Adobe CEO rebuts Steve Jobs’ Flash letter in WSJ video interview

As many of ProVideo Coalition readers read yesterday,  Steve Jobs published his open letter regarding Adobe’s Flash. Now, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen rebuts Steve Jobs’ letter in a video inverview with the Wall Street Journal. Ahead you’ll find a link to Steve Jobs’ open letter, to my article, and to the rebuttal interview from Adobe.

Steve Jobs’ open letter regarding Flash

I thank ProVideo Coalition reader WSmith for pointing out to me that Steve Jobs has published his open letter regarding Adobe’s Flash. WSmith wrote his comment in my article called Tépper is glad that the iPad doesn’t support Flash. I am glad to know that WSmith saw that article, and at this point, I don’t know whether Steve Jobs did too. Ahead you’ll find a link to Steve Jobs’ open letter, and to my article.

Panasonic announces AG-HMC80, the HMC40’s big sister

At NAB 2010, Panasonic announced the AG-HMC80, a bigger sister of the AG-HMC40, whose main improvements include a shoulder-mount shape/size, standard XLR inputs (as opposed to a US$300 option with the HMC40), and a manual focus ring (not available with the HMC40). Many ProVideo Coalition readers will already be familiar with Adam Wilt’s extensive review on the HMC40, and at NAB, Panasonic officials said that the HMC80’s optics, sensor, and recording modes are the same as with the HMC40. In this preview article, I’ll go into other differences between the HMC80 and its little sister, its European cousin, price, competition, and potential applications.

Why the iPad will dictate your shooting framerate & shutter speed

Back in 2008, I published an article called AppleTV, WDTV, or Blu-ray: Which one is best to distribute your HD project? In the few weeks that have passed since Apple’s launch of the iPad, it has become clear that the iPad will likely be a much more popular content consumption device than any of the other three. In that 2008 article, I explained that the highest HD resolution compatible with the AppleTV was 720p25, despite misinformation on Apple’s own multinational websites, which underrated it at 720p24 (and continue to do so). Fortunately, the iPad beats that, with a maximum published supported framerate of 30. This article is about how the iPad will now dictate your shooting framerate & shutter speed, especially if you want to have a consistent look on all possible outputs, including broadcast TV, the web, and the iPad.

Panasonic’s AVCCAM incomplete native progressive recording modes

I applaud the fact that Panasonic made the 720p23.976 recording native in many of their AVCCAM cameras. (AVCCAM is Panasonic’s brand for AVCHD professional.) However, I am concerned about the fact that they did this in a very incomplete way. In this article, I’ll cover the advantages of native progressive recording, how Panasonic and other brands have done a complete job in other cameras, and why there are missing certain native progressive recording modes in current AVCCAM models.

TecnoTur’s new English audio channel is live in iTunes

We are glad to announce that TecnoTur’s new English-language audio channel has joined the original Castilian-language one. Now, many other interested people —even those who don’t speak Castilian— are able to become TecnoTuristas too, as well as being guests on the TecnoTur program. The TecnoTur program will continue to invite industry professionals from throughout the planet to be interviewed. Now, with the English channel, TecnoTur will expand both its number of listeners as well as its scope of interviewees. As of today, TecnoTur’s new English channel is live on the iTunes store, and as with the original Castilian channel, listeners may subscribe —free of charge— to receive new episodes automatically in the iTunes application. It is also possible to listen to an individual episode without subscribing, or to subscribe to the RSS feed using other applications. The first English episode includes:

Tépper is glad that the iPad doesn’t support Flash

I am glad that the iPad doesn’t support Flash, and I hope it remains that way. I like efficiency, stability, security, omni-platform compatibility, direct search engine friendliness, truly open-standards, and long battery life. Back in 2008, I published Encoding web video in the age of the iPhone. Among many other topics, the 4-page article talked about how content producers are best served by steering clear of Flash-dependent media if they expect to have it be readable by what I called the fastest-growing computing device segment, which of course was —and still is— mobile devices. Since then, there has been exponential sales growth in that category, including iPhones, iPod Touches, multimedia Blackberries, and a handful of Android phones from several different manufacturers, including the recent Droid, Milestone, and Nexus One. On time for the iPad launch, some of the most important content producers in the world have understood the message that has been on the wall for over two years, and have already made themselves compatible with these Flash-free mobile devices, including Brightcove, CBS, CNN, ESPN, Facebook, Flickr, Major League Baseball, National Geographic, the National Hockey League, Netflix, Nike, NPR, People magazine, Reuters, Sports Illustrated, TED, The New York Times, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Time, the TWIT network, YouTube, Vimeo, Virgin America, and the White House. It’s time for the whiners to stop complaining and get the message too. Despite some criticisms about certain details in their products (i.e. their current lack of SFTP support), I love Adobe, and I admire its past, present, and future developments. Flash is perhaps the only thing that we don’t need anymore from Adobe, and that simply creates content that is unreadable on multiple millions of devices. My appreciation for Adobe should also be clear by my recent article called: Will Adobe’s new Mercury technology provoke a sudden exodus from Final Cut Pro to CS5?

Will Adobe’s new Mercury technology provoke a sudden exodus from Final Cut Pro to CS5?

As has already been covered by Chris and Trish Meyer and other colleagues at ProVideo Coalition, Adobe’s new Mercury technology will be officially announced on April 12th, at the start of NAB 2010. Anyone who has seen a Mercury demonstration knows that it is quite impressive, and may attract a large number of Final Cut Pro users to “jump ship” and switch to CS5 when released. At the crux of the compelling features is not only that Premiere CS5 can natively edit long-GOP H.264 (i.e. raw footage from Canon 5D MKII, Canon 7D, and recent Kodak & Sanyo cameras) with real time transitions, and that of AVCHD camcorders —which also use the long-GOP H.264 códec (including very recent professional models from both Panasonic and Sony). I say “not only” because even Premiere CS4 has been able to do that. The big difference is that Premiere CS5 can do it easily and gracefully… even with several layers. especially (but not exclusively) when it has a supported GPU. As you can tell, for someone who would like to edit that raw footage natively and in real time, Adobe’s Mercury technology is potentially kryptonite for Apple’s continuing sales of Final Cut Studio. Of course, there is a possibility that Apple will shock us at NAB time with announcement of a new version of Final Cut Pro that will finally take advantage of MacOS 10.6’s (Snow Leopard’s) OpenCL-facilitating technology. That is properly spelled, and stands for Open Computing Language. It is also possible that one of the professional interface manufacturers (AJA, Blackmagic, Matrox, or MOTU) will announce a way for their hardware to assist FCP to accomplish the same via OpenCL… or some other technology.

BCC/Broadcast Case portable video mixer to be shown at NAB 2010

It just came to my attention that the BCC/Broadcast Case will be shown at NAB 2010. BCC/Broadcast Case is the name of a portable audio/video mixer (aka “switcher” in the USA). According to the manufacturer, the device uses an intuitive touch-screen interface which helps to reduce the shlep factor in mobile production, and offers 12 inputs, 8 of which can be camera/video inputs. Supported cameras range from composite video to SD-SDI, HDMI, and HD-SDI. Also, the BCC/Broadcast Case boasts a unique integrated interconnection, which combines the video signal, power, and intercom signals.

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