Wither Widescreen? 16:9 is not wide enough!

Take a look at the most beautiful films-
the ones that win best picture, best cinematographer, etc…
how many of them were shot 4:3 or 16:9?
None of them.

Blade Runner: The Final Cut is supposed to open this coming October 5th in NY and LA. It is a remastered film print, not digital projection. But ask yourself, if all the HD camcorders are 16:9, will this mean the end of truly w-i-d-e-s-c-r-e-e-n movies?
The beauty of Cinemascope’s 2.55 or 2.35 to 1 ratio really helps draw us into a film.

Try to imagine Gaff’s spinner flying through the futuristic dystopia that Ridley Scott created if we only had square movies…

Use P2 (i.e. PC cards) on your ExpressCard-based laptop.

Addonics has released their ExpressCard Cardbus Adapter

This ExpressCard CardBus adapter is one of the few ways to add back the CardBus slot that is missing in new laptop computers. It is designed to allow the use of PC cards through the use of an adaptor that plugs into the ExpressCard slot and has a small PC Card “slot” that hangs on the outside of the user’s laptop. Addonics specifically states that it “can now accept CardBus Wireless broadband card, LAN card, Panasonic P2™ Card, CardBus eSATA adapter, video capture card and many other types of CardBus adapters.“

Panny’s new AJ-HPX3000 P2 versus RED-1.

Panasonic announced the nearly $50,000 AJ-HPX3000 to a fanfare of applause from P2 fans who laud the new camcorder’s 2/3 image sensors, 10-bit processing, full 1080i recording capability and two improvements to the basic P2 workflow- lots of slots and AVC-Intra recording for higher quality and longer record time on the cramped P2 cards.

The question is, why?

Please use “Over-Under” when wrapping cables.

Setting up for a job today, I opened up some wrapped mic cable, fifty-foot lengths of wrapped mic cable, and as I played out the cable, I realized that whomever the (insert pent-up, anger filled, derogatory term here) was who wrapped this cable up- they did not use “over-under” to wrap the cable but made dozens of loops, all in the same direction, which I now had to waste time to fix.

This follows a job just a week ago where I worked with a very tech-savvy kid who just graduated from a University. He was wrapping some cable and I watched him just loop, loop, loop his way through the cable.

I asked him what the heck he was doing.
I’m wrapping cable the right way, he postulated…

Sony’s SxS advantages. Are they real?

Sony wants to promote the speed advantages ExpressCard Flash Media (ECFM for short) are reputed to have over PC cards. In Sony’s SxS brochure, bullet point numero uno is “Faster Transfer Speed.” The chart that accompanies this promotion states 800 Mpbs (sic) versus 640 Mbps for PCMCIA (PC) cards.This would mostly have to do with the ExpressCard standard being a serial solution as opposed to a parallel solution. Does this sound familiar?

The latest laptop and dsktop computers are primarily outfitted with SATA or Serial ATA hard drives. These replace older ATA or Parallel ATA drives that we “used” to use not so long ago. By all accounts, the SATA interface is smaller, cheaper and considerably faster than we were achieving with the third generation of ATA, even with those wide, ungainly 80-conductor cables.

But does Sony’s SxS, and by that account, ExpressCard live up to the hype?

Sony’s XDCAM-EX & HD1000u & more!

YES, there it is. Sony’s XDCAM-EX in full motion-picture regalia- yours truly at the helm.
I just got back from Sony’s XDCAM-EX event at Sony Pictures Studio in New York City, Manhattan to be precise, and let me tell you, it was worth the drive into the city- something I try to avoid if at all possible.

At the event there were dozens of press from around the world. We were treated to Sony Pictures’ plush screening room, complete with surround sound and 4k digital cinema projection for the introduction of the EX as well as Sony’s new overarching marketing strategy under the new HDNA (HD in their DNA) branding.

After the polished show, which included a Spanish language section for the international press, I had some significant hands-on with both the XDCAM-EX, now the PMW-EX1 camcorder. Lots of photos. Sony also had the HVR-HD1000u camcorder there so I took the opportunity to pour all over that camcorder and take lots of photos.

Here’s a quick, late night report…

JVC’s webcast camcorder? Almost!

JVC recently showed (in Italy) a spiffy little camcorder, the GR-DA20, but hasn’t announced any US release dates or prices that I could find. This little Mini DV wonder sports what appears to be a 2.5″ LCD on the back that slides up or down to assist viewing from above or below the camcorder. Quite an innovation for a camcorder since the “sliding” screens have heretofore been pretty much been limited to cell phones (and the video cameras in cell phones, well, suck.)

Clearly a consumer camcorder- with just a few buttons and a joystick to control your navigation through what I am sure are a myriad of menus on this MiniDV maestro, this means that you won’t be adjusting focus and iris on the fly while leaving your audio with manual gain and on-screen metering. Ha. Don’t even think about it.

But the 36x optical lens, and the sheer design of this camcorder actually does take a few design cues from professional “box” camcorders. There’s no screen that swings out to the side. No, it all maintains a singular, purposeful design. There’s no wondering how one opens the screen. You point it at the subject and there’s your screen looking at you.

So what makes this almost a webcast camcorder?

Premiere Pro CS3 for Intel Macintosh

As a longtime Mac-based Premiere editor, I switched to Final Cut Pro 1 only because Premiere 5— the latest version when FCP debuted— was a lethargic editor with a new and unwelcome user interface. If I had to learn a new program from scratch, I figured I’d give Final Cut Pro a try, and I’ve never looked back.

Now, with the Intel-only Mac version of Premiere Pro CS3, we can be assured that there’s no legacy Mac code holding this version of Premiere back; it’s a ported-to-Mac version of the software that was redesigned from the ground up as Premiere Pro after Adobe abandoned the Mac platform. Also, Adobe has seen fit to offer FCP users a keyboard preset so they can make the transition to Premiere Pro a little easier by keeping keyboard commands and hot keys the same.

There’s a five page review in the September issue of EventDV. I’ve noticed that the camcorder articles here get a lot of clicks, but once you shoot the footage with your new camcorder, you have to edit it somewhere. Premiere Pro proved itself to be a good tool. Now, I’m not allowed to reprint my review here, (contracts) but there’s no subscription required to go and read it over at EventDV.net. You can also subscribe to the magazine and get more photos than appear online. Odd, but true.

Handy tower of links!

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On the right-hand side of this page, a little ways down;
Under the info about IEBA Communications, LLC,
I’ve added a host of links to useful tools.

These are not ads. There’s no money
or remuneration changing hands.

But I often need these links.
You might like them too.

You have any?

Enjoy.

Sony’s new HDV at IBC.

There’s some new video out on the net showcasing Sony’s latest HDV camcorders. As much as I look forward to testing Sony’s XDCAM EX (which is technically misnamed because it doesn’t use the same media as XDCAM) next week, I am a strong proponent of HDV because of the the many advantages of tape.

For those who need high-speed turnaround, there are many hard drive recorders that can be connected to an HDV camcorder and record the HDV stream right to hard drive for nearly immediate access after you stop recording. Forcing a camcorder to be flash-media only still seems quite a bit limiting to me. Are those who need very long recording supposed to stand there and swap cards all day? Or are they then supposed to connect a deck to the SDI output, defeating the purpose of getting such an “advanced” camcorder in the first place.

So tape still has good reason to exist, even as hard drive capacities increase and flash media starts to take over the smallest hard drive capacities (currently 4g, 8g and 16g in use, with 32g and 64g waiting for moore’s law to make them become anywhere near affordable), small 1″ and 2.5″ hard drives continue to out-pace flash media in both space and price. At IBC, Sony showed off their latest tape-based HDV iterations and both removable lens camcorders look very promising…