Tangent Element panels are now shipping

Word came out today from Tangent Devices that the first Element panels are now shipping. If you don’t remember the Element is Tangent’s newest color grading control panel that uses a modular design that is four separate pieces that can be purchased separately. They are designed to work together to make a more full featured panel than the Wave with trackballs and rings, knobs and buttons and transport controls if the buyer so desires. As for supported applications, Assimilate SCRATCH and Apple Color are two more common applications on the list but the one many people are asking about, DaVinci Resolve, is (so far) missing.

Study says prolonged sitting may be as dangerous as smoking

There was a recent news article from CBS San Francisco called Sitting Vs. Smoking. As an editor who spends a whole lot of time ... well, sitting I clicked over with interest. That’s where I was greeted by the first sentence of the piece: Smoking cigarettes is the cause of so much preventable, deadly disease. But now new research shows sitting for long stretches of time may be just as dangerous. Uh oh.

NVIDIA’s Quadro 4000 for Mac, more affordable speed for the right application

It’s been several months since NVIDIA released their newest graphics card for the Macintosh. The Quadro 4000 for Mac uses their newest GPU architecture called Fermi. This card packs a whopping 256 cores onto a card that is half the physical size of the older Quadro FX 4800 (it had only 192 CUDA cores, the slacker). The other bit of news is that the 4000 has a smaller price than the FX 4800 had, coming in at just over $700 (street price) from an Amazon search. On top of all that there’s quite a few applications out there that are taking advantage of NVIDIA’s CUDA technology that lets apps harness all this GPU power. Read on for a look at several post-production tools and how they work with the 4000.

How about application parity between the Tangent Wave and Euphonix MC Color

When it comes to affordable hardware for post-production, “affordable” is often a relative term. What may be affordable for one is not necessarily affordable for another.  Sometimes there may be limited choices for a particular piece of hardware so the price point is the price point and there’s not much the purchaser can do about it. Color grading control surfaces are no different. While some applications like Apple Color and RedCine - X support both the Tangent Wave and Euphonix MC Color others, like DaVinci Resolve and The Foundry’s STORM, don’t. This article is a call for developers to support both.

Christmas gift ideas for the editor

It’s very close to the Christmas holiday but my guess is there’s still a lot of shopping to be done. Editors need gifts too so I thought I’d put together this somewhat editor / edit suite specific list of a few items that might make an editor happy if they unwrapped them from under the tree. With that caveat you won’t see any software or downloadable products, which makes this list a bit difficult since so much of what we do is on the computer. But in the age of email, send this link over to your loved one if they need some gift ideas.

Pixel Farm brings AirGrade to your iPhone and your Mac

  Press releases flew fast and furious a week or so ago as the Pixel Farm released AirGrade for your iPhone (iTunes link). AirGrade a color grading app for your iPhone that connects to a companion application on your Mac to allow you to use the iPhone as a control surface for grading still images on your Macintosh. I hadn’t played with it until a discussion of AirGrade went around Twitter the other day so I decided to try it out. It’s fun and it works well but as it says on the Pixel Farm’s AirGrade website: “please remember it’s primarily intended as a learning tool” which, at this point, it’s probably not much of practical application except as an easy way to get graded photos from your Mac to your iPhone without the use of iTunes or any other application or service.

Hey, how about a MacPro clone to give us the system we need

For professional editors and post-production artists the choice of Macintosh is usually almost a religious decision. We want to nothing to do with the PC, not in the edit suite or with our machines at home.

Macs have always had a prominent place in creative disciplines like graphic design, photography so Macintosh dominated post-production is no surprise. The Mac OS has always felt like it was created as a simpler, more elegant way to work with your computer so that has appealed to the right-brain thinkers since day one.

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.

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