HD For Indies

Hey all -

I got home from NAB at about 4:30am on Friday morning, and slept the sleep of the dead...no, the sleep of zombies run over with a steamroller. Got up around 2pm and didn't do much but cook dinner and watch War of the Worlds on DVD (doesn't hold up to the Big Screen experience at all).

So what's next?

-Rita Sanders was kind enough to come in and help organize bins from The Texas Shootout while I was gone

-in a very Rube Goldberg-esque manner, the XDCAM HD cartridge that went home in a camera was handed to a person who took it to NAB who gave it to another person whom I'll have lunch with this week to get it back. Then I just have to get my computer, an XDCAM HD deck, and that cartridge in the same place at the same time.

-in the "The Universe Taunts Me" category, I was at NAB and saw 24p footage from the Sony F350 XDCAM HD, Canon XL H1 and JVC GY-HD100U HDV camcorders being cut natively in FCP 5.1....but I don't have it. I'm debating whether to wait until that ships, or just DEAL WITH IT in the meantime. Probably the latter.

....all of which leads me up to it is time to start going through all that footage and doing some actual analysis of the over 500 clips that I have (6 cameras, 24p, 24pA, 50i, 60i, live, from "tape", etc.) rather than just flipping through them and saying "that's interesting." The goal is to go through all the footage, document some hard numbers, do some analysis, render some opinions, render out a lot of 6-up comparisons, and make that footage available on SD and HD DVDs for purchase.

-other major tasks - I need to migrate the server for HD For Indies from the freebie/buddy server I've had to a "real" server, that'll be able to handle some of the new tasks I want to throw at it

-I want to do some serious testing of the stack of PCI-X, PCIe, AJA and BMD HD-SDI cards I have and see where the differences might lie.

-oh yeah - and got through the few hundred photos and 168 audio notes I have from NAB and post all that stuff up, so that's probably my first priority since it is a matter of timeliness about all that info.

-just as a "I just thought of this" point, I'm kind of glad there aren't major new OS, NLE, or camera options shipping imminently that would obsolete all this research that I want to do that'll take over a month I'd bet.

-also along those lines, since the "technology demonstrations" that Apple showed in the booth were of minor improvements (support for new cameras), and there was ZERO mention of a Final Cut Studio v5.5 or v6.0, I'd think that a significant new version is some distance away - if they were going to ship this spring/early summer, they would have previewed it I'd bet.

So I'm probably taking tomorrow off to do some Catch Up On Life stuff, but Monday, I'll split my time between server migration and starting to go through all the pics and stuff.

But feel free to check the website Sunday, I might post some stuff. Check often and compulsively. Click reload lots. And click on some ads on the right if you see something interesting if you feel like that too (or not).

: )

-mike