ProVideo Coalition

Wavebreak media competition

2008-08-20T03:28:57-08:00

Win one of the following competition prizes for video editors or producers

* Gold Award - $1000 of stock video and animation
* Silver Award - $500 of stock video and animation
* Bronze Award - $250 of stock video and animation

All winners will also receive a profile and publicity on our site.

Competition rules:

1. You may enter as often as you wish. No need to wait until the close date, send in videos as you produce them.
2. Your video can be any duration and in any format you wish. We are a multimedia company, we can read just about anything you can put into an electronic file! We wouldn’t wish to limit creativity so are not setting specifications.
3. Your production must use atleast one video from our online collection. There is no need to purchase, you may use any of the free monthly downloads that are available to all registered users. Registration on our site is free.
4. You must not infringe on any copyright laws.
5. Closing date is 31 Dec 2008. Winners will be notified in early Janurary.

Mail your videos on Tape, DVD, CD or USB Drive to…

Wavebreak Media Ltd
Rubicon Centre
CIT
Bishopstown
Cork
Ireland

Or send us a link to where we can view it online or download it from
awards2008 at wavebreakmedia dot com

http://www.wavebreamedia.com

Any questions, just send us an email. Best of Luck !

Red Bull Film Competition!

2008-08-04T14:52:17-08:00

RED BULL - FILMAKA WEBSITE COMPETITION DESCRIPTION

VIBRATIONS

Red Bull is starting another round in its x13 series of provacative
shorts! This round’s theme is VIBRATIONS.

Make a film that’s narrative, documentary, non-linear, experimental,
or any combination of the above. Use any visual style - animated,
grainy film, crisp video, drawn, photographed,
painted-onto-the-celluloid - we don’t care! Just make sure it’s a
rollercoaster ride of a movie.

Three important things - when you submit your film to us, it must be
less than 2 and a half minutes long, in 16:9 aspect ratio (wide
screen) and in High Definition Video. This is because your film may
be played on Red Bull TV or distributed in other ways.

18 cutting-edge clips will be chosen for the first cut. Those 18
filmmakers will receive $1000 each. The final films will be narrowed
to 13, and will receive another $2000.

Submissions are due by August 17.

For more info: http://www.filmaka.com/redbull

test entry and topic

2008-08-04T11:43:09-08:00

test entry

2008-08-04T11:42:24-08:00

This is only a test

FCC proposal may make your wireless mics obsolete

2008-07-24T12:27:03-08:00

The FCC may allow unlicensed use of TV white spaces. This use would mean interference for wireless mics. If you don’t know about this “white space” issue, see the article on http://www.provideocoalition.com by Steve Hullfish.

4K playback-- can anybody do it?

2008-07-23T19:31:53-08:00

hello

i am trying to play back a 4K file…
basically 6 HDV clips merged into one movie 3840x3240 pixels

i have tried AIC, photo-jpeg, motion jpeg, MP4, H264, MPEG2, compression
and have had no luck

anybody out there able to play clips at that resolution ? and what settings/compression are you using? and how fast of a machine are you using?

THANKS!
bill

more details, for the curious-- i want to play back 6 HD streams to 6 HD projectors, through the DVI ports ....
3 video cards with 2 outputs each
my understanding is that the GPU on the video card is NOT used for this video de-compression, only the CPU ( on OSX quicktime)
so the video cards are not the restriction, but the CPU’s
I basically figure on buying an 8core machine with an internal raid and run either OSX or linux, depending what works better
but don’t want to buy a machine and find that it doesn’t work
here is a reduced size version of the clip
http://media.bardo.com.au/combined6waters.html

and yes, i could go old school and buy 6 HD players ( like blue ray or such) and sync them with a external pulse timecode sync, etc-- but i’m trying to get away from that now-- and they don’t always have that great of sync anyway-- plus or minus 4 frames is not that grooovy… and will cost waaay more than a nice 8 core machine…

OS X and Final Cut Studio Running on Generic PC Hardware

2008-05-01T19:41:42-08:00

It surprised me today when I discovered a company selling a PC with OS-X Leopard pre-installed. The company is Psystar. Prices start at $400.

TechCrunch had a posting about it.

After a bit of research I discovered that anyone can build up a PC and use the info found on the OSx86 Project web site. You’d have to be brave about changing things and futz around quite a bit to get it working, though.

However, I thing this software likely violates Apples copyrights, so it’s probably not legal or ethical. (So does that make this gossip?)

Peace,

Rob:-]

Corrupt Clip: SxS Memory card or XDCAM Transfer error?

2008-07-17T20:34:23-08:00

After transferring a 20 minute clip from SxS card to MacBook pro using the latest version (2.5.1) of XDCAM Transfer, I discovered that the clip was corrupt. Compressor and Quicktime export are unable to save the clip in any format - it is unusable in any sequence unless about 2 seconds of the clip are excluded. Compressor reports “Quicktime error 0”. (But note: no problem with the audio even during the video glitch).

Tech support at Sony suggested that I attempt to view the problem area of the clip using XDCAM Transfer so I could determine if the problem was the original file on the SxS card or whether it was corrupted in the transfer. Unfortunately, I have deleted the original file from the memory. So we are left guessing where the problem is likely to be. I have “tested” the card subsequently by recording a long clip, transferring to MacBook and then Compressing . No error this time, but admittedly, that’s not very reassuring - and of course I haven’t actually viewed all the frames to “see” if there are problems.

The tech support person at Sony thought it could be the transfer process that was introducing the corruption, but without the original, un-transfered, source file, there is no way to tell. He said in his experience, however, problems with XDCAM Transfer are caught and reported by the transfer utility (e.g. “clip #16 failed to transfer successfully, try again"). He suggested that a more prudent workflow would include saving the original files from the SxS card in their pre-transfered format until the transfered versions are known to be good. Not terribly practical ("known to be good” - that’s a lot of frames to look at!). And then if there is a problem, it seems not unlikely to me that the problem will also be in the pre-transfered file as well.

I have a replacement SxS card on the way (warrantee exchange). But I don’t really know how to regain confidence. Maybe the best I can do is make this posting to see if others have had any similar experiences.

If you want to look at the corrupt clip, I was able to use Quicktime to open it and trim the prefix and suffix, so the problem is down to 11 Meg. Here it is:

http://www.sassafras.com/files/dd/trimmed.mov

Frames 16-34 are bad and it won’t transcode, just like the full file it was trimmed from. Look at it in Quicktime for one view of the corruption. Final Cut seems to try harder to make some attempt at building an image. But its not clear to me what information is really available for building the corrupt frames.

Maybe someone with intimate knowledge of how the compression codecs work and how bits are stored in the various file formats can make a more informed guess on where the problem occurred: was it the corruption in the original file on SxS card? or was it introduced by the transfer? And if it was in the original card, it that most likely due to the memory card being defective? or might it just as easily be due to firmware in the camera? or ???

I am dreading the re-occurrence of this problem when recording an important live concert. Fortunately, this time the clip was not crucial.

are software scopes good enough?

2008-07-10T18:24:46-08:00

Check out the Cut.n.Color article by Steve Hullfish for a shootout of software based video scopes. Are you using them? Do you use scopes at all? Do you have external scopes?

music composition

2008-07-09T11:15:01-08:00

Check out the review of Abaltat Muse on this website by Steve Hullfish. Have you tried this software? What do you think?