Incredible Sony Z7 information!

You may just want to learn French to really understand (correctly) all the information on this site. I’ve included a little bit of it here, and did my best to straighten out the rough automated translation– but all of this is just one section, of FOUR.

So without further hesitation, here’s the Sony HVR-Z7 as you’ve not yet seen it (in English):

CompactFlash Media Test Results.

We’ve worked with an early adopter of the Sony HVR-Z7U to test 10 different compact flash cards currently available. The test results of Marshall Levy, of Maverick Productions, will answer the following questions: Do you need to spend the extra money to get the absolutely fastest media available? What does the extra money actually buy? What kind of errors will we have by starting and stopping recording to compact flash over 100 times?
These are the questions we answer right now.

ROCK (tech) HARD PLACE. Yea.

The proverbial “between a rock and a hard place” is basically a tough place to be.

I was corresponding with a fellow videographer who works for a government video department. He tried to explain the troubles he faces with regard to new gear purchases. It’s beyond trying to decide between P2 or SxS. It’s beyond tape or flash media. It’s, well, let’s just say it basically covers the last 20 years of video production- every single day.

SDI is not composite video.

As an amateur radio operator, I’ve learned first-hand how the type of cable used to connect the antenna to the radio makes a huge difference to how well things work.

So I am continually surprised when video ops plug whatever cable they have on hand onto whatever BNC jack that needs it. There’s a lot to consider here as our productions move to HD-SDI.

Panasonic announces 32g P2 for $1650. Oh boy.

Panasonic has announced the availability of the 32GB P2 solid-state memory card (model AJ-P2C032RG) for its popular P2 HD and P2 product line.

Available at a suggested list price of $1,650, the reusable 32GB P2 card provides recording time greater than media for most tape-based and disc-based systems.

Thankfully, they also lowered the price of their 16g P2 card to $900. But…

Blu-ray 1.0, 1.1, 2.0… is your player out of date already?

Cnet Asia has a nice little rundown on the versions of Blu-ray specifications players are supposed to meet. Little did we know that October 31, aside from bringing out ghouls & goblins, made version 1.0 part of the undead– no longer living, but yet, still out there, walking around.
Well, maybe not walking, but still sitting on store shelves.

Blu-ray 1.0, 1.1, 2.0… is your player out of date already?

Cnet Asia has a nice little rundown on the versions of Blu-ray specifications players are supposed to meet. Little did we know that October 31, aside from bringing out ghouls & goblins, made version 1.0 part of the undead– no longer living, but yet, still out there, walking around.
Well, maybe not walking, but still sitting on store shelves.

Specs lie. (Actually they just mislead us.)

In a wonderful commentary article (rant) at High Def Digest, Joshua Zarber takes a moment to put down the hardware and the manuals and speak directly to the “number purists” among us and basically tells us to grow up.

Vimeo goes HD. well, 720 at least.

There’s plenty of video sharing sites, but I have to admit that watching video at 320×240 is crappy. And generally the quality of that video is crappy. And then, when people shoot widescreen video with any number of current and many year old camcorders, there’s no way to show that video in its native aspect ratio on most video sharing sites, let alone show it in HD itself. So you get black bars on the top and bottom, wasting what little usable space you have to show your video.

Vimeo has gone ahead and made HD available on their web site. Also, their site is good for those of us who have clients, or family, and we want to share videos, but don’t necessarily want the video as well viewed as a Google or YouTube video. In some cases, privacy counts for more than quality. Well, Vimeo seems to offer both.

Now if they could just add some color to that blasé logo of theirs…

HD Home Audio Formats Explained.

High Def Digest has an amazing rundown of each audio format available on each high-def home video standard- i.e. Blu-ray and HD DVD. Moreover, Joshua Zyber gets into the nitty gritty about the various audio interconnects between the players and other equipment, and how the myriad of audio formats are handled by each interconnect, on each optical standard. Yes, that’s a matrix of 56 different possibilities that Mr. Zyber has organized into a nice, neat article.