Cinematographer and Film and Digital Times publisher Jon Fauer recently sent me an email regarding the latest issue of his excellent newsletter which has a report from this years IBC.

IBC Wrap-Up Report

The 66 page report on new products, ideas and trends from IBC is ready both as a low-rez PDF directly from our home page or as a high-rez PDF in the MEMBERS section (subscription required).

Cinematographer Style Volume 2

The long-awaited completion of the Cinematographer Style trilogy is now ready. Along with the full transcript of Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC are the remaining 54 interviews conducted from 2003 and 2005 for the feature-length documentary Cinematographer Style. As with Volume One, the pages are packed with advice, anecdotes, lessons and history from some of the world’s top cinematographers. Available from the ASC Bookstore.

From Appleinsider

Apple in recent weeks has reached out to members of its professional video editing communities to help test a couple of updates to its Final Cut suite of video production tools: one major and one incremental.

The first is Final Cut Studio 3.0, the Cupertino-based firm’s second major overhaul to its professional video and audio production suite for Mac OS X bundling component applications Final Cut Pro, Motion, Soundtrack, DVD Studio Pro, Color, and Compressor…

Read the rest of the story at Appleinsider.com

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.

AJA Video Systems puts on a full court press by introducing several breakthrough products for Mac and Windows based digital content creators.

Io Express - Cross Platform, Portable Audio and Video Input/Output Device Ideal for File-Based Workflows.

Ki Pro Portable Disk DDR – Bridges Gap Between Camera Acquisition and Post, Recording Directly to the Apple ProRes 422 Codec and is supported by major camera manufacturers ARRI, Canon and RED.

Kona LHi - Mac Video Capture and Playback Card Adds Support for HDMI and 3G SDI,and 10-bit Up, Down, and Cross-Convert.

XENA LHi - Windows Desktop Video Capture and Playback Card Adds Support for HDMI, 3G SDI and Adobe CS4 Production Premium, Bridging the Gap Between Analog and the latest HD Formats.

Read the full press releases at the AJA Video Systems website.

Filling a void for a true professional video card on the Mac platform, NVIDIA on Monday announced plans to begin shipping its Quadro FX 4800 ultra-high-end solution for the Mac Pro next month.

From Appleinsider

The $1800 card boasts 192 parallel processor cores and a massive 1.5GB frame buffer with memory bandwidth of up to 76.8 GB/sec. NVIDIA says this architecture delivers high throughput for interactive visualization of large models, high-performance for real time processing of large textures and frames, and the highest quality and resolution with full-scene antialiasing.

Each Quadro FX 4800 also features a standard 3-pin stereo connector for true 3D stereoscopic imaging in modeling applications requiring 3D glasses, as well two dual-link DVI digital connectors capable of driving a pair of 30-inch Apple Cinema Displays.

“With its sophisticated GPU architecture and industry leading features, the Quadro FX 4800 delivers a substantial boost in graphics performance and capabilities, allowing users to continue to push the boundaries of realism and performance in markets such as: architecture, content creation, science and medicine,” NVIDIA said.

Read the rest of the article at Appleinsider.com

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.

Director, Stu Maschwitz, founder of legendary VFX shop, The Orphanage, creator of the Magic Bullet software suite and author of the DV Rebel’s Guide, spoke on a panel this morning at NAB entitled, Independent Filmmaking — A Million Dollar Look on a Thousand Dollar Budget: 2009 Edition. He was joined by Rodney Charters, director of photographty on Fox’s, 24 and Charles Papert of Instant Films.

Recently, Stu directed a short film, more of a camera test as he describes it, with a Canon 5D Mark II HD camera. I thought it would be fun to show you what someone with some talent can do with this amazing new camera. Take a look and be sure to check out Stu’s new blog, ProLost.

Canon’s original 5D Mark II Microsite

More excellent resources from Canon

What CAN’T you do with your iPhone these days? The phenomenal popularity of Apple’s mobile device and last year’s release of the iPhone developer kit have unleashed a plethora of handy, and some not so handy, applications. Now Israeli company KPL Production Services has released iTC Calc a small, useful application that will help anyone who deals with timecodes in a production or post-production environment.

iTC Calc’s design is clean and simple and looks like your typical Mac calculator, with a few exceptions. Apart from the usual number and mathematical operator keys, in the upper right hand corner of iTC Calc is a dialog box which, when tapped, let’s you choose from 6 standard frame rates of 24, 25, 29.97, 30, 50 and 60 frames per second. So it doesn’t matter if you are working in film or tape, NTSC or PAL, or a combination of both, iTC Calc has you covered.

After choosing your frame rate, you flip back to the calculator screen and are ready to work. To the left of the frame rate dialog you can choose to view your calculations in timecode or frames, very helpful for making quick film to tape or tape to film conversions. A yellow button at the center of the top row of entry keys gives you the ability to make your calculations with an offset.

Tapped the wrong number while entering your code? No problem, iTC Calc has iPhone’s signature “swipe backspace” feature which allows you to erase the last digit entered. More than one wrong number? Just continue swiping until you’ve deleted all the numbers you want removed. It doesn’t end there. Tilt your iPhone into landscape mode (horizontally) and iTC Calc reveals its History and Durations windows.

Entering timecodes can be a mind numbing process so like a paper tape the History window let’s you check and double-check your entries and quickly and clearly view the results. To the right of the History button you’ll find the Durations button. Here, tapping on the TC In, TC Out or Dur buttons transfers the value from the calculator into the respective field. Tap and hold (long tap) one of these buttons and iTC calculates that value. The bottom section of this window calculates TRT, better know as total running time from values in the Dur window. Finally, if you get stuck, there’s a help button to walk you through each of the utility’s functions.

KPL bills iTC Calc as “The perfect companion for any producer, post-production producer, editor, Flame or After Effects artist and anyone else who has to deal with timecodes and frames”. To this I’d add those on set including camera or sound crew, script supervisors or video assist operators. In post, editors and their assistants working in Final Cut Pro, Premiere Pro or any number of other editing packages will find iTC Calc an incredibly helpful addition to their toolkit. You can find iTC Calc and its lighter sibling iTC Light sans History and Durations features in the applications section of the iTunes Store.

Frank Capria has been at the forefront of digital content creation technologies since its earliest beginnings. New England based Capria was one of the first adopters of digital editing on the Avid Media Composer upon the systems release in 1989. His credits include work on landmark PBS series including, Eyes on the Prize, Frontline, Nova and American Experience. In 2001 Frank went on to found Kingpin Interactive, a New Media services company, which created award winning programming, websites, and motion graphics for fortune 500 companies, start-ups and non-profits.

Along the way Frank has become a widely known teacher, writer, and evangelist regarding the developments in technology which have revolutionized the way post-production creatives accomplish their work. For nearly a decade he wrote about the rapidly changing landscape of his profession in the pages of DV Magazine and has taught classes at the Maine Media Workshops. So it seemed a natural seque when late last year he accepted an offer from Avid Technology to join their team as a Senior Product Designer.

On a recent trip back east I had an opportunity to sit down with Frank and ask him a few things about the state of digital editing and what’s happening in his new digs at Avid.

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Appleinsider has an article speculating about the release of updates to many of Apple’s pro video products.

While Apple won’t be attending NAB, those familiar with the company’s plans say it holds ambitions of debuting a new version of Final Cut Studio, currently late in its development stage, at or around the same time the conference kicks off during the third week of April. Further details weren’t provided.

Final Cut Pro will be 10 years old this year and it and its offspring, Final Cut Studio haven’t seen a major upgrade in about 2 years. Other applications anticipated for new versions are the company’s video asset management software, Final Cut Server, compositing software Shake and Apple’s pro audio suite Logic Studio.

Final Cut Server initially generated much excitement and held real promise in the professional realm, particularly because of the lack of comprehensive media management tools in Final Cut Pro. Unfortunately, the software’s instability, unintuitive interface and underwhelming media workflow options have impeded it’s widespread adoption.

An exciting prospect is a seriously revamped or even entirely new version of Shake. The high-end compositing software has not seen an update since 2006 and Apple has been chided in the professional community for the products embarrassingly lackluster support.

Apple also has a replacement for its Shake high-end compositing software under development. It acquired that software in 2002 from NothingReal and last released a major update for it in 2006, when the company announced “Apple will no longer be selling maintenance for Shake and no further software updates are planned as we begin work on the next generation of Shake compositing software.” Apple was rumored to be working on a new replacement title under the code name Phenomenon, based on Motion code and expected for delivery in 2008, making its belated delivery appearing to be imminent.

Logic Studio is also overdue for a new release. The product has not been updated since its initial release in 2007 when Apple packaged Logic Pro with the other components which make up Logic Studio.

Appleinsider today is running a story about the next version of QuickTime, QuickTime X, which is slated to ship with the next major upgrade of the operating system, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. The article runs no actual photos, but includes artists renderings approximating what the software’s “minimalized” interface might look like.

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.