While a mention of “Black Friday” may make some think variously of a really bad day on Wall Street or a great Steely Dan song*, it’s the day where all of the retailers pull out all the stops in the hopes of bringing massive throngs of customers into their stores, with some doorbusters and other loss leaders. (We even found a filterable spreadsheet including a number of fantastic buys on camcorders, HDTVs, etc… don’t miss it. The filtering doesn’t work on Excel 97, but OpenOffice.org is your friend–and it’s free, too.) Theoretically, this will be the day that all of the retailers will show a profit, due to the large volume of sales expected to be generated on this day.

On the other hand, Friday is also Buy Nothing Day, and there will even be an event at Union Square in NYC organized by Rev. Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping.

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us to all of you!

*Why yes, I am a Steely Dan fan. Thanks for wondrering. And personally, I’m most thankful for my family… I love you, Chris and Zoey.

Join us on December 11th, at 11am PST (2pm EST), for a live review of Sony’s newest HDV camcorder the FX1000. We will be going over our impressions and reviewing the camcorder in a live web-cast at videomaker.com/live. We will also be taking questions from our audience via the chat room, so if you have any specific topics you want to know more about the FX1000 be sure to tune in and ask us directly. If you can’t make the live review, don’t worry, we’ll be playing the repeats of the review on our channel for the next few days. Join us on December 11th, and let’s go over the Sony FX1000 together.

Last week I was fortunate enough to be a part of a press group, that for the first time ever, was allowed into Canon’s factory in Oita Japan.

As we pulled the plastic shower caps over our shoes to keep the factory floor contaminant free, I wondered what exactly we were going to see. Visions of oompa-loompas dancing around and singing about camcorders were quickly dispelled, but the site of hundreds of young Japanese workers busily assembling camcorders was no less astonishing.

I watched molten glass being transformed into various aspherical lens elements, and tape transports being tested robotically before being attached to the chassis. It was fascinating to watch as you walked around the floor, to see a series of parts take the shape of a camcorder with surprising speed.

Canon uses a “cell” system of manufacturing, rather than a traditional assembly line. The flexibility of being able to create a small teams dedicated to the assembly of just one product allows a great degree of control in reacting to the demand of a particular model.

Canon’s factory in Oita handles all the assembly of Canon’s digital SLRs, video cameras, and lenses. So if you’ve ever bought something in those lines, odds are they were made right here.

Some interesting statistics about the factory:

• This factory makes about 20 new products, and ships approximately 20,000,000 units each year.
• They create about 400,000 circuit boards per day.
• How long did it take them to make your camcorder? About one minute, from pieces in the bins, to finished camcorder.
• Each cell can pop out about 500 camcorders per eight hour shift.

In a move that will be applauded by many (including this editor), Adobe was the first software company to focus a release an update to their editing software that focuses on COMPATIBILITY! Yes, even with other software packages. This newest update to Premiere Pro CS4 allows you to exchange projects with Avid and Final Cut Pro systems. While I don’t expect that every single effect, color correction, or special properties will come through the process perfectly, even simple timeline exchange with cuts and dissolves would be an incredibly useful feature to have in your NLE. And Adobe deserves some respect for being the first out the gate with this type of upgrade.

In addition the 4.0.1 upgrade provides support for the RED camera’s R3d files directly, with no transcoding necessary. Greatly simplifying what was once a pretty unnecessarily complicated Post process when shooting with RED. This latest upgrade adds to Premiere’s support of AVCHD, P2, HDCAM EX, all natively making it the current king of compatibilty among all the editing programs out there. If your camcorder can shoot it, it looks like Premeiere can edit it.

In addition there were stability enhancements  and full support for 64 bit systems included in this release. You can read the full release below:

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re the type that gets excited about tools and devices that beep, buzz, hum and generally need a battery to operate, then you may already know that the biggest international trade show is fast approaching and devotees are planning their visit like Trekkies at a Star Trek convention.

I’m talking about the Consumer’s Electronics Show,

commonly called CES that takes place annually during the first week of the year in Las Vegas.

According to Information Week, early reports say that digital cams, both still cameras and video cameras, and bluetooth technology and mobile devices, like smartphones  are going to be the biggest hits this year.

People from more that 140 countries representing 2,200 electronic companies worldwide annually converge at this event, and you can bet that the Videomaker Editorial Team will be there, looking the show over to find out what the next year’s gear will look like.

From gaming to kid’s electronics to planet Earth sustanibility, there’s going to be a lot to see, but we’ll try to keep focused on mostly video cameras and accessory related toys!

CES, sponsored by the Consumer’s Electornic Association, (CEA), began in 1967 and has been going strong ever since. Watch for more news on the event, and product announcemts, on Videomaker’s blog, during the next few months.

There’s some new wrinkles to Red’s camcorder lineup. First off, everything you knew about Scarlet? Forget it. They’ve revamped the whole thing and have a new version of the Scarlet alongside the Epic. The idea is that you can have a fully modular camcorder setup that is prepared for digital cinema at whatever resolution you want to shoot. You can start with the Scarlet “brain” for $2500, add a compatible (2/3″) lens, batteries, and as much monitoring, I/O and recording modules as you like. Then if you feel so inclined, you can graduate up with a new “brain”, lenses, etc.

The traditional camcorder manufacturers (and, really, film camera manufacturers too) are probably more than a little worried watching the Red lineup evolve. The pricing is fierce. The stuff looks cool. There are some Hollywood productions on the drawing board that will be using Red’s technology. We expect hard drive manufacturers to be rubbing their hands together in anticipation of big sales (on the order of terabytes, easy) of drives to Red camcorder owners working on big productions.

The lone problem? Red is mum about the exact date when the new stuff will become available. The original Red One is now shipping, though.