me some confidence in regard to Media Mill, but I’m not sure I would go so far as to say the DMCA is a good thing. And, the DMCA is like a soufflé – it’ll only get worse with age. Each new, DRM-encumbered technology serves to remind us of that. So, I’d argue that the DMCA is a badly broken law with a few good provisions. We can do better.

We’ve got about six months to go before NAB 2009, so I figure it’s time to start making baseless predictions. So, here’s my take.

First off, if we don’t have FCS3 or some other major video announcement from Apple around the time of NAB (whether they attend the show or not), I think it’d be time for some serious questions about Apple’s commitment to the product line. I don’t think there’s much truth in the occasional rumor about Apple shopping around Final Cut, and I assume that the big FCP shops already know the road map, but it’s time to move the platform forward.

There are a few big areas that I see as logical steps for improvement.

GPU Acceleration in Final Cut

Motion already makes heavy use of the GPU for effects, and Final Cut Pro already has the capability for GPU accelerated effects as part of its FXPlug architecture. However, the bulk of the filters in Final Cut are currently running on the CPU, and the realtime effects architecture is achieved based on CPU speed alone.

Unified Solid State Camera Support

Importing video into Final Cut has gotten to be a bit of a mess these days – you’ve got “log and capture” for tape, “log and transfer” for P2 and AVCHD, plus XDCam and DR60 importers from Sony, plus standalone apps for RED, and a handful of others. It’d be nice to see an importer plugin architecture that allows different importers to plug in to the “log and transfer” framework, so that we could have a unified interface and workflow.

Native AVCHD

Premiere Pro CS4 does it, so Final Cut should too. I know it’s not a “pro” format, but that doesn’t mean people won’t be creating compelling content with it. Transcoding to AIC really hobbles the support.

Kill LiveType

Please? It’s already Schiavo’d, just end it.

BluRay in DVDStudio Pro

This one I’m a bit less certain of – Steve called BluRay a “bag of hurt” at a recent event, but Encore is doing it. If DVDSP isn’t going to get BluRay support, it might be time to officially start phasing it out.

Better Roundtrip Support

Roundtripping is one of those ideas that works great in demos, but never seems to quite live up to expectations in real life. Final Cut -> Motion -> Final Cut tends to work ok, but FCP->Soundtrack->FCP is like russian roulette. Every now and again it’ll work OK, but usually it just blows up in your face. It’s not sexy or fun, but it sure would be nice if it worked.

Make Color Pretty

Nobody expected FinalTouch to get beautiful in one version, but for Color 2, it’s time to get an Apple interface and a refined workflow. Better Quicktime integration would be nice, and again, improved roundtripping.

OpenCL Accelerated Codecs

This one is a bit more “out there,” and the WWDC NDA prohibits me from talking about some of it, but OpenCL would provide some great opportunities for hardware accelerated video codecs. Not just for encoding, but also decoding of formats like HDV and AVCHD. Now, whether this will happen is a bit more uncertain – it’d be a pretty sharp departure from Final Cut’s reliance on Quicktime. It’d also likely be Snow Leopard only, though perhaps OpenCL can be integrated into an app, the way Core Animation showed up in Motion before appearing as an OS component.

Script Sync

Avid and Adobe are doing it now, so it only seems logical that Apple will add some sort of script-sync feature. Is this something people use in real life, or is it just nice for demos? I’m not sure.

Real Final Cut Server Integration

It’d only be logical to start building in Final Cut Server integration, to really start putting a bit more pressure on Avid in that space.

Other Crazy Stuff

If they were going to make it Snow Leopard only, there’s lots of other interesting stuff that could be done – grand central scheduling, proper soup-to-nuts 64bit, etc. Maybe for Final Cut Studio 4.

Motion Pro

Hey, whatever happened to the Shake replacement?

(Atom)

So, in Apple’s quarterly earnings call, Steve Jobs made repeated references to the “opportunities” out there for a company with $25 billion in cash.

So, what could they buy? This little economic hullabaloo has beaten up a number of companies, so lets look at some market caps:

AMD – $2 billion

NVIDIA – $3.8 billion

Avid – $600 million

Sandisk – $2.1 billion

Sony – $22 billion

Creative – $155 million

Thomson (as in Grass Valley) – $400 million

Bogen – $17 million

Sanyo – $2.8 billion

Autodesk – $5 billion

Now, not all of those are great buys. AMD would be a bit like buying a lead ballon (and not a Mythbusters lead balloon). And some of these would be impossible given anticompetitive issues.

If I had that kind of pocket money though, NVIDIA, Avid, Sandisk, Sanyo and Autodesk would make a pretty nice bundle of acquisitions. $15 billion total, leaving $10 billion in cash still floating around. Nifty!

If you were going to pick a format for closed captions in the year 2008, would you a) choose and easy to use, xml-based, human readable, machine parse-able format, or would you b) choose a format that uses 7bit hex values with 1bit parity, in two byte chunks with machine level control codes (clear buffer, move cursor, etc) and make it a proprietary format that costs $170 for the spec?

If you selected b), you might be Apple!

Ugh. Scenarist captions. Brain hurt.

I’ll do a bigger post about how to properly do captions with Compressor before too long. As soon as I get done writing a DFXP->SCC parser. Woot.

Is it just me, or are all of McCain’s ads standard def, and all of Obama’s high def?

Should we read into that?

I just purchased a season pass for Dr Horrible from iTunes, using a machine other than my desktop.

iTunes prompted me with this dialog box:

Wow, someone should really write a set of interface guidelines for stuff like this.

Here’s a tip – if the bulk of the dialog box has to explain what will happen when the user clicks each of the buttons, you probably haven’t done a good job. What it should be, and what 99% of other Apple applications would do, is “Would you like to make this computer automatically download all of your iTunes Season Passes?” with a button saying “Yes” and a button saying “No.”

Lame.

CEPro has a slideshow of 35 great CD/DVD/BluRay discs for demoing your home theater system, selected by “industry professionals.”

Yeah, I’m procrastinating this morning.

StudioDaily is hosting a rant from Scott Simmons about all those darned kids and their Final Cut Pro. He’s upset that us young punks don’t respect the old ways of doing things. While there is surely some truth in that, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing.

It’s a common criticism in many technical fields – essentially, it’s gotten too easy/affordable to do something that was once a protected trade. The influx of new users brings folks of all skill levels, and with all kinds of attitudes about the way the world should work. Final Cut makes it “too easy” to be an editor, so existing editors that have had to work hard for their skills feel threatened.

It’s worth a read, if only to get a rise out of people.