Mike’s NAB 2011 Day One Part One

Hey all! I’m here at NAB and am wandering the show checking out what interests me. My coverage will be based on what I saw in the order I saw it. Today I visited: Blackmagic Design, AJA, Red, Arri, Canon, Abel Cine, and Sony. So here we go:

Did Apple actually lame out on the new Mac Pros?

Apple rolled out new Mac Pros Tuesday, so of course I wrote about’em. Impressed by the power at first, after the warm fuzzy glow of new Macs wore off, I started noticing some things. Or rather, noticing some things that weren’t there - PCI 3.0, USB 3.0, eSATA, faster FireWire, 10GigE networking, Blu-ray burners, NVIDIA GPUs, and a $3500 price point for the “Big Mac.” What gives? Read on for what Apple giveth and taketh.

Apple Announces New 12 core Macs….for $5000

The good news - Apple today announced new 12 core Macs that are up to 1 1/2 times faster than the current speedy Nehalem 8 core Macs.

The bad news - “Coming August” and starting at $5000*

So after the jump for the full info and breakdown.

So - what’s up with Apple and Mini DisplayPort?

I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention when Apple introduced the new Macbook Pros with a Mini DisplayPort connector. Now that they are also in use ALL the new Macs introduced the other week (Mac Pro towers, iMacs, and Mac Minis), I figured it was time to do a little digging and find out what it is all about. Read on after the jump.

Blu-ray Won - What’s Next For…

As I guessed (once it was getting pretty obvious), Blu-ray has won the high definition optical disc format war. After Warners announced they were going exclusively Blu-ray, then Netflix, Best Buy, Blockbuster and Walmart said they were too, and Toshiba finally acquiesced and took HD DVD out in the back yard and shot it. Poor Old Yeller, but he had to be put down.

OK, so what will this mean? Lets run through repercussions for us as consumers, and more interestingly, as content creators.

AppleTV Take 2: New Software, Same Hardware

I very carefully and duly noted when Steve Jobs, during an interview, said that Apple had 3 businesses (Macs, iPods/iTunes, and iPhones) and a hobby (AppleTV).

If that wasn’t a tacit, explicit admission that a product hadn’t done as well as they’d hoped, I don’t know what is. To launch a product and then call it a hobby, you might as well say “Dude - it tewdally tanked.”

And with good reason - more expensive than a DVD player, with less content available, AppleTV didn’t add up to the sum of its parts in consumers eyes.

For high end users, it made for a nice way to have a good interface to their iTunes library that was constantly available, and also display pictures in high def on an HDTV. As bonus round, it could play movies in a pricey, low quality format, and Oh Cool! - it also could play back purchased TV episodes if you missed them. This was how I perceived it when I bought mine, and quickly realized I wanted a MUCH bigger hard drive than the 40GB unit it came with. * I was enamored and excited about it enough I even started a blog about it called AppleTV Hacker (which I haven’t updated since last August).

So I was pleasantly surprised to Steve Jobs spend some time talking about AppleTV again at this year’s MacWorld, as he described it as AppleTV Take 2.

Let’s Play “20 Questions” About Red Drives…

Let’s play “20 Questions” about Red Drives…

Jarred Land announced on Reduser the other week that Red Drives were shipping.

For those not keeping score, the Red Drives is the hard drive recording solution for the Red One camera. Up until Red Drives shipped, your only recording option was the special high speed CF cards (compact flash) recording officially 4 1/2 minutes of 4K at 24p apiece *. Since only one Red CF card can be loaded at a time, this was roughly the equivalent of a 400 foot film load. Survivable for steadicam work, a nonstarter for sitdown interviews.

That changes with the release of the Red Drives - you can record over TWO HOURS of 4K footage to the Red Drives, and many more hours of 2K footage (details below).

The Red Drives are comprised of two 160GB 2.5” mechanism hard drives set up in a RAID 0 (striped) configuration. This doubles the capacity and speed versus a regular drive….and also doubles the chances of failure - if one drive fails, you’d lose ALL the data on the pair due to how information is split between the two.

I emailed Ted Schilowitz, Red’s Leader of the Rebellion, a bunch of questions about the Red Drives, here’s what he had to say:

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