Sally Menke 1953 - 2010

Sad news began to filter around the Internet this morning, Tuesday, September 26, that Sally Menke (IMDB profile), Quentin Tarantino’s longtime editor, was found dead near a park in Los Angeles. LA was experiencing record heat yesterday so that may have contributed to her death. The Los Angeles Times article has details as it appears it’s being updated as new news filters in. The video embeded above is from the Inglourious Basterds DVD as the talent involved in Tarantino’s movies would often provide a “hi Sally” to keep her company in the editing room.

A video for Post-Production / Motion Graphics nerds to enjoy

This very well produced and very topical video is making the rounds today. I saw it via Twitterer beerad who is one of the co-creators. It certainly took someone some time and effort and as a post-production nerd who gets most of the references in the video I thank them for it! Motion graphics people will probably enjoy it most of all. NSFW.

The Quadro FX 4800 for Mac + Premiere Pro CS5 = fast

A couple of months ago I was offered the opportunity to test out the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800 for Mac. This beast of a video card is one of the more powerful cards available for the Macintosh but it’s also quite expensive (currently just over $1,400 at Amazon). I jumped at the opportunity as it’s this NVIDIA technology that powers the Mercury Playback engine in Adobe Premiere Pro CS5. That and the fact that I probably wouldn’t have been able to justify the cost of the card on my own. In short, the Mercury engine and the NVIDIA Cuda technology combine for some very fast editing of very processor intensive formats. Since then, this particular graphics card has become the backbone of another hot Mac product, the DaVinci Resolve for Mac.

Resolve is our Alexa

OK, let’s face it. Post-production gear isn’t really as exciting as the toys involved in production. While all the stuff that we use during the post process is equally as important as the stuff used to acquire the image it just doesn’t have the same kind of sexiness. But there’s quite a lot of folks in post that are very excited about the release of DaVinci Resolve for Mac. In its own way, Resolve is kind of like our Arri Alexa.

The Panasonic AG-AF101 intro video and global premiere

It’s been just a week or so since Panasonic posted the official website for their micro 4/3 AG-AF camera family. Here we are with IBC in full swing and they’ve now posted a video with details galore about the AG-AF101. It’s the global introduction of the camera and it professes to combine both the benefits of a DSLR’s large sensor with the functionality, ergonomics and features of a proper video camera. Watching the video will probably answer quite a few questions about exactly what features Panasonic have packed into the unit.

IBC cranks up, rolls on while the U.S. sleeps

I knew something woke me up bright and early this Friday morning, September 10. I first thought it was the cool fall-like weather as the windows were open last night for the first time but after checking Twitter while the coffee brewed (this is before 6:00 am central time) I realized it was all the news flowing out of IBC 2010 since they are well into their day. The Amsterdam halls were filled with announcements from Avid, AJA, Blackmagic Design, Quantel and The Foundry just to name a few. Here’s a round-up of some of these announcements with links over to some further reading.

Vivitar introduces a breakthrough $10 camera, for your grandfather

There’s a great video that’s been making the Twitter rounds that takes the point and shoot still camera to a new level. It’s Vivitar’s 35mm film camera. You read that right. It’s a camera that actually shoots 35mm film that you place in the camera itself and then take to be developed and printed. Video after the jump.

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