Archive of the I/O Category

Blackmagic Design continues its move from a modest supplier of post gear made much better than it had any right to be to flowering into one of the more remarkable developers of postproduction gear more useful than you would have imagined.

The Blackmagic product—among all of the others they introduced at the show—most striking to anyone building a post business is the Broadcast Videohub. Described by the Aussie company as “the world’s largest affordable SDI router�, the device looks to bring order to the chaos of confusing patch bay madness most growing facilities face. more

New KONA Software to Add RED-Specific Video Format Outputs

In an effort to optimize support for RED Digital Cinema workflows in post production, AJA Video is adding RED-specific video outputs for some of the unique frame sizes that the REDALERT and REDCINE software applications can produce. This additional support for RED will be included in the version 6.0 software driver for the award-winning KONA 3 video card. The version 6.0 software update will be a free upgrade for KONA 3 users, and will be available for download in late May of 2008. Read on at The Briefing Room

More 2008 NAB Show news from The Briefing Room

IO is not one of your marquee topics, but it is one of those essentials, especially when you don’t have enough. NAB was full of technology designed to smooth the transition from format to format, device to device, signal/codec to monitor. AJA‘s nifty IoHD–a portable survival kit for Apple Pro Rez users was just one standout example especially for in-the-field and/or small facility editing–it’s been discussed in earlier posts.

Another small victory in IO comes from Ensemble Designs. The Bright Eye 90 series of up/down/cross convertors can do everything from simple aspect ratio conversion in it’s most basic config to a host of HD up and down conversions, with processing that spans audio, HDMI, fiber, USB…. The company expanded the line at NAB offering more options for camera/projector interface, HDMI output for monitoring, upconverting analog camera signal to digital HD, handling HD and SD digital and analog composite signals and AES digital audio.

Final Cut Pro 6 was announced yesterday, and there’s no question that it’s a major update. First, there’s support for mixed resolutions, formats, and even frame rates in the timeline — all conversion is done in the background. For example, drop 960×720 native clips from the Panasonic HVX200 onto the timeline, and FCP auto-scales them to match the native 1920×1080 clips that you’ve already cut together. (Read the press release at The Briefing Room: 2007 NAB Newslink)

One of Apple‘s biggest announcements from yesterday was its new ProRes 422 codec. This is a 4:2:2 (obviously), 10-bit, variable bit-rate, full-raster HD codec that Apple is claiming is much more edit-friendly and effects-friendly than previous attempts to limit the bandwidth of HD video. Apple showed a demo of a ProRes clip — from a project that had gone from 1TB uncompressed to 170GB in ProRes — that had suffered ten encode/decode cycles and displayed it side by side with the uncompressed version. There was no distinguishable difference. more