FCP 4.5 Drops Frames with OS X 10.4.9

"Final Cut Pro 4.5 and Final Cut Express 3.0 may drop frames with Mac OS X 10.4.9"

This is a support document from Apple. Apple says the problem is dropped frames when capturing to firewire drives. Apple recommends capturing to an internal ATA drive. Or you folks running FCP 4.5 can stick with an older version of 10.4.

Blackmagic Design Intensity Review

Digit Magazine Review of Blackmagic Design Intensity

This card costs $250 and has one port for HDMI in and another for HDMI out. I can think of two good uses for it. One is using a consumer-oriented LCD screen for HD monitoring.

The other is for posting an HDV-shot piece in high definition. You can always dig HDV through firewire, but the format is MPEG-2 based with interframe compression. MPEG-2 is a rough codec to edit with. If you dig your HDV footage with the Intensity, then while capturing you can encode the video into the DVCPro HD codec or Apple's Uncompressed 8-bit or 10-bit codecs. The DVCPro HD codec doesn't require a lot of bandwith--it's around 100mb/s vs DV's 25mb/s. So a G-RAID would be adequate to playback DVCPro HD material. Once you go up to Apple's Uncompressed setting for HD you are talking a serious RAID setup, such as described in the DV article Build Your Own HD Workstation that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

There are some limitations to this product. It's doesn't support 24 fps because AFAIK the HDMI standard doesn't. It supports 1080i, 720p, and 480i (not 480p) video sources. It doesn't work on G5's--the only Mac supported is the Mac Pros. No other types of inputs or outputs besides the 2 HDMI ports, but it is only $250. Blackmagic Design does have more expesnive products with HDMI like the Decklink HD Studio.

DVD/CD Disc Stuck in Optical Drive

"Ask Apple Matters: DVD Stuck in Drive!"

The old paper clip trick doesn't work with slot-loaded drives. Here are some tips when a disc gets stuck in a laptop, iMac, or Mac mini.

Speech Recognition

So the day hasn't arrived when the computer will transcribe all of your footage for you, but some new tools are coming out that use speech recognition to help line up text with video.

Caption Sync uses speech recognition to turn a transcript and audio into a caption data and/or subtitle data. You upload the text and an audio file to their website, and they turn it around in minutes. It's up to you insert the caption file onto tape or add it as subtitles to a DVD. They also support lots of web formats, like Flash, streaming, MPEG4.

Avid's Media Composer, which can be bought software-only for $5K, has a new tool with speech recognition. It's called Script Sync. You feed in a script or a transcript. For scripts, if marks out which takes cover which parts of the script. With a transcript, you can click on a line and Avid will open the clip at that line in the viewer. Pretty nifty for doc folks with long interviews. Here's a good description on Script Sync in action on The Editblog.

Free Apple Motion Templates

"Free Apple Motion Templates"

Check out these Motion projects. I think the countdown clock with a slate is cool. Looks like the countdown that we get for the BBC shows.

Media 100 Back from the Dead

"Media 100 Producer: Media 100's New Software-Only Editor"

Frankly, I don't miss Media 100, but I know someone who does. The folks behind BorisFX have bought Media 100, and I think they could be the reliable developers that Media 100 has been missing for a long time now. This new software runs on Macs and will also run bundled with the AJA hardware cards Kona LH, Kona LHe, and Kona 3. Apparently you can mix different codecs and resolution in the timeline without rendering--that's one thing that FCP can't do (yet.) Sounds like this could live on the same system with FCP, but you have to screw around with drivers when you switch between apps to get AJA hardware to work. In addition to the Creative Cow article with the link above, the Creative Cow magazine also has a short article on Media 100 Producer with some more info (sign-up for future issues here.)

Generally, this would only interest me if I had some old Media 100 projects that I really needed to get to. It's supposed to open old project and old media. It costs $795 for the new Media 100 Producer software.

Eight Cores in New Mac Pro

Apple has put eight-cores in a Mac Pro, starting at $4,000. There are 2 Intel Xeon chips with 4-cores each running at 3.0 GHz. The Mac Pro line still includes the 2 chips with 2-cores each running at either 2.0, 2.66, or 3.0 GHz. In fact, the price on those quad-core models hasn't changed with the 2.66 GHz model starting at $2,500. So that's $1,500 upgrade cost to get the extra 4 cores. No other changes made to the guts of any of the Mac Pro's--neither motherboard, graphics, design, nor optical drives.

It is not clear yet what those extra 4 cores would get me. Apple posted some benchmarks, but Maya 3D was the only application I recognized that had stats for the new machine. No Final Cut benchmarks yet, which seems curious. Does FCP 5.1 not take advantage of those extra cores? Maybe FCP 6, which should be announced at NAB, is need to really take advantage of those extra cores? Hopefully, on 4-16, all will be revealed at Apple's NAB event.

My initial response is that that's too expensive for me, and I'm disappointed that they didn't drop the prices on the other models. On the other hand, this is clearly not a new line of Mac Pro's, which leave the door for completely new machines later this year.

I'd recommend reading HD for Indies response to the new machine and analysis about what it means for FCP.

Update: Anamorphicizer

Do you find DVD Studio Pro too hard to use and would rather do a quick-and-dirty DVD in iDVD? Well if your video is 16x9 be careful. Apparently iDVD doesn't properly handle anamorphic 16x9 movies. This free app Anamorphicizer is supposed to fix it.

I got this info from the Digital Production Buzz Tip of the Day.

UPDATE: Apple describes the problem here and gives there more labor-intensive solution in this support document "iDVD: DV widescreen 16:9 workflow from Final Cut Pro". Apple says this problem only affects 16x9 movies that are exported from FCP in the DV format.

Premiere Pro and After Effects CS3 Public Beta on 4-16

"Adobe CS3 First Look & New Public Betas @ NAB"

FXguide says that this includes the public betas for Mac of Premiere Pro and After Effects CS3. Premiere Pro will only run on Intel Macs (not your G5's or G4's.) Suggested retail for the Adobe CS3 Production Premium bundle is $1699 (not bad when you consider that After Effects Pro is $1K.) Here are all the apps you will get with the bundle that will come out officially before October:
After Effects CS3 Professional
Premiere Pro CS3 (Intel Macs Windows Only)
Encore CS3
Photoshop CS3 Extended
Flash CS3 Professional
Illustrator CS3
Soundbooth CS3
Device Central
Ultra CS3 (Windows Only)
OnLocation CS3 (Windows or Bootcamp)
Us Mac folks will miss out on Ultra which is a green/bluescreen software with virtual sets. Also no Mac OnLocation, which is software for capturing and monitoring video direct from cameras over firewire to a computer. Encore is their DVD authoring app, and Soundbooth is a new audio processing app. I don't know what Device Central is.

This is close to the same combined price of After Effects Pro and Photoshop. So a lot of folks who would get those apps are going to end up getting this bundle with a copy of Premiere Pro and all of its associated apps too. This will definitely give Apple some stiff competition if Premiere Pro runs well on Macs.

So the public beta should be a download on 4-16. I didn't check out the public beta for Photoshop CS3, but I understood it was only for registered owners of Photoshop. So I'm guessing that the same would apply for After Effects CS3 and Premiere Pro CS3. However, that doesn't really make sense for Premiere Pro since us Mac folks haven't had a chance to buy a new copy of Premiere in like 5 years.

I haven't edited on Avid in ages, but thought I'd mention the new version of Media Composer and Xpress are finally Universal (means they will run on Mac Intel chips.) Read about the new Aivd software at HD for Indies.

I also found this article on Adobe via HD for Indies.

"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.