Archive of the Content Delivery Category

For 14 years I‘ve watched manufacturers sweat NAB product debuts. This year we‘re doing it too. www.reel-exchange.com. I hope you‘ll check it out and let us know what you think. You‘re seeing phase 1 based on our strong new media backend and database capabilities. With your input we‘ll continue to refine the user experience, features and service. We think we made a good start, and want to continue to build out in ways that you‘ll find useful in promoting yourselves, your work, and your collaborators as well as finding new collaborators and clients.

Thomson Corporate Research General Manager Henry Gu, PhD, was an enthusiastic fountain of information a few minutes ago about the company’s research division, and some of the prototype technologies coming out of that division that are being revealed for the first time publicly at NAB.

We at Millimeter and Digital Content Producer tend to write frequently about the goings-on at Thomson’s systems’ division (Grass Valley) and service division (Technicolor), but Gu suggests research is where the action really is. He also points out that the research division (400 researchers worldwide, “most” of whom are PhD’s, according to Gu) also impacts not just the Thomson bottom line, but the industry as a whole, since much of the technology eminating from the group will eventually get licensed to manufacturers and users outside the Thomson umbrella. more

Trying to predict the ultimate usability and performance of Apple software based upon an Apple demo is like trying to judge the performance of any republican politician based upon what you see on Fox News. Fair and balanced, it ain’t, and rightly so. Still, at a high level, it was impossible not to watch Apple‘s Final Cut Pro Studio demo and not be impressed, especially at a time when a new barbarian at the gate, in the form of Adobe‘s Production Studio for the Mac, will soon start grabbing for share in the Macintosh editing market.

Final Cut Pro can now adeptly handle multiple formats on the same timeline, a major objection for many event and wedding videographers with one foot in HDV and the other in DV. The new variable speed controls in Motion replace the cryptic controls in Final Cut Pro, turning another glaring weakness into a strength. more

Sunday morning started with a magic bus ride. Rolling down city streets, through underpasses, along Interstate 15 at 70 mph, and finally pulling into an underground casino parking lot, a handful of journalists including yours truly got a preview from Samsung of a proposed enhancement to ATSC that enables perfect mobile reception of digital TV, particularly to handheld devices.

What‘s the big deal? In a word, YouTube. Even the most benighted of computer illiterati grew acquainted with the pleasures of Flash files over the past year. (Thanks in large part to Paris Hilton, but that‘s another story.) The idea that it‘s fun to watch videos in a small window a few inches from your nose instead of from across the living room floor has now entered the public‘s consciousness. Apple‘s video iPod is another manifestation of this shift in TV viewing habits, as will be the larger, sharper iPhone when it debuts in June. more

Today’s Digital Cinema Summit (put on by the Entertainment Technology Center at USC) was heavy on the 3D theme and its impact on both the creation of content and the distribution and exhibition of that content. The topic was apropos coming on the heels of Disney’s Meet the Robinsons–the subject of an afternoon session at the conference. During that session, panel members cited statistics indicating that the 3D version of “Meet the Robinsons” opened on 892 screens simultaneously worldwide, making it, according to them, “the biggest D-cinema release to date.” more

The Entertainment Technology Center’s Digital Cinema Summit’s morning session ended moments ago with news from Wade Hannibal, VP of Cinema Technologies at Universal Pictures, that the Digital Cinema Initiatives consortium has officially updated the Digital Cinema Spec.

As of this week–the spec is now known as the Digital Cinema Specification, version 1.1. Also, in response to the 3D frenzy, a topic of much discussion at this year’s Summit, the DCI group also announced the Draft Stereoscopic Digital Cinema Addendum, Version 0.9. DCI is also pushing ahead with a new phase of its DCI Compliance Test plan, and has a variety of other new initiatives going on as well as part of the ongoing struggle to standardize the digital cinema formats. You can read papers on the newest DCI announcements at the DCI site–dcimovies.com.

Interestingly Hannibal did not take any questions before the session broke for lunch …

–Michael Goldman

Trying to listen and type at the same time is pretty near impossible, but for those of you checking the site hoping for breaking news from the Apple press conference, here you go:

-new Media Asset Management tool – Final Cut Server – 10 licenses for $999; unlimited for $1,999
-new Final Cut Studio 2
-new Final Cut Pro 6
-new codec: “ProRes” – 4:2:2, 10-bit, VBR, full raster. Apple claims at highest setting, files are only 17% of what they would be size-wise in uncompressed HD
-slick looking HD I/O device: io HD (SDI, FireWire, etc.) with handle from AJA. $3,495

…more to come!