Cost Effective, Compact, Media Wrangling Tools

When it comes to managing your media on location shoots, the tool of choice is typically a laptop. However, laptops can get very expensive quickly, require big external power supplies and bags, and, for simple media management (copying files to a client’s drive) they are overkill. Today’s laptops are also powerful enough do basic grading, editing, and even media conversion and uploading while in the field. But what if you don’t need all of that capability? What if you just need to copy your camera files to an external hard drive for the client to take with them?

Pandigital Personal Photo Scanner writes to memory cards

The act of scanning a photo hasn’t changed since scanning was invented. Sitting at a computer, waiting for software to figure out what the next step is, waiting while the scanner moans through a scan, waiting while the software shows you the image, waiting while you save the file to disk, waiting, waiting, waiting. Which is probably why a lot of people don’t bother to scan all the stuff they should be archiving.

Pandigital’s latest, the Personal Photo Scanner, helps to cut down on that process by eliminating the computer as part of the scanning process.

Preview: NEXTO DI’s NVS2500 portable media storage.

The big buzz surrounding the NVS2500 is all about three features built into this diminutive, battery operated media storage device:

• the fast SxS transfer to internal hard drive
• the ability to play back professional codecs like XDCAM EX
• the eSATA slot for fast transfer to a computer

I’ve performed some preliminary tests and have some numbers to report.

Apple, Video Pros & the future.

It’s pretty clear that Apple dropping “computer” from their name was not just to use less ink. They’ve been behind the curve with the hardware for many years. Case in point: after PCs have had a SD card slot for many years, Apple finally decides to integrate this functionality into their laptops (but not desktops.)

But, in so doing, they ditch the ExpressCard slot from the 15″ MacBook “Pro” and specifically make the SD card slot not compatible with I/O devices so it can’t be used to expand the computer. wtf?

So now, the 17″ MacBook Pro is the only expandable laptop from Apple- for a starting price of $2500.
If I’m going to spend that much, I’ll buy a Lenovo 17″ (starting at $1,900) that offers me the capability of a quad-core chip, dual internal LCD displays, integrated Wacom tablet, Pantone color calibration of the displays, fingerprint reader for mobile security, internal Blu-ray, integrated cellular broadband, and more.

There were times, back when Apple didn’t have today’s market share, that they produced computers that were affordable, and wildly expandable. They strong to be what the other guys weren’t. They thought differently. That gave us the G3, the G4 towers. It gave us the G3 series PowerBooks with dual media bays, in addition to the PC card slot. That emphasis on providing users with innovative solutions ahead of the pack is gone.

P2 is the MOST SECURE…

It really bothers me when corporate marketing drones get so caught up in their own chest-thumping that they fail to recognize the hypocrisy of the stuff spewing out of their mouths.

For example, this is a quote by a Panny rep on a video mailing list:

P2 is reusable thousands of times
and is the must secure form of digital storage on the planet.

Digital Still Camera shoots HDTV.

Actually, this is not news. Numerous digital still cameras can record video, and the latest advancement is that they can shoot HD- usually 720p30 video. I haven’t seen any that shoot 1080p30 or 1080p24 yet, but I suppose it’s only a matter of time. Apparently, according to the review on FreshDV, the Kodak V1233 won’t replace our video camera- not by a long shot. But I look forward to more reviews of HD-capable still cameras.

SanDisk fails basic math. Intros “Video” SDHC cards.

In a move that makes absolutely no sense to me, Sandisk has introduced new “video” versions of their SDHC cards. Presumably, these cards are for video camcorders that record AVCHD onto any sort of similarly shaped flash media. (SmartMedia, your ship has already sailed)

But when one camcorder can record four different data rates, and different manufacturers camcorders use different data rates, there is no brand of math on this planet that ensures an 8GB card is 120 minutes of video, ever.

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Canon improves HV20- Now: “Vixia” & HV30!

It’s Canon’s new Vixia line.
This is the HV30. Look familliar?

It looks a whole lot like the HV20 we’ve already grown to love. But with a slightly higher price, manual exposure, and a black case.

How does it compare, feature by feature with the HV20?

Lets go through the rundown and find out.

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…

Flash Hard Drives (SSD) are they worth it?

I’ve long opined that flash media in a camcorder isn’t really worth it because the video data you record will end up on a hard drive, so why not shoot it onto a hard drive. At the same time, flash media makers are realizing this dichotomy and are starting to build flash media based hard drives, solid state devices or solid state drives. (i.e. nothing moves)

Engadget (author of the photo here) did a test of SSD vs. HDD (hard disk drive)…