-
Videoon 7/25/2011
Newest Laptops Eliminate Firewire Ports
Just be aware that the Firewire 800 ports may not work with a lot of Firewire 400 devices. That is a known Windows problem. No problems on the other side of MBPs (not for me with a lot of FW gadgets, not for others that I know).
-
Videoon 7/25/2011
OT: First 7D shoot
SWS, Nice work! Two small suggestions that I think would make this even more effective: 1. Ask the actress for a quick ADR to have her say, "Who are you?" in a less "modern" voice (so we're not taken out of the old world), but try just using audio filters first. 2. Change the spelling of the word "Magic" on the card after "How did you do that?" to "Magick" (the olden way to write this).
-
Videoon 7/20/2011
Boris Continuum Light Rays Unit for Vegas - FREE
Yes, the download is the whole package, and you get a free serial for the Light Rays Unit. The other Units are available as full function 14-day trials, after that you need to get serials for them. If you get on Boris' e-mail list, they offer various Units free from time to time. This lets you build a good set for free (if you can resist the temptation to fork over for the other Units). Also, if you decide to buy the whole set, you get full credit for any Units you bought individually. erikd: I would suggest a Windows restart and new download. You'd think downloads could never get corrupted, but I have seen it too many times.
-
Videoon 7/5/2011
Not OT: Completely Fake Sony User Forum
I wonder if they still earn it if my browser doesn't show them, i.e. AdBlock Plus in Firefox? They won't earn zip, because the ad doesn't show as served. It is not a case of receiving the ad but not showing it.
-
Videoon 7/5/2011
Not OT: Completely Fake Sony User Forum
This is an auto-generated site, created to earn AdSense money (showing Google ads). When googling for stuff, I see more and more obviously robot-created sites, pulling content (auto-scraping) from sites that rank high for the keywords they are interested in. This is a huge challenge for Google, because it makes their search less valuable, and if they can't find a fix, we're back to human-reviewed directories (remember those?). The funniest part is that this "Completely Fake Sony User Forum" thread has started to appear there....
-
Videoon 6/2/2011
OT: Finally bought an iPad 2!
iPhone or iPad running Speechtrans. It understands and interprets spoken Mandarin Chinese (which is the mainland Chinese dialect), and speaks the translation to you in English. Or it listens to you speak English and outputs what you say in Chinese over the built-in speaker. This is Voice-to-Voice Translation, previously limited to science fiction stories. And it can also translate Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish, all included. Not bad for $19.99... Especially since the same iOS gadgets can also run many hundreds of professional video and film production apps for serious use, all at very moderate prices. Any apps, music, or books you buy for an iPhone you can also install on your iPad at no extra cost There are very few people left in Hollywood who don't use an iPad for work every day.
-
Videoon 6/2/2011
OT: Finally bought an iPad 2!
On the iPad, download the app CloudConnect from the app store: This gives you access to for example Shared Folders on all your PCs, Macs and Linux machines via Wi-Fi, and you can poke around in your Dropbox folder, and much more. Think "Windows Explorer" for what it does, then add a bunch of functionality. Here's one clear review. As for Dropbox specifically, there are tons of apps that use it to sync with desktop PCs, with no iTunes involved. And it gives you the file system that geeks sometimes crave to feel at home :O). Flash sites? Of course there's an app for that. Get iSwifter from the App Store, it's a separate browser that lets you browse Flash video sites and play Flash games, for those who live for for example Farmville on Facebook... iSwifter is free, or you can pay pay 99 cents if you really like it. Oh, and iSwifter is available for Android tablets too. Why? Because those Android tablets that "support Flash" have only partial support for Flash, but iSwifter can do much more. And the iPad Safari browser is great. Perhaps it takes some time for some to get used to a touch-based UI, but it sure feels very intuitive. More "organic," more natural somehow. Great rendering too. it's easy to pan products one has never used, or only touched once or twice without learning how they work. I saw the same criticism of WIndows PCs in the days when people were used to command line interfaces. "These windows are stoopid. And this mouse flittering is so inefficient, instead of just typing what you want to do." But people got used to that too...
-
Videoon 6/2/2011
OT: Finally bought an iPad 2!
drop files directly via usb (no itunes syncing) iPad users just put files in their Dropbox folder, and they immediately show up on their iPad (or vice versa). See if you can get a Dropbox app for your tablet, that is even more convenient that moving cards around. The fast shipping from China: I think they send containers to the U.S., where each customer's package is then distributed locally (regionally) by the postal service.
-
Videoon 6/1/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
:O) There's gotta be a first for everything! After 10 years of OS X, someone wrote a social Trojan, sending messages like this: From: Bob Farss Inevitably there will be a few suckers who think that their friends are sending them free software to install, and they click "YES!" to everything. If they authorize an install, the result will be the same on Hardened Unix as on Windows or OS X. I don't know anyone who is actually using antivirus software on a Mac, and I haven't seen any viruses in the wild either.
-
Videoon 6/1/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
"Big Brothers" come and go. Today HP announced that they would soon ship 100 million computers per year running webOS, with a chunk of those replacing Windows. I really don't care about the success of one company or the other, I just buy whatever products serve ME best from time to time. For the moment, that means sitting in front of an HP workstation running Windows 7 next to a Mac Pro running OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. They both do great things, but there are a number of things on the Windows side that are not well designed (a few things were better in Windows XP), and a few things in OS X that are goofy. But on Tuesday we'll see OS X 10.7 Lion, and the world will be different again :O). Philip Hodgett talks about how great it is that Vegas provided a different paradigm for video editing in this blog entry. There is obviously room for both Windows and OS X and webOS and a few more, and that's how progress is made! As for "Big Brother," there were many Android users longing for a walled garden this week, after a good bunch of ordinary Google Android Market apps were found to be serious malware, with some of them being able to do malice without even having to be manually launched. The "walled garden" security inspection has been very good so far.
-
Videoon 6/1/2011
What was the Lowest Boris BCC was sold at?
You can also buy BCC Units and upgrade to the full package by paying the difference later. See their web site for details.
-
Videoon 5/31/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
Here's some practical and fairly positive info on the optional kit lens for the FS100 (for those who don't have a collection of Master Primes in their gear bags): Should you buy the Sony FS100 Kit Lens?
-
Videoon 5/31/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
I handled it at Sony's NAB booth. Yes, it's small. That's good for some situations, but the buttons are small. This is basically a camera for those who would really like an F3 but can't afford the extra $12,000 on top of the $5K for the FS100. If you can live with its minor limitations, you get a lot for the money. You want an optical TTL viewfinder? Save up for an ARRI Alexa. Totally bee's knees, if you can get one. Is there any camera under even $30K with an optical viewfinder? I have a DP friend who is using the Alexa to shoot feature films. He loves the PQ, but finds that he often needs a smaller camera for car interiors, etc.
-
Videoon 5/30/2011
Final Cut users: FC to Vegas codec?
Apple was behind MS in the earliest days of the internet, that is true (it made me switch from Mac to Windows at the time), but I think the 1.8 choice may possibly have had less to do with print than with the limitations of the CRTs of the day (on which the sRGB standard was based, btw). The same text & graphics shown on a Mac at that time just looked better for some reason.
-
Videoon 5/30/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
The F3 with the 3 Sony kit primes is a pretty reasonable package although the kit lenses are very good value for the money they're still not in the same class as the Ultraprimes which seem to be the sweet spot for most people. So factor in the cost of a set of those and I think you'll see where I'm coming from. Sure, but then we are not comparing ourselves with a $5,000 body that can use a few DSLR lenses we already own (and can use even rented Ultraprimes any time thanks to the PL mount adapter). If money was no object, I'd stand in line for the F3. It actually costs less than my SD camera cost new.
-
Videoon 5/30/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
That's definitely true. They are more focused on the creative side of shooting, post, etc., and they have little interest in spending time on programming and hacking avisynth etc. There are Mac geeks who truly enjoy the Unix that is built-in to OS X, and they thrive on using the EMACS shortcuts that have been around "since the beginning of time" (Unix time of course :O). Both quicktime and avi are legacy technoloies that are becoming painfully long in the tooth. Apple is coming out with a successor soon, utilizing the latest technology that is already in OS X, including what's in the OS X 10.7 Lion version about to be released in a few weeks (possibly even next week). Is Microsoft working on an equivalent? Impossible to say as long as Ballmer is constipating the creativity there (although the new development groups that are purposely kept outside the Soviet-like bureaucracy of the Office and Windows groups' thick layers of middle management are doing great work).
-
Videoon 5/30/2011
60p>24p
That needs Optical Flow (synthesizing new intermediate frames). After Effects and Motion have this, and there are many other tools. There may be some virtualdub/avisynth tools you could get for free (except for the learning experience).
-
Videoon 5/30/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
If I was looking at that type of camera I'd definately save up the dollars and buy the F3. If you can afford to spend nearly four times as much, why not just skip the F3 and go directly to the Sony F65? :O) The FS100 has the same (identical) Super35 sensor as the F3, but the DSPs are not of the same caliber (that costs money). This also limits what you can do with its PPs (no knee control, etc. like on the higher level lovely F3). It's not just the lack of ND filters that makes this camera unsuitable for handheld use on its own (without a DSLR-style "cage"). It really begs for a matte box where you can plug in ND filters, and rods for installing accessories. The whole thing is more like RED in that way, it's certainly not an ENG camera... HD-SDI would have been nice, but they either didn't have the space for BNC jacks, or they wanted to profile it a bit vis-à-vis the F3. I don't see any competition overall in its price range (US$5K without the crappy standard lens), but it certainly has some minor limitations. Something has to give to get the price down to this level.
-
Videoon 5/30/2011
Final Cut users: FC to Vegas codec?
Use Compressor. More control. It's OK to use a Reference file for input to the Compressor conversion, but the output going to Vegas must of course be Self-Contained. There is often confusion between gamma issues and "RGB vs. YUV" codec issues. This has to do with the interpretation, just like Vegas Computer RGB vs. Studio RGB. Using DNxHD, there are some easy gotchas, like what to do with footage shot at frame rates that are seemingly not supported by DNxHD. Holler if that's the case.
-
Videoon 5/30/2011
Final Cut users: FC to Vegas codec?
DNxHD is a good alternative to ProRes, they both can be written on Macs and read on PCs. The gamma is 2.2 on both Macs and PCs since two years, as long as the Macs are running Snow Leopard a.k.a. OS X 10.6.
-
Videoon 5/30/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
Quicktime and avi are wrappers, like "standardized envelopes." They contain codecs such as dv or uncompressed at various levels, although even "dv" comes in many flavors. Quicktime is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and works with all NLEs. There are a few more choices for wrappers, but QT seems the most practical for this. The FS-100 sensor is 2x the size of the Panasonic AF100 sensor, so much greater potential for limited DOF, which is good for scripted but not so hot for spontaneous documentary work. Canon's XF300/305 are stunning cameras also for a few thousand dollars more, but they have 1/3" sensors so "everything will be sharp" compared to the FS-100's Super DOF effect. The picture quality is stunning though (and approved for 100% use on BBC programs), and the camera LCD is in its own league for clarity and ability to judge the image. 2.5" SSDs cost from $69.99 (32GB) up to $4,400 (1TB). (Note that 8-bit 1080p24 takes up 334 GB/hour, 10-bit ditto 445 GB/hour, that gives you the recording time. Makes you wish for high-spec ProRes or DNxHD real quick.)
-
Videoon 5/29/2011
OT: This looks like a winner for Sony
Sounds nice but (Big BUT imho) it's AVCHD. :'( A very reasonable concern, but Paul says: "It records in AVCHD at up to 29 Mbit/sec, but looks better than Canon’s HDSLR H.264 encoder at a higher bandwidth..." The next step up is to use one of the now many tiny "clamp-on recorders" that can record the FS-100's 4:2:2 output to an uncompressed or minimally compressed codec. The least expensive one is the BMD HyperDeck Shuttle which records 8-bit or 10-bit uncompressed SD or HD video to plug-in 2.5" SSDs from HDMI and SDI (with pass-through of course). Not bad for $345.00.
-
Videoon 5/9/2011
WOT: iTunes Trailers Problem
You could try changing IE8's Compatibility View Settings (under Tools).
-
Videoon 5/9/2011
WOT: iTunes Trailers Problem
Works fine in Firefox 4 and IE8 on Windows, and Safari and Firefox on the other platform. It displays a red area with two buttons, "Info" and "Watch Now," with the latter offering all the choices from 480p to 1080p. Are you using IE9? IE9 on Win7 has been cracked thoroughly, as has Chrome on Win 7, where both Chrome's sandbox and Win 7's execution protection have been completely penetrated. Better stick with IE8, or better, Firefox 4.
Coursedesign
Offline, Member since 6/29/2004