Blackmagic Design

Ok, late news flash as this information is actually from MacWorld (what two months ago now?!?) but the folks at ATTO were able to crank up two MaxxDigital EVO HD SAS/SATA units to 1200MB/s. 1200!!! Good Golly Miss Molly that's some serious horsepower.

Ok, ok, ok, how did they pull this off since you can't connect two systems to the same card? Easy, two ATTO R-380 SAS/SATA cards in a Mac pro. Then connect a MaxxDigital EVO HD unit to each card. Stripe both EVO HD units as one large storage array and presto, 1200MB/s.

Hmmmmm, how many streams of video would THAT be? You could do the Brady Bunch Open times 5 at least I suppose. Would be fun to test that out with Uncompressed HD and see if there's any way to do multiple streams of HD in realtime with filters.

Here's a photo only a mama could love. A bunch of tech geeks standing next to the unit with the speed tests displayed on the screen.

So after dropping NAB once then reappearing, Apple has decided to join Avid and skip the NAB show floor altogether. This is an incredibly disappointing decision for a company that supposedly supports over 800,000+ Final Cut Pro users and countless other pro-apps users.

The New York Times reports that Warner Brothers has now lined up in Blu-Ray DVD corner effectively giving the Sony format about 70% of the high definition DVD market. They'll continue to release movies on both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray until May and then switch exclusively over to Blu-Ray. This leaves Universal and Paramount along with Dreamworks as the only major studios backing HD-DVD.

As a production company that had to jump into Blu-Ray production in support of one of our clients, this is welcome news for us. I have to say, if you have not seen Pixar's "Cars" and "Rattatoule" on Blu-Ray disc, you have not seen the true capabilities of Blu-Ray. Jaw dropping is the only way I can describe what these movies look like in HD. Better than what it looked like in the theater.

Full article on the New York Times website.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/technology/05disc.html?ex=1200200400&e...

So there's been a lot of talk on the forums lately about Magic Bullet Looks now being available for use in editing systems and I'm even going to try it out shortly myself. But for those of you with Final Cut Studio 2, keep in mind you have probably the most powerful color grading software available for desktop computers in Color just sitting there. Yeah it's not perfect, there are some issues to work around, but I have to admit, even with the issues, the end results are nothing short of stunning.

Hi all,

At long last, my traning DVD for Apple's Color is now taking orders!  If you've been staring at this incredible color grading software for a while, it's time to start using it!  "Stop Staring, Start Grading with Apple Color" is what you need to get going.

Here's the sales page with all the details and an incredibly cool trailer.   It's my absolute pleasure to bring this title to you guys!

http://library.creativecow.net/articles/biscardi_walter/stopstaring.php 

Enjoy! 

So we've had a lot of discussions on the Final Cut Pro and Apple Color forums about what can we use to replace the current Broadcast CRT monitors that are EOL? I've not been overly impressed with the current crop of LCD monitors out there. My favorite to date, the Panasonic 1700W and 2600W are both good, but cannot completey replace my Sony CRT Broadcast monitor.

This is Part 2 of a 4 Part series on Starting and Running your own business in the creative industry. In Part 1 of this series, I posed the question, “Are You Ready?” A link to Part 1 is at the end of this article in case you missed it. If you’ve thought long and hard on this and your answer is “Yes,” then let’s proceed with Part 2 of this 4-part trilogy. Here we’ll explore a lot of questions on setting up your company and getting ready to open those doors!

One question we see a lot on the forums, in fact there was another one today, is "How much storage will I need for X amount of video?" Our friends at Digital Heaven have created a wonderful free widget for those of you on Mac OS 10 computer systems for this very thing.

So a recent thread in the Creative Cow Final Cut Pro forum about Internal vs. External RAID's got me thinking more about the subject. I'm a firm believer in external RAID's and really don't have any desire to install 3 or 4 drives inside my Mac Pro tower.