Are you frustrated by overkill plastic packaging that’s impossible to open? The annoying plastic casings we’re familiar with are designed to stop counterfeiting, tampering and theft, while ensuring visibility of the product and brand. But, besides being so difficult to open, the costs to create and assemble the packaging are often more than those of the product itself.
MeadWestvaco Corporation (www.meadwestvaco.com) has a solution that eliminates a lot of the plastic, freeing the planet of needless waste and freeing our hands from the cuts and scratches as we attempt to open these plastic cocoons. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
Read Our Lips: No More Plastic!
Active Media Products Introduces Predator GT SATA-II SSDs
From an Active Media Products press release:
8-Channel Controller and 128MB of SDRAM Cache Combined with Flex-Fit Adapter make these SSDs Ideal for High-End Desktops - Active Media Products, manufacturer of unique USB drives including the Obama drive, today introduced the new Predator GT series of 2.5-inch Serial ATA solid state drives that support outrageously fast data transfer speeds and include a Flex-fit adapter bracket to facilitate mounting in 3.5-inch drive bays.
Editing in the Future?
Check out this video we found of a demo on the Making Of site. It’s an editing system called “Tamper” being created by Oblong Industries, a software company that’s looking into the future with a technology called G-speak. John Underkoffler, the creator, gave a demo of this amazing system at this year’s Sundance Festival.
The editing system’s design consists of human interaction by way of hand gestures, wearing special gloves. The user waves, flaps, grabs or spins the media being manipulated until the desired look is achieved. Read the rest of this entry »
Boris Continuum Complete 6 AVX Now Available
Reprinted from a Boris FX press release
Boris FX has announced the release of Boris Continuum Complete 6 which includes 15 New Filters, New 3D Objects, Exchange Keyframe Animation with Adobe After Effects. BCC 6 AVX is based on Avid’s AVX 2 plug-in architecture with support for Avid Media Composer, Avid NewsCutter and Avid Symphony. A special AVX 1 version of BCC 6 AVX for Avid DS will be released in the near future.
BCC 6 AVX adds nearly 200 plug-in filters to Avid editing and finishing systems. The new release features 15 new effects including Extruded Text, Extruded EPS, Layer Deformer, Cartoon Look, Lightning, and Swish Pan. In addition, BCC 6 AVX delivers unique workflow enhancements such as the ability to animate BCC filters in Adobe After Effects and transfer the animation to the Avid timeline - while preserving After Effects keyframes. Read the rest of this entry »
Matrox Graphics Unveils Triple and Quad Monitor DisplayPort M-Series Graphics Cards
Reprinted from a Matrox Graphics press release
Matrox Graphics today announced the availability of the Matrox M9138 and Matrox M9148 DisplayPort graphics cards. Expanding the M-Series product line, these new triple- and quad-monitor cards offer a remarkable 1 GB of memory, and with support for independent or stretched mode at resolutions up to 2560×1600 per output, users can drive business, industrial, and government applications on an exceptional multi-monitor platform. Read the rest of this entry »
Time to Move Beyond the Timeline?
Non-Linear Editing applications have become very mature at this stage. So much so, that I think we need to stop calling them Non-Linear Editors. When was the last time you edited a project linearly? It seems odd to define a software category as the opposite of something that no one is doing anymore anyway. It’s like saying horseless-carriage instead of car. How about just “Editing Software?” I know it doesn’t sound nearly as cool as “Word Processor”, or “Database Application”, but it’s descriptive.
In the same vein, does it make sense to base editing software on the film paradigm anymore? Do we really need bins, clips, and razors when most new people coming into editing have never even touched film before? In today’s environment, where the whole process is digital, and we’ve even stopped using tape, what need is there for “footage?”
As more and more people are drawn into the world of video production, whether just for fun, or as part of their business, visual literacy is becoming just as important as written literacy. And as these people learn editing, maybe it’s time to abandon the whole film based timeline paradigm for editing software, in terms of something different.
There are a few companies making some dramatic departures from the timeline. Take a look at this clip from the newest version of Apple’s iMovie 09 and you can see how the traditional 3 point editing structure is being replaced by drag and drop. The fact that the kid who made this tutorial is probably about 12 years old, shows just how ubiquitous video production is going to be as this YouTube generation grows up.
Another interesting editing paradigm can be found in LoiLo’s Loiloscope software, which takes full advantage of the graphics card, not just to render the final video, but in the editing interface itself.
I can see a lot of useful tools and interesting workflows, will “film-based” editing be relegated to pros only, or will we all be moving to a “drag and drop” future?
Super Talent Unveils MasterDrive SX SSDs
Reprinted from a Super Talent Technology press release.
Super Talent Technology today launched a new line of MasterDrive SX SSDs that incorporate 128MB of DRAM cache and reach new performance levels in high performance laptops.
The MasterDrive SX is based on an advanced new 8-channel controller and MLC NAND Flash. Its 8-channel architecture combined with a hefty 128MB of DRAM cache takes full advantage of the 3Gbps SATA-II bandwidth. The MasterDrive SX is capable of sequential read speeds up to 220 MB/sec and sequential write speeds up to 200 MB/sec. Read the rest of this entry »
New multi-point touch panel
Tech-On! is reporting that a new resistive touch panel that enables multi-point detection for up to nine points, was put on display by Touchpanel Laboratories. The technology seems very impressive, and seems to also be able to navigate around a curved surface. Touchpanel Laboratories also demonstrated how a potential touch panel-based ordering system would work that restaurants could use. For which the have plans to install into bars in & around the country. Be sure to check out the story, and be sure to let us know what you think!
Goodbye Viewfinder…
There has been a trend in camcorder design lately to eliminate the traditional viewfinder in favor of the LCD panel (such as the Canon HFS-100). And in my opinion it’s good riddance.
I’m going to probably break with most of my professional camera op brethren here, but I’ve become a complete convert to operating the camcorder using the LCD screen. I rarely bother to squint into the viewfinder anymore and these are the reasons:
I wear glasses. I know that all viewfinders have a diopter control that will compensate for my less than stellar vision, but it’s annoying to have to raise my glasses up and down constantly to check both the camera and the real life set.
Having one eye closed all the time is annoying, and takes a while to re-compensate to the real world environment. When seconds count, being able to take your head out from behind the camera and being aware of your surroundings makes it much more likely you will be able to capture what’s about to happen, rather than what’s in frame right now.
The resolutions of viewfinder screens are generally awful. In the SD days, you could still focus reliably using the viewfinder. But with today’s HD resolutions you still have to use all the focusing tools such as peaking and image magnification in order to get an acceptable focus. So what’s the point? Why not use the much larger, and (more likely higher resolution) LCD panel?
I haven’t seen a really good viewfinder since they were mini tube tv’s anyway. Film cameras are totally different, looking through the viewfinder to a nice piece of ground glass, is amazingly sharp and detailed. Looking through a plastic tube into a tiny LCD panel is just disappointing.
I know that the biggest obstacle is shooting outdoors in bright light, and that the LCD panel gets washed out very easy on a bright day. But they are getting better in this regard, some cameras such as Sony’s EX-1 actually use the sunlight, and optically direct it behind the screen to increase brightness.
That’s still the only drawback I can find, and one that’s easily worked around simply by shading the screen with your hand in most cases.
So what about you, so you still find viewfinders useful?
The HP Z800 Workstation Featuring New Intel Xeon Processor-Review Coming Soon
I just got back from the launch event for HP’s new Z-series workstations, rubbing elbows with the international press (seriously–I dined with journalists from Turkey and the Netherlands on Thursday night.) We were lucky enough to get a Z800 for some pre-release testing–that machine is sitting behind me in this photo.
The new workstations feature significant performance gains compared to the machines they replace in HP’s lineup, thanks to Intel’s new Xeon processors. The new processors include internal memory controllers (taking a page from Intel’s Core i7 processor and pretty much all of AMD’s processors), adding to their performance. Our machine was decked out with two different 15K rpm SAS boot drives (one with Windows XP 64-bit and one with Windows Vista Business 64-bit, which we could swap as desired,) a 1TB SATA data drive and an NVIDIA Quadro FX4800 video card. The systems are well-built with many thoughtful design features. I won’t tell you what all of them are right now because I want all of you to read the review (hee hee.)
The new workstations command a premium price, but the way HP sees it, the typical user will be able to do so much more work in so much less time that the machines will pay for themselves quickly–in many fields (hey, it’s not just video editors who need speed) HP estimates that a typical Z-series workstation will pay for itself in about a month when taking things like salaries into account.
I need to run a few more tests on the machine but the review should be ready quite soon–keep your eyes peeled.
