Is HD the Holy Grail?

Today, video producers are forced to handle more variables than ever before. They are tasked with making their productions look great on any screen on which people may see it—from HD screens and home TVs to continual demand for SD video DVDs, to the need to make the same video available on the web or PMP at a much lower resolution. What’s the best way to produce for today’s mixed media and tomorrow’s needs?

The Sounds of Inevatibility.

Agent Smith said:

“You hear that Mr. Anderson?
That— is the sound of inevitability…
It is the sound of your death…”

As I was unable to attend NAB in person, I read the same news as everyone else and there are clearly a few trends that it pays to notice because they will have a dramatic affect on production in the future. Whether or not you want to go this route, the sounds of inevitability are becoming louder.

Yuri’s Night

Human Spaceflight became a reality 45 years ago with the launch of Vostok 1. The capsule carried Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human to leave the bounds of Earth and enter outer space.

Exactly 20 years later, the United States embarked on a new era in spaceflight with the inaugural launch of a new type of spaceship — the Space Shuttle.

When the next 20-year point arrived, a new space milestone by connected thousands of people around the world to celebrate the past. That event was Yuri’s Night. It continues to bring the excitement, passion and promise of space travel closer to people of all ages, nationalities and backgrounds.

FCP / QT still export bug.

Adam Wilt has uncovered an error in Final Cut Pro’s still image export to still image routine- it fails to properly render applied filters before exporting the frame you want. The filters were used to correct for the fact that it also fails to properly “round-down” YUV video that goes over 100 IRE when exporting still images. It clips the whites. Yea, it’s about as dumb as the fact that FCP has to “render” MP3 audio dropped in the timeline, yet fails to do it correctly and you get garbled audio. Isn’t the point of “rendering” to make it work in FCP?

Thankfully, Adam has a simple workaround, which you can find on his Blog post here.

Incredible Sony Z7 information!

You may just want to learn French to really understand (correctly) all the information on this site. I’ve included a little bit of it here, and did my best to straighten out the rough automated translation– but all of this is just one section, of FOUR.

So without further hesitation, here’s the Sony HVR-Z7 as you’ve not yet seen it (in English):

Apple makes the Mac Mini Pro!

When I go to visit a developer friend of mine, I normally take no notice of what he’s got laying around his place. It’s crammed with junk. Stacks of software, boxes, manuals, shipping containers… half-built computers, cables, wires, hard drives… good golly… the number of hard drives.

But there, next to his keyboard was something that looked vaguely familiar, except it was so very tiny. It was the Mac Mini Pro that Mac users have been clamoring for for years. Was this a new test model? I became very intrigued an poked around.

Please excuse the small size of the images. I didn’t expect to see these cool design test units so I only had my cell phone to take pictures with whenever he left the room.