Jim Jannard, founder of the RED Digital Cinema Camera Company and community appointed leader of the RED revolution has announced a new product which, once again, looks like it has the potential to shake the very foundations of both the production and post production industries.

As promised, at 12:01 AM, Jannard posted information about RED Rocket, a PCI-Express card for Mac, PC and Linux workstations. RED Rocket will enable those working with native RED R3D files to decode, debayer and playback high quality, 4K (at 30fps) and 5K (at 25fps) files in realtime. RED Rocket will also accelerate Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, After Effects, Assimilate Scratch, RED Alert! REDCINE, RED Rushes and any application using the REDCODE SDK. The card will sport Quad-DVI and Quad-HD-SDI and will sell for under $5,000.

Jannard and RED decided to skip the NAB conference in Las Vegas this year, opting to deliver this news about the company’s latest product directly to the faithful via the RED user community boards at REDUSER.net.

Cine-tal announces the Cinemage B Series products and the full NAB product lineup

From Flameop via Twitter

New Cinemage B Series is offered in 42 inch, 23 inch and 19 inch configurations with
10 bit wide gamut display systems.

Cine-tal Systems, a developer of image monitoring and color management solutions, announces an expansion of its award winning Cinemage product line. The Cinemage B series expands the Cinemage product line with a 42 inch, 23 inch and 19 inch offering. The B series also provides true 10 bit display with wide color gamuts to support both HD and DCI standards.

Integrated into the Cinemage B series product line is the company’s cineSpace color management and calibration software. “By integrating our cineSpace technology into Cinemage we provide precision control of the wide gamut color
primaries creating a perfect reference for DCI, HD and SD monitoring. Cinemage is the only monitoring system utilizing an optimized combination of 3D LUTs 1D LUTs and 21 bit color matrices to provide….

Read more at the Cine-tal website.

Flash Video Will Be On TVs This Year

From PC World

On Monday, Adobe is expected to announce that at the end of 2009, the digital living room will likely support Flash and Flash-based applications.

Specifically, Adobe has convinced a wide swath of leading technology companies to support a new, optimized Flash Lite runtime for a number of chips that will form the foundation of connected TVs, DVD players, game consoles, and digital media adapters.

Adobe executives said they believe that the technology will be available by the holiday 2009 season within the U.S., and will be….

The final installment of my interview with journalist, author and new media aficionado Scott Kirsner. In it, I ask him about his site, Cinematech.com and what motivated him to start blogging about cinema technology. Then, we talk about his new book,  Fans Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age. Some of the things he writes about in it are; ways to connect with your audience, the Internet as a distribution channel, coming up with new business models and monetizing your work. We go on to speak about Boxee and some of the stumbling blocks that are delaying the ability to play media from the Internet on your TV. And finally, I mistakenly let Scott do the wrap-up, in which he bestows all too much praise upon the work we do at HDFilmtools.com in a sinister effort to get your humble interviewer to blush.

Today I’m excited to announce the soft launch of the HDFilmtools Gallery. Like other galleries ours is a place to showcase the efforts and talents of both established and aspiring artists. Unlike physical galleries the HDFT Gallery is virtual, giving us the benefit to display works to and from every corner of the globe. The objective here is to discover, promote and celebrate makers of the moving image, of sound, characters and stories.

How do you get your work into the Gallery?

Pretty simple, we encourage you submit your work for review. We prefer it be in HD, but all submissions will be considered.

Send us a link and a short synopsis of the project. Tell us about yourself, your background and the process of your work. Include any specific challenges, creative and/or technical, you had to overcome. The more information you can share with the community, the better chance we will be inclined to select your work for display.

Can I submit my demo reel?

Sure. All reels from individual artists will be considered free of charge. During our initial launch we will be hosting a limited number of reels for free, after which we will be unveiling a tiered services hosting plan. We are also happy to embed from established sites such as Vimeo and Blip.tv

What about my company’s demo reel?

Yes. Commercial work is accepted on a sponsorship basis. Please contact us for further details.

Why should I submit to the HDFilmtools Gallery when I can post to YouTube for free?

YouTube is a phenomenal resource, and it’s our personal philosophy that if you want to build a career as a filmmaker or other digital media artist you need to post and promote your work via as many outlets as possible. What makes our Gallery different from the vast amount of material at YouTube is that we’ll provide a filter. A way to separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak and highlight the work of what we believe are the most exciting and talented writers, directors, cinematographers, editors, visual effects and motion graphics artists, sound designers, composers and animators.

There are no other restrictions for submission and we encourage filmmakers from throughout the spectrum to submit their work. In addition to the more traditional genres this includes, documentaries, social issue projects, PSA’s non-traditional/non-linear storytelling, trailers and even advertising.

Do I give up any rights as the content creator to display in the Gallery?

Absolutely not. The Gallery is just the beginning of a host of new features, resources and services HDFilmtools plans to launch over the coming year.

We look forward to your participation and to getting the word out about your work.

Today I present Part I of a III-Part interview with Scott Kirsner. Scott is a noted author, journalist, blogger and digital technology expert who has written about innovation for publications such as the Boston Globe, the New York Times, Wired, Variety, Fast Company, the Hollywood Reporter, Salon.com, BusinessWeek, and Newsweek and his own website Cinematech.com, for nearly the last ten years. Much of his insightful work chronicles emerging trends in media and entertainment and the new artists and business models the Internet is giving birth to. He is the author if several books including; The Future of Web Video, Inventing the Movies and his most recent work, Friends Fans and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age.

In this first segment, I ask Scott what interested him in the sometimes arcane world of cinema technology, talk about his first book, Inventing the Movies, in which he tells some of the never-before-told stories of the innovators who shaped Hollywood. For anyone interested in the future of media, movies and entertainment, I think you will find this an informative and enjoyable series.

More from this series
	QuickTime Movie HD 768×432	Part I	Part II	Part III
	iPod/iPhone/iPod Touch 640×360	Part I	Part II	Part III
	Windows Media Format 640×360	Part I	Part II	Part III

From The NY Times…

The activist filmmaker Robert Greenwald has tried for years to speed up the production process for his documentaries. Now, he says, he is creating one he can release almost immediately, in stages.

Mr. Greenwald is showing “Rethink Afghanistan,” a skeptical view of America’s war strategies, in five parts on the Internet, with the implied hope that it will contribute to the foreign policy debate.

From the NY Times…

Watch out, Blu-ray: Apple is now offering high definition movies for sale—including the big-buzz “Twilight”—to iTunes subscribers for $19.99.

Avid Technology had released the latest version of it’s flagship Media Composer software. Version 3.5 boasts the ability to harness a 3D Stereoscopic workflow to accommodate the increasing number of films produced and distributed in 3D. Another added feature is native support for Sony’s XDCAM HD and EX formats allowing editors to quickly ingest material captured in these emerging standards. The latest version of the software also delivers a variety of new features designed to help editors work more creatively and efficiently including; streamlined HD audio and video workflows; addional offline editorial effects including keyframable color correction and a new “Fluid Stabilizer”; CPU and GPU acceleration of visual effects and improved interoperability with Digidesign’s Pro Tools. This upgrade also applies to Media Composer Symphony and NewCutter and is shipping now. For more information see Avid’s website.

The Complex and often arcane world of digital cinema mastering just became a bit more accessible as QuVis Corp. of Topeka, Kansas has announced the availability of a $699 digital cinema mastering plug-in for Final Cut Studio. The QuVis “Wraptor” enables FCS users to create professional-quality DCP’s or Digital Cinema Packages, the digital equivalent of a traditional film based “release print”, directly from a Final Cut Pro project. The plug-in uses the same QPJ™ encoding technology available in the company’s high-end, real-time mastering servers. QuVis developed the product in conjunction with Apple, who strongly supports the product.

Wraptor is actually a plug-in for Final Cut Studio’s Compressor. Considering Compressor’s distributed rendering capabilities, producers looking to take advantage of the plug-in’s low cost, will be able to do so without having to deal with endless render times.

The significance of this product should not be underestimated. To this point digital cinema mastering was one of the few areas of the digital filmmaking process that was not only difficult to decipher, but it was also very expensive. The cost of mastering a feature length film to a DCP typically runs in the 20K range, a stretch for the majority of aspiring and independent filmmakers. The Wraptor plug-in from QuVis seems like it has the ability to change all that and be another paradigm shifting tool that will help usher in a new era of digital cinema.