Firestore versus Archos.

Riddle me this, caped crusader…

If I want to capture video direct to hard drive in a pocketable recorder I could pay a lot or a little, then get a little or a lot. So which do I order?

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HD-SDI camcorders under $10,000. What to pick?

I was called by a regular client today.

They wanted to take their existing show and move it to HD. At the same time, there’s downward pressure from sponsors to get the most advertising bang for limited bucks.

So he needs to produce this multi-camera live show on a budget, and may need to do it over time, so he’s looking to invest in a system whereby he can produce episodes as needed, and then also rent out the gear when it’s not actively needed.

He knows all about HDV, but there’s no HDV live switcher yet (and the video delay with HDV is many frames) so what’s the solution?

Well, there are a few HD-SDI switchers out there that enable him to get a few of the latest prosumer camcorders that offer HD-SDI outputs and switch the show live and then record it to the format of his choice. But what camcorder should he get? …

not SDHC, not P2, not SxS, not MS, but HDV on HDD.

I’ve been shopping for a new camcorder. Not so much for me, though. IEBA Communications already has an HDTV arsenal that is based around the Sony FX1/Z1u camcorders (pictured here). I’ve been shooting HD with numerous camcorders for corporate and event video work since 2003. I’ve shot 720 and 1080. I’ve shot on flash media, and tape. I’ve recorded to two different external hard drive recorders. I’ve edited this footage and shown it to clients. The problem isn’t with my client’s interest. The problem is turning it around as fast as possible. Specifically- corporate work that requires an entire day’s worth of presentations to be available compressed and streaming… the same day. They can relent and accept SD (but the widescreen HD that I made for them was so very impressive). But no matter what format a camcorder shoots this stuff in it’s not perfect for BOTH places it has to go:

1) in our data pool for possible editing later, 2) on the web for e-learning.

The former loves DV. The latter loves Flash. Those two, disparate solutions don’t exist in one camcorder…

Our Cinema Treasures. Do you?

Films influenced me greatly while growing up. I still remember seeing Rocky from the back of a long, long theatre- a single screen house that had been split into two and the screen was so far away that it was like watching TV. I remember seeing Apollo 13 the week it opened. I got to the theatre late and I had to sit in the third row. The screen was so large that I had to turn my head to see left and right and take the whole image in. Point is, the rooms in which these films played were sometimes as memorable as the films themselves. In my time, I have seen numerous theatres go dark. The Mayfair. The Devon. Sams Place, the SamEric. GCC Northeast 4. The Orleans 8. The Boyd. etc. There is a place on the web where we can treasure these cinema houses. Those that passed, those that still exist, and those that are being reborn. This last aspect is something to cherish in this age of rampant (& crappy) development, and in an age of disposable mass media- where little is worth the electrons that carry it…

I E B A Tech Thoughts — R O C K S !

Thanks to all of you who come to read my Tech Thoughts,
I reached #7 on the fastest growing blogs this month.

Woo Hoo!

It’s clear you like what I have written for you.
Now let me know what you’d like to read.

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click the IEBA.com link and
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Vimeo goes HD. well, 720 at least.

There’s plenty of video sharing sites, but I have to admit that watching video at 320×240 is crappy. And generally the quality of that video is crappy. And then, when people shoot widescreen video with any number of current and many year old camcorders, there’s no way to show that video in its native aspect ratio on most video sharing sites, let alone show it in HD itself. So you get black bars on the top and bottom, wasting what little usable space you have to show your video.

Vimeo has gone ahead and made HD available on their web site. Also, their site is good for those of us who have clients, or family, and we want to share videos, but don’t necessarily want the video as well viewed as a Google or YouTube video. In some cases, privacy counts for more than quality. Well, Vimeo seems to offer both.

Now if they could just add some color to that blasé logo of theirs…

HD Home Audio Formats Explained.

High Def Digest has an amazing rundown of each audio format available on each high-def home video standard- i.e. Blu-ray and HD DVD. Moreover, Joshua Zyber gets into the nitty gritty about the various audio interconnects between the players and other equipment, and how the myriad of audio formats are handled by each interconnect, on each optical standard. Yes, that’s a matrix of 56 different possibilities that Mr. Zyber has organized into a nice, neat article.

Blade Runner – The Pristine Print

I went to see Blade Runner – The Final Cut.

First I have to say that the Zeigfield Theatre in NYC is a beautiful place to watch a film.
Even though the preshow was filled with commercials like your local run-of-the-mill multiplex, the theatre itself is a posh, 1000+ seat, single-screen, elegant viewing room. It is up stairs from the street level and the entire ambiance evokes the feeling of stage theater, as opposed to just the silver screen. The only thing it is missing is a curtain to open up in front of the screen before the main performance. (But then, if the screen was covered, there’d be no commercials… but I digress.)

The previews rolled right into the Ladd Company logo, (the green tree) which I immediately recognized. Then a long pause, and the first concussions of the stellar Vangelis soundtrack and the opening titles, white on black.
I looked carefully at the screen and saw that they were rock solid.

No waviness. No jitter. No odd flicker. Perfect… it was made as well as they could make it…

Hard Drive as floppy disk. Now for just $47.

I’ve ranted on about how inane it is to use flash media to record video because, in the end, all the video has to live on a hard drive. I’ve specifically asked, “Wouldn’t it be smarter to record video onto a hard drive in the first place?”

Well, the key element missing was the device that made using internal hard drives as easy as inserting a floppy disk. For those that don’t know, there were lots of disks used before CDs- 8″ floppies (on the right), 5″ floppies, (those two were actually floppy) 3.5″ floppies (that were not floppy, but stiff, shown on right next to 8″ floppy drive) then Syquest, Bernoulli, then Zip, Jazz, and then a bumpy transition into using CD and DVD optical disks as ways to give media to someone else. Now, perhaps supplanted by USB memory sticks. (They’re not “drives.” Drives spin.)

Now there’s a little USB dock where you can drop in any 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA hard drive as if it were a floppy…

Rolling shutter? – Pick the right tool for the job.

At DVXuser, there’s a detailed article called Sensor Artifacts and CMOS Rolling Shutter by Barry Green. He discusses, and does a very good job at showing a phenomenon whereby the image captured by a camcorder’s imaging chip is not gathered all at once (what I’ll call “progressive” like a frame of film behind a shutter) but may end up being collected across the chip like a farmer collecting corn from his field. This can create footage that has unique problems. He says:

While CMOS and CCD sensors do the same basic job (gathering light and turning it into a video image), they go about it in different ways, and the differences can have very significant impact on your footage… CMOS sensors (equipped with “rolling shutters”) can exhibit skew, wobble, and partial exposure; CCD sensors are immune to those effects. And a CMOS sensor with a “global shutter” would also be immune to them, but since no current CMOS camcorders are equipped with global shutters, a camcorder buyer needs to be aware of what the implications of a rolling shutter would be.

As I read through his article, I thought back to using tube video cameras.