{"id":36,"date":"2008-08-31T00:07:05","date_gmt":"2008-08-31T07:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2008\/08\/31\/and-i-am-back\/"},"modified":"2010-07-29T23:31:27","modified_gmt":"2010-07-30T06:31:27","slug":"and-i-am-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/2008\/08\/31\/and-i-am-back\/","title":{"rendered":"And I am Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has been quite a while, but I hope to get back into the habit of posting regularly, now that I have returned to Hollywood.\u00c2\u00a0 A few items of interest have surfaced while I have been away.\u00c2\u00a0 Many products that were announced at\u00c2\u00a0NAB<\/a> have finally begun to ship to customers, and we are seeing how they hold up in real production environments.
\n
\nConvergent Design<\/a> has begun shipping the first units of their Flash XBR<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0solid state\u00c2\u00a0HD-SDI recorder, and announced an even smaller model, the nanoFlash<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Many people are planning to use these to increase the record quality of their standard HD camcorders, but I see the most revolutionary application in combining them with an Iconix<\/a> camera, for and ultra light-weight and mobile HD recording device.\u00c2\u00a0 I recently used\u00c2\u00a0some early beta versions of FFV’s<\/a> Elite HD\u00c2\u00a0<\/a>recorder that saves HD-SDI to SATA drives in JPEG2000<\/a> format.\u00c2\u00a0 We had some issues, but at the end of the day, it got the job done.\u00c2\u00a0 The nanoFlash<\/a> should be much lighter, generate less heat, and have much lower power requirements, allowing it\u00c2\u00a0to be used in even more extreme situations for longer periods of time.\u00c2\u00a0 As a bonus, the MPEG2 MXF<\/a> files that it saves to its CompactFlash cards can be edited natively on a number of NLEs, including I believe, Matrox AXIO.\u00c2\u00a0 I am not sure the relationship between this format, and Sony’s new XDCam 422<\/a>, which is quite similar,\u00c2\u00a0 besides that the nanoFlash allows higher bitrates.<\/p>\n

Apple<\/a> recently released a free ProRes<\/a> playback decoder for both OSX<\/a> and Windows<\/a>, which is pretty significant.\u00c2\u00a0 This with allow Final Cut Pro editors to share their\u00c2\u00a0footage using this efficient codec with Windows users and\u00c2\u00a0Mac\u00c2\u00a0users\u00c2\u00a0who don’t have Final Cut Pro.\u00c2\u00a0 Since there is still no way to encode to ProRes on PC, another format is still required to get footage back from the PC to the Mac.<\/p>\n

Reading between the lines of some of NVidia’s<\/a> Nvision<\/a>, I believe I have acertained the specs on Nvidia’s next top end workstation graphics card.\u00c2\u00a0 The NVidia Quadro FX 5800 <\/a>will have 4GB of memory, with a PCI-Express 2.0 interface, for 8GB\/sec of bandwidth in both directions.\u00c2\u00a0 It should have two dual link DVI connectors and one DisplayPort<\/a> connector, besides the usual Quadro\u00c2\u00a0stereo port.\u00c2\u00a0 It should support SLI<\/a> Mosaic Mode, using four connections\u00c2\u00a0from two cards to support a four quadrant image, which will eventually allow full resolution display of 4K footage in realtime.<\/p>\n

Speaking of 4K, Red<\/a> has announced that Adobe<\/a> will be releasing a plugin<\/a> to edit R3D files natively in the CS3 suite of applications.\u00c2\u00a0 Coinciding with that due to the release of the first version of the Red SDK, Cineform<\/a> has finally released<\/a> an “official” version of their Red4K<\/a> convertor.\u00c2\u00a0 They have also begun to advocate an offline\/online workflow for the first time, under the brand name of Cineform Express<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 My only comment is, once Adobe supports Red natively, shouldn’t the online be done straight from the R3D files?\u00c2\u00a0 In a perfect world, a Cineform offline with a relink to R3D files, exported as an EDL<\/a> to SpeedGrade<\/a> for color would be the ideal way to do post with Red footage.\u00c2\u00a0 If only life was that simple; maybe someday it will be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has been quite a while, but I hope to get back into the habit of posting regularly, now that I have returned to Hollywood.\u00c2\u00a0 A few items of interest have surfaced while I have been away.\u00c2\u00a0 Many products that were announced at\u00c2\u00a0NAB have finally begun to ship to customers, and we are seeing how […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[15,24,31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hd4pc.com\/techblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}