“AJA Video today began shipping KONA LHe, the first PCI Express HD capable video card for the new Power Mac PCIe G5 systems.”

HD For Indies has more info on the Kona LHe card in a recent post.

At the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival this weekend. Saw a fantastic flick yesterday, it’s a 20min short called “Run To Jay’s: Tournament of Champions“.
This film is brilliant. The synopsis:

3 years ago, during a TV commercial break, Brett asked Casey if he thought it was possible to sprint from their front door to Jay’s Market across the street and around the corner, buy a soda, and then return to the front door…
…in under two minutes.
Brett’s attempt failed, but launched a competition that would span 3 years and involve dozens of athletes. With rules established and strategies devised, record times were being set at nearly every race, until one athlete set a mark that many thought could never be broken…

Not only is the premise good, but the pacing is spot-on. At the fest I am seeing the vast majority of directors are taking a 45min story and trying to make it a 90min epic. As such, good films end up dragging on and on, and my eyelids start dropping. Jay’s was the exception to the rule…editing was quick and smart, and it had me hooked from the first scene. It’s really quite funny too, these guys (and gals) have a nice, dry sense of humor. If you have opportunity to, check this one out.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation has announced that they are making over 450 interviews with key figures and legends of the television industry from the Archive of American Television available via Google Video.

These interviews are amazing. It’s like a free in-depth class on the finer points of the business of broadcast production!
There are multi-part interviews with people like Dick Wolf, Angela Lansbury, Phil Donahue, Ted Turner, Michael J. Fox, Ossie Davis, Bob Newhart, Grant Tinker, and Ed McMahon, to name a few. The sheer amount of material is staggering. Most of the interview segments are right around 30min in length, and many span 6, 8, and 10+ segments. All are encoded in streaming flash video, and since it’s Google we’re talking about, well, the performance of the video streams is virtually perfect.

Check it out, and learn something.

This is pretty cool…Silhouette has paint and roto plugins for FCP. No need to swap programs, import/export, or any of that jazz. Neato.

TUAW and DVGuru both point to Thought Equity’s stock footage widget for OSX Tiger. Sure, it’s for Thought Equity’s $$$ stock, but if that’s your bag it’s a fantastic little app. Search results loads QUICK.

VideoGuys has a link to Cineform HDV Intermediate Codec image quality comparisons. This comparison focuses on multi-generational quality degradation, and how well the Cineform intermediate handles that challenge. They compare raw MT2 media with sources that have been converted to the Cineform codec, and then show that media after 10 generations of processing.

The differences are striking. Cineform beats native M2T editing, hands down.
Yes, it’s Cineform that has conducted this test…but they are careful to note the exact steps taken in Sony Vegas to duplicate the test so that you can independently verify the results if you wish. Pretty interesting stuff.

Skramsoft has introduced a very interesting niche DV production app called First Cut. It’s an NLE for MacOSX that’s designed lean on features/bloat and emphasizes it’s use for quick cutting and logging of DV footage. Seems to be quite a departure from what is available at this time on OSX for editing, but the focus makes perfect sense to me. First Cut is lean, mean, and cuts fast.

The tagline is “Why pay for a Swiss Army Knife when all you need is a good can opener?” Cost is a meager $150.00, which I imagine is well worth it for those that need such a tool (and nothing more…why pay for FCP features that you won’t use on a logging workstation). No word on HDV support, which probably means that it’s DV-only.

System requirements call for a Mac G4 1GHz running OSX.

The current version is lacking one feature that may be a hangup for certain producers. That feature is in development, presumably slated for the next version.
XML Export:
Create an XML document for exporting the clips to your high end Editing package for final cutting.

At any rate, I’ve run it on a G4 iBook as well as a dual-proc PowerMac G5, and the app is solid. Again, for those that need such a tool, this app is a bargain. Get the demo version here.

The force compells you. Run Software Update.

Spotted this at DVGuru: Panasonic has announced the official specs of the forthcoming heir-to-the-Indie-fav-DVX-throne, the AG-DVX100B. It’s important to note that this camera is a revision/upgrade/improvement on the DVX series of camcorders, not a new camcorder model.

Barry Green has a thorough breakdown of the key differences between the latest revision and the previous model. Looks like Panasonic has been listening.

Steve Mullen of Videosystems has a nice breakdown on the particulars of 24p in the HDV format.

On the MPEG cadence that transports 24p: “Through this process, 720p60 is output carrying 24p video. Because JVC uses a standard MPEG-2 feature, some hardware and software were able to support the HD100 immediately…”

“Moreover, some software handled 24p without problems: CineForm’s AspectHD and Sony Vegas 6, for example. Thus, it is clear that if an NLE company had fully implemented MPEG-2 when it introduced HDV support, JVC’s 24p would be automatically supported.”

Zing. How do ya like dem Apple’s?

“JVC’s 24p also is able to be edited as one would film. By dropping the 36 Repeat Flags within each second of HDV and transferring only the 24 remaining frames of 720p HDV video to disk, one has the video equivalent of film.”

Great article, very informative.

We recently posted another Steve Mullen article that deconstructed how Canon potentially does 24p in the HDV standard.

Robert Nagle has links to several interesting podcasts related to tech, filmmaking and cinema.

The Writing Show
MediaArtist Secrets
FilmMaking Central
CineCast
Screenwriters Podcast
Mamo!
Sam and Jim go to Hollywood

Good stuff.

While largely an advertisement for Canon CMOS sensors in SLR cameras, Canon’s new CMOS info site does offer some interesting comparisons and useful information on the (relatively) new technology.

We mentioned full-35mm-frame CMOS sensors in the recent article about the ARRI D-20 film camera replacement.

Avid XPress Pro now supports working with/mixing HDV footage on the timeline.

Robert Nagle discusses Academy Award-winning film and sound editor Walter Murch. If you don’t already know about Murch, well let’s just say that he’s a big studmuffin in the editing world.

I love this paragraph:
“Your film: three lives and two deaths. It is born in your head, it dies on paper; it is brought to life again during shooting, where it is killed on film; and then resurrected in the editing, where it opens up like flowers in water.�

Great stuff.

It is being widely reported that Apple has released a new G5, the dual-core-dual-processor model complete with PCI-E, dual gig-ethernet, DDR-2, as well as other goodies. Ran across a few specs (and other news) in a /. comment. Read it here.

Here are a few things that interest me in the higher end config:
Dual 2.5 GHz dual-core IBM PowerPC 970MP (G5) processor
1.25 GHz frontside bus
512MB PC2-4200 DDR2 RAM, expandable to 16GB (!!!!!)
250GB Serial ATA drive
16x dual layer CD-RW/DVD+/-RW SuperDrive
Three open PCI Express expansion slots: two four-lane slots and one eight-lane slot
Quadro FX 4500 video (Mmmmm. Graphics. Yummy.)
Dual gigabit ethernet
AirPort Extreme (802.11g), Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
Mighty Mouse (Two button scroll mouse)