Technology | Film and Video Tools, Reviews and Digital Workflow and Issues

The New Final Cut Studio

Apple has been listening to its customers. This release directly addresses some of the workflow issues of the past, while adding robust enhancements and maintaining the terrific functionality and interface of the original app. It’s a ridiculous value with a ton of bang for the buck. It will make life easier—and much more fun—for a lot of editors. »

JMR Gears Up for High-Bandwidth Digital Production Workflows

In its 30-year business history, JMR has learned a few things about customization. Working with everyone from military and defense contractors to big-time Hollywood studios, JMR has developed a modular system of storage components that can be mixed and matched to create custom pipelines geared toward all manner of digital workflows. For instance, JMR's BlueStor product line is built specifically for content-creation applications, where a single dropped frame makes 100 percent of the difference between workflow success and failure. "Whether you're a small indie post house or large studio or somewhere in between," says JMR's technical product specialist, Miguel Saldate, "we have different storage building blocks that can fit whatever niche or hole you're trying to fill." »

Mega Playground’s DI on Big Fan and Creating Color-Accurate Dailies

Red workflow is not quite the mystery it was just a year ago, but each project still seems to have its own set of challenges, as was the case on the indie feature Big Fan, directed by Robert Siegel. Terry Brown, Chief Technology Officer at Mega Playground, describes the DI workflow on Big Fan as well as Mega Playground’s new service offering DP Dailies, which promises color accurate dailies at a fraction of standard telecine costs. »

Tech Report: Thunderbolt, SSDs, and Storage Trends for 2012

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. »

Q+A: Robert Sharp on Digieffects' Next Steps

Robert Sharp, who started out making plug-ins for Macromedia Director and was an early developer of Media Cleaner Pro, is now CEO of Digieffects, which he acquired in 2007. Brother of Colin and Jason Sharp, who run ToolFarm (founded by Sharp in 1999), he knows a thing or two about digital video plug-ins. We asked him to tell us more about Digieffects' recent releases and where his company's tools are headed. »

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