HD For Indies

more on FCP 24p workflow -

now there's a change so you can go 24fps to 25 fps more easily - you could go 25 to 24 before, but now it is easier because it just changes the QT header.

They have a DVCPRO HD sampler that I grabbed 3 copies of. If I haven't given them away to friends, email me and I might mail you the disk....I don't know if they (Apple) are going to mail these out to those who ask.

----------------------------------------------------

can capture from a D-5 to final cut Pro. D-5 is an uncompressed HD format. I need to find out what res/framerate/i vs. p it can do.

------------------------------------------------------

the new DVCPRO HD decks are about $25000 dollars

-------------------------------------
more from German HD guru dude from Apple:

eCinema one2one device - how is that different from preview window? You don't really have the HD signal, the quality is not that good, and this really gets the HD signal... it converts it...about $3500 for the new one2one from eCinema, it is a pixel for pixel translator...it's more of a monitoring rather than a previewing solution.

It has a USB connector to adjust color lookup tables and stuff...converts HD SDI to DVI-D, you can change your gamma, change your lookup tables etc. There existts some software to change/make/edit those LUT, but what does it cost and how easy is it, and knowing WHAT TO CHANGE IT TO could potentially be a non-trivial exercise...

MIKE'S NOTES: the preview will be "good enough" for many. It'll be tough to cost justify the extra cost (as much as a G5) when you can get "pretty good" results alone. Only if you're doing crucial work will most folks pop for the difference.

-------------------------------------

Graham Petty is the CEO and engineer and honcho...on what? eCinema? What?

-----------------------------------
H.264 is an industry standard, recently approved (by MPEG group? No?). It's a new delivery codec...they're showing 1920x1080p24 at 6.8 MBits (roughly 800 kb/sec) and it looks VERY good...compression time is a factor still that they need to optimize, so they weren't willing to talk specifics, but playback on a dual G5 was where it needed to be...rock solid....it is Apple's implementation of the industry standard codec. They were showing Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed trailers.

----------------------------------

Pixlet is intended to a working codec, a previewing codec, that will play back on any viable workstation. They were showing 1920x1080@24p. The engineer I spoke with actually encoded the content, it was at 61% quality.

---------------------------------------

DVD Studio Pro 3 - transitions that you don't have to pre-render (like iDVD 4), and HD to MPEG-2 encoding (no great trick there), import of iDVD 4 projects (way way cool for making more rich & complicated), GO BACK AND SEE MORE!

--------------------------------------

X-Serve notes:

-here at the show, they have 60 TB of storage here in the rack. (TAKE A PICTURE!!!)

-3.5 TB of storage for $11,000

-talking to System Engineer about X-Serve stuff, it will do 4 streams with REAL playback with DVCPRO HD, deliver 10 streams using preview function...implies it's sending LESS DATA from the drives to the computer when you are doing this kind of work...SEEMS to imply it is sub-selecting SOME of the data from the drives to do this...clearly need to follow up on this