New FAA lithium ion battery rules: Jan. 1, 2008.

The FAA has published new rules for transporting your camcorder & other batteries both as carry-on and as checked baggage. If you’re going to be carrying your own batteries on a flight in 2008 and beyond, it behooves you to read the new guidelines and, if necessary, call the manufacturer— because more than 25 grams of lithium content can get your battery confiscated.

i.e. They may take your $500 160 WH Battery and keep it…

Apple’s 10.5 Leopard file creation dates get wrong

Excuse the bad Engrish, but when Apple still can’t fix OS-X to properly maintain and track file creation and modification dates (one of the points that I griped about before) then there is no reliable way to track your media assets in Apple’s Mac OS.

I always use Creation and Modification dates to sort my various projects and files on today’s massive hard drives. I hate that Windows (at least XP) won’t intermingle files and folders when sorting by last modified, but at least it gets the dates right and properly maintains a file’s creation date when copying to and from external hard drives and servers.

But not Leopard. That’s a dealbreaker right there…

SSD RAID = 800 MBps & 0.1 ms latency. Really.

Next Level Hardware.com has a report on their Battleship Mtron. This is a test of solid state disks (SSD) and how they can take your computing system to the next level. In reality, they take a computing system to the next order of magnitude. Previous tests have taken the Mac Pro to 284 MBps with four internal hard drives striped n a RAID-0.

Would you like 800 megaBYTES a second with near instantaneous access?

Read on…

Firewire increases from 400 to 3200 Mbps. But why?

I am an event videographer who has long used DV and silently given thanks many times to those engineers who replaced 12+ cables between my Betacam deck and my capture system (Y in, Y out, R-Y in, R-Y out, B-Y in, B-Y out, Aud-L in, Aud-L out, Aud-R in, Aud-R out, Genlock, RS-422) with one, small wire. FireWire (as apple calls it) and iLink (as Sony calls it) are the IEEE-1394 specification. (Bonus points for the first person who can identify the black AV IO box pictured here in the comments)

First it was FW400 (400 Mbps) and then FW800. But many years have passed since FW800 shipped and the normal rate of development that had us expecting FW1600, etc, left us grossly disappointed for years.

Well, now the 1394 Trade Association has ratified a FW3200 speed.
But will anyone care? …

The 103″ edit site program monitor. Wow!

If you’ve got the wall space (and the cash) then Panasonic has no qualm about showing you what they say is the world’s largest Plasma display.

Standing in front of it on the expo floor, I have to admit being humbled… and then immediately wondering how the hell they mounted that 500-pound monstrosity on a traveling display wall- usually designed to be as light (and thusly flimsy) as possible.

Anyway, check out the video…

My Dream Camcorder… Part II

Since my September column in EventDV magazine about My Dream HD Camcorder, I’ve received great feedback about additional features we need.

I’ve also seen other camera operators like Will Holloway starting to talk about features of their dream camcorders.
It’s nice to see that we’re all of the same mind.
Maybe there’s something in the water.

In part two of my Dream Camcorder series, I’ll explore the reader feedback and some new features that should be found in a dream on-shoulder HD cam…

Red Rolling CMOS Shutter Redux, again.

One of the easiest ways to f— with video is to use flashes and strobes while shooting.

With CCDs, you’ll likely end up with one field of interlaced video completely blown out and the other “half” of the image is normally exposed. Apparently, with CMOS imagers, including the soon to be replaced first 100 RED cameras, strobes and flashes can look like this, where only part of the frame is illuminated. Odd, isn’t it.

The video on the Fini Films Site has lots of strobes popping, and most are captured properly, but a good portion- more than you would expect- aren’t.

Via FreshDV

Panasonic’s AG-HMC70 “Pro” AVCHD for

The blog transition took some extra time and slowed down getting all the video I shot at the GV Expo to you, but here’s the hands-on walkaround with Panasonic’s AG-HMC70 on-shoulder AVCHD camcorder.

Panasonics own Steve Golub shows us many of the new camcorder’s interesting features and explains what really sets it apart from Panny’s little “pro” AVCHD camcorder I panned not too long ago…

$299 HUI touchscreen for ProTools? Check it out!

There’s a wondrous little YouTube video that demonstrates some custom code enabling an iPod Touch or iPhone to wirelessly control ProTools with very little lag time.

It’s been a long time since I read about high-end studios using large screens outfitted with touch overlays to enable hands on screen editing, but this is a whole other trick.

It takes “control surface” to something that was never intended to do it and actually does a very good job of it…

FreshDV compares Sony HDR-FX1 to PMW-EX1: low light

It’s no secret that HDV camcorders have not been able to pull in as much light as their SD compatriots. (at least until the HVR-S270 & Z7 arrive)

Primarily this has to do with itty-bitty HD imaging chips squeezing in as many as 6x the number of pixels into the same physical space as SD chips. Each individual pixel has to be so much smaller that it can’t possibly gather the same amount of photons.

Well, FreshDV has a pair of very clean tiff images comparing Sony’s new PMW-EX1 to the HDR-FX1, what I’ll call Sony’s last CCD-based HDV camcorder. (or last CCD-based non-CineAlta HD camcorder.) We’ll see…