SubscribeNAB is over and I’ve finally had some time to sit down and think about what I saw in between my demos at the Noise Industries booth. NAB is full of big boys toys, they have whole helicopters with camera mounts on display on the show floor but scattered here and there were a few items cool enough (and cheap enough!) to be of interest to VJ’s or live video performers.
Absolutely the coolest product of the whole show is the Red Digital Cinema Camera. 22K US for a camera that can shoot 4K 60fps. OK it’s still expensive but they might be affordable to rent for even low budget indie films or VJ’s. Other people have said enough, check out www.fxguide.com for a complete rundown on the announcement that could revolutionise the visual effects market.
http://www.red.com/products/cameras/redone/index.html
http://www.fxguide.com/article347.html
I looked at the V440HD and the CG-8 at the Edirol stand and chatted to some of their demo artists and engineers, who revealed they are currently developing a SD replacement for the V4 and are actively seeking feedback from VJ’s on features wanted in the next generation standard def mixer. (I’ll post the email address here when I can find the business card).
The CG-8: now I’ve had a chance to play and see it demoed, well I wouldn’t pay for it, but I can see the point of having one installed in a club doing logos and sponsorship branding. Edirol is aware of it’s shortcomings and strongly suggested they would look at opening up the platform to allow people to author new scenes or run freeframe effects in a next generation product.
The V440HD does what it says on the box, a good solid product that should do very well in the rental market for crews that can afford it. It has no FX other than key white, key black and chroma but really that’s not what it’s aimed at. The image quality out of it was very nice and personally I’d really like to have one of these available for larger gigs. Street price is 12K US and they are now shipping. This is a little less than some prices I’ve heard but still a heap of cash.
http://www.edirol.com/products/v440hd/index.html
Tascam had some very cool control surfaces with professional integrated FW audio interfaces.
The FW1082 has a heap of motorised faders, knobs, buttons including jog,shuttle and FF,rewind buttons. It was designed for Pro Tools users but they were showing it with Final Cut Pro and Motion and confirmed to me that they had also tested it with VJ apps like Grid Pro and Modul8. It’s perhaps a little large for taking to a live gig but at $599US I’m tempted to get one for the studio and if I was doing an AV Set I’d need the sort of high end audio interface that this includes anyway….
http://www.tascam.com/Products/fw1082.html
On to Apple, Apple was showing the Universal versions of Final Cut Studio but did not announce or demo Final Cut Pro 6. They did do a technology demo showing support for some new high end codecs in FCP but did not clarify when they are coming or what version that will be. Shake 4.1 universal version was announced, shipping in a month.
I also had a very interesting chat to Pete Warden, it was great to meet him in person. Pete developed the freeframe API and a heap of free plugins and now works on the Motion development team at Apple. The whole VJ community owes him a round of thanks for his work on freeframe, besides the fact that he’s also just a nice guy. Pete also loaned me an Intel mac mini for free frame developers to port their plugins to Mac OS X, currently VJ Bigfug is working on Patchbox and Audiobox. Other interested UK based freeframe developers should contact me directly to arrange to loan the machine.
go to http://www.petewarden.com for his free plugins.
Last news but most worthy (of course), Noise Industries have the FxPlug version of their plug in authoring package Factory Tools coming soon for Motion and Final Cut Pro. Factory Tools is a system that allows anyone to use Quartz Composer to author plugins that run on the GPU inside first Avid editing systems and now the Apple FCS suite. My own pack of 31 plugins is bundled with the Avid Pro version and will soon be available to Motion users. I know there’s a lot of VJ’s using Motion, so I’m pretty excited about having my plugins running in a more affordable platform than the Avid systems.
For a list of effects and to get a preview of what’s coming checkout www.organoptics.net
For info on factory tools see:
www.noiseindustries.com
Technorati Tags: VJ, NAB, Final Cut Pro, Apple Motion, Red Camera, MIDI controllers
