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Final Print
I'm just getting into video editing thanks to a video podcast I'm producing. This new world of digital video frightens and confuses me. I'm just a simple boy from Philadelphia with no prior cinematic experience. Despite the fact that I am a video neophyte I can still use the usefulness in Final Print, a cool little app from Digital Heaven.Final Print is an app that takes a Final Cut Pro project and lists all the markers and notes that are in the project (this information is stored in an XML file). This makes it easy to hand over a video project to someone else, or to get a quick overview of a project you're working on.Final Print costs $99 and there is a free demo available.[via DV Guru]
Interview with 8 BIT's indie documentarian
Justin Strawhand is the co-director, producer, and editor of 8 BIT, a new independant documentary about the burgeoning video game art and music scene. Our colleagues at sister-site DV Guru had a chance to talk with Strawhand about the project's inception, the production, and their plans to get the film shown.The film premiered at New York's Museum of Modern Art last Saturday but, lucky for you, they're having another screening tomorrow night at MoMA that doesn't appear to be sold out yet, you just have to buy your tickets at the museum. Can't make it? Strawhand says, "We're getting many many requests to show in art museums / universities as well, so whatever happens, I think that our film will have some legs and hopefully the people who want to see it will be able to." Yeah, we're hoping so too.If you have no chance of attending, but just want to get your hopes up, we've embedded the trailer after the break.
iMac 24-inch surprise: graphics card is upgradeable?
MacsimumNews broke down a MacGeneration post (a French publication) revealing that the new 24-inch iMac Apple introduced this week could quite possibly be the first iMac with a truly upgradeable graphics card. Thanks to a new Mobile PCI Express Module (MXM - originally designed for high-end notebooks) standard in the biggest iMac of 'em all, owners might be able to upgrade their own graphics card and (finally) ditch that old just throw it out when you want to upgrade stigma - if this is true, of course. You can also thank NVIDIA and their partnership with some of the industry leading notebook manufacturers (we would imagine Alienware and even Dell, believe it or not) for this standard that was quite a long time coming. Why this much-requested feature isn't getting any spotlight time on the new iMac's graphics page, or why the 24-inch is the only model to receive the coveted upgrade-ability treatment, definitely doesn't help our skeptical side. We'll be investigating this further, as it could easily be that Apple adopted the standard for one reason or another (like cheaper manufacturing costs), but still soldered the card (which will most surely cause an uproar, if true).We'd also like to echo MacsimumNews' observation that it would be stellar if Apple could work this standard into the next MacBook Pro revision, as the company kinda dropped the ball with their current lineup.Thanks Michael!
De-interlacing demystified
This site is targeted towards people looking for information on video compression, but their information on de-interlacing, how it works and the various challenges faced can give you a lot of information on what your TV or media player is doing when upconverting content. If you can't understand why some people get so up in arms over the 1080p-or-not debate, or why SD content can look so bad on your brand new HDTV, take a look and be educated. There are a lot of ways to get around resizing and upconverting content, and some are better than others (blending fields, adaptive, bob, bob and weave or progressive scan, motion compensation or motion adaptive just to name a few).[Via DV Guru]
QuickTime Components 101
Ever wondered what happens when you can't view a QuickTime movie, and Apple's QT player prompts you to "download the missing component?" Essentially a QuickTime component is QT's version of a plug-in. Similar to how Flash plug-in allows you to view Flash content, or Windows Media Player used to do play WMV's in your browsers on the Mac. Apple long-ago started using an API of sorts for 3rd party developers who wished to extend the functionality of QuickTime. Extend it? Isn't it pretty fully-featured, what with the support for QTVR (yeah, what happened to their authoring tool anyway?), and 3DMF (haha, that's an unfunny joke there)? Even with all the toys packed inside, QT needs room for growth. Send in the clowns of multimedia: your 3rd party component developers. For example: I live a stone's throw from where venerable Web 1.0 company iPIX used to exist. iPIX, for those who remember, pioneered a way to record and play back immersive video just like QTVR. Initially their tech was only available via RealPlayer, which, at the time, had the most open architecture. Eventually they made a QuickTime version, as did about a dozen others. Recently I tried to play a training video, and I needed the TechSmith codec. I had to download the component, and everything was viewable. Perhaps the best known and widely used component is the MPEG-2 codec, which is needed for DVD authoring.Components can be codecs, but they don't have to be. The categories of QT components can be found here, although it's a bit technical. The hard part, honestly, is figuring out which components to install. But since there are only 11 on Apple's QT components page, I suggest installing them all and enjoy yourself. And shame on you lazy devs out there who have yet to implement a Mac version! In some cases, the open source community has taken up the gauntlet. Witness XiphQT, an effort to bring Ogg support to QuickTime. A lot of the furor over components has been laid to rest, however, as we see more specialization. For instance, video via Flash is now a popular method of putting videos on the web. This obviates the need for 3 different format buttons (remember those, along with hi and lo bandwidth versions?). Also, specialized content is being embedded in everything from Adobe's PDF format to specialized readers anyway, making the discussion less relevant every day. One special note of caution: the Apple page lists PowerPC components. Unfortunately, you have to check each component on their home site to find Universal Binary editions. The PPC versions will NOT work on an Intel Mac.
Going to Sundance? Check out the HD House
Now of course we would say DVGuru is the best place to go learn about high definition tools for producing independent films, but if you like to get more hands on and happen to be in Utah starting tomorrow, visit the HD House. They've got panel discussions, product demonstrations and more planned. The tech sponsor for the house is Grass Valley, who will be spotlighting their HD camcorder and media. Any of you prosumers hitting up Sundance want to tell us how it is?
