Archive for category Video/TV
Canon Rumours and the Future
Posted by Dylan in High Definition, Video/TV on February 23rd, 2010
Nikon started it with their D90, but then Canon stormed in with the 5D MkII, then the 7D and the 1D MkIV and the recently announced EOS 550D and has largely owned the HD DSLR market. The Canon cameras have been widely adopted by film- and video-makers at all levels, and have seen use in network TV shows, music videos, commercials and even a feature film.
Barely a year ago no-one had even heard the term HD-DSLR.
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The Apple Codec Problem
Apple’s Final Cut Pro is entirely built upon their Quicktime core. So for Final Cut Pro to support a given video format it needs to have a Quicktime codec for that format. That means the FCP development team have to implement common codecs in Quicktime for FCP support.
And that’s where it can become a problem.
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Editor’s Swiss Army Knife
Most of us these days probably carry a USB stick with us pretty regularly, handy for getting files off client’s laptops and so forth, but it can also be your swiss army knife!
I have a range of ‘portable’ applications on my USB stick which I use to solve little problems when the software installed in my edit suite doesn’t easily do the job. Here is a list of some of the more useful apps I have on my own USB stick – these are all for Windows, there might be similar options for use on a Mac, but it’s been such a long time since I regularly used one that I haven’t tried to build up tools for use there.
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Network Rendering with MetaFuze
Posted by Dylan in Avid, High Definition, RED, Video/TV on February 4th, 2010
Avid MetaFuze is a tool from Avid Technology that converts various video formats (most notably DPX and RED RAW) into native DNxHD media that can be used with Avid’s editing products. The product ships with two interfaces – a GUI for direct transcoding, and a command-line version more suitable for scripting.
A small number of modestly powered computers can be put to work transcoding media from a large pool in a shorter time. However this isn’t something that MetaFuze will handle natively and must be managed.
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Downconversion in Media Composer
Posted by Dylan in Avid, High Definition, Video/TV on December 6th, 2009
Updated: I’ve done a little research on image evaluation, and decided that SSIM presents the best option to evaluate the the perceptual quality. SSIM results are now included below.
In a recent thread on the Avid Community Forums there was some discussion of the quality of Avid’s downconversion from HD to SD. I have used various downconvert methods from within Media Composer in the past and have never had any serious problems with any of the results, but I figured I might be able to conduct some vaguely reasonable tests. Read the rest of this entry »