We gave away 15 free passes to the opening night of HDFEST a few days ago.
Well, the HDFEST organizers have upped the ante now…the first 15 FresHDV readers to respond will receive two free ALL ACCESS PASSES each to the HDFEST LA event. The passes are good for free admission to everything; workshops, panels, screenings, etc. These won’t last long, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

All it takes to claim your free All Access Passes is:
Email admin@hdfest.com with “FresHDV.com Ticket Giveaway” in the subject. Include your name, your guest’s name, your mailing address and your email address.
If you were one of the first 15 to respond, HDFEST will email you back with a confirmation and information on how to receive your two comp All Access passes.

HDFEST LA will be held in Los Angeles, CA December 1st-4th, 2005 at the Hollywood Pacific Theatre & Dolby Laboratories Larry Umlang Presentation Theatre II. The festival will feature HD film screenings (features and shorts), panels on HD/HDV production, visual FX, and much much more. Check out the itinerary for schedule details.

As usual, HD For Indies has the scoop.

The man behind HD For Indies, Mike Curtis does an interview with DVGuru. Good stuff…

UPDATE: Part 2 of the interview is now up.

Will the BluRay spec support authoring regular ‘ole long GOP MPEG-2 HD content to standard DVD-5 blanks? This would provide a quick and dirty way of dropping HDV footage onto cheap media, for playback in a BluRay player/drive.

Mike at HD For Indies has the scoop.

No, this is not specifically about moving images. So shoot me. It’s really sweet, and I had to post it.

Wired is reporting on a experimental plenoptic still camera outfitted with 90,000 microlenses that enable changing the focus point of a captured image in post production, even if nothing in the original captured image was actually in focus.

In an overly-simplified-nutshell, it works by capturing not just the light that exposes the CCD, but the angle and direction of the light rays. And that enables the image to be reconstructed in post production with a different point of focus, or even allows shifting the POV of the viewer across the aperture of the camera lens (effectively allowing you to “look behind” something in the image). It’s pretty incredible stuff, and you have to see it to believe it.

There is a detailed writeup at the Stanford site, gallery of images, and even a video that explains exactly what is going on. Check it out.

Quick notes:
The camera can operate on very short exposures. As an example of this, the video and PDF include a shot of a drop of water, caught in mid-splash. The camera does not capture images that are as sharp as a conventional camera at the same exposure setting, however, the signal-to-noise ratio of the light field images is much higher than the conventional images. 5.8x the SNR, to be exact, due to the light field camera capturing 25-36 times the light for a given image.

I’d be curious to hear what ways this can/will be applied to moving images. What kind of storage requirements are we talking about, and how quickly can an image be taken. Is 24fps possible? Imagine a camera that would allow you to capture not just the exposure and color characteristics in LUTs (Look Up Tables), but also allow you to manipulate focus in post production…

Harvey Mark at CreativeCow was impressed enough with his experiences with Avid Liquid 7 to bestow 5 Cows, the highest rating on the bovine scale. A few things that caught my eye:

*Breakout box with the Pro version does just about any analog/digital conversion.
*Open Timeline: realtime mix and match SD, HDV, MPEG, WMV and even DivX on the same timeline.
*Handles HDV natively, support for both P2 and XDCAM.
*Multicam built-in.
*As with previous versions, background rendering.
*More realtime and GPU-based filters (as well as 50 filters borrowed from Commotion).
*Smartsound is built in.

(Via Videoguys)

Here’s an oldie, but a goodie. I was reminded of this recently when asked about default timeline scrolling behavior in Final Cut Pro. Larry Jordan has the scoop and outlines the available options.

Also, a longtime Vegas user was lamenting to me that in Vegas he could roll his mouse wheel to zoom in/out of the timeline quickly, and he couldn’t figure out how to make Final Cut Pro behave that way as well. I wasn’t able to find a way to do this within FCP, but it’s possible with USB Overdrive ($20 shareware, and well worth the dough).

*Load up USB Overdrive and create a custom profile for FCP (hint:”New”)
*Select “Wheel Up” in the middle pane, in the right-most pane select “Keystroke” from the dropdown, tick the “Option” box, and type “=” in the “Keystroke” input box at the bottom.
*Repeat for the “Wheel Down” setting, but substitute “-” in the Keystroke input box at the bottom.

This will allow you to roll the mouse wheel to zoom in/out of your FCP timeline. What’s really cool is that when you create a new profile for Final Cut, this behavior only applies when FCP is the active application. Your mouse Global Settings remain untouched.

If you want to scroll your timeline sideways with the mouse, you can do that as well with USB Overdrive. I set my “Clicked Wheel Up/Down” behavior to “Scroll Left/Right” (choose that option from the dropdown in the right-most pane). Number of lines to scroll is configurable, the default of “1″ isn’t enough. I’m liking “8″ at this point…

“Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (SPHE) president Benjamin S. Feingold today announced that authoring has been completed on the first Blu-ray Disc (BD) to contain a full-length, high-definition feature film. Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle was compressed and authored in MPEG 2 full high-definition (1920 x 1080) by Sony Pictures’ Digital Authoring Center (DAC) and is now being shipped to BD hardware companies for player testing.”

I guess they chose “Charlie’s Angels: More Inanity” so they wouldn’t feel sad if they got a bad disc burn. *rimshot*
This Slashdot poster may have the real reason though: “…they won’t have to worry about anybody trying to pirate the first Blu Ray disc because nobody will want it”
Seems plausible to me.

UPDATE: HDBeat has discussion on better movie selections for launching this new format.

HDFEST has teamed up with FresHDV to offer you, the loyal reader, free tickets to the upcoming HDFEST LA event. The first 15 FresHDV readers to respond to this message will receive two free passes each to opening night of the festival in Los Angeles. The event will be taking place December 1, 2005 at 7:30pm-10pm at the ETC Digital Cinema Lab at the Hollywood Pacific Theatre, 6433 Hollywood Blvd.

HDFEST is the world’s only high-definition film festival. The festival schedule can be found at www.hdfest.com. All festival content was created exclusively using HD technology, and festival material is played back at HD resolution. On opening night, December 1st, HDFEST will screen a series of HD animations, HD comedy shorts and the HD feature film “Silence Becomes You” starring Alicia Silverstone shot with the Viper FilmStream camera. All content will be screened with a 2K projector.

If you are interested in the tickets just email admin@hdfest.com with the following:
“FresHDV.com Ticket Giveaway” in the headline
Your name and your guest’s name
Your mailing address
Your email address
If you have won the comp tickets, HDFEST will email you back with a confirmation and information on how to receive your two free passes.

We previously mentioned HDFEST here and here.

HDForIndies has the synopsis. Good stuff.
I think Canon is going to sell a lot of these.

Camcorderinfo has posted new info from the Japanese AG-HVX200 site.

Synopsis:
1080p CCDs (1280×720 downsampled from 1920×1080p)
14 bit A/D DSP with an internal precision of 19 bit.
Variable frame rate (only in 720p mode) adjustable in 11 steps between 12 and 60 FPS.
Also a variable slow shutter down to 1/12 second when using variable frame rates.
8 gamma modes

Check out the Japanese site, there are a few recording time charts, as well as other (badly mangled) info.

Turner Entertainment has done initial proof-of-concept testing of holographic storage, in hopes that it will solve their growing storage issues. The problem is that Turner has over 200,000 flicks, 25,000 commercials and 49,000 promotional spots in the library. And currently all that data is stored on digital tape libraries and disk arrays. Disk costs and tape retrieval lag time has become an issue, not to mention that HD films “use six times the storage space of traditional movies.”

The article also mentions that Turner Entertainment will soon be upgrading it’s 96 1Gbit/sec. Ethernet connections to 10Gbit/sec. streams. So storage read speed is another issue.

“The holographic disk promises to retail for $100, and by 2010, it will have capacity of 1.6TB each. That’s pretty inexpensive,� said Ron Tarasoff, vice president of broadcast technology and engineering at Turner Entertainment. “Even this first version can store 300GB per disk, and it has 160MB/sec. data throughput rates. That’s burning. Then combine it with random access, and it’s the best of all worlds.�

Holographic storage used to be vaporware. It’s interesting that they are already testing initial versions. 2010 ain’t that far off, folks. I think I speak for most of us when I say “I want one”.

HD For Indies has an interesting post pointing to a forum thread on Canon’s official stance about detailed info pertaining to the 24F mode offered by the new XL-H1 HDV camcorder. Currently, Canon’s official stance appears to be “go screw yourself, our lips are sealed”.

In the thread, Steve Mullen postulates that Sony Japan has pressured Canon Japan into silence “to prevent the loss of face by another Japanese company.”
Sony might have the leverage, as they are possibly the supplier of CCD’s and DSP chips used in Canon’s new XL H1 HDV camcorder. They might also have the motive, as the XL H1 24F mode initially looks like it will whoop up on Sony’s Cineframe “24-Fakey” mode. Should be interesting to see what goes down…

UPDATE: HDFEST passes here, FREE to the first 15 respondents.

HDFEST Los Angeles is the last city in the HDFEST 2005 World Tour. The LA event will be held on December 1st-4th, 2005 at the Hollywood Pacific Theatre & Dolby Laboratories Larry Umlang Presentation Theatre II.

Looking at the schedule, there will be a variety of HD features and shorts screened, as well as seminars and panels on HD, HDV, and production in general. Also, on Sunday night, HDFEST will present the HDFEST 2005 Deffie Award Ceremony at the Dolby Laboratories’ Larry Umlang Presentation Theatre II. The Deffie Awards recognize achievement in High Definition filmmaking. Wish I could make it…

HDFest is billed as the “World’s Only High Definition Film Festival”…they showcase projects which have been shot exclusively in HD. The films are screened using 2K projector technology. We mentioned them previously when they announced they would be screening at the NYC event exclusively using the DivX HD codec.

ThinkSecret thinks so (secretly, of course). Look for Intel-based iBooks to be announced at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco.

“…sources have told Think Secret to not rule out the possible release of other Intel-based Macs at Macworld Expo, but that it is more likely the initial release of products with the new processor will be consumer-based products only and not professional, high-end lines, such as PowerBooks and towers, as some Web sites have reported.”

But an Intel Powermac can’t be far behind.