There were a couple of post-production things that were interesting, but not earth shattering. Blackmagic Design added HDMI in and out to their $1000 Decklink HD Extreme card. They keep cramming more and more features into their cards. At this point AJA only matches Decklink's in and out on the aprrox. $3000 Io HD (which stole the show last year). I like AJA's gear but they aren't staying competitive feature-wise with Blackmagic. Heck, the analog-only and standard-def only IOLA is still selling for $1K.
Blackmagic also announced a little USB thingy called simply Video Recorder that captures standard-def video straight to h.264. So there's digitizing hardware and h.264 compression in a tiny piece of plastic that plugs right into a USB port. For $120 you get analog capture with the Blackmagic Video Recorder. For $300, you get SDI-only input and RS-422 deck control. Sort of like Elgato's Turbo.264 with video capture too. Not sure how we would use this. It's basically like a quick-and-dirty way to capture really compressed video. Hopefully it will do a good job with the compression. Seems like they should have it work with some PVR software like Elgato's EyeTV.Matrox came out with a something like a competitor to the Io HD. The MXO2 is portable I/O hardware for about $1600. Unlike the Io HD, you can do uncompressed HD if you want. But unlike the Io HD there's no built-in codec support. A great thing about the Io HD is that it will transcode to ProRes in the box. ProRes is pretty processor-intensive to transcode in real-time--for HD you need 4 Intel Xeon cores at a minimum. So I don't see how you could capture HD on a laptop with the MXO2. It hooks up to a tower through a PCI-E card and to MacBook Pro through Expresscard slot (so no support on iMac's or Macbooks.) It also is supposed to do up/down/cross-conversion and claims support for Adobe Premiere Pro and of course FCP.
Last year, Telestream announced Pipeline, a network encoder/capture-device. It basically has an SDI input, SDI output, rs-422, port, and an ethernet port. Because it's on an ethernet network and any computer can use it--it doesn't need a host computer to run. It could be a good way to share a deck with SDI in/out between different computers. It also can layback to tape, but I'd like to see it as the capture and lay off are done through Telestream's software. A cool thing they were showing at NAB was the ability to start working on video while it was being captured. They demo'd an encode in Telestream Episode Pro of video that was being captured. HD support is supposed to be on the way for Pipeline. They also announced Pipeline support for Final Cut Server.Finally in the "Shape of the Things to Come?" category, there's Maximum Throughput and their MAXedit systems. It's network and web-based editing. No beefy computer needed to edit your footage. Maximum Throughput hosts all of the heavy-lifting on the a server and then the editor is accessing all of the footage and the heavy-lifting through the network using any-old PC as a simple client. There's also a web version too for remote editing. Sounds cool. If you read my last post on Final Cut Server, I was bemoaning a crucial missing feature--editing. Last year Apple said that Final Cut Server clients could do some editing of footage on the server. But this year, not a mention of editing for Final Cut Server. I'm hoping that we'll see the feature in a year, but I'm worried that Apple is protecting sales of Final Cut Pro and Mac's. Network-based editing not only undercuts sales of licenses for expensive editing software, but also hardware-sales. With network-based editing, you don't have to worry about each editor having the latest and greatest Mac. Now, I don't know about you, but I've never heard about of Maximum Throughput. But I think they are really on to something.
