With last year's introduction of the Thunderbolt interface, the mobile editing workstation really came into its own. Some observers speculated that the super-high-speed jack, which makes incredibly powerful peripherals truly portable, was a signal of the impending demise of the decidedly non-portable Mac Pro tower. And when it came to portable power in 2011, more editors and VFX artists than ever started eyeballing solid-state storage as a potential win for their mobile workstations. The drives remain quite expensive compared to spinning disks, but with hard-drive prices sky-high in the aftermath of major floods in Thailand, they didn't seem quite so extravagant by year's end. Curious how the makers of increasingly mobile desktop software packages were seeing their user's experience changing, we asked reps from the big three makers of nonlinear editing software — Adobe, Apple and Avid — about Thunderbolt, SSDs, and what other storage trends they expect to make the difference for their customers this year.... »
Sony's NEX-FS100 gets a free firmware update early next year that enables PAL recording, an extension to the AVC HD codec, and support for a new adapter that supports continuous focus adjustments while using Sony's Alpha lenses on the camera.... »
Though moviegoers have had plenty of chances to catch stereo-3D fare at the multiplex, it's only recently that 3D has started to take hold in the arthouse, as well. First there was Werner Herzog's well-hyped Cave of Forgotten Dreams. And now there's Pina.... »
It's an exciting time for video and audio editors. We asked Greg LaPorte, Sonnet's VP of sales and marketing to fill us in on what's shaking with Thunderbolt and more.... »
Quantel came to NAB this year with the cloud on its mind. Touting "global teamworking," the company was positioning its new QTube system for accessing and editing footage over IP connections as a revolutionary new tool.... »
Working with development partner Synthetic Aperture, Gamma & Density has ported its 3cP on-set color-correction system to the iPad and iPhone. G&D founding partner and CEO Yuri Neyman was at NAB demoing iC Image Control, which he said is currently being reviewed by Apple before making its way to the App Store.... »
XenData Archive Series software does something simple but powerful — it makes a tape archive look like a disk drive, thus simplifying the process of reading and writing to tape. Geared specifically toward the media-and-entertainment industries, XenData's software is in use by customers that manage large media libraries on behalf of their own clients —Modern VideoFilm is a customer, as are London's Re:fine and Canberra, Australia's DAMSmart!. We got XenData co-founder and CEO Phil Storey to fill us in on the technology, explain some usage scenarios, and even give us a preview of what we'll see at NAB next month.... »
Throwing catnip to RED users — and aspiring RED users — Element Technica (ET) has announced the Atom, a new compact 3D beamsplitter rig built specifically around the spanking new RED Epic camera.... »
The team behind 127 Hours contacted HD Camera Rentals in Los Angeles not long after the company figured out how to strap an SI-2K POV camera — and a CineDeck recorder — onto an Olympic skier performing a 120-meter jump in an AT&T Winter Olympics 2010 spot.... »
When Panasonic announced earlier this month that Bexel was using Panasonic's cameras in stereo rigs from 3ality and Parallax3D, it represented more than a technology partnership between the two companies. It's a new strategy for Bexel, which has outfitted its existing BBS1 truck to support stereo 3D production in hopes that it can facilitate experimentation in the industry.... »
If you want to ditch the battery belt needed to keep more power-hungry lights in continuous use, LEDs are a lightweight, surprisingly bright alternative. I still wasn't convinced, until I got the chance to take four LEDs, including a cheap consumer version, out for a test run.... »
If you were at SIGGRAPH last month, you may have wondered just what was up with the mechanical bull-riding contests being run out of the back of the exhibit hall. Turns out that was just Fusion-io trying to get the attention of the VFX-and-animation market. The company makes drives based on solid-state NAND flash memory — a memory technology that's similar to RAM, but non-volatile. It's also a little bit slower than RAM, but it runs cooler and is cheaper, meaning that it can be deployed in much higher quantities, the company says.... »
At NAB 2010, Aberdeen launched the AberSAN, a high-bandwidth, highly scalable storage appliance based on the Intel Xeon 5600 series of processor. The device streamlines some aspects of shared-storage set-up by combining block-level connectivity via Fibre Channel and iSCSI with network sharing that allows multiple users to connect to virtual volumes on the AberSAN as if they were Raid 6-protected hard disks connected locally to their workstations.... »
Now that the AJA Ki Pro boxes have been in the field for a while, users are stress-testing them. One of those early users is Bradley Levin, director of the National Geographic Channel documentary series Repossessed.... »
One of the bottlenecks in Renegade’s workflow historically has been its system for encoding files for MPEG-2 based deliverables. Now, Renegade has retired that solution in favor of a StreamZHD server from Digital Rapids connected to its Unity and a 4 TB NAS box.... »
