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.

ProxyMill - the encoder that can encode just about every camera format out there

I don’t do a lot of XDCAM work. Before the Canon revolution it seemed there was a lot more Panasonic HXV200 shooting than XDCAM in my market. But that recently changed as two Sony EX-1 projects came on board. As I was figuring out workflow for the first time I was researching the best way to get the media to ProRes for a Final Cut Pro edit. It seemed it was a two step process: re-wrap the original media to XDCAM .mov files and then convert those to ProRes. Finally I found an answer to the single step: ProxyMill from Imagine Products. Though it wasn’t without a bit of frustration.

New Media Webinars offers fast, affordable training

When I finished my NAB 2009 Post Pit presentation I was approached by a gentlemen who operated a website called New Media Webinars. We discussed possibly doing a webinar similar to what my Post Pit presentation about cutting a Canon 5D multi-camera concert. After a lengthy discussion upon returning from NAB we decided on the topic of DSLR Filmmaking Post  Workflows. This was my first presentation for NewMediaWebinars.com. New Media Webinars would end up with four DSLR focused webinars (thus far) on production, post, color grading and audio techniques.

Kicking the tires on The Foundry’s Storm beta

It was a busy week this past week as November changed to December and The Foundry released their long discussed Storm product as a public beta free download. Storm is a “RED Digital Cinema Camera Production Hub” and has been described by RED’s Ted Schilowitz as REDCine-X on steroids. After kicking the tires on Storm for a few hours over the weekend I’d say it’s not just REDCine-X on steroids but rather what will be a much more well thought out version of REDCine-X that will hopefully be more robust, less quirky, easier to use and an overall better application. And that’s as it should be as Storm will cost $375 when it finally ships its paid version around March 2011.

Export via Sorensen Squeeze 6 from the FCP timeline

Just the other day I needed to export mp3 audio files from several long Final Cut Pro timelines to send to a client for review. There was no reason to send video and they wanted to get small audio files that didn’t have to be of great quality attached to an email. What better format than mp3! With that I remembered that Sorenson Squeeze 6 (now at version 6.5) installs an Export Using QuickTime Conversion option in FCP. After making the mp3s I thought that a reminder of this would make a good blog post.

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.

DSLR Post Webinar available On Demand, extra questions answered

Last week I had the privilege of conducting a webniar with NewMediaWebinarrs.com called DSLR Filmmaking Post Workflows. That webinar is now available on-demand from New Media Webinars for $25. That gets you the entire 90 minute webinar in HD, an audio podcast where we answered some questions from those attending, several Canon 7D video files for your own workflow tests and some useful links. There were a lot more questions asked by attendees than we had time to answer so I jotted down some quick answers to most of them and have posted below.

Magic Bullet Grinder grinds your DSLR footage into a more editable format

Red Giant Software has just dropped a new tool into the family of Magic Bullet products and it might be of great interest to the DSLR shooter. Magic Bullet Grinder is a simple application tasked with transcoding your Canon 5D/7D/1D files out of their H.264 native state and into something a bit more usable. It also can create lower resolution offline versions of the same clips for editorial should you be in an offline to online position. While simple, Magic Bullet Grinder works quite well and has a few tricks up its sleeve.

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