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.

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.

Review: MC Color control surface

A bit earlier this year Euphonix began shipping its highly anticipated MC Color control surface. This unit was designed for use with Apple Color and has been welcomed by Color users to add another option to their hardware based control surface choices. Until the MC Color came along your choices were either one of the JL Cooper units or the more affordable Tangent Wave. At $1,499 the MC Color doesn’t break what I think is the magic $999 mark (magic in the sense that it will put a control surface in the hands of a lot more users) but it’s right along side the Wave in price and less than the JL Cooper offerings. The MC Color is also a very new unit. There’s a few glitches and bugs than can probably be worked out in software but the hardware is what it is at this point and there’s both a lot to like and a missing feature in the hardware itself. But there’s one thing that’s certain, the MC Color makes the Color application much more useful than a mouse alone.

First impressions of the Euphonix MC Color

The delivery guy walked in the door just over a week ago with a box containing a sparking, new, fresh off the assembly line MC Color control surface from Euphonix. For those who aren’t familiar with this unit, it’s a brand new entry into the affordable (relatively speaking at $1,499) trackball based hardware support for Apple Color. The Euphonix unit has the Tangent Wave square in its sights with a similar price point and similar functionality. In fact it’s hard to talk about one without comparing it to the other, which is inevitable. This first impressions article is a short summary of early reactions to the MC Color and less, at this point, about a direct comparison to the Wave. It will take a lot more time to dig deep into the features and get really comfortable with the MC Color, but like I did with the Tangent Wave, I wanted to write down a few first impressions. I’ll be doing a full review after I’ve used it for a few more weeks.

Ideas for the Apple iPad in post-production

With Apple’s announcement of the iPad there’s been tons of articles, tweets and blog posts about this upcoming piece of hardware. There’s also been tons of ink spilled about just how this little device could be useful in the filmmaking process as well, some right here on this site. I had decided not to write anything at all about the iPad since pretty much everything had already been said. But I got to thinking how this device might integrate more with the post-production side of the filmmaking process while on a flight the other day ... so I made some notes.

Is TAMPER the editing system of the future?

I found this video via a Twitter message from Tyler Ginter the other day (and that message came to Tyler via Jason Wingrove [It’s the many levels of a Twitter re-tweet]). It’s a demo of a very Minority Report-like computer interface that is being demonstrated for use in video post-production.

The Apple Magic Mouse just got a bit more useful

A few weeks ago I wrote a review of the new Apple Magic Mouse and using it with Final Cut Studio. There’s now a little 3rd party application called MagicPrefs that adds even more functionality to the mouse.

Page 2 of 3 pages  <  1 2 3 >