Fair

8 February, 2008
Apple, avid, final cut pro
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Apple have followed Avid in dropping out of NAB this year. Some see this as a sign that trade shows are becoming less important. The return on investment isn’t good enough. Maybe Apple has all the mindshare it needs from now on.

This reminds me of when I beta tested Macromedia Director for the Mac and PC back in the mid-nineties. Every new weeks we’d get a large envelope full of floppy discs. We would stress-test the scripting and animation features. I would attempt to get the user interface to break. It wasn’t hard. We got to know the software engineers quite well by email. We were shocked when the news came that the testing was over. Given the amount of bugs we knew about, we thought that there were many months to go before the software was ready. It turned out that the marketing department had picked a launch date and they wanted to stick to it.

Maybe Apple and Avid no longer want to have their schedules set by trade fairs. NAB is too soon for Final Cut Studio 3, it’s too late for a single user interface combined version of Avid’s various editors.

Maybe from now on we’ll hear about new products when they’re ready for us to use instead of at the next trade fair.

Film

6 February, 2008
film making
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If I was going to film a short that I’d want people to think was shot on 35mm film, I’d use a $700 camera, a $1,100 adapter and $1,400 worth of fixed lenses.

080206_hv20_full_res.jpg

That is a crop from a frame taken for a test film shot with this system, for more, go over to Mr. Bloom’s blog. Thanks to Matt Davis for the link.

Tapeless

1 February, 2008
avid, final cut pro
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The BBC reported recently on its progress on removing tape from its post workflow. They believe in open source software, so if you want to use their Linux-based software for your tapeless production, download the sourcecode from SourceForge.

The software includes:

A Windows package that takes a Avid rendered show and wraps it in the correct flavour of MXF so that when put onto a P2 card can be output from SDI on your Panasonic P2 camera.

A Samba VFS module for Linux that allows teams of Final Cut and Avid users to share media on ‘low-cost commodity storage.’

The BBC report that they use the system on their highest rated evening soap: EastEnders (4 x 30 min a week), and plan to use it to digitise the million tapes in their archive.

Screeners

31 January, 2008
film making
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Maybe the last hardware format will be DVD.

According to Variety, instead of sending DVD screeners to TV Academy members, they’ll have exclusive access to a web site where entire seasons will be streamed ‘for consideration.’

I think the age profile of members of the Film Academy will delay the death of DVD screeners for a couple of years.

One day we will buy licenses to watch media on any flat surface we happen to be near.

25

15 January, 2008
film making
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The BBC’s online TV catchup service has reported how popular they’ve been for the two week Christmas period. From Christmas day, around 1 million people watched a total of over 3.5 million TV shows. The BBC iPlayer features as many shows as the BBC has rights to which are available for streaming for two weeks after broadcast.

Initially the service was set up as a downloading/peer-to-peer software networking system. When the BBC were instructed to make sure that non Windows-based PCs could use the service, they added a streaming service. The ease of watching streamed shows means that streamers outnumbered downloaders by 8 to 1.

The most important statistic is the average time people spent watching: 25 minutes. Up until now, internet video has been associated with 5-10 minute YouTube clips. Once people get comfortable watching for longer, niche broadcasters will step up. They’ll need content that is well produced, written and edited. Good news.