"Mac Mini: The Original AppleTV"

This is a good article on Mac home theater software. It reminds us that at $600, a Mac mini isn't that much more expensive than AppleTV, and it is a real computer to boot.

I have been hoping that Macs will turn into true home theater PC's with good PVR (personal video recorder) functionailty, but it doesn't seem to be in Apple's plans. Microsoft has done this with their Media Center Edition of Windows. At Link, we do so much off-air recording that we are eventually going to have to start using computers to record TV around the clock. With standalone DVD-and-hard-drive recorders disappearring from the US market, we really don't have much choice.

I found the article via tvsquad.com. Engadget HD brings up the issue of whether consumers even want a computer connected to their TV at all. Apple has gone with the media extender idea--having a cheap, simple device that streams media from your computer, and the XBox 360 is a media extender too (as well as a game console.)

Adobe Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects CS3 Announced

So Adobe announced the updates to all their major software apps. Design stuff (e.g., Photoshop, Illustrators, InDesign) shipping in April. Video stuff, including Premiere for Mac and the first Universal version of After Effects, shipping in "3rd quarter"--I guess that's before October.

Once again, HD for Indies has the best details and analysis here. Stuff you won't see in the press releases.

Neokast

"The $7 TV Network: Neokast brings multicasting to the masses."

So Bob Cringely from PBS is promoting this new technology called Neokast. This strikes me as the best idea for transposing the idea of TV to the Internet. That is, broadcasting the same signal to thousands or millions of viewers at the same time. Viewers parrticipate in some peer-to-peer action that helps push the signal along to others. That way there isn't a big load on network by the broadcaster, and it also helps get around any other network problems around the internet. The $7 refers to how much network access would cost per month to run a video service with the Neokast technology. OK, so I don't really understand how it works, but if it does what they say it will do for free, then this is something to watch out for.

Whether TV on their computer is what people really want is another question. After all, the reason why YouTube is taking off is because it is not centrally controlled video, but directed by social networking. And YouTube is also on-demand. On the other hand, this could be a route to real a la carte TV programming, which the cable/satellite companies are terrified of. That is, I only pay for the TV channels I want to watch. Seems like Neokast could be a really disruptive technology.

"Basic Camcorder Maintenance"

Camcorderinfo links to a couple of articles by Jake Luddington on this post. While it is necessary to have a DV cleaning cassette, my approach is to run those as needed and not on a regular basis as Jake Luddington recommends. Those cleaning cassettes wear down your heads--that's bad. I say only use them when you have clogged heads, which isn't that often in my experience. He does bring up the whole Sony vs other DV tapes issue. I sort of thought this was over, but he says that Sony tapes don't play well with others. We tend to be a Sony shop in terms of gear and tape stock. So I guess we are OK, as long as we don't throw too many other brands of tape into the mix. He also recommends buying a DV tape rewinder.

Orb: Stealing AppleTV's Thunder?

Not really. But their press release annoucing support for streaming to XBox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii did catch my attention. Basically Orb is software that will set up a high-end PC as an internet media streamer. Orb will stream video to internet-connected devices like other PC's, Macs, smartphones, PDA's, Playstation portables, etc.

This could be useful for Link to handle a big library of video for easy playback. For example, having translators watch reports anywhere in the world that we have recorded. It even works with PC Tuner cards. So it will handle the recording of TV (at least what those PC cards can tune to) and serve playout over the internet. Pretty neat.

What Is a Network Encoder?

I'm not really sure what a network encoder is, but Flip4Mac just announced one, Pipeline. It looks like a small box with a SDI input and an ethernet port, and that's about it for connections. Unlike AJA and Blackmagic products, it doesn't seem to need a host computer to run. So what happens to the video once it's inside the Pipeline box? Well it gets distributed over ethernet to FCP systems or systems running Flip4Mac's encoding software Episode. (They also mention "3rd party support.") Interesting concept. I could see using it with a DigitBeta deck, which is too expensive to put in every edit room (or any edit room at Link TV where we also don't have routed house video.) It will encode the video to DV25/50 and IMX 30/40/50, but not uncompressed codecs. It says its external encoding "allows fast ingest without burdening edit workstations". I like that idea, and at $1995 it seems affordable. The brief description leaves me with lots of questions, but we should learn more about it at NAB.

More AppleTV Stuff

Mike Curtis has a new blog AppleTV Hacker with loads of good insights and info.

AppleTV already being hacked.
Put in a bigger hard drive.
Add Xvid support (I assume this also means Divx).
Basically the AppleTV is running OSX so if you can get inside the box then you can install support for other video codecs.

BusinessWeek points out some problems with content and AppleTV in this article:
Apple's TV Blurry Future

I generally agree with BusinessWeek. If Apple wants this to be as successful as the iPod, they have to provide good video content that people are willing to pay for. With music you could easily rip CD's that you bought, and put your music on your iPod. But that isn't the case with movies. The movie studios don't want you ripping their DVD's to your hard drive and from there to your AppleTV, and they try to stop you from doing that. So I think Apple really has to work to get more movies on the iTunes store, eventually at HD quality, to make this a success. It seems that Apple did a great job with the design of the product, hardware, and interface, but the content is still a big question.

I played around with a demo unit in the Apple Store. It was hooked up to a Sony 32" LCD screen. The iTunes TV shows and movies did look soft. So far no HD content on the iTunes store and they call their movies "near DVD quality." Apple seems to limit their content to 640 pixels wide. For your iTunes movies that means the resolution of the source is only 25% of a 1280 by 720 resolution screen. So a pretty big scale up to fill the screen. I looked at some of their clips in the Apple Store and I found that I had to stand back over 15 ft. from the screen before I wasn't annoyed by the softness of the image and some of the compression artifacts. That's pretty normal living room conditions, but if your TV is bigger then you will be seeing more of the iTunes imperfections on your HD screen at the same distance.

The unit will play back 720p movies at 24fps and 960x540 at 30 fps. For encoding your own stuff and podcasts, you could use those resolutions. But for Apple, who is clearly marketing this at HDTV owners, you think they would make their own content more attractive, especially considering that those movies cost from $10-$15 a pop. It is not even meant to run on a 4x3 standard-def TV (like I have) where that iTunes Store content actually looks good. Obviously Apple has some obstacles to providing HD content--namely the movie studios and issue of big downloads on the internet.

This points out another issue, which is that standard-def rarely looks good on a high-def display. Especially normal TV, 4x3 and interlaced, it will always look crummy on a big, widescreen, and progressive display. Americans are clearly giving up on 4x3, interlaced TV's. So it will be interesting to see when broadcast TV decides to switch to widescreen and/or progressive broadcasts.

Apple TV Review: "It is classic Apple: simple and elegant."

"From PC to TV -- via Apple"

With the first units on their way to consumers, the reviews are starting to roll in. Walt Mossberg writes for the Wall Street Journal and says he's been up and running with Apple TV for 10 days. He sounds happy. No simple setup either--he has the Apple TV streaming video and audio from 3 Macs and 3 Windows over an 802.11 G network. Seems like a good review in terms of covering what Apple TV offers (and doesn't), how to use it & set it up in good layperson terms.

As I've written before, I'm very interested in the podcasting features of Apple TV. If Apple TV takes off, our show Mosaic (and any other orignal production) can be on a lot more TV's than just those folks with Dish TV or DirecTV. For more about my thoughts on Apple TV, check out these posts:
More on Apple TV and Video Podcasting
Apple TV

Poor Man's EyeTV

Vidi is a simple, free application that turns your Mac into a timed video recorder. It works with any firewire analog digitzer and records to DV files. I read about its use on this article "Set analog recording stop times using Vidi". We do a bunch of recording on DVD Recorders of news programs. This could be an alternative. EyeTV, which is a nice hardware-software combo, can record directly to MPEG-2 which can be nice for archiving purpose--just burn your video right to DVD with no encoding.

Good Articles on the Canon XH A1

Run'n'gun Canon

Canon XH A1 By Adam Wilt

The first article by Taylor Wigton is a review and reports on some tests on the 24F mode of the Canon cameras. 24F is a progressive format which is derived from an interlaced image. They report that there is some loss in the vertical resolution by using a single field of interlaced video (540 lines) to generate a full frame of HD video (1080 lines.) But overall they are pleased with the image quality in Canon's 24F mode, even in comparison with much more expensive cameras with true 24 frame progressive imaging. I got a tip from the Canon Booth at MacWorld that you can use the low-cost Canon HV10 camera to capture 24F footage in FCP at 24fps. Obviously you can do the same thing with the XH A1 but using the HV10 could save you some wear on the heads in the long run if you use your camera a lot. I found this report at FresHDV.

The second article by Adam Wilt gives the XH A1 a DV Award of Excellence at DV.com (registration required). Very nice endorsement for Canon. Sony is doing true 24 progressive with the V1, but the Z1 can only record 60i. (The Z1 also has a fake progressive mode but it's still gets recorded in a 60i video format.) Seems like Canon is now besting Sony in the sub-$5K market. What with just about every new TV being sold having a progressive display, I think the time is coming to drop interlace. On the other hand, broadcast TV still has 2 interlaced formats that are dominant, 480i and 1080i. However, generally it's easier to bring a progressive image into an interlaced format than vice versa.

Two Divergent Ways to See Docs on the Web

Nomads Land
Educational TV Blog

Nomad's Land's tagline is a distribution service with a mission that sounds similar to Link TV. They plan on showing docs, features, shorts and music on their site and through downloads. The first doc featured on their site The Boy Who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan is a good doc that Link TV shows. So they offer that film and others on a fee-based rental or to-own basis (some others are free to watch on their site.) They also strive to help filmmakers with networking and also fundraising (they will host trailers and other rough cuts.) I found it via FresHDV.

Educational TV Blog seems to be some guy who tapes stuff off-air and then puts it on Google Video. No price for you--no rights acknowledged for the producers of the films. I hit upon it via this blog entry at Camcorderinfo.com on 'The Cutting Edge', a good doc on editing feature films, that is on the Educational TV Blog.

Apple's Guide to Setting up a XSan

"Pro Apps 4-Seat SAN
Quick Setup Guide"

No, I don't have an XSan. But consider this guide for future reference when I actually get some shared storage. If you are interested in the nuts-and-bolts of how an XSan works, or if you actually have to set one up, then this guide from Apple is for you.

Video Encoding Lilnks

"VisualHub: Easy encoding at an affordable price"
"Encode for YouTube using Apple Compressor"

These are a couple of articles about encoding video for the Web from camcorderinfo.com. The first is a plug for the VisualHub app, which I was just reading about as faster with h.264 than QuickTime Pro (can't remember where I read that, sorry.). As I understand it, VisualHub acts as a GUI for ffmpeg. The second article suggests settings for Compressor to get good-looking video on YouTube.

Best Way to Scale Up Video (without buying another plugin)

One more post of my cribsheet from DV Rebel's Guide. So Stu Maschwitz recommends using Photoshop to scale up video. In his case, he's talking about using video shot letterbox 4:3 to a native 16:9 for DVD, but seems like it could work for standard-def that needs to go to high-def too. After Effects uses bilinear interploation, but Photoshop CS has a better algorithm for scaling images--bicubic sharper. So how do you use Photoshop to work with video? Stu recommends converting your movie to series of TIFF images (with LZW compression) and then using Photoshop actions to automate the process. This assumes that you have progressive video--if you have interlaced footage then you'd have to deinterlace with After Effects (use preserve edges), output 60 fps of TIFF's, scale in PS, the re-interlace in After Effects.

Rumor/Speculation: Apple to Take on TiVo

The Great Apple Video Encoder Attack of 2007

I'm a bit skeptical, but Bob Cringely thinks that Apple is going to add hardware-based video encoding capability to all Macs. Then Apple could go head to head to with TiVo for recording TV. I don't think this is a good idea because I think the satellite/cable companies have a lock on DVR (Digital Video Recorder) capability and are not going to give it up. Setting up a third party device to control your TV and record is complex and the TV providers are going to keep it that way. But Cringely was predicting Apple TV about 18 months, so maybe my skepticism is misplaced. Whether or not Apple wants to make a Digital Video Recorder, I think faster h.264 encoding would be good for Apple for getting any kind of video you want to your Apple TV and iPod, which both only support MPEG-4 and h.264.

Here's some speculation for you: if you Mac could do real-time encoding to h.264, then it wouldn't matter what codec your video was in. You could play a DVD on your Mac, which would transcode it to h.264 then send it to your Apple TV via wireless. Same thing for a Divx movie or WMV movie or a ripped MPEG-2 file/TS folder or even a HD-DVD/Blu-Ray disc.

Rebel Color Corrector

I was just writing about motion effects tips that I got from Stu Maschwitz and his book "The DV Rebel's Guide." Well Stu also has an interesting approach to using color correction using After Effects. He doesn't like the look achievable with FCP's 3-way color corrector and has authored a plugin Colorista, which I've blogged about before here. That post includes a link to a movie that demonstrates why Colorista is a superior product.

Well you can achieve the same results of Colorista with a free plugin for After Effects called Rebel CC that Stu is giving away at his website for "DV Rebel's Guide. There's also a good tutorial video on using Rebel CC on his website, but to master it I think you would need to read the book. The interface for Rebel CC is not intuitive, which is why it is free and Colorista is $199.

There's also a competing product to Colorista called The Grading Sweet which LAFCPUG did a tutorial on.

Motion FX's in After Effects

I generally hate using slow motion in FCP because I don't like the results of FCP's frame bleding. Frame blending basically just makes up new frames by blending frames together--sort of like little dissolves. This especially doesn't look good with interlaced footage which is what I mostly work with because you have to add on the look of deinterlacing, which basically leaves you with half of your picture because it throws out every other line of video.

There's a better way of doing slo-mo called interpolation. Compressor actually will do interpolation, and it is why Compressor does good conversion from PAL to NTSC (if at shockingly slow speeds.) But Compressor is not set up to do interpolation for slo-motion. There are some workarounds, but if you have After Effects 7, then I think it is a better workflow.

With After Effects 7, Adobe introduced a new setting to frameblending called "Pixel Motion", which is interpolation. With interpolation, the software looks for what areas of the image are moving and figures out what the in-between steps would be based on how fast and in what direction those moving parts are moving. It's more processor-intensive but the results are superior to the frame blending.

So how do you turn on interpolation in After Effects? There has always been frame blending switch in After Effects, but now it has three settings--off, draft, and fine. Draft is regular-old frame blending like FCP does, and fine is interpolation. Make sure to turn on frame blending in your rendering settings or otherwise AE won't do anything when you render.

With interlaced footage, also check you footage interpretation. According to Stu Maschwitz in his book "The DV Rebel's Guide", use the Preserve Edges option for footage interpretation to insure that "jaggies will be reduced." I don't know what that means by I defintiely trust Stu 100%. This post is basically a note about what I just read in "The DV Rebel's Guide." The book is for aspiring action-film makers, but it is chocked full of awesome advice on getting the maximum out of Adobe After Effects. This info came from a chapter on creating slo-mo effects. He says shoot your movie in 24p but your slo-mo shots in 60i (interlaced), which is sort of like overcranking a film camera. Stu has a blog ProLost with a link to his book. Lots of great stuff in the book. I'm going to try and write down notes for myself here on the blog, but there's no way I could get down all the great things in the book. For any lo-budget independent who want to make a "video" for theatrical purposes, this book is a must-read.

"Import Motion Files Into Adobe After Effects"

Apple has a tutorial for bringing in Motion projects into After Effects. Why not just render your Motion Project and import the movie into After Effects? Because with this method, you can tweak the Motion project and it will update in After Effects. FCP will do the same thing with Motion project files, which are really just XML files.

Found via Creative Workflow Hacks

Apple TV Video Encoding Presets

HD for Indies is once again out in front with some good information. This post on Quicktime 7.1.5 describes the new encoding presets for Apple TV. Apple TV will play back 1280x720 at 24fps and 960x540 at 30fps. Doesn't seem to be any interlace support or 60 fps. The Apple TV presets use the H.264 codec.

HD for Indies also mentions a problem with the QuickTime update. I usually don't jump into any upgrades personally, and with that warning, I'm going to wait a while--maybe for another QuickTime update before I install any new QuickTime stuff. Since Apple TV isn't even out, there's no great need for the update unless you're dying to get fullscreen Cover Flow in iTunes.

"Build Your Own HD Workstation"

Mike Curtis at HDforIndies.com is my favorite tech blogger. He has distilled all of his wisdom down for DV.com in this article "Build Your Own HD Workstation". DV.com requires registration, but it's worth it for the quality of their articles. If you aren't sold on the registration yet but want to know more, here's Mike's post on his article.

Pixel Aspect Ratio

For nearly 10 years, Chris & Trish Meyer have been my After Effects gurus. They still do a column a few times a year for DV.com. They are now doing a different series of articles on pixel aspect ratios--handy stuff to know for working in After Effects and Photoshop with video. Here are Part 1 and Part 2 in their series on pixel aspect ratio.

I now work in native aspect ratios because I compose in Photoshop on my NTSC monitor and not my computer monitor. With the AJA Kona cards and the Blackmagic Decklink cards, you can extend your desktop to a NTSC monitor. That way I know exactly what I am getting in terms of detail and color for video when I'm composing in Photoshop. The big drawback with this approach is that sometimes things need to be stretched out 110% to look correct--like circles and fonts. Because of DV's non-square pixels (read the tutorials by Chris & Trish) typefaces and circles look skinny when you work in a 720x480 image with square pxiels, like I do in Photoshop. Chris & Trish Meyer recommend working in 720x534 when composing a Photoshop image on a computer monitor, but because I'm actually composing right on a native NTSC monitor then I work at 720x480.