It’s been an eventful few days in and around the general world of film and video post-production. If you haven’t heard (but of course you have) Adobe made the decision to move all of their software licensing to the cloud, their Creative Cloud, and charge $50 a month to access to everything they make. No more paying some $1,500 up front for the Production Premium and having a box shipped to your door. While it would be nice to have a less expensive monthly access to only those video-centric apps (I’m never going to use Dreamweaver, InDesign or Muse among others) you really do get a lot for that $50 (check out the pricing page for other price options that could lower your monthly bill to Adobe). 

Another NAB has come and gone so things can begin to get back to normal. With that end to NAB let’s have a new entry into the Useful Tools for Editors category with our After NAB Edition. We talk PCs, relinking, keyboard emulators, slideshows and (of course) FxFactory.

I was having a discussion with some students recently about hard drive speeds and why it’s important to have a fast drive for editing. All the discussion of data rates and different types of connections can only go so far as students new to editing need to see that speed in action. The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test (Mac App Store link) is a good way to visualize drive speed but we didn’t have that handy so here’s those big speedometers scaling from USB up to a very fast Thunderbolt connection.

I know I probably shouldn’t get excited by something as simple as a bunch of buttons but I have to say that one of my favorite things that I saw at the 2013 NAB show were the X-keys Sticks from P.I. Engineering. These things are just a strip of 4, 8, or 16 buttons that I envisioned as an extra set of function keys. I know it seems silly but boy did I immediately see a big use for something like that. I’ve tried so many different input devices over the years but nothing seems quite a nice as buttons.

Not everyone in post-production has the need for shared storage and probably even less of those need portable shared storage but if you’re one of those that do look no further than the TitaniumZ–5 from Small Tree. It’s got some impressive specs and an eye-catching, yet useful form factor. It looks like it would be the perfect fit for certain editing situations.

One thing I noticed when walking the South Hall of the 2013 NAB show was there are quite a new more PCs in the various booths running various software demos. There were also quite a new vendors offering fast, customizable PC workstations. One of those vendors is ProMAX and their very MacPro looking machines are called the ProMAX ONE and One+. I loved the description of the machine from the ProMAX rep I talked to: It’s like a “higher end MacPro … it doesn’t run OSX.”

While not tool in a booth on the NAB show floor Elklight Software’s Velarium is another DIT -centric tool for the offload and transcoding of file-based, mainly DSLR, media. It takes a different approach than Red Giant Software’s BulletProof. Velarium is a more focused tool that presents a single-window approach to its task. The developer is based in my hometown of Nashville and I’ve been having a number of discussions about the tool and what I, as an editor, would expect in the files I receive for editorial. It looks like a promising product that’s going to be trying to find its way in the growing DIT offloading tools.