Every once and a while I like to stop and give credit where credit is due. Recently manufacturers have started to finally embrace the wide angle part of the lens as a selling point, and I for one applaud them.

Unless you’re shooting wildlife or sports, a very wide lens is usually much more useful to the videographer than a long zoom. Nonetheless it seems for years manufacturers have been using the zoom length (10x, 20x, 30x) as one of the main selling points for their camcorders. I think it all stems from the uninformed consumer who having a choice of a 10x zoom or a 300x digital zoom will obviously think the 300x is better, regardless of the fact that at that extreme digital zoom, it would be hard to distinguish from the mosaic filter.

That being said two recent camcorder releases, the Panasonic HMC150, and the Sony FX-1000 (Z5-U) have equipped their cameras with pretty astoundingly wide lenses.

I’m not sure what recent technological advances have occurred to make these lenses more affordable, but I certainly appreciate it. The 13x wide lens of the Panasonic 28mm-368mm (35mm equiv) is impressive in its versatility. Not to be outdone, Sony’s new camcorders offer a 29mm lens on a 20x zoom as well.

I just thought I’d pop up to give some well deserved praise to the engineers of these new lenses.

Reprinted from a proDAD press release:

proDAD GmbH today announced the availability of free downloadable “Starter Kits” of its popular Adorage and Vitascene effects products.  The Starter Kits are not trial or demo versions, they contain fully functional effects and transitions as well as plug-ins to allow the effects to be used seamlessly in popular NLE applications from Adobe, AVID, Corel, Canopus, Magix, and Sony.

The Adorage Starter Kit includes 170 popular effects and transitions for hobbyist video editors and is ideal for wedding, event, holiday, family, and sports video productions.  Adorage is very easy to use and the effects can be “expanded” to more than 10,000 effects through purchase of Adorage Effects Packages (volumes 1 ~ 9 currently available).  The Adorage Starter Kit includes plug-in support for Adobe® Premier/Pro/Elements, AVID® Liquid, Canopus® Edius, Sony® Vegas/Vegas Pro, ULead® Mediastudio, and Magix Video Deluxe 15 NLE applications.

The Vitascene Starter Kit includes 50 of the most popular professional grade effects, film-looks, transitions, and text-effects for professional video editors.  Vitascene utilizes your graphics card’s GPU for up to 50 times faster rendering, improved quality, and sharper details.  Vitascene Starter Kit users can expand their effects library by upgrading to Vitascene or Vitascene LE.  Full plug-in support for Adobe Elements/Premier/Pro AVID Liquid 7.x & Xpress 5.x, Media Composer Adreneline 2.x, Canopus Edius 4.x, 5.x, NEO 1.x, Magix Video Deluxe 2008, Magix Video Deluxe 15, and Sony Vegas 5.x, 6.x, Vegas Pro 7.x, and 8.x

“The Adorage and Vitascene Starter Kits are proDAD’s way of ensuring that users don’t miss the best effects regardless of whether they are a professional or a hobbyist video editor,” said Andreas Huber, general manager of proDAD GmbH.  “Simply by installing the Adorage or Vitascene starter Kits users can begin adding creativity to their work immediately with proDAD’s high quality effects, completely free of charge.”

Availability
The Adorage and Vitascene Starter Kits are immediately available for download
Adorage Starter Kit: www.prodad.com/starter/adorage.html
Vitascene Starter Kit:  www.prodad.com/starter/vitascene.html

The old adage goes ”you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” And this is true, from what we’ve seen. We’ve got a pretty diverse audience, with all kinds of skill sets between them. Some are rank amateurs with no background and others are extremely advanced users.

Around here, we try to have a little bit of something for everyone. We often have reviews of some rather high-end equipment alongside our column for the beginning beginners. But as part of trying to get our beginners up to speed, we end up running a lot of the same articles over and over again (how many times can we really write about three-point lighting?) This is one of the things we hear a lot from people who tell us they aren’t planning to renew–”it’s too repetitive”.

Issue planning is an interesting but chaotic time around here. Not only do we try to predict what’s going to be hot this year, but we try to keep balance between beginning readers and more advanced readers. And the outcome? A number of our most advanced readers “outgrow” us and don’t renew.

It’s more interesting now in that we’re one of the few video publications left on the shelf. Will we reclaim readers? Will more readers move over to the web instead? Time will tell.

JibJab has been a rite of passage for political campaigns (particularly presidential politics) for years, but there’s a lot of recent talk about the effect of Tina Fey impersonating Sarah Palin generating some of the highest ratings that Saturday Night Live has had in years… and, similarly, some rather amazing traffic figures for NBC’s web site.

Increasingly, we’re starting to wonder whether online videos are getting to the point where, like the sales of Halloween masks of the candidates, the candidate with the most hits wins. There’s a bit of precedent to this already, where the 2006 Virginia senate race appears to have been strongly influenced by a viral video of then-incumbent Senator George Allen making a racial slur at a supporter of his opponent, Jim Webb (one of the current senators from Virginia, having beaten Allen by a slim margin).

Could it be that politics are now decided largely by quick, but highly influential, videos for those of us with short attention spans? Is this a good thing for democracy? Is this evolutionary or devolutionary?

If you haven’t seen it yet, there’s a new weekly online show that focuses on the world of video production and post-production called That Media Show.

The show comes in fairly fragmented news bites, focusing on film, television shows, software and hardware.  But it’s a handy way to get your video news for the week as a roll through of press releases, presented in an easy to consume info-tainment format. I know that doesn’t sound exactly flattering, but trust me, it works.

Check out That Media Show for yourself. Available on Blip.tv or on iTunes.

NVIDIA has just released it’s new Quadro CX graphics card. It’s been designed in conjunction with Adobe to specifically accelerate certain features of the recently announced CS4 suite. I attended an online demo yesterday and the technology involved looked very impressive.

The Quadro CX allowed very fluid interaction with your content in Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere. Many of the simple tasks, such as resizing and rotation were instantaneous, and certain time consuming tasks such as h.264 encoding were greatly accelerated. The Quadro CX is squarely aimed at Adobe professionals, where time is money. We hope to get one in soon to test out for you.

The card itself has 1.5 Gigs of graphics memory and is priced at $1,999, and has drivers for both XP and Vista. A Mac version is currently “under discussion”.

You can read more details in the press release below:

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