Onei Solutions has just unleashed a brand new 6.1 home theater speaker stand into the world! And I thought that it may be of some interest to Videomaker Readers to look at. After all we all watch TV, some of us are in the process of creating & compiling or already have a Home Theater set up that can make the average movie goer blush. Featuring six 15W speakers with a built in amp, HDMI ports and a VFD display, the piano-black finish looks very nice on the eyes. Currently available in the UK, it has not made it to the states yet.  Definitely an accessory worth considering for all or you renters and movie buyers out there…

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.

Do you think you’re spending too much time staring at a video screen?

According to a Nielsen study, the average person spends 8 hours a day looking at screens, whether on a TV, computer, mobile device or even an advertising screen in a grocery store checkout line.

The poll, reports an article in the New York Times, was the largest most intense survey undertaken by the TV monitoring service. Instead of relying on people’s memories of what they did, pollsters followed them around for several days, making note of when and how they looked at the myriad of screens all around their world.
The New York Times article writes, “The researchers found that television and video games attract the most undivided attention, while other actions (like listening to music) often occur while people are doing other things.” which shows that people really do prefer to lay back and relax when watching video, and that we are in the right business at the right time to capitalize on that viewer market.

Read the full article here.

I hate it when the taskbar on the Windows machine I use at work gets needlessly polluted by things like emails, Explorer windows, pop-under ads that sneak through, etc.

Everyone we can think of off the tops of our heads uses a PDF reader often. I was using one just today as part of my job duty of technical editing; reading some technical documentation to supplement a review I was writing. (And you, my fellow video editing friend, I’m sure you’ve used PDFs before. You’ve probably been sent to an instruction sheet or two for a new plug-in.) It used to be that Adobe Reader wasn’t guilty of polluting my taskbar when I had to have multiple PDFs open, it would open muliple PDFs in the same window… but lo and behold, the current version opens every PDF in its own window, and has stripped away the option of letting one window handle many PDFs to help keep your taskbar uncluttered.

I have been a stalwart user of Adobe Reader for years. You don’t have to put a PDF reader on a Mac because it comes with Mac OS X, but I installed Adobe Reader anyway. There are a lot of freeware choices for readers on the PC side of things that are more svelte than the official Adobe Reader, but I stuck by Adobe Reader for the utmost in compatibility. But now I have to admit that I’m having to second-guess my choice. I’m disappointed that I’m even having to contemplate this; but I urge software developers to think twice when it comes to making choices that will drastically alter the way users use their software.

I just returned from a whirlwind adventure in Disneyland, also known as the happiest place on earth.  It’s also one of the most photographed places on earth.

Disneyland Logo

But for me, for the first time in my life, I did not take a video camera on the trip.  Not because I didn’t want to lug the cam around, but because I forgot to grab it as I rushed out the door.  So, I was stuck watching other people shooting video, and in the three days there, I learned a few things about how the average person captures their vacation memories.

I wasn’t surprised to see that nearly every family there had at least one member shooting video. What I was surprised by, however, was the number of older Hi8 and Super8 video cameras still in use. There were also a lot of the very tiny camcorders like the Flip, which are easy to carry and flip out anytime. Most of the camcorders I saw, however, were the mid-sized cams like my son’s Canon Vixia HD cam. He daringly shot video onto this small palm-size camcorder while soaring down the Matterhorn. Something I’d never have attempted with my larger Sony VX2100.

The most amazing thing I saw, though, was even with all the knowledge about shooting techniques on the internet, in books, magazines, and DVDs, people still can’t compose interesting shots.

Fireworks over the Mark Twain Riverboat

I stood in line for a ride behind a woman trying to capture a shot of the Small World façade in the distance. Most of her video had the back of the heads of the people in front of her. While on a raft crossing the river to Tom Sawyer’s Island, one man kept panning from his kids to the left to the Island to the right; back and forth… back and forth… And another clueless guy was trying to shoot and walk down the middle of Mainstreet, narrating his footage as he stumbled and trip over pedestrians, baby strollers, and garbage cans.

It was hard not to tell these people, “here, let me help, I’m a pro.” Or hand out my business card telling them, “Subscribe to Videomaker… please”.

While trying to compose a night-time shot of my grand-daughter in front of Cinderella’s castle in Fantasyland, the brightness of the castle’s lights kept dimming the light level on the auto iris on my daughter-in-law’s point-n-shoot still camera, throwing my grand-daughter into darkness.

I told her to step back about twelve feet from the castle, bring my grand-daughter closer to the camera, which would allow more light on the child and more darkness around the castle to enter the camera’s iris. My daughter-in-law marveled at how well it worked.

As we were leaving, I saw another woman move into the same stance, and move her child into the spot my grand-daughter just vacated. Ah… teaching shooting techniques, one convert at a time.

Shane Ross runs the very fine blog: Little Frog in High Def, where he blogs about editing issues and technology. It’s one of my daily reads and you should definitely check it out.

Anyhow, in a recent post Shane goes off on a rant about the difficulties in working with HDV in a professional production environment. I personally thinks he sells the format short, he seems to have a real problem with some of the nitty gritty technical aspects such as capturing and workflow, and then goes on to dismiss the entire format out of hand as “unprofessional”.

I’m thinking he may have just had a bad capture day, but read his post and see if you agree with his observations.

Update: Shane’s taken down his original post, citing a bit of misplaced anger and frustration.