More color correction tests, courtesy of Little Frog in HiDef (the artist formerly known as “It’s a High Def World“).

These comparisons pit Final Cut’s native 3-Way Color Corrector vs. Color Finesse and Magic Bullet. I’m a little confused why Magic Bullet is being used to “correct color”, it’s really more of a suite for imparting a look in concert with color correction, and not a color corrector per se. Anyhoo, there it is. Check it out, see for yourself.

LFHD previously mentioned here and here.

HD For Indies Lame-O-Meter.

Nice.

MacNN has the scoop.

Macromedia claims that Flash Player 6 has 96.4% market penetration in the US. Grain of salt required, those are Macromedia’s numbers.

Steve Mullen is at it again. This month he has a continuation of his fine series of articles on the Canon HDV 24F format.

The first few articles in the series can be found here and here.

Had a question today…”What does LANC stand for?” If you are involved in the video field, then you probably already realize that you can use a LANC jack on a camcorder to attach external camera controls and such (like a zoom rocker for your tripod). I did a little digging, and here’s a LOT more info on LANC, courtesy of “Rodney”. I’ve chopped up and posted here what seems relevant from the original text.

“LANC stands for Local Application Control Bus. Don’t ask me why they chose the letters LANC to stand for what it does. :-) LANC, also known as Control-L, is an editing protocol which has been included on some camcorders and VCRs for at least ten years…

…In addition, LANC camcorders can be controlled remotely by a LANC remote just like the IR remote, in some cases allowing zoom, focus, and quasi-stop frame or time-lapse sequences. (The TRV900 has a built-in intervalometer for time-lapse, but most other cameras lack this feature, and the few commercial LANC controllers with time-lapse are apparently discontinued.) Some underwater housings allow control of
the camera via a LANC wire.

Like all other current Sony camcorders, my Sony is equipped with a 3/32″ stereo jack for LANC control. Physically the format is 9600 baud serial, one-line bidirectional (open collector); eight bytes per video frame. Control L is a two-way serial open collector 9600 baud protocol. Cameras (control-L) use a three pin sub-mini jack that has ground on the sleeve, power (up to 100ma unregulated 5-9v) at the tip and LANC signal on the ring…

…The LANC bus is an open collector so it is normally pulled high to about 5v and is pulled low to send commands or status information. You can hook the LANC signal directly to the input of a 1488 RS232 line driver and feed that into your PC serial port and capture the 9600 baud data stream. It will have to be inverted before you use it (00 will read as FF).

The data stream is 8 bytes, then a gap (1.7ms? until the end of the current frame) then 8 bytes for the next frame, another gap and so on. If you can write your serial driver to sync to that gap you can read it easily.

The camcorder puts out an 8 byte data packet with each video frame. The first two bytes are for controllers to command the camera and are usually 00 00. The next two are for tuners and are also usually 00 00. The last four bytes are for the VCR status and carry the counter and several other status bits.”

A little techie, but good to know anyway.

We mentioned the Tascam HD-P2 recently, a field audio recorder packed with features, at a great price. Looks like the Fostex FR-2 recorder also offers just about the same featureset, at around the same price. One key difference would be that the FR-2 supports PCMCIA HDD storage in addition to Type II Compact Flash media.

Powermac G5 Quad’s are shipping. HD For Indies has a few commenters that have posted their ship dates.

In related news, Envy is making a comeback as the Cardinal Sin of choice…

Camcorderinfo has posted “CamInfo Select 2005″, a comprehensive listing of the years best camcorders. Camcorderinfo is widely respected as the benchmark for solid camera reviews and details, so this list is the Good Stuff ^TM.

Spoiler alert; the Sony HDR-HC1 takes best in show, with the FX1 taking “Best Camcorder Over $2,000″ honors. Canon’s shiny new XL H1 hadn’t been reviewed at this time, I imagine we’ll see it on the ‘06 list.

Read an interesting post at Cinematography.com’s forums that talked about mixing Varicam and Z1 HDV footage in a video production. It’s not clear what settings and such the director/editor used, but the HDV footage was all but thrown out in the final cut; “all the shots with movement started to go soft”. Odd. I wonder why?

UPDATE: Original poster has provided a few more details:

“We grabbed it through fire wire and converted it to DVCPro HD 1080i 50 - everything was fine at this stage - the image was as sharp as what we saw on the monitor while filming.
The Varicam footage was 1080i 50
There was no fast movements at all - in fact some of them were almost still images - but for some strange reason - when the whole edit was down converted to a PAL timeline - the image went soft.”

William Speruzzi reports at zeroes and ones that Ripple Training has started their own videocast feed for iTunes/iPod. (Note that anyone with Quicktime installed can view the content.)

“If you’re part of the ear-budded masses that prefer your content “on-the-go”, we now offer you iPod-friendly podcasts we’ve dubbed “Ripplecasts”. Ripplecasts are free Quicktime movies and tutorials created by our Apple-certified trainers that cover a range of software and hardware-related subjects. ”

The first 3 videos available are “Podcasting 101″, “Watermarking using Final Cut Pro”, and “Watermarking using Compressor”.

I am a big fan of Ripple Training instructional materials, it’s top-notch stuff. I expect this resource to be no different.

Digital Heaven has released version 1.0 of MovieLogger. It’s a standalone app that logs DV footage to txt files for import into FCP.

“MovieLogger integrates seamlessly into a Final Cut Pro workflow with direct import of up to 16 QuickTime movies and the ability to export logs as a Final Cut Pro XML file (logs are converted to clip markers) or as Rich Text Format (for further editing or printing of logs).”

The software is $99, and a demo version is also available. The demo allows import of up to 3 movies and creation of up to 5 logs per movie. From the product page, it looks like a Windows version is in the works as well.

Mattias Sandström has updated his free Too Much Too Soon plugin pack for Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express editors. There are over 20 free filters in the package. The two latest additions are Smart Noise Reduction and Smart Deinterlace. If you are an FCP or FCE editor, go read the full list of plugins. A lot of good stuff there, and you can’t beat the price!

Japan Broadcast Corporation recently tested a “Super Hi-Vision” live video relay over a 160-mile fiberoptic link. “Super Hi-Vision” is their term for a high-definition program shot with specialized 8 megapixel CCD video camera that achieves a 7680 x 4320 pixel image. That’d be a 16:9 image.

“In the field test, it sent the two cameras to a sea park and sent baseband signals without image compression using an fiberoptic network formed by multiple network companies.
The signal of the total 24 gigabits per second was divided into 161.5 Gbps HD-SDI signals to sent using the DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplex) method.”

At the end of the article, they state “…we succeeded a live relay over a long distance. This means that Super Hi-Vision proved the possibility of being a future TV broadcasting technology.”
Overly optimistic perhaps, as the bandwidth requirements are staggering. But interesting nonetheless.

There are a few more details at the NHK site, they mention that the camera uses a “60-Hz frame rate progressive scanning scheme” and it “employs a 22.2 channel 3D loudspeaker arrangement to realize excellent sound field reproduction and a wide listening range”.
I don’t know what the hell “22.2 channel 3D sound” is, but just working roughly off the standard More Is Better Principle, it sounds like a pretty good deal to me…

(Via Slashdot)

Holy Crap.
ExtremeTech has noted that ATI has been investing in a new graphics card architecture that enables the use of “GPGPU (general-purpose computation on GPU) applications”. The X1000 series of ATI cards support this new architecture.

Well, ET just demoed an ATI app called Avivo Transcode. This program is built to transcode video from one format to another. Aptly named, wouldn’t you say? Doh. But I digress… Anyway, in testing on a very fast Athlon 64 outfitted with a Radeon X1800 XT graphics card, it cut encoding/transcoding times down to 1/5 the total encoding time!

I’ll say that again, only slower this time…you obviously weren’t paying attention. The. Program. Encodes. Video. In. One-fifth. The. Time.

“Encoding this nearly 5-minute clip, at DVD resolution, takes about 2 minutes 17 seconds with DivX 6, with single-pass encoding at 1 megabit. Windows Media Encoder can produce a high-quality single-pass transcode to WMV9 at 1 megabit in about 4:35. Windows Movie Maker 2 takes a few quality shortcuts to produce a DVD resolution clip at 1.5 megabits in 2:05. That’s all pretty good: This is, after all, one of the fastest CPUs money can buy, paired with very fast RAM.

How fast does ATI’s new Avivo Transcode app get it done? Try 24 seconds! Okay, that’s “give or take a second,” because the MPEG-4 profile finished a 1-megabit encode in 23 seconds, the MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video 9 profiles were done in 24, and the DVD profile at 6 megabits finished in 25 seconds. That’s all at the default full resolution, too. Crunching down the output resolution by choosing the “WMV9 for PMC (Portable Media Center)” profile at 700 kilobits per second completed the job in 17 seconds.

That’s right; we’re look at a minimum of 5-to-1 speed improvement over CPU transcoding speed. That’s just huge.”

I’ll say.
They go on to state that at this time the Transcode app doesn’t do audio, only allows specific pre-defined presets for encoding (single-pass encoding only, limited range of bitrate options, etc). After all, it’s a demo. Exciting stuff though! I still think there is magic involved…

In related news, the ATI X1800XT was recently overclocked to 1GHz (runs a 625 Mhz engine out of the box), and Gigabyte has been experimenting with supporting 4 GPU’s on a single motherboard.
Do the math, people. Some very interesting developments indeed…

(Via Slashdot)

DVGuru scratched up an interesting survey that found “48% of respondents were already using HDV in their broadcast workflow” and even more had intentions of adding HDV in the coming 12 months.
I have found it rather suprising how quickly broadcast companies seem to be embracing emerging technologies like HDV and P2. P2 especially seems to be taking quite a foothold in the industry.

FWIW, we’ve covered P2 adoption in broadcast previously.